American Revelation (Part Two)

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. ~Revelation 6:3-4

I ran into a friend of mine at work yesterday morning when I took the kitchen laundry over to the hotel, a lady I hadn't seen in awhile, and for that reason I'd wondered a bit if everything was OK. Her name is Virginia, she and her husband Henry have been very good friends of mine for years. They're immigrants. Henry is from Zimbabwe, Virginia (despite her strong African accent) is from the UK, though her father was a Black dude from South Africa. After the requisite couple minutes of small talk, I said "So, I've been wanting to talk to you, or Henry, about Zimbabwe, I saw that Robert Mugabe is gone. I watched the events of the Coup very closely...and I thought of Henry."

At that point, this old, chatty African lady exploded into joy. "Yes, Gone! It was beautiful. The best thing of all, no one died, there was no violence. Henry was very happy." I wholeheartedly agreed that it was a beautiful thing that all this happened without violence. I told her that I was just a little kid, not quite eight years old, when Mugabe became the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. Virginia replied that she had just graduated from high school the year before. We talked a bit about the situation, she said that international aid has increased, and some of the expropriated land has been returned to white Zimbabweans, which she believed will motivate foreign investors and bring in needed capital, which will decrease the need for aid and help get the country on its feet. Virginia isn't an economist or even management where I work, she's a housekeeper. We covered all this stuff in a conversation that lasted five, maybe six minutes, while me and another dude were unloading a couple hundred pounds of laundry. Then Virginia gave me a hug, we agreed we had to make arrangements to hang out and talk more about this stuff, and she went to punch in for her workday.

The other dude, John, who barely follows American politics or economic stuff, was dumbfounded. He said "You know a lot about politics, don't you? I couldn't even imagine following that stuff in another country." I laughed "You should, it certainly could affect you."

See, there's more ties between Zimbabwe...or more properly, Rhodesia, it's white-dominated predecessor...and the American far-right than one might think. The exact kind of nuts that are now Trump Supporters are the same people who went over and fought for the Rhodesian Army or engaged in sanctions-busting, or otherwise supported the white minority government in the 1970's at the height of the Rhodesian Bush War. I'm talking about people like this damned nut. I'm talking about people like Robin Moore, who wrote the book on which the John Wayne movie "The Green Berets" was based, I'm talking about the fact that the US government violated its own sanctions to buy ore from Rhodesia and I'm talking about Soldier Of Fortune magazine.

These are the people who thought Nixon didn't go far enough...who thought that the Vietnam War should have...or could have, or would have...ended with mushroom clouds over Hanoi. As if the Chinese or the Soviets...both of whom would have lost people in such an attack...would not have responded with a retaliatory strike of their own somewhere.

Hell, their only answer to Communism was massive, naked force as well. Their answer couldn't have been better ideas...because they didn't have any. For all their love of it, they don't understand war. War is not about destroying things...war is about making the enemy break before you do...otherwise there would be no battle cries or war dances. War isn't about just destroying or killing...it's about doing so effectively. Otherwise, well, you get Vietnam, or the Soviet or American misadventures in Afghanistan. In such cases, all the enemy has to do is hang on until the invader poisons local public opinion against themselves enough...

But that's not really what it's about. Get used to that idea, that it's never really about what these people say it's about.

Anti-Communism was often, among far-right types at least, a racist dog-whistle. The UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) government of Ian Smith, especially after they declared Rhodesia a Republic, cast themselves as the defenders of Christianity and Western Civilization, fighting against the hordes of Godless Communism. Sound familiar? Now, none of that is true, of course. Whether one sees it on Alt-right Nazi websites today or heard it from far-right politicians or the KKK back in the day, it's still bullshit. The Zimbabwean Nationalist rebels got a lot of help, training and weapons from the East Bloc, but that was who would help them. Funny thing but towards the end the Rhodesian government had no issues with buying Soviet-made T-55 Tanks from Poland, either, just like the Alt-right has no issues with accepting help from Russia now...even though Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent and steeped in "Godless Communism" himself.

The way this war worked, was that the Rhodesian Security Forces held the upper hand against Nationalist Guerrillas, while maintaining a reign of terror over the majority Black population, and the fighting was primarily rural. It went on this way from UDI in 1964 until the 1974 Carnation Revolution (a successful revolt by liberal-leaning NATO-trained military officers against Portugal's borderline fascist government following the death of dictator Antonio De Oliviera Salazar) led to the end of the war in Portugal's overseas colonies, including Mozambique. This deprived the Rhodesians of one of their two main sources of military supply and support (the other being South Africa) that was willing to break the arms embargo and it forced the government to start looking for a political solution to the war. Negotiations were somewhat successful, an internal settlement was reached, and a Black-majority government was installed, but the two main armed Nationalist groups were excluded...so they kept fighting and kept the pressure on. It worked, and after the Lancaster House agreement with the UK in 1979 the country reverted briefly to British rule and under the authority of (yes, Conservative) Margaret Thatcher's government...even though she personally sympathized with Rhodesian Whites...  which held to the stated policy of No Independence Before Majority African Rule) a more permanent solution was achieved. In 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe became its Prime Minister.

Despite his socialistic rhetoric and acceptance of Chinese and Soviet aid, Mugabe adhered to a largely-conservative program...but one that fully included the Black majority in all respects. Faced with competition, a lot of the whites left in gradually increasing numbers, and Mugabe's seizure of land owned by white farmers in 2000 caused still more to leave. None of that helped anything, and Mugabe himself spiraling off into autocracy and greed made matters much worse. In fact only agricultural assistance and equipment provided by China helped Zimbabwe to begin to redevelop the skills to use the land properly. In the meantime, Zimbabwe is still a net-importer of food (where food was once a major export) but as my friend said, things have improved a little bit in the meantime, and there is hope for more.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, during the conflict it was quite common to see Rhodesian housewives out and about carrying sub-machine guns and such (so, along the lines of "This is the future conservatives want" yet again...) and as I've said before those people's rhetoric and that of white American conservatives are pretty damned similar. The fact of a changing international situation is also broadly similar, although current environmental problems add a variable that didn't exist (at least not on this level) forty years ago.

But on some level...the conservatives? They're largely the same or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they've begun to revert to the kind of bullshit they were known for in the 1950's. Of course, that too started with the National Rifle Association back in the 1990's. Ironically, much of the worst of it happened under Charlton Heston's leadership. Now how a guy goes from marching with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights and protesting segregation...to dog-whistle racism and waving a gun around, I'll never know...Neoconservative or not.

Fuck, *I* used to be a Neoconservative and I couldn't support that type of shit. I let my own NRA membership lapse in 2000 because I thought they'd become too political and that was never what I signed up for.

I'm glad now, that I left when I did because (even though the craziness actually died down during the Bush years) it's gotten much worse lately.

One gets the vibe that these people just can't wait to shoot it out with their fellow Americans. What makes people want to do stuff like that? I'd submit that in retrospect, it seems fairly obvious that the farther-right one gets, the more racism becomes part of the program. Whether people intended for that to be the case, or it just happened, doesn't matter. We're there now. We have people who'd rather have kids killing kids, or mass shootings with almost 600 total casualties, than take a chance that they might actually be fully equal to Black folks...rather than merely legally equal. After all, as conservatives themselves are so fond of telling people, just because one makes a law about something doesn't mean that people will obey. I guess they'd know. They don't have to arm themselves and organize and shoot it out with the rest of us, all they have to do is provide easy access to weapons, including providing them to crazy people, and watch as crazy and malicious and stupid people kill other people for all sorts of dumb reasons.

It's population control through murder and suicide, that's what it is.

How else would Dylan Roof, a goddamned racist nut with legal issues and a drug problem, and who owned a jacket with a Rhodesian flag on it, get the handgun he used to kill nine African Americans in a church? According to none other than then-FBI Director James Comey, the only reason Roof was able to purchase his Glock .45-caliber handgun was lapses in the NICS background-check system, which is operated by the FBI. You know who resists any attempt to make that system work better? The NRA. That's who.

From the beginning, capitalism and guns have been intertwined with racism...but even these fools know that if they just went out and started killing black people, or gay people, or Muslims or poor people or whatever they'd get taken out real quick, and whoever of them survived they'd be put on trial for ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass murder...you name it. But no...aim it at an average of 30,000 random people per year, then recast it as mere corporate profit, and package it up with a good corporate lobbying game and an action-movie star or two (and the NRA board is loaded with them) and it's not only perfectly legal, but likely to be resoundingly popular, at least among those who think they could or should have had a shot at being action movie stars.

They know that at least some of those 30,000 people are going to be the people they don't like. They know at least some of those people are going to be people they consider a drain on the system. They don't care about the collateral damage, as long as it isn't them.

It's the same thing with homophobia. I always said that homophobia got to be such a thing because it wasn't cool for people to be racist anymore...and there's the added bonus that people of color end up being LGBT at about the same rate as everybody else...so they got to hand onto a little of their hatred for everybody else, too.

Guns and hate go way back, too.

The fact that something like 80% of Americans including a lot of conservatives want better gun control? That just gets lost in the mix, because the American system is tilted towards handing a megaphone to the crazy, the rabid, and the salacious.

The fact that all African-Americans or most of the rest of us want is a fair shake? They don't care about that, either.

In fact, at this point I'd wager that any resolution to any situation that doesn't result in a firefight is a disappointment to the fucking NRA. When all you have is a hammer, sooner or later everything starts to look like a nail.

It doesn't hurt that guns fir well with their mentality of authoritarianism and life as a zero-sum game, either.

"Do what I say, because I've got a gun" ...only works for as long as the ammunition holds out.

I'm a gun owner, I grew up around guns, and I say this is ridiculous.

The only reason that the Right to Bear Arms is being pushed to the point of absolutism...is because it's the one most easily capable of being used as a club to beat on all of the other rights of their neighbors, citizens and otherwise, immigrant or native-born.

Then, of course, there's the American political class (Left or Right, it often seems) and corporations and their love of war, as my inclusion of the picture of Henry Kissenger was meant to suggest, but regarding that issue...which of course could be many more posts of its own...I think I'll just say that these days, I'm really feeling like a lot of why we get ourselves involved in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam...is because if the people who really drive this problem actually chose to invade Chicago...which Trump was actually dumb enough to bring up...or Los Angeles, Americans might notice, and stand up and do something about them. Republicans want to bomb North Korea because they know if they bombed California, they'd have a civil war on their hands, that they'd more than likely lose.

And after all, as far as Republicans are concerned, what good is spending all that money on weapons (or anything else?) if it doesn't keep them in power?

Remember, that's what all this crazy bullshit is all about, power.

But remember, too, that there's another way...and that when I spoke about these issues with an immigrant...that was the first place her mind went, without having to exhaust other alternatives.

...And that, right there, is a threat to those who wish to hoard money and power, who'd happily retroactively throw out Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan for their liberal heresies (such as working with the existing systems in the context of their time and place even when it didn't favor them, or doing what a majority of the people wanted) and who want to throw out any aspect of our system...up to and including naturally conservative-leaning parts of it like the Federal Bureau of Investigation...because adherence to (and rule of) law is also a threat to that power.

Change is coming, and these people started it, or will make it worse, depending on one's point of view. Conservatism in America is at least as dead as Ronald Reagan is.

We...the rest of us...had best come up with something new fast, before people's worst impulses start filling the void.

American Revelation (Part One)

American Revelation (Part Three)