Zimbabwe: call it dictatorship
What makes the atrocity in Zimbabwe so horrifying is that Mr. Mugabe and his kleptocratic cronies find entirely consistent ways to mock the forms of government even as they officially steal, loot, and pillage what remains of a beautiful country. As today’s Washington Post reports:
JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 30 — Zimbabwe’s parliament voted Tuesday to give President Robert Mugabe new constitutional powers to seize farmland and to restrict travel by government opponents in a country whose government is already regarded as among the most repressive in Africa.
There is no plausible reason why restricting travel could have any link to any public policy except that by coupling them, Mr. Mugabe can once again cloak his tyranny in the guise of ‘land reform’:
The parliament, flush with new members from Mugabe’s ruling party after a March legislative election that was denounced by many international observers as rigged, cast 103 votes for the constitutional changes, enough for the two-thirds majority needed in the body of 150 members. News reports from
The practical effect of the changes was hard to predict in a country where the government has already endorsed violent land invasions, demolished hundreds of thousands of homes, shuttered independent newspapers and threatened would-be protesters with arrest and attack.
But opposition leaders predicted that Mugabe, who is expected to swiftly sign the changes into law, would soon revoke their passports, making it more difficult for them to lobby for international pressure against Mugabe’s autocratic leadership.
Come on, Washington Post! Please stop calling it ‘autocratic leadership’!
Call it dictatorship, call it a military junta, call it a tyranny, but don’t debase the language by calling it autocratic leadership.
[No, because of his theft, repression, pillage, dictatorship, and slow genocide by bulldozer. — Ed.]
Mr. Mugabe’s cronies continue to practice Orwellian doublethink by labeling famine bounty, tragedy celebration:
“Today is a happy moment,” Charamba said, according to the Reuters news service. “This gives us an opportunity as Zimbabweans to be the true owners of the land and to be truly independent.”
Faced with hyperinflation, 70 percent unemployment and a paralyzing shortage of fuel, Mugabe has recently sought financial assistance from friendly countries, including
Agricultural production in
George Orwell saw it all, as he wrote in 1984:
“To know and not to know:
· To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies
· To hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them
· To use logic against logic
· To repudiate morality while laying claim to it
· To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy
· To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all,
· To apply the same process to the process itself.
That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.’”
Meanwhile, those outside dither:
A team from the International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, has been making a final evaluation before deciding whether to expel
What could the IMF possibly be waiting for?
Write to them (directly at eastafritac@imf.org) and ask,
“Why haven’t you expelled
