Talk:Propaganda in the Rhodesian Bush War

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I completely disagree with the 'Propaganda: Operation Split-Shot' section!

208.118.188.90 (talk) 13:47, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't this article be called Government propaganda of the Rhodesian bush war?

It only seems to focus on the Rhodesian government's propaganda efforts. Also, in the censorship section should there be some mention of newspapers deliberately printing solid black columns to protest censored articles? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.84.24.242 (talk) 14:57, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

This article is really biased for Rhodesia. Note the lines: " ZANLA and ZIPRA forces began infiltrating Rhodesia, committing acts of murder and terrorism against farmers...In response to the violence perpetuated by the ZANLA fighters in the Chiweshe Tribal Trust, the Rhodesian Front created protected villages...ZANU and ZAPU announced a joint "Patriotic Front" and together began infiltrating Rhodesia, committing murder and acts of terrorism against Rhodesians, particularly in the protected villages, with many of the forces living in these protected village as a form of cover. ZANLA and ZIPRA violence escalated to include murder, rape, abduction, torture, beatings, robberies, and cattle-maimings". The source is the 1974 pamphlet Anatomy of Terror by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information. At present, much of this article is not an article about propaganda relating to the Bush War, it is instead recycling propaganda issued by one side during the war. There is much here about atrocities committed by the guerrillas and there is nothing by atrocities committed by the Rhodesian state. This is very one-sided way of presenting the Bush War that implicitly glories a white supremacist regime as the defender of black people against what the Rhodesian government always called the "CTs" (Communist Terrorists). One is reminded of German accounts written by Wehrmacht veterans and right-wing historians about the efforts to hunt down guerrillas in the parts of the Soviet Union occupied by Germany in World War II where the guerrillas are accused of committing all sorts of atrocities while on the German side there is the most scrupulous respect for human rights. The reader would never know from reading these accounts that the German forces committed far, far more atrocities and killed vastly more people than the Soviet partisans ever did. Note also the sentence: "In an effort to make the facts known to the outside world, particularly the West, the Rhodesian Government published a series of booklets offering photographic evidence of the terrorist methods used by Patriotic Front military forces". This is repeating the Rhodesian line was just being misunderstood by the West with Rhodesia as a bastion of stability and order being attacked by fanatical "Communist Terrorists". Furthermore, note how the term terrorist is not put into quotation marks while the term Patriotic Front is being in quotation marks as to imply the guerrillas were not really patriotic Rhodesians by trying to overthrow the government instead of being the good submissive blacks who should had known their place.

One should not romanticize guerrillas. The sort of person who makes for the best guerrilla leader is a very authoritarian person, and thus guerrilla movements had an in-build tendency towards authoritarianism. Good guerrilla leaders tend to make for bad democrats. It is not for nothing that the French Communist Party, a very rigid, authoritarian organisation played a disproportionate role in the French Resistance. The sort of person who made for a good French Communist also made for a very good Resistance fighter, and hence a disproportionate number of Resistance fighters were Communists. The most notorious examples of good guerrilla leaders being very bad leaders would be Mao Zedong in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia. The leader of the most successful guerrilla movement fighting against Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) became the first president of Zimbabwe. Mugabe was a very authoritarian guerrilla leader who became a very authoritarian president who ruled in a thuggish style, rigged elections, ruined the economy, waged a near-genocidal campaign against the Ndebele people, and looted the nation to provide himself with a luxurious lifestyle. It is criminal that at a time when much of the population of Zimbabwe was on the brink of starvation that Mugabe's wife, Grace, went off to Paris on a shopping spree to buy herself the most luxurious of French luxury goods. Mugabe's response to criticism about this was simply to say that he was the president of Zimbabwe and he and his wife were entitled to enjoy whatever they wanted. Mugabe who defined himself as a "Marxist-Leninist of Mao Zedong Thought" in a 1975 interview had the rigidity and fanaticism one could expect of "Marxist-Leninist of Mao Zedong Thought". It is the same with all these so-called Third World liberation movements-they all talk a good line about freedom and democracy, but the moment they get into power, it all goes out the window and the regimes that they establish just as oppressive as the ones they just had overthrown, if not more so. As Theodore Dalrymple noted here in regards to Algeria which has been (mis)governed by the FLN since 1962: "The only sense in which the new regime was freer than the old had been was freedom from the old oppressor. The new oppressor (who immediately killed 15-30 thousand of his fellow countrymen who had fought on the old oppressor’s side) was, however, of the same ethnic, cultural and religious origin as the population it oppressed. How much of an advance was this, and was it worth the lives of half a million people to make it?" For more about his essay see here: The Battle of Algiers. To use another example, just look at Mao in China who talked a good line about freedom, but turned out to be an extremely thuggish, oppressive leader who let 50 million of his own people stave to death in the "Great Leap Forward", saying that mattered was making China into a world power and the lives of his own people did not matter at all. Just like Mugabe, Mao had a massive sense of entitlement, expecting the most luxurious of living establishments and had an obsession for having sex with pubescent girls because he wanted to make certain that they're were virgins. Mao was literally a dirty old man, a man who never took a bath and brushed his teeth and by all accounts reeked while at the same time had this creepy obsession with having sex with his harem of pubescent girls. The sort of person who makes for a good guerrilla leader is somebody who is fanatical, uncompromisingly, rigid, intolerant of other viewpoints and very authoritarian; the sort of man who embraces violence as a positive good in and of itself. The most classic example would be Avraham Stern of the far right-wing Zionist guerrilla group Lehi, better known as the Stern Gang. Stern, a self-proclaimed "Jewish fascist" and an Anglophobic fanatic whose hatred of the British was such that he actually proposed an alliance between his group and Nazi Germany in 1939. Admittedly, this was just before the Holocaust at a time when the policy in the Third Reich was to make life so intolerable for Jews in Germany that they would just leave, but it was a bizarre gesture. Even more bizarre was the fact during World War II when Britain was fighting Nazi Germany that the Stern Gang continued their armed struggle against the British with Stern again making an offer of alliance with Germany in January 1941, proposing that the Germans make him the dictator of a future fascist state to be established over the former Palestine Mandate. To be fair, the Stern Gang only comprised about 500 people at its maximum strength, but still it is rather odd that there were Jews waging a guerrilla war against the British in hope of a victory for Nazi Germany. It takes a very fanatical person to do that, and by all accounts the Stern Gang were the most extreme of all the Zionist groups; even the right-wing Irgun group shunned them as fanatics. It is true that the guerrillas, especially the ones from ZANLA did commit atrocities against both blacks and whites. However, what is wrong here is the one-sided treatment of the subject with no mention of any atrocities committed by the Rhodesian state.

The fact that Mugabe was such a disaster as a leader has been used as a retroactive justification for Rhodesia with people such as the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn arguing that Mugabe's brutality and corruption proved the claim of the Smith regime that majority rule would everything down to the dogs. But in truth is that the failures of Mugabe proved merely that guerrilla leaders make for bad leaders, not that black leaders make for bad leaders. Wars radicalise people and drive people to the extreme solutions that would had been unthinkable in peacetime. In 1965, when the British government that it was going to grant independence to the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia on the basis on color-blind voting, Mugabe was a marginal figure in the black community. The mainstream black leaders in Southern Rhodesia were moderate men who were willing to work with the white community in an independent nation. But the white community by and large did not want to share people with the blacks, which is they elected Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front who were adamantly against allowing the blacks to vote. Smith was quite open about that-he believed that blacks were just too stupid to be allowed equality with whites. Smith unilaterally declared independence in 1965 and established Rhodesia. Initially, it was the hope of the black community that the United Nations sanctions would force Smith to blend, but that didn't happen. It was only in 1972, a good 7 years after the UDI that the guerrilla war began. What is surprisingly is not that the black people took up arms, but that it took them so long to do so. During the war, the Rhodesian state waged a massive amount of violence against the black population, which had the effect of radicalising them and increasing the appeal of extremists. Hence when a free and fair color-blind election was finally held in 1980, it was won by the extreme black supremacist thug Mugabe. Rhodesia was criminal folly of the worse sort. Had a color-blind election been held in 1965 instead of 1980, the winner would had been a far moderate black leader. Smith's policies were a self-fulling prophecy that brought the very ruin of the white community that he wanted to save. The example of Rhodesia proves the very opposite of the claim that likes of Steyn are trying to make-it would been far better to a color-blind election in 1965 instead of fighting a war that killed thousands of people and which the whites had no hope of ever winning (more about that below). All Smith succeeded in doing was delaying the inevitable for 15 years and in the process got thousands of people killed for no good reason.        

Just checking the references for this article, quite a few of citations are to Rhodesian propaganda like this link here Red for Danger. This pamphlet Red for Danger also invokes the "Yellow Peril" stereotype with the cartoon of the sinister red Chinese dragon about to devour Africa on its cover and its depiction of the Chinese as a relentlessly greedy people draining Africa dry. The pamphlet Red for Danger invokes that standard anti-Asian stereotype of the Chinese as a militantly anti-Western people with insatiable desires for more and more that can never be fulfilled. As an example of Rhodesian propaganda, it is OK, but it fails the test as a RS.     

The ZANLA was trained and armed by the Chinese, and anyone familiar with the tactics used by the Communist guerrillas in the Chinese Civil War will instantly recognize the tactics used by ZANLA. ZANLA waged a classic Maoist guerrilla war, and embraced Mao's famous aphorism that "guerrillas should swim with the people like fish in the sea". Contrary to what this article claims solely based on Rhodesian propaganda pamphlets (!), the guerrillas did not run amok and kill people. The Rhodesian government was willing to pay generously for information about the guerrillas and there were black people who did work as informers for the government. The blacks killed by the guerrillas were people suspected, wrongly or rightly, of being informers, and it is true that the ZANLA guerrillas did have a sadistic streak. The guerrillas, especially ZANLA, wanted the support of the people in order to "swim like fish in the sea". Killing indiscriminately would be counter-productive. As this article does note correctly, the Rhodesian government published photographs of black people who had been gruesomely murdered as example of guerrilla atrocities. However, in least several of these cases, it appears that it was the Rhodesian soldiers or policemen who had gruesomely tortured and murdered people and tried to pass them as the work of the guerrillas.              

Several times this article calls the guerrillas "terrorists", which is a rather POV way of phrasing it. Furthermore, note the way the forced relocation of thousands of black farmers into "protected villages" is misrepresented as a means to "protect" the ordinary people from the "terrorists". This taking Rhodesian propaganda at face value. A very common counter-insurgency tactic is to forcibly relocate rural people to fortified villages/camps under government rule as a way to sever the people supporting the guerrillas from the guerrillas. The concentration camps used by the Spanish in Cuba and by the British in South Africa during the Boer War are especially notorious examples of this tactic; in both the Cuban and South African case, hundreds of thousands of people died in the concentration camps owing to unsanitary conditions. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the British locked up the Afrikaners together with the entire rural black population. The suffering of the Boers in the concentration camps is well known; less known is the suffering of the black population in the concentration camps, even through three times the number of blacks died as Boers. During the near-genocidal "Pacification of Libya", the Italian Fascist regime forced the Muslim population of Libya into concentration camps to stop them from supporting the Senussi guerrillas. In the Algerian War, the French forced about 2 Algerian Muslims into either camps de regroupement or villages de regroupement to sever the Algerian Muslims from the FLN guerrillas. At the same time that the French were forcibly relocating much of Algeria's rural population, the British were doing the same during the Malaya Emergency. Because the Communist guerrillas in Malaya were overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese, the British relocated the entire Chinese minority of Malaya into the "New Villages" built to keep the guerrillas apart from the populace that supported them. In the Kenya Emergency, the British forced much of the Kikuyu population into concentration camps, where even Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of Kenya admitted in 1957 that the living conditions in the camps were "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia". Perhaps the best known example of this tactic were the "Strategic Hamlets" built by the Americans in Vietnam with the aim of keeping the South Vietnamese peasants apart from the Viet Cong guerrillas. The "Strategic Hamlets" were described as being a way to protect the Vietnamese peasants from the Viet Cong, but most of the peasants felt the "Strategic Hamlets" were just sordid and squalid prison camps surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun posts, as to keep them in as to keep the Viet Cong out.  

The purpose of the "protected villages" was to sever the black population from the guerrillas, not to "protect" the black population from the guerrillas. The poor living conditions in the "protected villages", which black farmers were forbidden to leave are correctly noted, but the article excuses the Rhodesian state, saying: "The Smith government asserted that these conditions were forced by the violence of the ZANLA forces, and that the lack of adequate accommodations was simply caused by their inability to build the infrastructure quickly enough." This is very biased way of presenting the war. There is nothing about how the black farmers forced into the protected villages felt them to be very much like the "Strategic Hamlets", just glorified concentration camps intended to keep them in while forcing to endure very squalid living conditions. The forced relocation of the entire rural black population of Rhodesia into the squalid "protected villages" did impose considerable suffering and played an important role in radicalizing the black population.

The article could use some mention about the way in Rhodesia sought to bring white volunteers. Rhodesia's fans both at the time and since such as Lord Richard Cecil glorified the "superbly professional" white Rhodesian Army which was so good at killing black guerrillas, but it didn't matter. The black population outnumbered the white population by 23 to 1. The Patriotic Front guerrillas would lose hundreds of men killed while the Rhodesian Army would lose dozens killed, but the guerrillas always replaced their losses. There were so many young black men in Rhodesia living in extreme poverty with no hope of better future under the white supremacist government so there was never a shortage of volunteers for the Patriotic Front. By contrast, the Rhodesian Army had much difficulties in replacing their losses and by the 1975 the Rhodesian Army was suffering from a desperate manpower shortage that grew progressively worse as the 1970s went on. Because the white population was so much more smaller than the black population, even losing a dozen or so men killed in a operation was a major loss for the Rhodesian Army who could not replace their losses. According to the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannia Yearbook, the Rhodesian Army had 3, 400 men with 7, 000 reservists to be called up in times of emergency. Additionally there was the para-military British South Africa Police (which despite its name was neither British nor South African) which had 6, 400 men on duty with 28, 500 reservists who could be called up. So all said, Rhodesia had about 45, 300 men under arms in 1969. A typical division in an army is about 25, 000 men while a brigade is about 4, 000 men. The 1969 Yearbook also gives the population of Rhodesia as being about 5, 090, 000 people, of whom 1% were Asian being huaren (overseas Chinese) or Indian; 5% were white, being mostly of British or South African origin; and 94% were black, being either Shona or Ndebele. Moreover, despite what Rhodesian propaganda liked to claim about the white population being the descendants of rugged British settlers who came there in the 19th century, much of the white population had arrived only in the 1950s. Just looking at the biographies of members of the Smith cabinet, one is struck by just how many were born in either the United Kingdom or South Africa, and just how few were born in Rhodesia. Because much of the white population was of recent origin, being people who had come to Rhodesia to enjoy la dolce vita in Africa in the 1950s, many of whom left when the war began. The situation was quite different in South Africa when the white population was not only larger, but also had been there longer. The South African whites are divided into the Anglos, the descendants of British settlers who came there in the 19th century and the Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers who came there in the 17th century. Given the problems imposed by "white flight" and the general smallness of the white population, the Patriotic Front guerrillas quite literally bled the Rhodesian Army to death. This was a war that the "superbly professional" Rhodesian Army had no hope of ever winning, which is why Rhodesia finally came to an end in 1980. In an attempt to make good their losses, the Rhodesian waged a propaganda campaign trying to encourage white men from America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France and elsewhere to come live and fight for Rhodesia. The recruiting campaign in the United States tried to encourage white Vietnam veterans to come fight for Rhodesia. The campaign was a failure as only about 400 white Vietnam veterans went to Rhodesia, where most of them failed as soldiers with about 80% of the American veterans ended up deserting from the Rhodesian Army. Most of the American volunteers were men who failed as soldiers in Vietnam, failed as civilians when they're left the U.S Army and not surprisingly failed in Rhodesia. But this article should talk about this a bit.

On that line, this is topic that has been looked, indeed might make the fine subject of somebody's PhD dissertation as I cannot find about this in a RS, but a recurring theme of Rhodesian propaganda and by Rhodesia's friends in the West is the tendency to equate being white with being Western. It is striking how often claims like Milton Friedman's absurd statement in 1976 that the end of white rule in Rhodesia would be the "suicide of the West" were made. Indeed, when the nation was Rhodesia, it was considered to be of the West; the moment it became Zimbabwe it stopped being considered part of the West. The same is true about South Africa. When it was under the apartheid regime, it was a "vital" part of "Western civilization"; the moment the first color-blind election was held in 1994, it became just another Third World country, even the demographics before and after the 1994 election were the same. It would be interesting if somebody could find a RS about the way that Westernness was linked to whiteness.      

An example of the POV-pushing here can be seen in the line about the Rhodesian state sought to "maintain the support of the country's black majority in the face of infiltration and indoctrination of ZANLA and ZIPRA". In other words, the black population actually supported the white supremacist government of Rhodesia and if there any support for ZANLA and ZIPRA, it was because of this sinister "infiltration and indoctrination". The reader would never know from reading this article that the vast majority of the black population of Rhodesia did not support the Smith government, which for the very simple reason that they did not want to be treated like second-class citizens, deprived of the right to vote and hold office and forced to serve as an impoverished underclass serving the white minority. The reader would never know this from reading the article, instead material from the Rhodesian pamphlet Red for Danger being presented as fact as the article saying: "It identifies ZANU and ZAPU political parties as cover organisations for Communist expansion and was an attempt to elicit the help of Western countries actively pursuing containment". In other words, life for Rhodesia for black people was very wonderful and the only reasons why movements like ZANU and ZAPU existed is because the Soviet Union and China wanted them to exist. In short, black dissatisfaction did not really exist and the only reason why there were guerrillas fighting to overthrow the white supremacist is because the Chinese and the Russians put them up to it; the fact that the black population had to live under an apartheid regime was apparently not a factor at all. There were two guerrilla movements fighting against Rhodesia. One was the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army whose membership was mostly Shona and which was supported by China. The other was the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) whose membership was mostly Ndebele and which was supported by the Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviets supported the ZIPRA and the Chinese supported ZANLA is true, but it is not the same thing as these movements were conjured out of thin air by Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Zedong as this article is making out. In 1980, there were free and fair elections conducted by the British while being supervised by the United Nations that allowed for color-blind voting. By all accounts, the 1980 election was a free and fair vote. Mugabe won a crushing majority in these elections while Smith's party was crushed. Mugabe was not a good leader, but by all accounts, the 1980 vote was a free vote, and judging from the election result, it appears that the black population supported him. The Shona overwhelmingly voted for Mugabe, and as the Shona are the largest of Zimbabwe's ethnic groups that was enough to allow him to form the government. If the black population really supported Smith as this article claims, then why didn't they vote for him in 1980? If there was no black dissatisfaction against Rhodesia, there would had been no guerrilla war to overthrow it.

Finally this article only focuses on Rhodesian propaganda. There was also an extensive propaganda against Rhodesia, which goes unmentioned in this article. Both the Soviet Union and China waged extensive propaganda against Rhodesia in the Third World, emphasizing their opposition to a racist state as way to gain support. This propaganda was so successful that the United States never recognized Rhodesia. Even Henry Kissinger, who is scarcely a man sympathetic towards people in the Third World, argued in 1975 that the United States had to come out against Rhodesia because to continue support Rhodesia would mean alienating public opinion in Africa. The United Nations had imposed sanctions on Rhodesia in 1965 and the United States had promised to enforce the sanctions. In practice, the U.S. government allowed fairly generous exemptions to the sanctions for "strategic" businesses that were supposedly vital for U.S. "national security", and a 1971 study showed that over 200 American corporations listed on Wall Street were still doing business in Rhodesia, including such well known "strategic" companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi.It was only in the mid-1970s that it was realized in Washington that the Soviet Union and China were winning friends in the Third World by their staunch opposition to Rhodesia that the Americans finally got serious about opposing Rhodesia out of fear of losing influence in the Third World. It was only in 1977 that the United States finally got serious about enforcing the UN sanctions against Rhodesia, making no more exemptions for "strategic" trade. Beyond that, a good many liberal and anti-racist groups in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere waged propaganda against Rhodesia, arguing that a state based on white supremacy was an abomination. This article only focuses on Rhodesian propaganda, about the case for Rhodesia. There is no mention about the case against Rhodesia, and the reason for that is quite simple. To talk about anti-Rhodesian propaganda means to talk about the decent people who were appalled at a state that was based on the principle that some people because of the color of their skin are inferior to other people, which is an argument that the editors of this page were evidently not interested in. You would not know this from reading this article, but Rhodesia lost the propaganda war. The majority of the people in the West were not willing to support a racist state. The case against Rhodesia turned to be far stronger than the case for Rhodesia, and it is because ideas about white supremacy were not longer acceptable. This article badly needs a rewrite.--A.S. Brown (talk) 03:03, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Anatomy of Terror booklet

At issue is this edit by Smefs, which they have now tried to force in twice. The edit makes it seem as if the propaganda booklet "Anatomy of Terror" was a factual document. The secondary source (which I added, as the paragraph previously had no secondary sources) makes it clear that this is not the case. Fred Zepelin (talk) 21:51, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this an intentional misreading of the document and accompanying sources at best and an outright lie at worst. The user Fred Zepelin has been removing reliable sources and information documenting massacres and whitewashing atrocities committed by ZANLA and ZIPRA during the Rhodesian Bush War. Another example. If you want to debate the existence of the St Alberts school attack, I'd recommend doing so on that page's talk page.Smefs (talk) 13:28, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm going to assume good faith here and point out that you've made a (possibly honest) mistake. In the edit you point out above, you should look more closely at it, and understand that I did not remove a single source. As for tangents like the St Alberts school attack - well, this section is purely about the Anatomy of Terror booklet. So please try to stay on topic. Fred Zepelin (talk) 18:14, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

The St. Alberts attack is a literal example of one of the atrocities that the ZANLA and ZIPRA committed. So it is actually relevant, and proves my point. I find it hard to assume good faith when you are continuously hounding me and attempting to whitewash African genocides, so I will be restoring the corrected version.Smefs (talk) 19:51, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that photos of the atrocities committed by ZANLA at St. Alberts school were included in the pamphlet and are thus relevant.Smefs (talk) 19:57, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

You can mention that all you want, but if a reliable source does not say that, it is meaningless. This discussion is only about a single propaganda booklet. Whether or not there is any content in that propaganda booklet that actually happened is irrelevant, unless you find a source that connects the two. In the absence of such a source, our text goes only by what is in reliable secondary sources. Fred Zepelin (talk) 01:15, 21 May 2024 (UTC)