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Rhodesia is an interesting case in that it is a 60 year old mirror of modern day progressivism. White rule is unacceptable, for equality's sake we will support Mr. Mugabe. We all know how it turned out, but that hasn't stopped the same thing from happening 30 years later in South Africa.
My question is, who at the time was the major force against Rhodesia? Was it the UK and/or Harold Wilson, was it the US and/or Lyndon Johnson? Was it instead a political party? Were these governments happy with the end result, or did they ever say that they made a mistake with Rhodesia? I would guess not, given that they continue to do the same things. Anyone have any extra insight on the who and the why for the putting down the most effective African regimes, which just happened to be white?
Good read, hadn't seen that one yet. So Moldbug says it was just Universalists being Universalists. It fits well, but it's interesting that despite the total collapse of Zimbabwe after "liberation," the anti-colonial crowd did not bat an eye. They just moved on to the next one. To me that seems more sinister than the simple naivete that Moldbug talks about.
I think there is a small but significant portion of the universalist establishment that are intellectually dishonest meme warriors who are so caught up in the left-versus-right battle that they will lead cancel mobs against those who bring up counter-narrative evidence and "give ammo to the other side." These warriors will also aggressively spin former events -- so Mugabe's rise becomes the fault of a the racist whites who never brought education and civic training to Rhodesia, or something like that. That Mugabe's rise could have been prevented if Carter had thrown his full support behind Muzorewa is something that just gets memory holed. The rest of the universalist establishment just receives their narratives from the intellectual environment shaped by these meme warriors, and so either never learn about the disaster that happened, or the disaster is spun in such a way that they don't understand why it happened.
From the examples I've seen, "intellectually dishonest" is too innocent. Was Stalin or Lenin intellectually dishonest? I don't think so, I think they wanted to kill the kulaks and said whatever they had to say to make it happen.
Same thing with Rhodesia, I think they just hate the idea of white colonists so much that they depose him in favour of the nastiest guy they can find. The country burning afterwards is superior to it continuing to be prosperous under Smith's leadership. It's also the same as Soros DAs who are no longer prosecuting criminals. They don't care about the criminals, their motivation is hatred for normal people who fall victim to the criminals.
I don’t have a good mental model of soros DA’s, or indeed the kind of people who support them, but ‘hate the victims of criminals’ doesn’t seem like a good explanation for bad policy- for one thing, almost none of the victims are white kulaks that they dislike, they’re mostly poor minorities.
The Soros DAs have been doing their policies long enough to observe that the effect is... more crime. They are therefore pursuing this is a goal. The only real choices are "they love crims" and "they hate the people the crims attack". I prefer the latter, because nobody loves crims.
They could also be willfully ignorant, or they could believe they’re accomplishing some other goal(say, racial equity) that is more important than crime control.
Frankly, ‘they hate crime victims’ is the least likely explanation. I do not claim to understand them, but I feel like we can safely say they aren’t pure evil because very few people are.
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