Here is a reply to this post. This is personal, my friend Jerry (he has called me “Pete” for over 50 years) knows these people who have had this experience.
A very interesting topic Pete...and one with which I have some personal interest. I know some folks, a man and his wife and their two children, who fled that troubled country in a hail of bullets with a small truck of treasured household belongings and some $500 in cash. The fellow was a 3rd generation Rhodesian farmer... one of those that made that country the bread basket of Africa, and his wife was a 4th generation South African until she married the farmer. They met in college in South Africa. By the way, he told me he would hitchhike to college from what was then Rhodesia... it was safe to do so.
They never have returned to that troubled place, although both of their children have. I never detected actual bitterness, though I can’t imagine them not being bitter. There was huge disappointment at being driven from their home and livelihood, and then see the country fall to shambles.
And they were such nice people. I recall Pat and I spending an evening with them...all of us enjoying the company. As another couple happily wed for a good period of time, we were discussing the merits of long-term relationships, and the concern we had contemplating what death would do to that. In the graceful lilt of his English accent, the gentleman said it would be their strong preference, their hope “to fall off the perch together.”
Mad men are not limited to one race or one continent, and revolutions are not all just. There are so many grays... so many unknowns.
The free world has chosen to ignore numerous injustices. It takes strong leaders to risk the actions necessary. You can argue the role of involvement six ways from Sunday. How much treasure and blood are we willing to risk?
Perhaps someone different than Roosevelt in the White House, or someone less persuasive than Churchill, and the world could now look a good deal different. Our country has been fighting “little” wars in far off places for generations now, and our enthusiasm for such endeavors wanes. We can’t always get our arms around who the good guys are, so it is easy to look the other way and decide it is not our battle. And the truth of the matter is that if we don’t do it , there’s a good chance no one will.
Man’s
injustice to man fills history books. We applaud the exceptions, and
bemoan some of the others.
Why do so many of my posts to this blog have something to do with man’s inhumanity. Certainly, the subject today is one of the worst, a man who boasted about being today’s Hitler.
Here is a much better comment on the man and his evil: http://view.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=858bff985004208ffa3bcfb59454e7add7c299243931775e60500269799648ad82f4d58b34e2b2819f228e4a51df75d78dfb9887d0bb5e9833cf87e08968cbf7d8e4e358b3bd928c202ca6afca49fe0f493635bd4c696a40
Jeff Jacoby is a talented writer and observer.
This is a message about the tragedy of Zimbabwe and how the free world stood by and praised his murder and mayhem, doing nothing because any interference with the killing and punishment of whites by blacks is political suicide. Apparently.
Another observation. Africa is a BIG place. For example, a trek from Morocco to Ethiopia is approximately the same as going from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami. Doesn’t look that big in my mind??
The murder of whites by blacks is not only a part of the history of Zimbabwe, formerly the breadbasket of Africa where starvation rules today. It has and is happening in other parts of Africa, such as South Africa, another highly-praised practitioner of questionable policies.
Also, the Global Slavery Index organization estimates that 9.2 million people are living in slavery in Africa.
And the free world stands by, doing nothing.
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