Re: Brit neo-colonialism... in Zimbabwe

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bravo

I have much more sympathy for Mugabe in resisting mugging by global finance
capital and the forces of Empire than I did for Milosevic who turned to
crude and ethnically divisive nationalism.

Land redistibution is not the most progressive of causes because it creates
a large landed petty bourgeoisie but it is a democratic demand against
colonialism, neo colonialism, and finance capital.

One of the twists that is often not appreciated is that the white land grab
of the late 19th century only really bit in terms of the lifes of the
landless poor when the farms started adopting aggressive capitalist methods
in the last 20 years.

The "proletariat" of Zimbabwe should in this context be making an alliance
with the rural dispossed, even if the democratic anti-imperialist demands
are in a sense petty bourgeois.

There are other concrete cases, and each case must be evaluated on the
politics of the conflict, where it may be more progressive for the
democratic forces to appeal to the external forces of the Empire. But in
this case, despite injustices to the workers in the trade union movements
who support the MDM, it is reactionary for the MDM to court the favours of
the international imperialist community for their internal agenda rather
than unite for the demand of a just and compensated land distribution.

The behaviour of Britain is a typical racist disgrace. The Selous scouts,
financed indirectly by sanctions busting UK and US oil companies, used to
cut off the lips of people when they terrorised the villages. A recent book
on torture gives an illustrative account of how a British officer, brought
up in the character forming sado-masochistic culture of the British public
boarding school, found the most effective technique was this: they would
visit a village from which all the young men were absent because they were
either in the liberation army or knew they would be accused of being so.
The forces of imperial law and order would try to intimidate the senior old
men of the village but this usually did not work. They therefore would get
the old man's grandson and dunk his head in a bucket of water until he
almost drowned, thrashing desperately with his head in the bucket and
gasping with terror when his head was lifted out. This display cut through
most language problems very rapidly. It broke the will of the old headmen
by forcing them to choose between one loved one and another, in front of
the rest of the village.

The compensation that Britain should pay to the people of Zimbabwe is only
a tiny fraction of the total transfer of capital that progressive people in
the west should demand goes on a regular annual basis for the safe
development of the people and the environment of what is the mother
continent of all of us.

Chris Burford

London




At 24/01/02 17:42 -0800, you wrote:
> The struggle for our land
>
> Britain is interfering in Zimbabwe in support of corporate power and a
> wealthy white minority
>
> George Shire
> Thursday January 24, 2002
> The Guardian