Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Ian Smith: The Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Robert concludes the life story of Ian Smith by explaining the Rhodesian Bush War, and how prejudice led to military disaster.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that this is the part two of our series on Ian Smith, the prime minister of Rhodesia, a country made by racists, for racists, and of racists. Here to talk to me about racists. Becker-Ramos. How are you doing, Becca? Love it. I do feel like it is an area of expertise I have as a woman of color in America. but you know, what can you do? What can you do?

I mean, these are like, these are the racists who like trained a lot of the racists who came after. Although they're still standing on the shoulders of great racists like Cecil Rhodes and the Confederacy. But, you know, if they could be more racist, it's only because they stood on the shoulders of racist giants. They learned from the racist before them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know how else to talk about Rhodesia. Loving them, loving their brand of racism.

It actually does remind me of Puerto Rico a little bit. Just in the way that they... I'm like, how do I put this? The colonial status of Rhodesia is kind of similar to, I feel, like, the way the United States utilize Puerto Rico, where they colonize Puerto Rico, and then they called it in unincorporated territory. And then they're like, no, no, no, but it's not a colony, though. And, like, if you work really hard, you can maybe become a state. And, you know, it's never going to happen. So.

Denying Puerto Rico, any kind of, like, real autonomy is just the same as, like, well, we don't want their votes to mean more than, like, our white votes. And they're not a lot of votes. So they don't even have representation. Mm-hmm. You just take that away from them, basically. Yeah. Like, it is, it is interesting. Like, because, yeah, the U.S. answer to, like, what to do with.

with Puerto Rico was just like, let's obscure it a little more than the Rhodesians we're going to, right? Yeah. Like, but it is always, the fundamental issue is always, okay, but like, yeah, if we give back power to these people in a democratic system, they're going to vote for stuff that's good for them and maybe not good for like the 40 of us who own everything. Exactly. And contextually, this is happening similar timelines, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Jones Act happened early 1900s, you know. So it's like at this time in history globally, it is not cool to be a colony, which is where I feel like Rhodesia and Puerto Rico are learning how to navigate their own political systems while it's not saying colony. Yeah, we're not saying.

And that is exactly kind of the, and both their their kind of mother countries are trying to deal with the same problem, right? The U.S. and Great Britain are both dealing with the fact that globally, it doesn't look good to be pro-colonialism and pro-colonies in this period. But we don't want to give up our stuff entirely. So, I mean, that's less of the British by this point are kind of accepting we're going to have to give up a lot of our stuff. So it's for them more, how do we avoid, like, embarrassment, right? How do we avoid being, like, shamed over, like, the fact that things are going to fall apart once we leave or whatever? Whereas the U.S. is like, well, what if we just call them a cult? What if we just make up something for them that means they're technically members of the state,

but they don't get to like vote in a way that matters, right? Exactly. But it's still like the same fundamental issue is like, well, we want a colony, we can't call it that. How do we make sure these, the majority of the people who live in this area don't get to actually make decisions? Because we want their stuff still. Yep.

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We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to BodyBags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast. network. Iheart. Open your free IHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. So in Central Africa, the first way that this is the white people attempt to maintain their power in the post-colonial era is this dream that Ian Smith signs onto called the Central African Federation or CAF. This was established in 1953 as a sort of bulwark for

British white supremacists in Central Africa. The Federation, as I noted last episode, consisted of Southern Rhodesia than a self-governing British colony and the British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Niasaland. Each territory remained autonomous and subject to a representative of the British Queen's government, as well as an African Affairs Board, which was meant to protect indigenous people from discriminatory laws. You always had to have that in there, right? This is part of the ploy. That's part of how they want to dress up the CAF is like, and there's this whole board dedicated to making sure we're not mean to the black people, right? Don't you want to give us our independence now? Doesn't this sound good? And this is all a show. The board and this fiction

of a federation are all meant to exist as long enough as it takes to get the international community and Britain to recognize them as an independent state, at which point they will revert to being what they always were, which is a way for rich white families to get cheap labor, right? Now, this whole idea of the Central African Republic was the brainchild of a northern Rhodesian politician named Roy Wollinsky, and Roy realized that the only way to get England to support the independence of a white-led Central African state was to dress it up as something other than that, right? And Wollinski himself is a fascinating example of the bizarre racial politics of colonial Central Africa. He was the son of a Lithuanian Jewish refugee and

an Afrikaner woman who had been born, and he was born into the poor white community of Salisbury. Unlike Ian, he's like a poor Rhodesian right, which still white, which still. aren't like really poor, but it means that he's going to have to like work harder as a young man to get places. And it's interesting. It's like, because he's Jewish when he's younger in the pre-World War II days, a bunch of like fascist South Africans deface his office with anti-Semitic graffiti. And so he's both has this experience of like being a member of an ethnic minority who's had to escape a genocide and also you're actively trying to create a racial apartheid state. It's a really fascinating position for a man to be.

in that Waliski finds himself in. And Frank Barton, former editor of the Central African Post, later wrote that, quote, It is curious that a man who has endured such discrimination should be the main pillar of the discrimination practiced against millions of non-whites in the Federation. And it is an interesting thing to note. It's not weird. We see this pattern. Yeah.

Yeah. This is like a consistent pattern that we see a lot, not just throughout history, but in modern times as well. I think you can dot the eyes across the table. tease on that one. But, uh, yeah. So the whole point to this federation is to convince the British government that they could leave, right?

And that if the British government leaves, everything will be okay. We'll have a state. It's not going to be mean to the Africans. No one's going to get angry at the British Empire for leaving us in charge. You guys will be fine. This won't be a shame to your country for the rest of time that you left us racists in charge of this part of Africa, right? You will never regret this.

That's what, that's the whole idea behind the, the Central African Federation or is like you don't have to worry leaving all this shit in our hands. We'll take care of it for you. But London, they're not quite willing to take that, right? In part, you've got a left in British politics who has for the last several decades been like, we're going to decolonize as soon as we get any power. We're kicking you assholes like out. This is bad.

We don't want to do this anymore. And you also, even among the larger chunk of the British government who are not fanatics about decolonization, these guys still are like, well, we don't want to be embarrassed if you turn out to be a bunch of monsters, which we know you're going to be because we know Rhodesians. So you need to, we need to have before we'll cut you loose, you need to give us some guarantee that the majority of people who live in the Central African Federation want to be part of the Central African Federation, right? You need to provide us some evidence that the black majority of the country wants to be a country with you guys, right? And they can't prove that because they don't because they, like, these people are awful. Like, the black people don't want to live under the commands of these assholes who have been ruining their lives for decades now, right? There's never been any chance of like even getting enough of like folks, like, tricking them into backing this republic to get the British government.

on board with anything. And so by 1960, the dream is in free fall. You know, after about seven years, it becomes clear to everybody, this is never going to take off. They're never going to get the majority of the population to support this idea. And so the British government's never going to support this idea. In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold McMillan gives a speech called the Wins of Change speech, which is very famous because he's talking about how, like, Africa is going to change. This massive change is sweeping Africa right now, and all of these colonial states are going to be gone soon. That's the winds of change speech. And so Harold gives Rhodesia a two-year ultimatum, and he tells, you know, Wollinsky basically, you've got two years to get your ducks in a row

and come up with some way to convince the international community that the majority of black people living in this territory want to be a part of this federation too, right? And Wollinsky, fails. There's never any chance of succeeding on this. Right, right, because they don't want to, because these people suck. So by 1962, his failure is evident and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the C.A.R. whatever, kind of falls apart as a dream. A big part of why is that there are major black led liberation movements in the Aeseland and northern Rhodesia by this point in time, and they're big enough that like, number one, every time this guy claims, no, really, they want to be part of the Federation. There's like large groups that have international recognition that are like,

no, we don't. We're actually like talking for ourselves now and we don't want this. And they've gotten enough recognition in 1962 that Niasaland and Northern Rhodesia are obviously about to become independent black-led countries, right? And so Southern Rhodesia has just been, is now sitting alone, this dream of a federation is dead. And they can kind of see the writing on the wall. If the British have backed like black majority led governments in all of the surrounding post-colonial states to us. They're not going to let the white people continue to own everything in Rhodesia before they give it up, right? And this is where we return to our pal Ian Smith, who is smart enough that he can see the writing on the wall, right? Friend of the pot, enemy of the pot. Yeah. So again,

Smith had been a big backer of Wollinsky's federal party, and in 1958, he'd become the chief government whip in parliament, because there's like the federal party in southern Rhodesia, that is the party that supports this dream of a federation. And Smith is with that until 1958, when the federalists, as part of an attempt to, like, get black Africans to support the federation, they start pushing this new constitution that guarantees black people, a set number of seats in the Rhodesian parliament. And Smith gets furious at this. His number one issue is there should never be any meaningful degree of political power

handed to black Africans in Rhodesia. And so he's like, you guys are just doing this because you think it'll convince the British to make us a dominion. But they're never going to do that. They're never going to give white farmers a free state. And so if we just handing over political power to the black people who live here is just going to encourage. them to rebel against us and make them think they can get even more. So we can't do any of that.

And that's when he breaks from the party. He leaves politics for a little while because he's like, Smith is, he's looking at what's happening in Africa. You know, he's a monster and a racist, but he's also not blind. You know, in seven or in 62, 63, 64, Belgium's pulled out of the Congo by this point and that's gotten really violent. Niasaland, which is about to become Malawi, has a majority black parliament. And the British government is very clearly, as Smith sees it, they're just trying to keep us white farmers from panicking before they abandon us. All they're waiting for is an excuse to kind of carve us up the way they have these other territories. And then once we have no more power, they'll hand things over to the majority population who will take our land from us, right?

So that's what Ian Smith realizes in 58. And he's like, Wollinsky is incapable of seeing the situation as it is. And so I have to take action. So he leaves the party. He spends a year or two kind of bumming around. And he meets up with the leader of this conservative party, the Dominion Party, a guy named Winston Field. And Winston is sort of, he has been gathering all of like the right wing Rhodesians to him.

And Smith decides, like, this is the path forward for the independence, like, wing of Rhodesian politics. And so he starts a new political party with Winston Field that's specifically white supremacist and that is aimed at creating a new right-wing government to take power from the United Federal Party, which was Wolinsky's party, and oppose majority ruler decolonization, right? This new party is called the Rhodesian Front. And this is Winston Field and Ian Smith creating a white supremacist, far-right political party that's whole goal and its whole promised. white voters is we will stop change white right uh and the reesean front does very well they sweep the 1962 elections that december their big like uh motto for like the the election campaign they run is vote rodesian front for a white christmas and they're it's not doesn't snow in rodesia they're very

much talking about for like a white like in the most literal sense of the work right yeah um a time correspondent covering the six election described the Rhodesian Front's platform as scarcely distinguishable from the apartheid practice to cross the border in South Africa. And this is a noteworthy change. Rhodesia's always been racist. It's always been an apartheid state, but it's also always sought to be different from South Africa and not look as race.

They certainly don't want people to see them as as racist as South Africans up until 1962. And when the Rhodesian Front takes over and wins and when Ian Smith's party starts dominating things, that means it becomes like the Norman Rhodesia to be like, no, no, we're like the South Africans, but even more racist, right? Like, we're explicitly accepting that about ourselves now. We tried to deny it for years, and we're no longer doing that. So that's what's happening.

There's a good, that Times correspondent that I quoted from earlier, the way he summarizes one of the Rhodesian Front's most popular campaign ads should make it clear what this party is all about. quote, under posters showing the legs of white and black schoolgirl standing side by side, the front blared, Rhodesia is not ready for this. That's their big scare ad. It's like, look, white and black kids at the same school. Like, you don't want that.

Let's fight a war to make sure this never has to happen. Like, that is the Rhodesian front's direct promise to voters, as you will never have to send your kids to an integrated school. The front promised to maintain white Rhodesian interests and argued that majority rule would destroy the economy and lead to the creation of a communist regime. Ian Smith's new party had a couple of main catchphrases. One was their promise to preserve civilized standards. He uses that term a lot, and it means white social norms, right?

Those are civilized standards, and his other term is responsible government, and that means white minority control of the government. Those are Smith's two big talking points, is we're going to keep white people in charge. He basically just made like a year-round white Christmas. Yeah, you're around white Christmas. Yes, exactly. So because white Rhodesians are by this point outnumbered 13 to 1, the front also encouraged outreach to other white people in Africa

and urged them to immigrate to Rhodesia if their own homes had fallen victim to the evils of decolonization. So if you're a white person in Africa and the colonial government is leaving, and there's about to be like a black majority democratic government, Rhodesia is putting up propaganda that says, move here, join the Rhodesian army, you'll never have to give up power if you stay here. So basically, we're trying to pull in all of the white people in Africa who want things to stay the way they were under colonization.

Move to Rhodesia. That's their big, like, PR pitch to the rest of the continent. Now, in their first couple of years in power, the front has to govern as part of a coalition, right? They're not initially in total power. And I want to quote from an article on historyrise.com here, summarizing this period of time. Ian Smith in the Rhodesian front claimed that they based their policies ideas

and democratic principles on meritocratic ideals and not on color or nationalism stating that these policies and what he called separate economic advancement would ultimately result in an equal partnership between black and white is an alternative to majority rule. And that's interesting.

I love how often meritocracy winds up as like a white supremacist talking point of like, oh no, we don't want a white state, we want a meritocracy. And that just means that the best educated people and the richest people should govern things because they've already proven to have the most merit, you know? Like that's the, again, they're just trying to be a little more subtle than, well, we just don't like black people, right? They have to be a little more subtle than that. So, Winston Field leads the front for its first two years in power.

But he's far too milk-toast and moderate to hold on the power for long. You know, he's one of these guys who... The name's Winston. His name is Winston. He just doesn't have a lot of juice to him. And so in April of 1964, Ian Smith engineers a change of power between the two. And he steps into the role of prime minister for what's going to prove to be the rest of Rhodesia's life as a country. And at this point in 64, when he takes over his prime minister, the Rhodesian Front is the only party that has any power in Rhodesia now.

They've successfully done that. And he's basically a dictator from this point on. He has no real opposition. he's able to, the government does whatever Ian Smith wants. It's usually not discussed that way, and he does come to power democratically, but he's a dictator in every way that matters. Nobody's questioning Ian who has power within Rhodesia, right? It's like his, and so what's everything that's going to happen,

Rhodesia's whole war for independence is entirely based on what Ian Smith wants and thinks is a good idea. And that's really important to keep in mind here. There's almost no one else who's able to be able to. to like counter him or push for any other state of affairs in Rhodesian politics. So Smith comes to power with an understanding that under previous negotiations with the crown, Southern Rhodesia had been promised dominion status when they wanted it. I talked about this last episode. But that wasn't an actual promise that the British government had ever made.

Like, Rhodesians convinced themselves that that was the promise the British government made. But the British government was like, we never said that. What the fuck are you talking about? Like we're not obligated to do anything. A handshake verbal non-agreement. Right. Right.

Honey, do better than that. Yeah. What are we doing? Get better our representatives. This is not. You need a lawyer present, baby. What? That's what they've got in Smith.

At least that's what they think. Because Smith, in 64 and 65, there's this big debate between the British prime minister, Harold Wilson and Ian Smith over what is going. going to happen to Rhodesia. And Smith is like, you're supposed, you said you'd make us a dominion. So just do it. Whereas Wilson argued that like, no, no, no, we agreed we might do something like that if the independent state that we would be creating would be acceptable, quote, to the people of the country as a whole. And Smith is like, well, everyone I know is fine with Rhodesia being a country, to which Wilson is like, but you only know white people. And like, there are at this point

African nationalist Rhodesian leaders and their African nationalist Rhodesian parties. And some of those leaders are speaking up and being like, but we like, we actually don't agree with this guy at all. Like, we don't like, fuck this dude. So it's very obvious that like, and it's obvious to British people in London that Smith is full of shit about this, right? And so this is the kind of thing where there's never this point where the rest of the world plays along.

This is purely how Smith and the Rhodesians pretend things are working. But everyone is aware that, like, no, you're just gangsters trying to take everything for yourselves, right? So Wilson's government ultimately settles on a hard stance. No independence before majority rule, which for some reason gets the acronym Nibmar. I don't know why you give an acronym to that, but they're like, no, we can't. That's too long to say. We've got to have an acronym. Nibmar, right?

No independence before majority rule, which means we won't let Rhodesia be its own country unless you have an actual democratic government where the majority. of people get to vote, right? And Ian Smith and the rich white farmers he represented are really shocked by this. And they're shocked by how much mockery they get in mainstream British society. Again, we're in the 60s. There's like mainstream, there's like modern media. There's like people are talking about this whole debate and they're talking about what Ian Smith is claiming and the obvious realities on the ground in Rhodesia that are very different. And it becomes sort of like Rhodesians become how you in sort of like British political society, how you make fun of someone for being like an old racist throwback. Like that is the Rhodesian in British like

they're not wrong, right? But that really pisses off the roadies. This paragraph from a relevant article in the independent by Rupert Cornwell gives you an idea of how the Rhodians are discussed in like popular British society. Old white Rhodesia, the joke ran, was a surrogens. The with the lunatic fringe on top. And Surrey is like a suburban part of England, right? So it's like this chunk of like British suburbs that's entirely run by the lunatic fringe. To continue with that quote, whether it was lunatic was a matter of opinion. But suburban Surrey, it did resemble in its perochiality.

It's golf club outlook on the world. It's unquestioning certainty in its own values. The white population never exceeded 3% of the total and no more than a decent English provincial town. but they believe they had created God's own country, right? So the idea over in England is these are all a bunch of, like, rich suburban maniacs who don't actually understand anything but like playing golf and like games and stuff, but think they've created like a perfect country by virtue of the fact that they've got everyone else who lives there working for them. And that's accurate. That is, in fact, what Rhodesia is. And it's very funny that Smith and the other Rhodians have to see this great British.

world that they love immediately turn on them. And all, and it's, it is, it's kind of interesting too, because like all Smith and his fellow roadies are a product of the British world and its education system and everything it had tried to make its colonial white citizens into. And it's really funny to me that in a, in the space of what seems like an afternoon, this goes from being how the entire country is trying to like encourage its young men to be to, oh, these people are idiot throwbacks. Look at these dummies. Look at these dummies and their old outdated ideas that like we were teaching them 20 years ago. But it is funny to me how quickly that happens. And the Rhodesian men never get over that. There's this sense of deep whiplash where they're

like, but it was cool to be a racist really recently. Why are you treating us badly now? Like they never fully understand why their government has abandoned them. And it's just because they're obviously a bunch of maniacs. Well. Good stuff. Good stuff. You know who else is obviously a bunch of maniacs? The sponsors of this podcast. That's right. That's right. That's right. Let's listen to them. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Some people love summer. It's their favorite season. Travel picks up. The kids are out of school. There's nothing but adventure on the horizon. Other people can't stand it or at least have a lot of trouble with summer. It's hard to juggle. It can be overwhelming.

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Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, for his part, Smith and his fellow Salisbury Conservatives reacted like paranoid old fuddy-duddies to the fact that they're not cool anymore. as Ian Smith wrote in his autobiography Within Britain itself We were landed with a socialist government Hell bent on appeasing the cult of Marxist Leninism At the extents of the old traditional values

Of the British Empire Very funny A bunch of Marxists in London Running everything in fucking 1964 It's very much It's always the way these people go, right? It's like, oh somebody like people don't like us People have realized that we're like a bunch of gross race

It must be Marxism. That must the only reason reason why we're not popular. It's the only reason why people don't like me is the Marxists stole their brains. And Smith just absolutely cannot understand why people are pissed that as they look at this country where like 3% of the population owns everything and controls everyone else. He sees anyone being angry at this. It's just like left-wing propaganda. Insane. Yeah, it's, and it's, it's very, if you look at how Rhodesians talk about things in Rhodesia during this time, it's very normal for white Rhodians to refer to the black people who make up the majority of their country is our black people in a way that implies both ownership and paternalism, right?

Well, these are our people, and so obviously we take care of them. They're like family to us. And one of these days, maybe they'll be able to take care of themselves. We have to raise them up, right? And Smith would be like, and obviously this is better for them. Rhodesia, Smith says, is home of, quote, the happiest black faces you ever saw, you know? Like, because they don't have basic human rights, they're not worried about voting. They can just enjoy their lives working for us, you know?

And that's very much how Rhodesians talk about things internally. And that's how they attempt to portray themselves to the outside world. It's not they rationalize it to themselves as well. Exactly. Exactly. They need this. We're doing good for them, right? And they have to believe that because what they're actually doing is incredibly brutal.

It's obviously brutal. Once in power, the Rhodesian front world. fervishly to pass laws denying black people what little freedom and autonomy they'd previously enjoyed. Smith's party supported the existence of two separate electoral roles. In order to qualify to vote or hold office, you had to meet certain property, income, and educational requirements. Now, these are the same requirements for Rhodesians of any race, but the requirements were deliberately written out to exclude Black Rhodesians, right? So anyone... So crazy. But, like, also, we built these based on, like, okay,

how many black people have this much property? Is it none of them? Then that's how much property you got to have to vote, right? Like, it's very obvious what they're doing. So, 1963 saw this formal dissolution of the Central African Federation, followed by months later in 1964, Britain granting independence to Malawi and Zambia, which had previously been part of these, like, colonial protectorates around Rhodesia. So now Rhodesia is surrounded on at least one side by independent, like,

democratic countries that are like run by the black majority of the population. And then there's just South Africa on the on one side that's like the only white governed state still around them. Now, London continues to hold the line on Nibmar during independence negotiations. And they also start offering buyouts to white members of the Rhodesian armed forces because they're just the British armed forces. So part of what Britain's doing is like, okay, Ian and his guys are going to try to delay. how about we just buy out the whole military so that there aren't white people with guns in Rhodesia anymore, right?

And if we can do that fast enough, maybe the white Rhodesians who don't want to give up will just leave afterwards when they realize like we've bought the army out from underneath them. But Smith and his friends, they're not quite that stupid. They see what London is doing and they realize they're trying to like take our military and our way to defend our independence away. And around the same time, they can see that these militant African nationalist groups in Rhodesia are increasingly organizing and advocating for power, but they're also clashing for themselves. And there's two different main nationalist groups. There's Zanu and there's Zapu. And they're both like they both call themselves. You don't need to do that shit.

Everyone needs an acronym for your political party. No, they don't. What are they? It makes them feel more official. If they have an acronym, then it sounds real. Exactly. What do they stand for, Robert? Jesus.

Zanu is the Zimbabwe African National Union, right? And Zapu is something else, right? But both with Zimbabwe, which is the name that Rhodesia is going to have after independence, right? This is like the name that the people who had lived here were already calling it, right? Rhodesia was just what the white people called it. After a racist, they particularly liked. So 63 and 64, you've got Zanu and Zappu, these two different, like, black. Black independence groups starting out and starting to like arm themselves and agitate.

And they're initially, initially both Zano and Zappo are primarily aimed at and agitating for independence from Great Britain. They're not fighting the Rhodesian state initially, right? Because they don't see that as like a big deal. Like their assumption is that it's going to happen like it happened in all of the surrounding countries where the British will leave and we'll just kind of roll over these folks when we win the election, right? So in an article for Small Wars Journal, William Turner summarizes what happened next.

The internecine struggle with petrol bombs, intimidation, blackmail, and murder lost the support of much of the innocent African population, who were dedicated to the nationalist's inns, but suffered by their violent means. Neither Zapu or Zanu emerged dominant. And so because these two different, you've got these two different nationalist groups, they're both opposed to the British Empire, and they're also both opposed to each other. Because they're both like communist but different kinds. And in early on in 63, 64, they're not really fighting Smith's government because they don't see it as relevant.

So they're kind of murdering each other, which causes a lot of alienation from like the majority of the population. And it creates a situation that if Smith hadn't been so racist and had been more intelligent and creative, he could have taken advantage of. You've got these, like, most motivated and organized chunk of the black population who want independence are in one of these two groups and they're both fighting each other. If I make friends with one of these groups, I can take advantage of that conflict and have an alliance of convenience and, you know, push for independence and some sort of a state in which we share power. But Smith cannot accept sharing power. He cannot accept the idea that any group of Africans will organize to insist on their own rights and future. So even though he has a chance to co-opt one of these nationalist parties and destroy the other, he bans both and arrests leaders of both and forces both out of Rhodesia, which ensures that in

the future, the only forward option for their cause is going to be armed resistance and often armed resistance where they're kind of, if they're not directly working together, they're at least tacitly working together. They will fight sometimes too. but Smith kind of ensures that they're never going to, they're going to consider him a threat before they consider each other a threat. He has the opportunity to have his enemies fighting each other, and he turns them together into fighting against him because he's just such a bigot.

He can't even make use of what could be a good situation for him. And it's interesting because like the British Empire got everywhere by doing that, by being like, okay, we've got these two different local or three different local militant groups fighting each other for power. If we back one, then we get to stay in charge and we eliminate most of the resistance to our regime. Smith can't even conceive of that because his first principle is only white people should have power. Like he can't even do the thing that's best for the white people in his country because

he's such a racist, which I find really interesting. That's like the whole why the Rhodesians lost their war writ large is they're too racist to ever do the smart thing. So he cracks down on these local groups. He imprisons their leaders, including a guy named Robert Bugabe, who we'll talk about in a little bit. And then in November of 1965, that's the year after he cracks down on these nationalist groups, after one last fruitless phone call with Harold Wilson, Ian Smith decides it's time to stop arguing about independence with England. It's time to just take it. So he gets on TV and he gives what becomes known as the Universal Declaration of Independence, or U.N.S.

UDI. And here's how Samantha Power, writing for the Atlantic, describes the UDII. The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders, he said, calling on white Rhodesians to maintain standards in a primitive country. Smith saw himself as an apostle of Cecil John Rhodes, the British magnate who gave Rhodes his name and who in the late 19th century duped black tribal leaders into signing over the fertile land to white pioneers. Although Rhodes in 1965 was home to just over 200,000 whites and 4 million blacks,

Smith shared Rhodes' belief that the black majority rule would occur never in a thousand years. And that's pretty biting, but Rupert Cornwell, who is another historian who wrote an analysis of this declaration, gave an even more biting description of it that I want to quote from. The UDI proclamation was itself a parody of the American Declaration of Independence, full of lofty whereazes and therefores, but in practice a charter for white rule. Each member of the cabinet approved it and signed it before Smith made a rube. radio broadcast for the nation, telling Rhodesians they had refused to surrender to communists in Africa and Asia. We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization, and Christianity, he declared, right?

Because if we hadn't done this, there would have been a fair election and communists would have won. Sure, pal. Of course. Yeah. It's always communism. And again, like, if he had allowed an election, if there had been an election, there's actually a very good chance because of how much power the white Rhodesians had and money they had, that there would have been like a coalition government. Because of the war he fights,

there is going to be a communist government in Rhodesia. But it's entirely a product of the fact that Wilson refuses to negotiate with any of these nationalist groups. He just murders them and exiles them, which makes them even evermore, both of these groups that he's kicked out get closer and close to the USSR in China because of what he does. Like he creates this thing that he's terrified of in large part because he's not willing to do anything more reasonable. So, Rhodesia is now calling itself an independent country. And once they do this, the government in London has a choice because Rhodesia is a crown colony. It's not legally an independent country.

It's not been recognized by the UN as one. And so it's effectively all these white people just broke the law, British law, in order to create their own country in order to force a racial caste system on the majority of the people living there. And so the prime minister of the UK has every right to use the Royal Army, the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Everything else to treat this as an insurrection and return Rhodesia to the fold before dissolving the colony. What Wilson should do, as the Prime Minister of Great Britain, is send in the military to stop the Rhodesians from stealing the state, which is what they're doing. However, that would mean fighting a war against a bunch of white people

in the 60s. And no British prime minister's going to agree to do that. Like, you're not in, not in Africa, maybe in Ireland, right? But not in Africa. So instead, Wilson reaches for that most beloved tool of lazy statesmen, sanctions. That'll solve it. That'll solve all the problems. I'm going to throw some sanctions on Rhodesia, and then we'll just walk away, right? So Wilson announces sanctions upon the former crown property that are primarily going after like tobacco and their other cash crops. And he predicts that this UDI, this independent Rhodesia, will last weeks or months. And then Smith and his fellows are going to come crawling back for help. That's not what happens.

Now, these first sanctions are pretty, you know, they hurt a lot. They're bad for the economy. But they don't bite as deeply as Wilson hoped because South Africa is right there on Rhodesia's border. And they hate the crown. They're happy to trade with Rhodesia, as are, uh, uh, Portugal still controls a whole bunch of Africa and is governed by a fascist, and fascist Portugal is happy to trade with Rhodesia. So initially, these sanctions don't hurt too bad because they've got allies in their immediate area who are willing to help them stay propped up. Now, other leaders of

newly independent African states call out London for the cowardice that they had displayed and not taking out Rhodesia. President Konda of Zambia said, what manner of dealing with such a serious problem is this. Today you brand someone as a rebel, a chap who has committed treason, and tomorrow you declare publicly you will embrace him. A rebel, according to us here, is arrested, tried by a military court, and shot dead. Right? Like, these guys are committing treason. Why aren't you punishing them for their treason? Why are you just like leaving them to be Africa's problem? Which is exactly what London does. It's like, they'll figure it out. Like, they'll figure it out. We don't have to, it's not on us to do anything here. It's not on us to fight a war against what were our own people who

we raised to be like brutal colonial oppressors and then just decided we didn't want to do that anymore. It's not our responsibility to clean up. We'll let the Africans handle it. And that's what the next 15 years of Bush War are going to be. The Rhodesian Bush War, which starts after this point in 65 and ends in 79, is just the result of Africans cleaning up Great Britain's mess, right? Right. So this is all a Cold War conflict. And because of that, It's going to be wrapped in Cold War terms sometimes, to an extent that's reasonable, right? Because a lot of Rhodesia's neighbors are getting military aid from the USSR and China, right? Zapu and Zanu are both getting guns from the USSR and or China, depending on, you know, their allegiances.

But it's also not like most of these nationalist groups are not primarily motivated by Marxism. They become Marxists or start spreading Marxist talking points because they're, those are the people giving them guns, but they really just won independence. That's the primary thing. And so he's going to, Smith is going to really frame this as a fight against communism. This is like part of the global Cold War, but it's not really. Like, not in any meaningful sense of the way. Like, he makes communism be central to it and he makes sure that the people who overthrow Rhodesia ultimately will be communists.

But this isn't really a Cold War struggle in that way. This isn't the result of like the USSR and the United States wanting to like having these like competing power areas they're trying to prop up. This is the result of a bunch of white people not being willing to hand over the shit that they stole and then declaring anyone who wanted to take their stuff back from them communists, right? That's really what's happening here. So after 65, once he's declared independence, Zano and Zappu officially started acting as insurgents, right? and their goal is to create enough violence that they force the Rhodesian government to either capitulate or make the West intervene and force the Rhodesian government out. Basically, if we just keep fighting long enough, this will get ugly enough that the Rhodesian

government will fall apart and then we'll be able to have black majority rule. And that strategy, in short, is going to work. Like, this is a very effective, like, way to do things. Smith never quite catches up to what the real fight is about. And as a result of this, there's going to be kind of two narrative approaches to this war, right? The Rhodesians are going to affirm what they're doing is fighting communism, which is really just like black people running their own affairs in Africa, right? And as a result of the fact that they see it that way, where this is a very, I mean, if you'll forgive the term black and white situation, they're not able to deal with any of their enemies in a nuanced way. They're not able to be like, well, are there guys we could work with?

Do we have neighbors who would be willing to, like, partner with us in exchange for something? It purely comes down to this racial struggle because of the way Ian Smith's politics are. And there's no way to negotiate a settlement out of that. There's no way to – there's nothing but, like, increasing levels of bloodshed as a result of how Ian Smith and the other white farmers in Rhodesias see the world. So in 2007, Michael Evans wrote a study on Rhodesian tactics. for the journal Small Wars and Insurgencies, and he concluded, quote,

the Rhodesian Front's ideology based on settler status anxiety, appelled a conspiratorial interpretation of modern politics that emphasized virulent forms of anglophobia, anti-communism, anti-internationalism, and anti-liberalism. The Smith government portrayed African nationalism not as an indigenous political phenomenon,

but as an external instrument of world communism and Western appeasement. So that's part of what's going to destroy Rhodesia is they're never able to look at the world as it is. They have to create this fanciful, alternate reality as what's happening. It's not, we took everything from these people and they want some of it back. And instead, no, no, no, there's this world communist specter that's trying to destroy the West and we're the last, you know, men on the wall, stopping communism from breaking through and taking all of Africa. That's very much how they have to look at it. And so again,

they can't think about what's actually happening. They can't deal with any of these communities as real people. They have to treat them as these like conspiratorial shadows on the wall and that means they're never able to effectively have a strategy. They're never able to really wrangle

or build power in a meaningful way. All Rhodesia has is the ability to kill people militarily. They don't have any ability to actually build a base of power or expand the stability of their government. All they can do is kill large numbers of militants

until they run out of guys to do that with, right? And that's kind of the short story of the Rhodesian Bush War. So the long story is, you know, as I've stated, you've got these two different groups, Sanu and Zapu that are like these, you know, fighting for a black, like majority ruled state to succeed Rhodesia that they want to call Zimbabwe. Zapu's militia is called the Zimbabwe Independent People's Revolutionary Army or Zipra. and I know there's so many pain in the ass acronyms here.

What you need to know about Zipra is they're mostly made up of Nebele tribesmen, right? And they're armed by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations. So one of these militias is USSR-backed and made up of Nebele tribesmen. And the other militia, Zanla, which is Zanu's militia, is made up of the Shona tribe. And it's mostly armed by China. Now, again, on paper, these are both communist militant groups, but they fight each other as often as they fight the Rhodesian state because this isn't really about communism. It's not even about the differences between the USSR and the People's Republic of China.

It's about the fact that these two militias are made up of two different tribes that have hated each other for a very long time. And so they wind up shooting at each other all the time. And again, great situation to be in if you're Ian Smith's government to have your two enemies primarily fighting each other. And he just can't take advantage of it because he's such a stupid. a dummy. Like, it's a very, this is an easy situation for a smarter man to get some sort of benefit out of, and he just cannot stop fucking up here because he's such a bigot. A competent counterinsurgent force would have made a lot of pay out of this, but Smith's white supremacist front cannot abide nuance. All black militias are communists, all communists are the enemy, and so we

can't work with one above the other. Per that article in Small Wars Journal that I quoted from earlier, Rhodesian military sit reps designated all guerrillas as communist-trained terrorists, CTTs, and few white Rhodesians could even accept that they were involved in a civil war for black emancipation until the late 1970s. Rhodesian foreign prime minister P.K. Vanderbilt said, this is not a racial war, but black terrorists and white-skinned communists on one side and a multiracial army of black and white soldiers fighting shoulder to shoulder on the other side. In contrast, a Zanla training document characterized the war as follows.

The principal objective of our revolution is the seizure of power by means of destruction of the racist political military machine and its replacement by the people in arms in order to change the existing economic and social order. So again, on the side of the Rhodesians, this is a fantasy. It's not a race war. We're fighting a war against communism. And we actually have a multiracial army. It's just that all of the black groups are communist, right? Whereas the militias have this idea that we're fighting a racist state.

And if we break down that racist state, we're going to replace it with something. So fundamentally, Zanla and Zepra are looking at the world as it is in some way. And the Rhodesians are looking at a fantasy of the world. And that's, I think, fundamentally, why Rhodesia is going to lose is they're never really looking at what's actually happening in the world. And this is enough, the fact that they're operating from this point of delusion is enough to overcome some major advantages they have. Not only do they have an army at the start of this, and Zanla and Zipra don't. They've just got some guys in the woods. At the outbreak of hostilities, both Zanla and Zipra are training for wildly different purposes, right?

Because the USSR and China have very different military theories, right? The Soviet Union is a big believer in advanced weapons systems. We're going to get you guys the right weapons, and you'll use those to destroy the Rhodesian military, and then you'll take power. The Chinese instructors are very much, they're Maoists, right? they're talking about you're going to build this people's army and you're going to like very methodically take and gain support in these little villages and once you get the support of all of the people living in this area then you'll form these kind of like people's militias in order to take back territory from the state security forces which is going to work like ultimately that is

the strategy that works a lot better than the USSR's strategy but they're not really able the Rhodesians aren't able to look at either of these groups as different even so they're not able to actually see like how they're gradually starting to lose this war. Over time, as Zanla starts training and recruiting networks of informants and getting, you know, support from all these villages across rural Rhodesia, Rhodesia's intelligence operations, which had been good at the start of the war, they start losing all of their insight into what's happening on the ground as people, you know, their spies get murdered and as their enemies get better at actually like building a ground game and building like a sort of like an intelligence network. And so the first thing that

happens to Rhodesia is they lose their eyes and ears on the ground, these networks of Maoist informants that are spreading across rural Rhodesia, which means they become increasingly blind to what life is like to the majority of people in the regions that they're fighting over. And so because they don't know any of that, all they think about is in terms of how many enemies are we killing. And like how many how many battles are we winning and not well are we like winning battles that matter are we winning the support of the people are any of these villages coming over to our side or are more and more of them becoming sympathetic to the enemy every year and so on paper rodisi's winning every year of the war they never lose a battle they damn near never lose a firefight because they've got all

the advanced guns they've got the armored cars and tanks they've got helicopters and planes and so for a long time, Rhodesians and people internationally look at the conflict are like, look, another battle where the Rhodesian's military won. Obviously, they've got to be winning this struggle when in reality they're winning nothing. All they're doing is killing people and they can't see that that's actually taking them closer to defeat because they're running out of ammunition. They're running out of men. You know, they don't have much of either. And as they make more and more of the majority black population deliberately hostile to them, those people fall into the arms of these militias that they're fighting, which just keep getting bigger and bigger.

And they're just like, well, but we keep killing them every time we fight them. And that doesn't negate the fact that they're getting larger still. And to the point where they're getting larger than you can fight back. And so it's just sort of this process of Rhodesia winning on paper until they lose after about 15 years. It's a very like fun war to look at from that standpoint. And it very much the Rhodesian Bush War is the war that presages all of like the 21st century great power conflicts that the U.S. has been in where you've got this advanced military with a lot of special forces guys. And it seems like they're always winning and then we lose the war. How did we lose the war? It's because no one is

ever looking at like what would it take to win the war, right? And it's about war. Yeah. It's about winning the war. It's not about killing. The thing people still fuck up is they're like, well, you win by killing the enemy. No, you don't. No, you don't. You don't ever do that. You need real strategy. You win by having the stuff. You win by having land. You win by having food. You win by having territory. Sometimes killing the enemy is helpful for that. But if you're just kind of, what the Rhodesians are doing is they're creating what they call like these fire force missions where they'll find a group of guerrillas in the woods and they'll get a bunch of them to gather together. And then they'll wipe them out in a set piece battle where they send in a bunch of guys and they'll kill like

a thousand dudes and then they'll leave and they still don't actually hold anything and they haven't won any hearts and minds they just killed people but because they're good at this we're really good at these battles and it's really easy for a general to make a case for themselves and to get promoted by look at how many of these battles i've won that smith and his generals become convinced these things that we're good at are what means we're winning because we're good at this part of the war, that must be the part of the war that we have to be good at to win, as opposed to does it matter that we're good at this part of the war? Does it matter that we never lose a gunfight if we don't actually take anything?

It's the problem the U.S. ran into an Afghanistan. We've got all these great special forces. They're the best in gunfights of anyone in the world. They never lose in a stand-up fight. How could we have lost? Well, because we never took anything. We just killed people for a while and then left. It also turns out that like senseless violence, not really a thing that wins people over to join your side.

No, no, not at all. So as the war goes on, it becomes clear that the Rhodesian military is going to rely more heavily on black soldiers than they had hoped. Smith's party grudgingly offered mild concessions to black citizens in order to try and convince some of them to join. In 1969, a reformed constitution guaranteed six million Rhodesian Africans 16 seats in the assembly. Rodeja's 270,000 white citizens got 50 seats. That same year, Smith's party introduced a land tenure act that equalized the amount of land reserved for white and black owners. And again, none of these are really very equal, but this shows the desperation he's in.

He doesn't want to be doing any of this at all. He just has to because, like, we, like, I need, there's this slow understanding that we need to do something to win hearts and minds. It's just always way too slow and never. Like, he's never willing, he doesn't actually care about these people, so he just hopes they won't notice that 16's a smaller number than 50. So the first stage of the Bush War ends in 1968. And it looks like Rhodesia's winning at this point. They kill a lot of, they kill so many insurgents that for a brief period of time in 68 and 69, there's not really any insurgents left in Rhodesia itself.

They all have to flee to, like, bases in the neighboring countries in order to, like, avoid getting massacres. And because the neighboring countries are like South Africa and Portugal's African Empire for the most part, this is pretty good for Rhodesia initially. But then in 72, Portugal's African Empire starts to fall apart. And Mozambique over the next couple of years is going to, like Portugal is going to lose control of Mozambique. And then it's going to become like it's going to get taken over by the people who live there. And they're going to create a communist state. And those folks are going to be willing to provide aid and support to these like, Rhodesian insurgents when they leave Rhodesia and need to rebuild their strength.

So the fact that they were really good at killing these guys initially looks like it's working, but all that really does is it causes them to like set up bases in areas that Rhodesia can't follow them into and start building their power from there. And when the Rhodesian government realizes what's happening, they start launching attacks into neighboring states, which pisses off everyone else in Africa and leads to their increasingly getting separated from the allies that they'd had, and it leads to a further escalation of violence. So all they're doing by killing all these people and then moving into these other countries to kill the rebels that had fled to these neighboring countries is

isolating themselves and burning more and more of their fairly scant resources, killing people that it doesn't benefit them at all to kill. So the situation spirals out of control pretty quickly past this point. It's just incredible that we've learned absolutely nothing. Oh, no, nothing. This is still how Western militaries think of counterinsurgency. This is very similar to what Trump's doing right now. Well, it's very similar. The Rhodesian military is the first one to figure out like, okay, well, we've got these forward operating bases that are in basically enemy territory that need to be supported by these caravans of armored vehicles. So we'll design these armored vehicles that are meant to take roadside bombs because the enemy's setting up a lot of roadside bombs. And so they're built, it's very similar to what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan.

You've got these big route clearance type vehicles and armored vehicles driving from post to post, trying to hold these posts and occasionally doing these fire force missions where they massacre a bunch of insurgents, but they're never actually owning or holding anything because the populace is never anything but held at gunpoint, right? So because all of this, all this increasingly falls down to just like how many people can we kill. And that becomes the only language that the Rhodesian government talks about the war to itself in. And the only language the Rhodesian government talks to the outside world in is body count. And I'm going to quote William Turner's piece again here. Body count became a political drug that Ian Smith wielded as a negotiation tactic, thanks in part to a robust, albeit hollow, counterinsurgency strategy. And that strategy is we find these different militia encampments. We send in these fire forces to spark fights with them and we wipe out a bunch of guys.

And then we crow, look, we killed another thousand guys. Clearly, we're winning. Why don't you come to the table and negotiate with us, right? And none of this works because the enemies of Rhodesia understand that, like, yeah, you're good at killing us, but we always have more people because 97% of the populace is more or less supportive of what we're doing. So all we have to do is keep them fighting us until they bleed them. themselves white. And this is why anytime in the modern era, too, if you see like an advanced

military fighting an insurgent war and they start bragging about body counts, they're losing. You can refer this to the U.S. and Iran. Whenever you have a military that's bragging about, look at the list of guys we've killed. Look at how many guys we're killing. And that's all they're telling you. That means they're losing because killing guys doesn't win wars. No. No. You know what does win wars? Products and services. Kind of.

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Listen to BodyBags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. We're back. So Rhodesia is gotten locked into this by the early 70s, this disastrous strategy of carrying out these missions, killing as many guys as they can, and then bragging about it on the news, basically, and hoping that that's going to eventually make the enemies stop fighting them. And this is all a direct result of the political ideology crafted and touted by, Ian Smith. This strategy is based entirely upon the Rhodesian Front's politics that Smith had

authored, per the Journal of Small Wars and Insurgencies. After 1972, when Rhodesia faced a protracted insurgency, many of the principles of Rhodesian Front ideology were applied to counterinsurgency warfare with disastrous results. Because the Rhodesian government viewed African guerrilla warfare as unrelated to domestic politics, Rhodesian counterinsurgency lacked a realistic political to mention. The dictates of settler ideology blinded the Rhodesian government to the vital need to wind hearts and minds by applying timely principles of political pacification and reform to its counterinsurgency effort. Instead, a Rhodesian counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force was pursued. Because they can't see these as people with legitimate grievances that need to be like met and

solved, they only see them as the sinister communists who have to be destroyed. And that means they're never able to gain any actual ground. In 1974, Smith's government launched Operation Hurricane, carrying out attacks that reduced the number of guerrillas in Rhodesia again to less than a hundred. Several times, they wipe out basically all of the insurgents in Rhodesia, and hey, look, we're on the verge of victory. And then a year or two later, there's thousands of more insurgents, and they're fighting, you know, their backs to the wall again.

Because all people are doing is, like, leaving and recovering their strength nearby, and then moving right back in. Now, that same year that Smith declares this victory, there's a coup in Lisbon that permanently ends Portugal's African Empire. And a Marxist government takes power in Mozambique after that and starts providing insurgents with open aid and assistance. By this stage of the war, Rhodesia has transitioned fully to a military that very much resembles our own in some ways.

At the start of the war, Rhodesia had had their kind of special operations units, which were there to support the regular army. By 74-75, special forces are doing nearly all of the killing and fighting, supported by these elite armored and airborne regiments that the regular military is there to support. So it goes from special forces are there to carry out missions the regular military can't to. It's all about special forces because we're really good at training these small units of killers up and having them do these like very complicated missions.

and we don't really know how to do anything else. So we're just going to assume that that's going to win us the victory because look at how impressive these special forces guys are. They can carry out these missions so well. It doesn't, no one ever, it's the same thing. It's the same thing with the U.S., right? Where we're like, look at how scary our Navy SEALs are. Look at how good at these guys are at like killing or capturing the leader of this country.

Maybe we don't need anything but special forces and air power to win a war. And then you wind up in the situation like Iran where you realize like, no, you need quite a bit more than that, actually. right but smith is trying the reason why they like relying on special forces is that you can you you don't need a lot of guys so you don't need as many soldiers and they're less likely to die in the field and so you have less casualties you have to explain to these grieving white families so in the mid-70s they move over to this concept of what they call pseudo operations which is the term they have for these special forces raids they're going to increasingly be reliant on

Here's how Ian Martinez described pseudo-operations and a 2002 analysis published for Third World Quarterly. Security personnel would dress as insurgents and infiltrate rural communities seeking out real insurgents. When they found the real insurgents, they could opt for an engagement or call in their position and allow other army units, notably the Rhodesian Light Infantry, to come in. At first, highly trained white officers of the SAS were used for the operations, but language barriers and the distinct physical facial features of the whites necessitated the use of Black Zimbabweans. Now, this is something, if you read current-day Rhodesia defenders, they'll be like, Rhodesian Special Forces were integrated.

They had white and black soldiers fighting alongside each other, right? How could they be a racist state if they had Black Special Forces guys? Now, the reality is these Special Forces guys, and most of them are in a unit called the Salus Scouts, which is a mixed-race unit, but that's a unit, it's a mixed-race unit because they need Black people to infiltrate rural communities and carry out terrorist attacks, basically. That's why they've integrated their special forces, is that white people can't hide. But you could also say this about all Army for all of time, you know? Well, yeah.

Just because there are people of color in any military, no matter what country, does not mean it's not racist. Yeah. But it's like it's particularly right. The pro-Rodicea propaganda is always, but of course, like all these black people wanted to join the military. How could it have been a bad state if they were willing to volunteer for the military? And that is a lie, as Martinez's piece makes clear. Injured or captured insurgents were turned and made to serve the Seleu scouts. Thus compromised, they could never return to their villages and were beholden to the regime for their lives.

The new recruits were able to provide intelligence and the latest call signs used by the real insurgents. The British had used a similar pseudo-op's concept in Malaya and Kenya. The Seleu Scouts were housed in a secret facility near Mount Darwin within the hurricane theater of the war. The Salus Scouts proved extremely effective in providing the security forces with useful and timely intelligence and were responsible for a staggering 68% of all insurgent kills and capture in their areas of operation. But if you look at that, if you dig into that statement, what's happening is they're

taking injured and captured insurgents. they are making them carry out what are effectively war crimes. These people are often wiping out whole villages and in order to stay alive. Basically, we'll pay you and will give you your lives and freedom if you carry out war crimes for us. And as a result, the folks who do join the cellist scouts, like the black soldiers who agree to be a part of this unit are being made in, like, this is just a war crimes unit. They're doing the most nightmarish crimes against humanity imaginable and they can never go home again, right? This is not a, these people believed in Rhodesian cause thing.

This is a, you capture these people and basically tortured them until they agreed to fight for you in a lot of cases and then made sure they had no life outside of committing war crimes for the regime, right? That's the reality of these mixed race units in the Rhodesian military. So the SELU scouts are effective fighters, but they are also primarily effective at carrying out horrific war crimes, primarily war crimes using chemical weapons, which the Rhodesian government comes to love in the late state of the war, chemical and biological weapons. They're huge fans of that.

So if you want an idea for how a lot of these raids tend to look from a casualty standpoint, Rhodesia launches like 40 raids into Mozambique between February and June of 1976, and the largest of these rage, Operation Eland ends with a little over a thousand guerrilla fighters killed. These are Zanla guerrillas killed and zero casualties for the Roziet. military, right? And that sounds great on paper. But it also, like, the fact that these are individually successful operations on the ground doesn't mean they're successful strategically, because Operation Aland pisses off South Africa. Rhodesian sending special forces into an

independent country, Mozambique. And South Africa is currently dealing with the fact that, like, Mozambique is a geopolitical enemy of theirs that's being supported by both the Soviet Union. and the Cuban government. And so they have issues if, like, if Rhodesia is invading this country and it pisses off Mozambique and that increases the operational tempo and brings in more foreign assistance to Mozambique, it creates problems for South Africa, right? And so the South African PM gets so pissed at Rhodesia after this successful raid that he withdraws all South African soldiers, pilots, mechanics, liaison officers from Rhodesia.

and by 1976, half of Rhodesia's defense budget was paid for by South Africa. It's a great example of how, on paper, we carried out this massive attack. We killed a thousand enemy guerrillas and none of our own guys even got injured. What a success. No, you pissed off your only allies so much that they took away all of their assistance that made your war possible, right? It's like one example writ large of how stupid this strategy is, of all we need to do is be better at killing. Well, no, because you ignored the political dimension. You pissed off. You were too

racist for your own racist allies, and they took their ball and went home. And now you're fucked, right? That's what brings down Rhodesia as much as anything, right? You know, they've been flat-footed after their collapse of their Portuguese allies in 74. And then after 76, they don't even have South Africa to rely on. Smith has to call on reservists and draft ever larger numbers of, like, these shrinking white population, because it's also pretty dangerous to be a normal Rhodesian soldier. Most of them are not these elite special forces units. Most of them are hanging out in these like isolated, like forward operating bases or getting bombed on roadsides.

And so they are dying and getting wounded at a high level. And so young Rhodesians are fleeing the country. They're going to other Western countries where white people are able to move and they're bouncing from Rhodesia because they don't want to fight and die in this increasingly futile war. So by the end of 1976, Smith is fucked. Not only have all of his allies backed out, but the Prime Minister of South Africa, B.J. Wuster, had called for majority rule in Rhodesia, right? So now South Africa has gone from arming Rhodesia and supporting them to saying, you guys really need to give up, right? And this is the thing that kind of fucks it for Smith. You know, he had been Kissinger

had been pushing him at this point, you know, open up to majority rule. The British government had been pushing him. It was when South Africa was like, you have to accept majority rule, that he knows Rodija's goose is cooked. So he knows that by 76, but he doesn't accept the reality for more than two years. In 77 and 78, Smith poured all of his nation's hopes and dreams into special forces operations that he knew were already failures. And increasingly, these special forces units are only maintained by bringing in foreign-born

volunteers. And so in the late 70s, Rhodesia starts a major ad campaign. They're putting ads on all sorts of right-wing papers in the United States, in Britain, and all across, like, the Western world, basically being like, hey, are you a racist in another part of the West? Come to Rhodesia, you can fight a war against those, like, scary black communists, and you'll get to live in like a white apartheid state afterwards. It'll be just like the Confederacy was.

That's like the pitch Smith is making to white Americans largely as if you move to Rhodesia and join our army, it'll be like the South never lost, right? And that's kind of like the... It's fucking on him. It's crazy stuff. Now this is all matched. The fact that like this pitch to come and join us,

you'll get to be part of like a white state, is matched with this propaganda. about how good the Rhodesian military is. There's all these books about these fire force attacks, which they're still legendary and like white supremacist propaganda as like these are the best warriors the world ever produced. These great Rhodesian soldiers, they killed 1,200 men and didn't lose a single man because, you know, Rhodesians were the best fighters of their day.

And the reality is that, like, no, they were picking fights. They knew they could win and not fighting fights that they knew they were going to lose and they lost the war because of that because like the fights that they were winning didn't matter. Like they were not they couldn't win any of the fights that mattered so they picked a bunch of useless fights that looked good on paper to convince

racists to join their army, right? That's what Rhodesia's kind of doing at this point in time. By the end of 1976, Rhodesian military planners had started admitting privately to each other that victory was no longer possible. All their army could do was stave off defeat. From that point forward, Smith told the army,

the gloves are off. You can do whatever you need to win the war. There's no, any crimes against humanity you want to commit, give it a shot. We have no other, like, we've got nothing else in the tank, basically. So, Rhodesia's SIOPS unit creates a plan to kill and capture terrorists to win over the local populace. And in practice, this means they start executing prisoners in the field and assassinating Zanu officers abroad in, you know, independent countries. And this disrupts the organization enough that, like, Zanu actually does suffer a lot from the casualties of, like, their high-ranking leaders. But Zanla, the other militant organization, is still doing just fine.

And that just means that, like, they get stronger by comparison. And at the same time, Smith and his generals are so convinced that this is working that they start escalating their dirty tricks campaign and really pouring all of their military effort into that. Martinez summarizes, quote, the techniques used were poisoning wells, spreading collar, infected clothing used by terrorists and using anthrax to kill cattle and thus deny food supplies to the guerrillas. By 1975, clinical trials were being performed on humans, a clear and recognized crime against humanity, provided by Rhodesia's answer to the CIA and the Salu Scout's secret detention center in Mount Darwin.

The doctors would administer various agents to the prisoners, experimenting with agents and dosages. The CIA, which is Rhodesia CIA, then disposed of the bodies of the victims down mine shafts. By 1976, deployments of the agents were ready and carried out by Salu Scouts and South Africans. The CIO and the scouts used thalium at first. Thalium was injected into canned meat, and through the use of pseudo-op's techniques, the poisoned meat was given to insurgents who believed they were being resupplied by other friendly insurgents. In one instance, because of a shortage of food in the tribal trust lands, another deliberate tactic of the Siaps unit, their gorillas gave their thalian-laced food to innocent villagers, thus killing them.

So this is like these last... acts are these biological terrorist attacks where they're basically giving guys, like, giving groups of insurgents clothes and food that they're supposed to hand to either other insurgents or just starving people in these tribal reservations that the Rhodesian state created where the land doesn't grow enough food. And so when these guerrillas start giving food to starving villagers to try to get them on their side, the villagers get poisoned and die. And that's part of the plan is maybe they won't like these militias.

as much. If they think the militia's poisoning them, let's give the militia poison to give to our own civilians, right? Like, that's the Rhodesian operating strategy here. Another brilliant scheme involved drilling holes into bottles of water and lacing them with cyanide. On another account, the Selyu Scouts laced a well near the Mozambican border with an unknown poison, killing at least 200 civilians. Radesia also operated a plan with South African help to supply guerrilla fighters with poisoned uniforms. And these are also, All of these are like horrific war crimes. They're all based on the fact that we don't have bullets anymore because we're not getting trade like we used to have from like South Africa.

So all we can do to kill large numbers of people is to poison them, to starve them, to like spread disease around them. And as their military techniques are in growing increasingly war crimey and desperate, Smith also starts making increasingly desperate political moves. In March of 78, he allowed the election of a black prime minister. Now, this was for show. The fact that there's a prime minister of Rhodesia who's black, now doesn't mean that Smith isn't still in power because he still controls the military and intelligence agencies. Right?

This guy's just there for show, and it doesn't work. The international community still fails to recognize Rhodesia. That summer, militants shoot down a commercial Rhodesian plane, and the surviving civilians are butchered by insurgents. Smith's government responds by invading Zambia and Mozambique that October with Rhodesian forces. And again, the military parts of this seem to go well. They kill thousands of guerrillas. And again, they piss off everyone around them and earn international condemnation that cuts them off even more from the food and the arms that they need from the people that they had been buying them from.

And so outside of these well-funded. Huh? 78. 79. All right. Yeah. So by 79, the whole Rhodesian special forces are just, you know, just poisoning poor people?

Yeah. Are people not, like, that's all we're doing, really? And are people not just, like, livid about this? Yeah. Yeah, they are. There's more rebels than ever. They're outnumbered badly. The regular Rhodesian army keeps shrinking because they're getting killed. And, like, they don't have the weapons that they need anymore.

So they're fleeing the country. Who, like, they don't have any money anymore. Oh, good. Why the war has to end, right? Is that. Yeah, because they're running out of money. Because he's broken the country. War is expensive. Right.

War is expensive. Eventually rebels destroy the entire Rhodesian strategic fuel stockpile, which is all kept in one place. And Ian Smith just not and his government just do not have the gas, literally and figuratively to continue fighting after 1979. Where's Great Britain and all this? Kind of sitting back and being like, you guys got to stop doing that. Oof, you're using a lot of war crimes.

Booy, are those chemical weapons? You guys really better stop. Wow. But, like, they don't, you know, send in the RAF or anything. And, yeah, I think it's, it is as horrifying as that is, and as many people as they kill, it is worth noting. Because there's always this thing, whenever you talk about, like, these wars that are kind of done similarly or that, like, that feel very similar to the Rhodesian Bush were like Vietnam, where, like, there's a lot of Americans who would be like, oh, we would have won if we could take the gloves off. It was just those damn liberals in the media, didn't let us, like, fight that we should have fought. there were no gloves for the Rhodesian military.

They used all of the forbidden weapons. They used anthrax. Like, they used fucking phallium. Like, they were poisoning wells. They did everything you're not supposed to do. They did all of, like, the hardcore stuff that these, like, fascists think will make sure they win. If they're just tough enough, we can win a war. And they lost really badly.

Like, because they didn't, they never knew how to win. They never had a plan for winning. All they had a plan to do was kill people. until they stopped fighting, and that never works. Right? So, as things start to collapse, Ian Smith reaches out increasingly to what had become his most reliable foreign supporters,

the global white supremacist far right. By the late 1970s, the white population of Rhodesia was already a diaspora, composed not just of British colonists, but Portuguese and Afrikaners, who decided that their own homes weren't quite white enough, and that Rhodesia was the place to fight for white Africa. And so Smith's idea,

again was like, why can't we try getting other white racists? Are there enough of them to like fill out our country? Right. And so he takes advantage to the fact that both there's a lot of white journalists in media in like the U.S. that will report the way he likes to frame the conflict as if this is really an anti-communist campaign. Right. And you can see that even in like the New York Times. I found a 1976 article by the New York Times that's not like super pro-rodea. But here's how it describes, like Ian Smith's Rhodesia in 1976. The white Rhodesian resents any comparison between the race attitudes in his country and those of the powerful Afrikaner-run Republic of South Africa. In general, the Rhodesians have the paternalistic view of the non-European, which allows in the very long run for black participation when he has reached our standards in a century or so.

Not for Salisbury or Bolawayo those nasty whites-only signs and hotels and other public institutions. instead the more discreet right of admission reserved, which any black Rhodesian ignores at his peril. Most true Rhodians will insist that the harsher racial attitudes are the monopoly of the newer immigrants, those who settled to take advantage of the post-war bloom in the tobacco industry in Rhodesia. Basically, oh, the racists came in after Ian,

like started opening it up to the rest of the world. Like, we weren't as racist until, like, the late stages of the war. Also different because we infantilize them. So it's different. Yeah. We didn't just hate them. We just didn't believe that they were real people that could govern themselves. Yeah.

And it wasn't until later that the racists came in, you know? And for an idea of the ads that Ian's putting out desperately in this period of time, Sothe's going to have one on the screen that's a very famous Rhodesian Army ad from the late 70s. And these would run in U.S. magazines like Soldier of Fortune. It's just, be a man amongst men. And there's like a guy in Camo with a rifle. And it says, Rhodesian Army. You know, that was their motto.

It was like, be a man amongst men. in the Rhodesia. You could really be a man in Rhodesia, you know. And this takes off really well within like the U.S. far right. There's like a cottage industry and people coming back from Rhodesia with their stories of, oh, I fought for this unit or I participated in this firefight. And, you know, I got to fight the communists. And people will write these like, like, honestly, these kind of like pornographic stories of like participating in violence on behalf of like this colonial settler society in.

Africa and it was very much the appeal to a lot of these American racists is this is a place that's like the Confederacy would have been if it were still around, right? There's a good article in Jacob and by Kyle Burke on all of this that looks at, kind of describes a little bit like the American Friends of Rhodesia in this period of time. William F. Buckley had even helped organize a propaganda campaign known as the Friends of Rhodesian Independence, which worked hand in hand with the Rhodesian government to popularize Rhodesia's cause in the United States. But nothing seemed to work. The growing war, coupled with U.S.

British and UN sanctions, imperiled Rhodesia's future. If it fell, then, communists would take over as in Angola. That alone troubled right-wing Americans, but perhaps even more disconcerting was the result of the U.S. government, especially the CIA, which had been hamstrung by a series of scandals and investigations that rocked the intelligence community in the mid-70s. The state appeared both unstable and unwilling to reverse the spread of communism in Africa, when the CIA had mounted a covert action against Angola's Marxists in late 1975, Democrats and Congress shut it down within a few months.

The West isn't doing its job, one American mercenary lamented. The U.S. especially isn't doing its job. If they're too scared to fight the communists, then people like me have to act independently. I consider it my duty to fight in Rhodesia. After Vietnam and Angola, we can't afford to lose any other countries. Wow.

We did. We did. We just did. None of these guys, these handful of white Americans who came out of, none of this was enough to prop the state up. It never could have been. That was always a fantasy. For one thing, Ian was reliant upon there just being this massive population of Americans who were raised the way he was, unlike heroic stories of colonial warriors fighting crowds of Zulus. And those people just didn't exist. You know, there's some racists, but even most of the racists didn't want to move to Africa to die

fighting in a bush war, like for your stupid racist country. By 1979, an estimated 40,000 people had died in Ian Smith's Bush war, tens of thousands had been imprisoned. Margaret Thatcher, the incoming British Prime Minister, made it clear to Smith that it was well past time he and his compatriots fuck off into the sunset and ultimately they did.

The plan was for a freely elected Parliament and with universal suffrage. Whites would be guaranteed 20 of the 100 seats in Parliament, which is not, you know, even free, right? That's still unfairly biased towards the white people, but they're still unhappy with this, right?

And, you know, the man who replaces Smith ultimately is an equally ill-omened monster. Rabut Mugabe wins the first Zimbabwe elections in 1980. You've probably heard of his name. He is not a good guy. He was originally a school teacher, but he becomes like a Marxist organizer and gets locked up by Smith in 64. And he goes on. Once he takes over, he's a horrible dictator. And he destroys a lot of Zimbabwe as a result.

A lot of like the society that exists is ruined by his kleptocratic regime. However, his regime, number one, when it comes to power, inherits the security state that Ian Smith had set up. All of, like, the guns, all of these different, like, legal institutes that had been created to allow him, Smith to lock up his political enemies. All that's still in existence when Mugabe gets into power. And Mugabe uses a lot of the state that Smith had built to create his own dictatorship, right? Now, the other thing is that Mugabe himself was partly a product of Smith's horrific war. Mugabe was arrested in 1964 and spent 10 years brutally imprisoned by the Rhodesian government because he was a political organizer advocating for, like, nationalism, right?

And he's even, like, three years into his prison sentence, Mugabe's, like, young son gets sick and is, like, and dies. And Mugabe begs to be given leave to attend his boy's funeral. It's like, three-year-old kid's funeral. And Ian Smith is like, no, fuck you, right? So when Nagabi gets freed in 74, initially as like a peace overture by Smith's desperate government, he's not super happy nor is he like a really well-adjusted guy. And by the time that he swept into power in 1980, both he inherits this like brutal and powerful police state built by Smith to wage the Bush War. But he's also become like very much an angry, brutal man himself in the process of surviving and winning this Bush War. And so, yeah, his dictatorship is pretty brutal and horrific and is also part of the dictatorship in a lot of ways that Smith establishes, right?

The fact that Mugabe is so awful and ruins the country even more is a continuation of the desperately bad policies that Smith had pushed that started ruining the country, right? For his part, Smith spent the rest of his life living in Harare, which had been Salisbury and is the capital of now Zimbabwe after. Mugabe wins. And Mugabe actually leaves him alone. Like he's allowed to live his life. He keeps a nice house. Like 10 years on, his land gets appropriated by the government. But he lives out his life for years in Zimbabwe as a free man.

Periodically, Mugabe would, like, threaten him, you know, to be like, oh, I'm going to prosecute him for war crimes or something whenever his own popularity was low. But, you know, he's able to live out his life. And he never apologizes. He never apologizes for the atrocities committed while he held office. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, when he was interviewed in the year 2000 in The Guardian by Sandra Jordan about like, do you feel bad about all the people you killed? Smith said that he had no regrets about the 30,000 or so Zimbabweans killed during his rule.

Quote, the more we killed, the happier we were. We were fighting terrorists. Yeah, the happier you were. What a cool guy. Yes, yes, the happier you were, which is why you lost the country. because most people weren't happy. Thank you. Yes.

Did he at least die of something horrific? He dies. He doesn't live forever. He's not a, it's not like a. He doesn't live forever. I can give you that much. He does not wind up being like our first immortal. Oh, cool.

But he has like a long retirement. Yeah, he travels. Again, he's a free person. He gets to visit like South Africa. He lives into the fucking 2000s. He dies in Cape Town in 2007 at age 88. after a stroke, right? So it's too long.

You know. He lived too long. Yep. He lived way too fucking long. Anyway. It was buddies with Kissinger. Yep. Well, he didn't like Kissinger, but he didn't like anybody, you know?

Yeah. He was a real piece of shit. Anyway, how are we feeling? Yeah. Bad. Lovely. Yeah. Well, that's the story of how Rhodesia became.

Zimbabwe and how Ian Smith became a dead person. Becca, you want to plug your plugables at the end here? Well, that was a lovely episode. Thanks, you guys, for having me. You can find me and follow me at Bex, PECC, C-E-C-S, Ramos, on all platforms, and you can find my podcast, Welcome to El Barrio, wherever you stream your podcast. It is not video, it is audio only, I should say, when I say stream. But, and you can find and follow us on Instagram at Welcome to El Barrio.

And you can email us at Welcome to El Barrio at GML.com with any, if you have Puerto Rican guest suggestions, your own barrio stories, and et cetera. Awesome. Well, check that out. And yeah, folks, we'll be back next week with something. I don't know what yet. Don't hassle me. I'll figure it out in time.

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