8 ms·
Robert Mugabe, Strongman Who Cried, ‘Zimbabwe Is Mine,’ Dies at 95
- microcolonel 7y agoHallelujah. How long until the Prime Minister of Canada writes a glowing eulogy for him?
- dang 7y agoCould you please not post flamebait comments so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dagnysdildo 7y agoAnother tyrant bites the dust, and good riddance.
- chatman 7y agoRIP President Mugabe!
- razster 7y agoShame it didn't happen sooner. Much much sooner.
- paggle 7y agoPower is power. Never paid any price for the horrors he inflicted on millions.
- scarmig 7y agoHe was an authoritarian dictator with terrible economic policies and no respect for human rights, but "horrors he inflicted on millions" is overstating it a bit. He's not Idi Amin.
- paggle 7y agoHe is much worse because his policies led to widespread starvation killing millions. Not just killing 100,000 people. Both are terrible of course, and should have died in a brazen bull.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y agoSometimes it seems there is no justice in the world. I guess because there isn't. Terrible people who do catastrophic harm to millions of citizens live in wealth and comfort to the ripe old age of 95. At the same time, innocent children lose loving parents to disease and accident every day. I just hope that Zimbabwe will never again experience so terrible a leader, and that his legacy will live on as an example of how not to rule a country.
- agapon 7y agoI guess that there is no justice and no unjustice. The world is just very random / complex.
- kilroy123 7y agoCoincidentally, I'm actually in Harare, Zimbabwe right now. I was told earlier that there would be parties all over the city. Some will be celebrating but many others will mourn his death. Pretty surprising for me, a white westerner to hear that people will be morning for the guy.
- ceejayoz 7y agoEven the worst dictators have fans, or they get overthrown.
- dx87 7y agoI saw a documentary where doctors snuck cameras into NK. The doctors were doing free cateract surgery for people, and it was really prevalent because of how malnourished they were. The people getting surgery kept praising Kim Jong Il for saving their eye sight, even though he was the reason they needed surgery in the first place.
- turbo_fart_box 7y ago> I saw a documentary where doctors snuck cameras into NK. The doctors were doing free cateract surgery for people, and it was really prevalent because of how malnourished they were. The people getting surgery kept praising Kim Jong Il for saving their eye sight, even though he was the reason they needed surgery in the first place. They had to give praise. They were on camera
- chessturk 7y agoThey didn't know they were, but I think soldiers were in the room, so similar idea.
- sys_64738 7y agoPeople mourned Stalin.
- ncmncm 7y ago
- test1235 7y agostrongman?
- spaceflunky 7y agoThat's a funny way of spelling murderous dictator
- bitwize 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongman_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongman_(politics)
- mudil 7y agoZimbabwe's trillion dollar notes are quite popular with numismatics. On eBay, single $100 trillion dollar notes go for $10-30+ American dollars! I think the most rare ones are $20 trillion dollar note, though. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trillion-dollar-note-hyerinflation-investment https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trill...
- 52-6F-62 7y agoNow I sort of want one. I hope that the bills have to go away and that their economy can improve...
- skim_milk 7y agoI used to have a trillion dollar note and a large stack of million-dollar notes before some idiot at work stole them. Instead of retiring early all they got was my eternal disappointment. I keep wanting to replace my cash but the price of Zimbabwe bucks keeps going up and up, 100-trillion costs $70+ now! And when the notes were officially abandoned you could get whole bricks of unused stacks of any denomination for super cheap! Someday I will just have to take my losses and buy my 100-trill back.
- mudil 7y agoI have 100 sequential uncirculated and bound 100 trillion dollar notes that I bought on ebay ten years ago for probably $5. I remember when you could buy literally bricks of trillion dollar notes for a few dollars!
- brokenmachine 7y agoI've only got 50 Trillion... Got it for AUD$2.10 (USD$1.44) in 2013. Maybe I should have invested more. :-)
- rayiner 7y agoInteresting to read socialists’ take on Mugabe: https://solidarity-us.org/atc/51/p4616/ https://solidarity-us.org/atc/51/p4616/
- boomboomsubban 7y agoThe world was largely pro-Mugabe in 94. That's the year that the British gave him an honorary knighthood.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- billfruit 7y agoOf course he and his supporters have at times resorted to violence, but also it is to be remembered that he led the fight to end colonial rule in Zimbabwe, I remember during the Mandela memorial function many world leaders including Obama had made the appearance, Mugabe was the one who got the highest applause. IIRC Mandela didn't share the opinions of the western press regarding Mugabe. Perhaps it might even be said that esp the British Governments upto and including Tony Blair's didn't deal fairly with him for decades together, and that had a major role in what he eventually became. https://www.thenation.com/article/robert-mugabe-and-the-poisonous-legacy-of-british-colonialism/ https://www.thenation.com/article/robert-mugabe-and-the-pois...
- krustyburger 7y agoThe British government being “unfair” doesn’t excuse Mugabe’s tyranny or avarice. And tyrants are usually very good at generating applause while they are still in power.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cbnotfromthere 7y ago"the British Governments upto and including Tony Blair's didn't deal fairly with him [Mandela] for decades together" On the contrary, the Brits dealt fairly friendly towards what was, for all intents and purposes, a racist Communist thug with killers in his closest circle.
- notacoward 7y ago> he led the fight to end colonial rule in Zimbabwe, That overstates his role a bit. As in many 20th-century revolutions, the main thing distinguishing Mugabe from other leaders was not his actions vis a vis the target of the revolution (the Rhodesian government) but his ruthlessness toward his allies (e.g. Nkomo, Sithole).
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoThe more I see the stories of these leaders who led their country to independence and then stayed on and became dictators, the more I appreciate how unique George Washington was. His single decision to retire after 8 years set up American democracy for success.
- positr0n 7y agoEven well before his presidency, right after the British surrendered, he had to quash small scale conspiracies to have the army take power. And they would have easily made him a military leader similar to Cromwell if he wanted. Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newburgh_Conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newburgh_Conspiracy
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoGood point. The very fact that we even have an elected President owes a lot to him.
- tinus_hn 7y agoSimilarly Nelson Mandela, although it remains to be seen how successful he has been.
- Gibbon1 7y agoThing to consider is George Washington was a member of the Virginia General Assembly for 15 years before the revolution. And that body had been in existence for the previous 150 years (founded 1619, reorganized 1642) So George Washington was first and foremost a politician.
- scarmig 7y agoThere seem to be a lot of people here perplexed about why, exactly, Mugabe is celebrated, when there's so much there to (rightly) condemn him for. Read up on Rhodesia, and more broadly the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Africans weren't even second class citizens: the vast majority were given zero say in governance. Legal protections were de facto non-existent. And, in the midst of the bush war, tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the Rhodesian military. Does that at all excuse Mugabe post-Rhodesia? Not at all. But it's important to contextualize him if you want to understand why many still valorize him. As a point of comparison, Americans celebrate George Washington for leading a successful anti-colonial struggle and establishing a republic. But, a much darker gloss is that he founded a white settler republic that enshrined a brutal system of slavery in its Constitution and that regularly committed campaigns of genocide against non-dominant ethnic groups. Indeed, British restrictions on that was a substantial motivating factor for the white American settlers to have rebelled. Reducing Washington to that would mislead more than it reveals, but people are doing the exact same thing with Mugabe. Focusing on Mugabe's very real sins to the extent it obscures what people find compelling about him is limiting your own understanding of the world.
- mmsimanga 7y agoI appreciate the attempt to bring another side to the debate but the point you are missing is that it is us black Africans who are being critical of Mugabe. We all experienced the oppression by the Rhodesian government. It his actions against fellow blacks after "liberation" that we are criticizing. He presided over the murder of 20 000 people[0]. A leader who presides over record inflation no matter the excuse has failed and should step down to give someone else a chance. He had to be removed through a coup as he was preparing to hand over the country to his wife. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukurahundi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukurahundi
- rayiner 7y agoMany Americans aren’t constitutionally capable of criticizing countries that aren’t America.