Civilization Regressing - On Zimbabwe, Pirates, More.

[Ed Jones]

We're supposed to be going forward, making the world more civilized. Today a couple takes on places where things have been sliding.

And yes, I blame a lack of sophistication in education--primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate.

Zimbabwe on the Verge of Collapse Op-FOR

"This is just sad. Not just sad, but tragic. Students of history weigh-in: is this the most drastic peacetime collapse of a nation-state ever recorded?

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Zimbabwe could collapse within months due to its political and economic crisis, South Africa's ruling party leader said on Monday, citing former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other prominent figures.
African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma said a cholera epidemic that has killed around 300 people in Zimbabwe and sent hundreds more fleeing into South Africa highlighted the need for urgent action by Zimbabwe's political rivals.

"The elephant in the room, one that the media generally refuses to acknowledge, is what Zimbabwe used to be: the first-world country of Rhodesia. Read the press and you get the impression that Zimbabwe is just another African failed state. It wasn't. Rhodesia, though tainted by the evils of apartheid, was a wonderfully prosperous little nation. As the white minority government watched post-colonial Africa collapse around them, they vowed to defend their borders against the endemic blights of warlords and Marxism (and -in the case of Robert Mugabe- a combination of the two).

"White Rhodesians are often boxed into the same category as white supremacists from South Africa and the American South. That's highly inaccurate. Rhodesians despised "racialists" (their handle for 'racists') and never subscribed to the eugenical arguments -that the white man is inherently superior to the black man- of their neighbors to the south.

"Their apartheid, for better or for worse, was based on the theory of limited democracy as developed by our own American founding fathers and the early British parliament. Rhodesians believed that to have a functional democracy, one first must have a vested interest in the government -whether that be through land ownership or financial holdings. That their system inherently (and severely) favored whites over blacks was a tangential consequence, a price that Rhodesians believed had to be paid to insulate their highly functional society against the chaos and genocide sweeping the rest of Africa.

"This wasn't a new concept, really. It's been around since the time of Plato, who warned that mob rule inherent in the exercise of unchecked democracy would ultimately lead to tyrrany. That's highlighted in the old joke which describes pure democracy as two wolves and a sheep sitting down and voting on what's for dinner.

"It's useful to remember that universal suffrage is still a relatively new phenomena. Ian Smith, Rhodesian Prime Minister from 1964-1979, always stated that the Rhodesian approach to black majority rule would be "evolutionary not revolutionary," in that their stated goal would be to slowly assimiliate Rhodesians blacks into the government through a combination of a strong economy and matching educational system. Of course Smith also famously said that he did not "believe in majority rule, not in a thousand years," so I'm often left wondering what his true intentions were.

"Regardless, a measured and moderate solution to the "Rhodesia problem" was finally reached in 1978-79, where Rhodesia dropped their property and financial restrictions on the vote and opened the polls to blacks. A moderate black Prime Minister, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, was elected in a free and fair election in which a large majority of Rhodesian blacks voted. The trade-off was that Rhodesian whites would retain control of key institutions like the army and police (though both were dominated by blacks). That government was widely rejected and lasted a mere six months, as the mob-rule of world opinion demanded that Robert Mugabe's violent Marxo-terror group Zanu be allowed to participate in the electoral process. Mugabe, who claimed that he would resume the war against Zimbabwe-Rhodesia if he lost, won the 1980 election through massive voter intimidation and violence.

"The rest, they say, is history.

"UItimately the Rhodesians' worst nightmare, that their 'jewel of Africa' would become another Uganda or Zambia, was fully realized. Robert Mugabe, acting as all petty marxist dictators do, has single-handedly dismantled every aspect of the Rhodesian infrastructure that existed in 1980. Now Zimbabwe is one of the poorest nations on earth, and is danger of becoming not another Uganda or Zambia, but another Somalia. "


Why Don't We Hang Pirates Anymore?
"Year-to-date, Somalia-based pirates have attacked more than 90 ships, seized more than 35, and currently hold 17. Some 280 crew members are being held hostage, and two have been killed. Billions of dollars worth of cargo have been seized; millions have been paid in ransom. A multinational naval force has attempted to secure a corridor in the Gulf of Aden, through which 12% of the total volume of seaborne oil passes, and U.S., British and Indian naval ships have engaged the pirates by force. Yet the number of attacks keeps rising.

"Why? The view of senior U.S. military officials seems to be, in effect, that there is no controlling legal authority"

...
"Pirates, said Cicero, were hostis humani generis -- enemies of the human race -- to be dealt with accordingly by their captors. Tellingly, Cicero's notion of piracy vanished in the Middle Ages; its recovery traces the recovery of the West itself.

"By the 18th century, pirates knew exactly where they stood in relation to the law. A legal dictionary of the day spelled it out: "A piracy attempted on the Ocean, if the Pirates are overcome, the Takers may immediately inflict a Punishment by hanging them up at the Main-yard End; though this is understood where no legal judgment may be obtained."

"Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we've regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it."

[Connie Weber]

Ed,
I heard some coverage about the Cholera outbreak around Zimbabwe this morning (on BBC or NPR). So dire. Was thinking of the journalism side of that coverage: the reports went into a refugee medical camp. "Sir, how are you today?" The interviewee was very polite and dispassionate. "Oh, not so well..." (Surely this person had been previously selected for being able to hold it together with a microphone, not scream and cry, not shout a desperate plea to the world.)

He might have said "My life and the life of all the people I know and love has come to collapse. This is the end. We are powerless in this situation, just swept away by forces larger than us... Help us! Help us!"

The reporting side: it's different from an interview of people after, say, a tornado has swept through and devastated an area. There's the underlying message that maybe, as a part of world forces, we could SO something. If we could just figure out what it is. I wonder, what sort of reporting helps a situation like this? And beyond that, what else helps a situation like this? Can't we bring world resources together to SOLVE a problem?

[Ed Jones]

This one probably should have been first:

The war in Congo alone has led to more deaths than any war, anywhere, since the Holocaust. Five million people have died there in the last decade. The wars in Sudan over the last two decades -- both in the south and in Darfur -- have cost the lives of more than 2.5 million people.

Obama's Opportunity to Help Africa: The two deadliest conflicts in the world merit urgent attention.