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
