Zimbabwe In Shackles

A lady by the name of Cathy Buckle writes a weekly letter from Marxist Zimbabwe to the controversial news and opinion website Rense.com. Every time this poster reads those reports, it both saddens and enrages me. Saddens, because similar situations are happening all over sub-Saharan Africa. Enrages, because both the West and the Sino-Soviet....excuse me, Sino-Russian Bloc won't do anything about it. The former, because they either don't want to be accused of racism and neo-colonialism, or because it would be bad for business. The latter, because they are comrades in the "struggle for liberation of the global proletariat", as well as it would harm their own business investments.

Anyway, Ms. Buckle has reported that Zimbabwe's opposition - the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - has announced that it won't run any candidates for office on any level in the country. Why? Not because they despair of freeing their land from their Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe. But that his ZANU party keeps changing the rules for elections, and often at the last minute. And so long as the Mugabe regime sets the rules, they "refuse to play the game".

Good for them, and too bad for Mugabe and ZANU.

Like South Africa, Zimbabwe - the former Rhodesia - had an apartheid regime. And like South Africa under the ANC, Zimbabwe under ZANU has become like so many other dictatorships through the world, whatever their racial or ethnic backgrounds. What their apartheid regimes did to the blacks, both the ANC and ZANU are doing to their respective white and rival blacks. Small businesses and co-operatives are crushed under over-regulation. Gun control is rigorously enforced. In Zimbabwe, like in other tyrannies, it is now illegal to criticize Mugabe at all.

Along with liberation from Mugabe and ZANU, Zimbabwe needs to know about the Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton and their legitimate successors. The temptation to centralize and dominate one's smaller rivals finds effective resistance when a nation implements Distributism to it's own unique situation. It will not stop such temptations all the time, true. But it will remove many occasions of it, helping a nation to promote Christ-centered sanity in it's domestic political and economic policies.