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Well, in the sense that it was a functioning country with a functioning economy, where despite the law people of all sorts had employment and improving standard
by microcolonel 7y ago
Well, in the sense that it was a functioning country with a functioning economy, where despite the law people of all sorts had employment and improving standards of living.
Fixing the undue separation of society without handing the place over to incompetents and backstabbers would be better, yes. As I've been led to understand it, Rhodesia's armed forces were majority black, and the majority of them did not support the new nationalists at the outset, but the state failed to liberalize, and so sealed their fate.
> like saying a better, freer Third Reich would have been a better place than Communist East Germany
Yes, if the Nazis reformed away from an attempted socialist German ethnostate into a liberal state rather than trying to take over the world, that would have been a good thing, and probably better than East Germany. In fact, West Germany was basically that reformed liberal state they could've been without quite so much bloodshed (though maybe without the technological innovations necessary for the war, you could argue it would not have been as great, in a twisted sort of way).
Altogether it is better to have a reformed unpleasant past than a revolution that throws the baby out with the bathwater. The fault for this, in my opinion, rests squarely on the shoulders of those states who let these institutions run their course until revolution was inevitable, and until the backstabbers could stab everyone in the back thoroughly.
- tptacek 7y agoRhodesia was not merely a white ethnocracy, it was a state premised on white ethnocracy; that was its reason for existence. I mean this sincerely: I think you might want to make your point about different ways to handle decolonialization without invoking "Apartheid: The Good Parts".
- mmsimanga 7y agoOne of the problems we have as Africa is we struggle to separate practical systems introduced by oppressive governments from the ideologies the governments that came up with these ideas. An example is the Rhodesian government did some good work in identifying different agricultural zones within Zimbabwe. They put up extensive fencing making it easy to deal with disease outbreaks. We were able to export beef to the EU, using the train built by Rhodes (to Cape Town port). I digress. The fences have not been maintained the EU will not touch our beef because we cannot guarantee it is free of Foot and Mouth disease. Our neighboring countries immediately shoot and burn Zimbabwean cattle if they stray into their countries because they don't want to tainted. Due to sanctions the Rhodesian government worked out a way to use sugar cane created ethanol as an additive to petrol. Unfortunately most of these types of debates get very emotional and it is hard to separate the ideology from good practical science and practice.
- microcolonel 7y ago> Apartheid: The Good Parts Apartheid was not the whole government, and the government is not the whole society.