http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402771_pf.html

Indira Gandhi and Costa Rica’s Jose Figueres are notorious for having received funding for both the CIA and the KGB.. I wouldn’t be surprised there were more who managed to “play the game”.

“Didn??t the US send a plane to rescue some Belgian refugees from the Congo once?”

Are you talking about Operation Dragon Rouge in Kisangani ?

I don’t know that CIA supported ZANU-PF, but the “liberation struggle” certainly had many American supporters outside government proper – most notoriously, the World Council of Churches. Nice going, guys. I promise never to complain about the Spanish Inquisition again.

Castro as well as many others could be added to the list. I don’t know of any American activity in Africa, left-wing or right-wing, that did our country much credit or good. Didn’t the US send a plane to rescue some Belgian refugees from the Congo once?

Devlin’s book, it is true, does reveals a great deal about CIA influence over the post-Lumumba regimes in Zaire. But I wondered while reading it whether it was in fact a very elaborate decoy — lots of revelations to persuade us that CIA did not kill Lumumba. Revealing Mobutu’s larceny was the price they paid perhaps for this diversion.

I don’t know Judith Todd personally, but people whom I know well also know her well. So I know who she is and know about her fate following Independence. Ms Todd was on the side of majority rule, the only side which any morally decency human could be on during the Zimbabwean Second Chimurenga. That good deeds are often punished is a predictable feature of our world, but that fact does not justify choosing doing evil or doing nothing over doing good. But it is easy, and somewhat supercilious, for me to say this. I do not wish to take away from the suffering that brave and good lady has endured. She is an example to us all.

I suspect that our argument here could continue for years, with neither of us shifting ground, so I won’t continue arguing. But, under no circumstances may you take this as a submission, in any respect whatsoever, to your obnoxious, morally repugnant, un-Christian and historically-unsupported views.

Instead, I will just take up your final point.

In your list, you omitted Castro, who received CIA funding and arms for an attempt (in 1956) to overthrow the Cuban dictatorship, and Saddam Hussein, who received CIA funding for his first (abortive) coup attempt in Iraq in 1959.

And you included Mugabe. Do you have any firm evidence of CIA support for Mugabe and/or for ZANU-PF? I ask because of the following circumstantial evidence has long intrigued me:

– Judith Todd in her recent autobiography says that within ZAPU circles, there were always rumours that ZANU-PF had CIA funding.

– The Rhodesian Government allowed Mugabe and Edger Tekere to leave the country in 1975 when they fled to Mozambigue, according to an interview with a former Rhodesian CIO officer in Heidi Holland’s recent book about Mugabe.

– In the early 1960s, the CIA had agents and friends inside the South African ANC (the CIA used these agents to inform on Mandela in 1962) and among the senior leadership of the Belgian Congo, including Mobutu Sese Seko (according to Larry Devlin’s recent book on his time as the CIA Station Chief there in the 1960s).

– At Indepedence, Zimbabwe refused to allow the USSR to open an embassy for 2 years.

– For several years following Independence, the Zimbabwean CIO had a counter-intelligence division with only two sections: one devoted to countering South African intelligence activity, and one devoted to countering Soviet intelligence activity. When I once asked a senior CIO officer (an ex-ZANLA man) whom I knew well why there was no section devoted to countering USA activities, he told me that the ZANU-PF Government did not believe the USA was a threat. This was in 1985, five years after Independence.

“This animal is very vicious. When attacked, it defends itself.”

The victims in Rhodesia were the whites. You’re claiming it was the whites’ fault. Of course, there was infighting among the whites: some of them were on Ian Smith’s side, some of them were on your side. “This animal is very vicious…” Let’s take an example: Judith Todd. Do you know the story of Judith Todd? Which side was she on, and which abused her more atrociously?

Many people who died in the conflict, of course, were not white. But if you can claim that the war was over anything but white supremacy versus black supremacy in Rhodesia, or that the former side did not lose or the latter did not win, you have transcended history.

Talking about the similarities between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe is like talking about the fact that the Allies, after they occupied Germany, reused many of the old Nazi concentration camps. Of course they did. They needed the same kind of facility. But this does not enable any meaningful comparison between the Allies and the Nazis. It does not make the Allies responsible for Nazi crimes, or vice versa. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and claiming that any man or party is responsible, in some magical way, for the crimes of his enemies, is extraordinary. At least in my book.

And the thing is repeating itself. You might enjoy this link. Scroll down to where he describes it as a government-sponsored campaign. Rest assured that the author (a surgeon in South Africa) is anything but an unreconstructed Rhodesian Front supporter. (Actually, in hindsight, the RF was far too liberal in the end. I’m more of an unreconstructed Rhodesian Action Party man myself. The Rhodies should have struck for Beira and dared the world to do its worst.)

Note also your complete refusal to consider my explanation of the difference between Rhodesia and Zambia and Malawi, or the similarity between Rhodesia and Zanzibar. (For those who are not African history buffs, Zanzibar is the “zan” in Tanzania.) Don’t worry: we reactionaries are accustomed to the old stone wall.

Noam Chomsky was right: the US is and always has been the world’s leading exporter of terrorism. Revolutionary terrorism, to be exact. Support from the most prestigious institutions in America fueled Bolivar, Mazzini, the Fenians, Juarez, Chiang, Mao, Ho, Mugabe, Mandela and Zuma. Perhaps at some point, the State Department, the CFR, the Times and Harvard will learn to quit adopting any murderous bandit warlord who can dupe them into thinking he’s a 18th-century Renaissance man, a 19th-century statesman, or even a 21th-century technocrat. But I am not optimistic in this matter. The delusion is too advantageous to all concerned.

It is a grossly-inaccurate and tendentious distortion of my argument so say that I am claiming it is the victims’ fault in Zimbabwe. I am claiming nothing of the sort.

If Zimbabwe had achieved majority rule anytime before 11 November 1965, and thus before the Second Chimurenga began, the most likely political and economic evolution of the country would be the same as that we have seen in Zambia, Malawi or Tanzania. That the country’s political and economic evolution since majority rule turned out differently is thus (let me repeat that in case it is not clear: THUS) directly attributable to the policies of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front between 1962 and 1979. These policies not only delayed majority rule but guaranteed that majority rule would only be achieved after a military struggle, and thus that the eventual leaders would be people able and willing to use terror and murderous force to gain and keep political power. This was obvious to some people — eg, former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, a conservative and virulent anti-communist — as far back as the early 1960s.

It should also not be forgotten that the RF between 1962 and 1979 was not benignly promoting economic development and social mobility in the tribal trust lands, but was itself running a criminal campaign of state-sponsored terrorism and economic malfeasance against the country’s own non-white citizens.

Unreconstructed Rhodesian Front supporters, of course, even now refuse to accept this clear causal link between the locust-like policies of plunder of the illegal regime of Smith and the locust-like policies of plunder of the illegal regime of Mugabe. As was said of the Hapsburgs, RF supporters have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.