How THE WEST SOLD RHODESIA TO COMMUNISM

The West has a notoriously bad habit of betraying countries which defend freedom. During President Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, he sentenced the people of Eastern Europe to communist rule following World War II when he connived with “Uncle Joe” Stalin at the Yalta Conference. When Serbia—an ally of the United States in both World War I and World War II—sought to expel the Islamic invaders who settled in its territory of Kosovo, the United States and NATO launched a military operation to defend the Islamists from the native inhabitants of the Balkans. When Kosovo eventually seceded, the West sanctioned the secession by recognizing Kosovo as a sovereign state. If Charles Martel lived today and tried to expel the Islamic invaders from Europe, it would not be surprising if the so-called leader of the free-world—the president of the United States—held a press conference at which he announced the intention of the West to bring “war criminal” Charles Martel to justice.

They say that one should only love one’s country if one’s country is lovely. I love my country, but I fear that she has become somewhat of a whore.

The treason against freedom the West has committed is not limited to Europe, for freedom-loving African countries have been betrayed as well. When Soviet-sympathizer and terrorist Nelson Mandela desired to take South Africa away from the Afrikaners, the Western world obliged him by placing economic sanctions on South Africa in order to aid him in his ignoble goals. Instead of encouraging the South Africans to keep Mandela in the only place where he belonged—prison—the West served as an accomplice in the crime of putting Mandela in the worst place he could possibly be—in charge of South Africa.

The vilest case of treason committed by the West against freedom is arguably the case of its betrayal of Rhodesia. Rhodesia, once a colony of Great Britain, declared its independence on November 11, 1965. The British government and the United Nations declared Rhodesia’s independence to be “illegal,” because the British government desired to continue to control Rhodesia as a colony. In 1970, the United States government declared that “under no circumstances” would it recognize Rhodesia’s independence. In an article in Time entitled “Sanctions Against Rhodesia” (11/23/1966), the article states that for the first time in its history, the United Nations Security Council voted to place “mandatory economic sanctions” on a country—Rhodesia. The U.N. “declared an international embargo on 90% of Rhodesia's exports, forbade the U.N.'s 122-member nations to sell oil, arms, motor vehicles or airplanes to the rebel territory or to provide it with any form of ‘financial or other economic aid.’” God bless South Africa which announced after the U.N. placed economic sanctions against Rhodesia that “it had no intention of obeying the resolution.”

Rhodesia existed until 1980, which is the year that black Marxists seized the government and began calling the country “Zimbabwe.” The changes the Marxists implemented, however, involved more than just a change in name of the country.

According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, of Zimbabwe’s population of 12 million, nearly a quarter of them—24.6 percent—are infected with HIV or AIDS. The economy is in shambles: the inflation rate there is, as of August 20, 2008, at 11 million percent, the unemployment rate is approximately 80 percent, the GDP growth rate was last estimated at negative 6.1 percent, and the populace eats rodents for sustenance. In 2007, the people of Zimbabwe had the world’s shortest life expectancy—37 years for men and 34 for women. The population growth rate is currently 0.568 percent.

How great was white-controlled Rhodesia compared to black Marxist-controlled Zimbabwe? When Rhodesia existed, the country was considered the “breadbasket of Africa,” for it was an exporter of food. Until 1974 the Rhodesian economy prospered and so the country was oftentimes referred to as “the jewel of Africa.” If one does a search for “Rhodesia” on YouTube.com, one can find video footage of what Rhodesia once looked like: the cities—including the capitol city of Salisbury—appear no different than many American cities of the Midwest (excluding Detroit of course).

The telephone line system of Rhodesia was “once one of the best in Africa,” but now suffers from poor maintenance. Before the Marxist takeover of Rhodesia, the estimated population growth of the country was 4 percent, which was “perhaps the highest in the word” says Lane Flint in his book God’s Miracles Versus Marxist Terrorists. Former Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Smith writes in his autobiography, The Great Betrayal, that “It is difficult to find a black Zimbabwean these days who will not tell you that his standard of living has deteriorated [since the Marxists gained power].”

How was Zimbabwe able to replace prosperous Rhodesia? Mainly because the Soviet Union financed the Marxist campaign of terror and communist Chinese troops trained Zimbabwean soldiers how to wreak havoc. Flint writes:



Weapons and ammunition were hard to come by and it was apparent that the Marxist terrorists were being supplied with modern weapons from Russia to launch attacks with and fight a savage war. All the while Rhodesians were making use of the meager supply available to them and nothing could deter their determination. . . . Practically the whole world (except South Africa) [was] against them.
According to Dorothy Davies in her book Race Relations in Rhodesia: A Survey for 1972-78, the World Council of Churches granted $120,000 from the Special Fund to Combat Racism to the communist movements in Africa. To deal with political unrest, the Marxists were trained by communist North Korean military officers to suppress dissidents. While left-wing churches and leftist governments such as China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union aided the Marxist insurgency in Rhodesia, the Rhodesians received little to no help from the rest of the world.

What did the Marxists do to which the West turned a blind eye? One of the more heinous acts committed by the Marxists during their war with Rhodesia was when they used Soviet-supplied heat-seeking missiles to shoot down civilian aircraft flying from Kariba to Salisbury (now called “Harare” by the barbaric Marxists) in 1978 and 1979. The second plane crashed and everyone died instantaneously. The first plane crash-landed and some of the passengers and crew survived. Unfortunately, Smith recounts that “Before our security forces could arrive, the terrorists were on the scene and murdered everyone they could find, including women and children.”

This kind of vile activity was not an anomaly to Marxist revolution; it was central to it. One night in July of 1977, Marxist “freedom fighters” kidnapped and burned 22 people alive. There was no justification for this attack, other than that the terrorists desired to instill fear in the populace to gain power over them. When Rhodesian forces arrived, they discovered a message that had been left by the Marxists:


Zimbabwe will come through the barrel of a gun. Forward with ZANLA. Smith’s soldiers are pigs, dogs and baboons. Don’t think you are going to win this war. Forget it. On this day you are going to see how bad we are going to be!
ZANLA is the acronym for the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army. That was the muscle behind Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF political party (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front). ZANLA was based in nearby Mozambique and was largely instructed by communist Chinese troops.

Smith recollects in his autobiography:

They called themselves ‘freedom fighters.’ We referred to them as “terrorists” because they deliberately used terror to intimidate people. The record shows, without any shadow of doubt, that our terminology was correct.
Smith also notes the hypocrisy of those who criticize Rhodesia prior to the Marxist insurrection:


Terrorists destroyed [everything that was] associated with the white man. Everything associated with the white man and his civilization had to be eliminated. Many thousands of children [of all races] were thus denied the opportunity they had previously enjoyed—hardly the fault of the ‘previous white racists.’
Not only were landmines placed haphazardly throughout the country, civilian planes shot down, and people burned alive, but also “mass abductions and the indiscriminate murders of defenseless children” were common as well. Children, teenagers, and the elderly were often forced to join the ranks of the Marxist terrorists.

The “freedom” that the Marxists fought for was a perversion of the true meaning of the word. Rhodesians of all races, classes, and creeds shared the bewilderment of a daughter of an elderly woman who was “kicked, beaten, and tortured by terrorists who accused her of working against the ‘liberation forces.’” The daughter was quoted by a newspaper as asking, “Is this the freedom they are fighting for . . . the bestial and barbaric killings perpetuated in the name of freedom and justice? Heaven help us, we don’t need such freedom.”

Prime Minister Ian Smith did his very best to prevent Rhodesia from succumbing to Marxism. Smith was awarded a miniature lighthouse by the America-Rhodesia Association in New York in the late 1970’s “for so many years [of serving] as a warning beacon to the free world of the dangers of international communism.” Says Smith in his autobiography:


One must always be on guard against subversion and terrorism. Terrorists are adept at using freedom inherent in our philosophy and constitution in order to subvert freedom. Intimidation is a dreadful instrument, and it is used most expertly by those who are disciples of the philosophy of communism, or fascism, or Nazism—there is no difference between them. They are all dictatorships which believe in the “one-party state” philosophy: once power is seized, it is held forever, and anyone who dissents receives a clear message: change your mind, or else!
Smith’s dedication to opposing Marxism did not wane even in the later part of his life. In 2000, he returned to Zimbabwe from Britain, ignoring threats from leftist dictator Robert Mugabe that he would be arrested for demanding that Mugabe resign. At Harare’s international airport, Smith told reporters that “[Mugabe] must heed calls from his own people because he has destroyed this country. We cannot afford him anymore.” Mugabe’s bluff was called; Smith was not arrested.

Mugabe may not have arrested or killed Smith at the airport, but he ruined the Rhodesian economy, did away with legitimate political systems, and set loose anarchy on a once civilized society. In fact, all of the black Marxist terrorists were granted amnesty for their crimes—rapes, murders, kidnappings, arsons, and terrorism—in March of 1979 by Mugabe.

Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe is very similar to Soviet Russia, because a “socialist top down [governmental] structure” was established. Some of the reports that have come out of Zimbabwe are vile:


Thousands of men and women, children and elderly, were rounded up into interrogation camps where they were held for weeks. People died in these torture camps. . . . Digging graves was a daily routine for the captives. Some of the dead were loaded into trucks to be dumped in local mine shafts. At [one] police camp . . . people were held in open cages spattered with blood and human waste from previous detainees. They were exposed to the wind, rain, and sun while in adjacent interrogation cells the screams and groans of those being tortured could be heard, day and night. It was a replication of the colonial regimes, but perpetrated at a level much worse, by a black government headed by Robert Mugabe.
Hell on Earth was established in a once prosperous country, and the West is to blame, for Rhodesia was denied help in its hour of need. The West should be ashamed for all the South Africas, Rhodesias, and Serbias that it has betrayed in the past.