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News from a different perspective.
Horror in Rhodesia
by Dr. William Pierce Last week we talked about the plight of the farmers of Rhodesia, now known as "Zimbabwe." Last week I reported to you that more than 800 White farms had been invaded and illegally taken over by Black squatters, with the blessing of the government of Black dictator Robert Mugabe. This week the number of White farm families pushed off their land by Black gangs has risen to more than 1,100, and the violence of the farm seizures is growing. Before, the Blacks used knives and clubs. Now they're using firearms. I also reported to you last week that I had seen on CNN Headline News a one-minute news segment about the dispossession of Rhodesian farmers. That was on Tuesday of last week. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I saw additional one-minute segments. Brief news segments also have begun appearing on other channels -- but they're all brief and all low key, all understated and unemotional, conveying no sense of urgency or tragedy. I guess that the excuse of the media people for the sparse news about Rhodesia is that the saturation news coverage of the Elian Gonzalez soap opera is keeping all of the journalists too busy for anything else. It's not that news isn't available. There are journalists stationed in Salisbury, now known as "Harare." They file reports on the Internet every day. Anyone who is interested can read dozens of current reports about events in Rhodesia, detailed reports. Most of these reports are very urgent, very tragic, very gripping: quite different from the very brief and bland reports now beginning to appear on network news programs. One gets the distinct impression that the media bosses don't want the real news from Rhodesia to show up where the couch potatoes might stumble across it. That sort of news wouldn't be good for race relations in America, would it? It might alarm White Americans. It might make some of them think about what's in store for America if the present process of multiculturalization continues.. Well, let me try to stimulate some thinking. I'll read to you from one of these reports on the Internet. This is about what happened on Wednesday of last week at the Lonely Park Farm, 20 miles east of Salisbury. The Lonely Park Farm belongs to Paul and Liz Retzlaff. During the day a truckload of Blacks stopped at the driveway to their farm and attacked one of their Black farm workers who was mowing the grass with a sickle. They took his sickle away from him and then hacked him up with it. Later in the day about 70 Blacks gathered outside the gate of the farm and began chanting and shouting threats. The Retzlaffs called the police, but the police refused to come. In Rhodesia these days, the police are all Black. Their boss, Robert Mugabe, won't let the police interfere in these attacks on White farms. Rhodesian farmers have erected high-voltage electric fences and gates around their farmhouses since the trouble with the Blacks began, and usually that's enough to keep the Blacks out. At the Lonely Park Farm it wasn't enough. After dark the Blacks drank and chanted until they had worked up their courage, and then they crashed through the electrified gate with a truck. The Retzlaffs heard them howling for blood as they came up the driveway toward the house. In the darkness, they fled to an adjacent cottage and barricaded themselves inside. Liz Retzlaff reported: "When you hear them coming your stomach just goes into a knot, and you feel defenseless." She and her husband and son crouched behind the cottage door and listened to the rampaging Blacks wrecking their house, smashing windows, breaking furniture, stealing everything they could carry away. In the darkness they used a shortwave radio in the cottage to call their neighbors for help. Then the Blacks stormed toward the cottage, howling war cries and brandishing axes, knives, clubs, and iron bars. They were smashing down the door to the cottage, when they heard the Retzlaffs' neighbors arriving by truck. Even as the Black mob fled into the night they opened fire with assault rifles on the rescuers. Now the Retzlaffs are cleaning up the broken glass and smashed furniture and attempting to repair their wrecked home. And they are living in terror, afraid to sleep at night, never knowing when another mob of Blacks will attack -- and also knowing that they can expect no protection at all from the police. Furthermore, if they defend themselves forcefully and kill their attackers, then the police will come -- to arrest them. But the Retzlaffs have nowhere else to go, and they don't know what they can do except rebuild and hang on. Paul Retzlaff told a reporter, and I quote: "We were born and bred here. My grandchildren are fifth-generation Zimbabweans. Of course, we aren't going to leave. We started with nothing, and we built this farm. There's no way we can just abandon it." -- end quote -- Imagine yourself in the Retzlaffs' situation. Imagine the hopelessness, the despair. Of course, in the end they will be forced to abandon their farm, or they will be murdered. Things will not get better in Zimbabwe; they only can become worse. It's not just that the Black dictator of Zimbabwe has promised his followers that he will give the farms of the Whites to them and will be in serious trouble if he doesn't keep his promise. It's that a process of general deterioration began when the White Rhodesians turned the country they built over to Black rule in 1979, and that process is accelerating. It will not be stopped. Unemployment is up and rising; inflation is up and rising; crime is up and rising; the HIV infection rate among Blacks is 20 per cent and rising; production is down and falling. As conditions in Zimbabwe become worse, the Blacks will blame the Whites for it, just as in America they blame Whites for all of their problems, and the demand for confiscation of White property will grow. Mugabe understands that as more Whites are driven out, the economy will collapse, but he is to a certain extent a captive of his own policies. If he tries to pull back from the brink, other Blacks, who have even less concern for the long-term consequences of continuing the seizure of White farms, will force the issue. A Black who is now one of Mugabe's supporters but who could become a rival is Chenjerai Hunzvi. He heads the largest group of former Black terrorists, the National Liberation War Veterans Association, and he is pushing hard for a full-scale ethnic cleansing of Zimbabwe. Every time he speaks to the press, he calls for speeding up the process of confiscation of land from the White farmers. "The land has been left in their hands too long," he told reporters in Salisbury last week. This sort of encouragement from their leaders, together with the lack of any restraint applied by Britain or the United Nations, has encouraged the Black mobs who are seizing the White farms. Last weekend they murdered a White farmer just 50 miles from the Retzlaff farm. Black squatters invaded the farm of David Stevens, 75 miles east of Salisbury. They abducted Stevens -- a father of four, including two-year-old twins -- and five of his neighbors who had come to his rescue when he radioed for help. Stevens, considered a flaming liberal by his neighbors, had been determined to maintain good race relations with his Black workers. He always distributed ten per cent of the gross earnings of his farm to his Black workers, over and above their salaries, and he took a personal interest in their problems. When a mob of Mugabe supporters -- so-called "war veterans" -- showed up at his farm last Saturday and began attacking his Black workers with machetes, Stevens tried to protect them. He tried to reason with the mob. Just as his neighbors drove up to help him, the Blacks handcuffed Stevens and threw him into the back of his own car and drove off with him. Thirty other veterans followed in a bus belonging to a Christian missionary station. The Christian missionaries in Rhodesia generally have sided with the Blacks against the Whites. Stevens' neighbors followed in their own car, until the Blacks in the mission bus began shooting at them. Then the White farmers sought refuge in a police station. The Blacks followed them into the police station and seized them, while the Black policemen in the station refused to intervene in any way. The Blacks then drove Stevens and his neighbors, all handcuffed, into the bush and began beating and torturing them. The bones in their hands were broken with iron rods. Their bodies were whipped with automotive fan belts. Their feet were burned with cigarettes. They were beaten savagely with clubs. Then the Blacks stood David Stevens beside the road and killed him with shotgun blasts to his head and back. One of the neighbors, John Osborne, who was abducted and tortured with him described the ordeal from his hospital bed. All of his neighbors are convinced that Stevens was singled out for killing, not despite his good relations with his Black workers, but because of them. Thank God for that! After the killing, the Black mob returned to Stevens' farm and wrecked his farm house and burned the homes of his Black workers. Three days later -- that's last Tuesday -- another White farmer, cattle rancher Martin Olds, was murdered on his farm near Bulawayo. And of course, you haven't heard about any of this, beyond a dispassionate news report here and there that another White farmer has been killed -- a report without details, without anything to make it seem real -- because, remember, the media bosses are too busy with Elian Gonzalez to spend much time on faraway Rhodesia. As economic conditions continue to worsen, the pressure for seizing even more White farms will increase, and the more White farms seized, the worse economic conditions will become. The first thing the Blacks do when they take over a White farm is "Africanize" it. Even though the White Rhodesians have had Black workers on their farms for more than a century, the Blacks seem to have learned nothing from the experience. They are not able or willing to change from the Black way of farming to the White way. The Black way is a very primitive style of subsistence farming. When a mob of Blacks take over a White farm, they wreck the farm house, subdivide what was an efficient farm into inefficient plots, and then quickly run it into the ground. They fail to maintain the farm machinery properly, and it soon stops working. They eat the breeding stock. They wear out the land. Grazley Farm, 130 miles from Salisbury, once was the most productive dairy farm in Rhodesia. Its owner, Ben Harding, employed 100 Black workers on his 2400 acres. When the Blacks seized Grazley Farm the first thing they did was slaughter the most productive dairy cow on the farm. They ate her for their Christmas feast. Then they tore up the irrigation system to make kitchen implements. Today weeds grow up through the ruins of the farm house, and the burned-out wrecks of cars litter what was once the garden. Twenty Blacks scratch out a bare living amid the dereliction and decay. Surrounding them are tracts of untended, weed-grown land and vandalized storehouses reduced to empty shells. Despite the brave words of the Retzlaffs and other White farmers who express their determination to stay on their farms, most of them can see the writing on the wall. About 20,000 of the 75,000 Whites remaining in Rhodesia are entitled to claim British citizenship, and thousands of them are rushing now to renew their passports. The problem is that the British government doesn't want them. If they move to Britain, they are hardly likely to be supporters of the Blair government. Instead they undoubtedly will be staunch opponents of all of Tony Blair's very progressive programs for integrating the United Kingdom into the New World Order. It's not that Blair and his government don't want more immigrants. Oh, my goodness, no! They love immigrants! It's just that the Rhodesian farmers are the wrong color. Some of them, having been exposed for so long to the racial realities of Africa, may even be racists! Therefore, the Blair government is not at all happy about the prospect of their coming to Britain. And as for the 55,000 or so White Rhodesians who are not entitled to, British passports, don't even mention them! There's no chance at all that they will be allowed into Britain, even as refugees. Where will they go? Well, that's not Tony Blair's problem, is it? It's their problem. Tony Blair doesn't want to hear about it. And for the most part the controlled media in Britain are helping him not hear about it by not reporting on events in Zimbabwe any more than they absolutely must. Britain's mincing, prancing, smirking little prime minister, who was one of the most bloodthirsty advocates of the bombing of Belgrade in protest against Serbia's program of ethnic cleansing in its Kosovo province, is absolutely determined to ignore the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Rhodesia. When the Serbs were putting down a terrorist insurrection by the KLA in Kosovo province a year ago, Tony Blair was filled with righteous indignation. The little man's eyes flashed as he announced to the world that ethnic cleansing would not be tolerated. And it's just about the same story in the United States. Do you remember the preaching that Mr. Clinton and his kosher crew in Washington gave to us about Serbia last year? Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was painted as a monster, a war criminal, for unleashing his army and his police on the KLA and giving rough treatment to Albanians in Kosovo suspected of collaborating with the KLA. Have you heard Mr. Clinton say anything harsh about Robert Mugabe? Have you heard the little troll in charge of his State Department, Madeleine Albright, speak out against the ethnic cleansing going on in Zimbabwe? Have you heard her call for Mugabe to be tried as a war criminal? Of course, not. And it's quite plain that the refusal of Western governments to criticize him has emboldened Mugabe. He sees the silence of Blair and Clinton as a green light to do whatever he wants to do to the White minority in Zimbabwe. The day after the murder of David Stevens and the beating and torture of his neighbors, Mugabe announced publicly, specifically in response to complaints from other Whites about his government's failure to take action against the murderers, and I quote: "We warned the White farmers. We cannot protect you if you provoke the war veterans. You must expect the consequences." Now, if that is not a call to further ethnic cleansing by his followers, I don't know what is. And so far neither Mr. Blair nor Mr. Clinton has said a word. Mrs. Albright has not waddled in front of the cameras and announced that the civilized world will not tolerate any more ethnic cleansing. |
