The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1112: Remember Rhodesia w/ Will Tanner

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

62 MinutesPG-13Will Tanner is a law school graduate and the Proprietor of the American Tribune Substack.Will joins Pete to give an overview over the history of the country of Rhodesia.American Tribune SubstackWill on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star. Three, there's Patreon. Four, there's substack. And now I've introduced Gumroad, because I know that a lot of our guys, guys are on Gum Road and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you

subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free and you'll get an invite into the telegram group. So I really appreciate all of the support everyone's giving me and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingona show. Will Tanner is here. How you doing, Will? Doing well. What about you? Doing good, man. First time on the show. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so I just graduated from law school this spring, which is why I've been pretty quiet on the internet up till now. Just busy hitting the books. And then through that, I've kind of been working in digital marketing and on the internet for a while now, started speaking out more on Twitter.

It happened to have a thread on Rhodesia, go nuclear and take off and get a rent. Think up now we're almost up 8 million views on it, which was fun back sometime in August, I think. And since then, just kind of been writing about that sort of thing on Twitter and on my substack. And, yeah, mainly focus on European life up until the guns of August in 1914 and then also on decolonization in the 60s and 70s. Kind of my two areas I enjoy writing about. Cool. Well, I mean, I invited you to come on to talk about Rhodesia, give an overview. So I guess, where to start? How did you get in, how did you get interested in, in the, topic. I have a pretty tangled backstory getting into it. Probably not one of the normal ways,

but when I was like 10, I found a book about Eric Prince in my local Barnes & Noble and thought it was just the coolest thing and he was the coolest guy. And through him, I found out about Soldier Fortune magazine. And around the time I was getting interested in all that, the guy who founded it, I believe Robert Brown wrote an autobiography called Dancing with Devils. And in it, he tells this awesome story about smuggling guns to Rhodesia through his local small town airport because he knew the guy who had handled baggage. So he just smiled and waved to the guy and sneak into Rhodesia, a couple duffel bags full of a Ruger Mini 14s and banana mags for them and hand him out to the Rhodesian farmers when he got in country. And so I thought that was pretty cool and just

kind of had it lurking in the back of my mind. And then eventually discovered Prime Minister Ian Smith's autobiography, which is called The Great Betrayal, it was reprinted as Bitter harvest in the early 2000s. And it's about his struggle against really the entirety of the West and the entirety of the communist bloc to make Rhodesia independent. And I'd forget how I stumbled across that, but more or less accidentally. And through reading it, kind of remembered what I'd heard from Brown about fighting the communist rebels. And then looking at it through Smith's eyes, was able to see how the West got involved. And that really sparked an interest. And I started reading more about it, just various memoirs, autobiographies, that sort of thing.

Well, do you mind if we start off talking about the fact that Rhodesia is named after Cecil Rhodes and that even though we love Rhodes, we don't love Cecil Rhodes? Yeah, I'm more ambivalent towards him than a lot of people are. The Pioneer column, which is how it was started, he funded the British South Africa company and sent a column of men into Rhodesia to found it. And it was a pretty cool experiment and that it was very selective as to who they took on board. It wasn't this typical sort of freebooter adventures that you find in these stories, but was really the second sons of the British gentry. And that was kind of the immigration policy Rhodesia had moving forward, which is the best men. And so that's where the Cecil Rhodes connection comes in was the founding of it. He, as I'm sure everyone listening to us, he's one of the big proponents of the British Empire,

and there are a lot of mixed views of them online. I'm more ambivalent towards them because I see the British Empire as a civilizing force, but also I can see why a lot of people dislike him and dislike it. Well, I think a lot of it also has to do with a lot of his writings were picked up by people that we would call globalists and used for those purposes. Also, when I was growing up, I was taught that, you know, if you're a Rhodes Scholar, that's something special. And then we find out that most Rhodes Scholars.

are globalists scum. Yes. The few Rhodes scholars I know are just awful and very much not what I would want. I think he wasn't quite like that. He wanted the Rhodes Scholarship to be the best man being and brought into British aristocratic culture and somewhat like the Ford Foundation. It's gone downhill since he died, which is quite sad. So talk about the founding of Rhodesia to get into how

this, you know, how this colony, you know, this white colony in black Africa was started. Yeah, it's really interesting because it's a flash to flash back to the past in a lot of ways. It was, so just to keep in mind, as I describe it, it was a private colony up until 1920s, until the 1920s, meaning it was run entirely by the British South Africa Company

as a private experiment, somewhat like Jamestown originally was, or the Raj under the East India Company, which is interesting. But so in 1890s, the British Empire was reaching at Zenith, and Rhodes is one of his many projects, wanted to build a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. And to do that, he needed the middle part of Africa. The British needed the middle part of Africa, but also the government was getting somewhat tired of the expenditures of having to try and colonize and settle and civilize the entire world. So it wasn't particularly interested in marching into the belt and trying to carve civilization out of just grassland inhabited by. subsistence farmers. So Rhodes had to do it individually and more or less without permission from the government. It was just a private initiative. So over a couple of years, he banded together what was

called the Pioneer column and it was a collection of men from England largely. It wasn't South African and that it wasn't bore, it wasn't Dutch, it was English. Largely the sons of the gentlemen of England. So they're educated, they're gentlemen. They weren't just a rogues gallery like Andrew Jackson's Defense Force of New Orleans. And they marched north under the banner of the British South Africa Company, which despite being called the South Africa Company was in charge of Rhodesia, not South Africa. And did so quite successfully, what they found in Rhodesia was, as anyone who's read the Allen Quarterman books, which is based on Courtney Sellis, will remember, it was largely uninhabited. There were a few subsistence farmers in the area, the pastoralists,

agriculturalists, but essentially living in the Stone Age with no wheels, no technology, no buildings of note. It was uninhabited except for just a few huts and cows and such. So they settled it and did so quite successfully. It became a booming area of the empire that was quite agriculturally successful because unlike England, there were no large costs of enclosure. They could just start farming these huge tracks of land. So you hear about Dukes, getting tired of the death duties in England buying say 10,000, 20,000 acres just at the drop of a hat in Rhodesia in farming it quite successfully and not having to deal with all the nonsense that was going on in England. So that's somewhat the role it took on was this place for people to go who wanted to have large

estates and farm them well without having to put up with nonsense. And it grew because of that. And the area was quite fertile once they started farming it well using modern implements. And it grew successfully. They served in World War I fighting bravely in the trenches, but it was still pretty small at that point, so it wasn't really that many men. And then in 1920, the British South Africa company let it devolved to local self-rule rather than company rule. Ready for huge savings, we'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is

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So if you, yeah, once you start having self-rule and it becomes decentralized, basically. So how does this decentralization affect the culture, the people? Yeah, so two big things. One is that immigration policy-wise, they didn't want the very poor moving there. They didn't want to be somewhere like Australia was where criminals were deported there. They wanted to maintain British society at its best. They also didn't want a bunch of reprobates like traveled to Kenya and just kind of had Swinger a couple orgies. And it was just Kenya was kind of a disaster zone for the reprobates of the empire. Rhodesia, they wanted the gentleman. who were successful farmers and were going to do a good job, but also not just be poor looking for welfare type situation. So they had a selective immigration policy and maintained that through the 60s, at which point they just needed men

and started trying to drag in everyone from the West. But so for 40 years, they had a very restrictive immigration policy and we're looking for second sons and that sort of thing. The Duke of Montrose moved there and became a political force. Secondly, they had to decide how to run the government because though originally there were a few Native Africans in the country, they grew tremendously once there's Western hospitals, much more food, better agricultural practices, all that.

There were quite good relations between the natives and Rhodesians, but they were still uneducated and as Ian Smith later said, unable to rule themselves, so they needed a paternalist hand if they were gonna live well, which the Rhodians wanted them do. So instead of having a mass democracy, like at that time was transforming England after the parliament bill or was President America since Jackson really, They went with the old system of landed voting and landed democracy where you could vote and it was a parliament.

It was a normal Western legislature. But instead of everyone voting, it was only those with the requisite amount of property or who later on met certain educational criteria to show that they were intelligent, which mainly meant it was white voters. But also the locally successful blacks ended up voting. And there was participation through the local tribal chiefs. what kind of relations did they have with South Africa? I mean, South Africa at this point has been around a lot longer than Rhodesia. Yeah, it was mixed. Their relationship during the Bush War, which we'll talk about later,

was quite complicated because the South Africans were trying to maintain their own system while under similar pressure from the Western world. And so it became standoffish. Up until then, it was somewhat mixed in a similar way. Rhodesia was a very Anglo culture. They only really let in the English. There weren't Portuguese or Dutch there, like in Mozambique or South Africa. And so there was some conflict with the Dutch in South Africa because they didn't like the apartheid system.

They saw it as unjust and unnecessary compared to the just landed democracy style system they had. And so there was some tension on that front, but also they were trading partners. They were close by and had pretty close economic and commercial links. and there's a good deal of inflow from people who land in South Africa and move up to Rhodesia. And both became loyal members of the Commonwealth and Empire, at least up until World War II, and contributed a large number of men to that war. So, again, it was mixed. The problem was just a conflict of cultures where Rhodesia was very Anglo,

civilized, aristocratic Anglo, not kind of the low culture we have now. And that conflicted, I think, a good bit with the Dutch from what I can gather. But it also wasn't hostile. It wasn't like, you know, between Germany, East Africa and South Africa or wherever during World War I. Well, I think during the World War I series with Thomas 777, we covered, talked to some about the Boer War, but obviously didn't go, you know, extremely deep into it. So, you know, tell us about what happened. just with the Boer War generally or with as regards Rhodesia yeah okay yeah so for those who don't know it's really the second Boer War is what people mean when they say the Boer War

the first one was pretty short and the British lost it handily handedly excuse me the second one was much more of a large conflict because the Boers put up a stiff fight and the British kept setting and endless numbers of men so you all know that I don't really need repeat it at that point Rhodesia had only been founded in 1890s this was taking place maybe a decade later There weren't really a large number of men to fight and they were also focused more on the commercial aspects of it. It was the British South Africa company rather than the British Empire. So I haven't really read much about Rhodesian involvement in the war war.

And from my gather, it's because if there was any, it was quite small. And much more of that war was about the invasion from the south to the north rather than any attempts to get men into Rhodesia and have them push south. So how did it affect them at all? how did it affect their growth and how to, yeah. Yeah, it helped draw more resources into the area. For example, Lord Randolph Churchill of famously visited South Africa and helped invest and find the what became the Randines that are famous and very wealthy today. So the Boer War was helpful to Rhodesia and that it brought renewed British interest

and investment in the area. And also that people could then travel up and see it and move there, build there, invest there, all that. It wasn't overly impactful as regards to South Africans just because there is commercial relations and clash of cultures. So it was kind of like us in Mexico, I guess, might be something approaching an example, though incorrect in many respects, just where there's tensions, there's migration back and forth, their commercial links. But how did Emperor Ferdinand or whoever's invasion of Mexico infect us during the Civil War? Not overly much. You mentioned up until World War II at some point.

So what is what is Rhodesia doing during World War II? So Ian Smith, who became the prime minister during the 60s until Rhodesia fell in 79, was a Spitfire pilot in World War II. And that was a pretty representative example of Rhodesian service. They were excited about war because those were their chance to participate fully in the empire because during World War I had still been the British South Africa company. from what I gather it wasn't really an ideological involvement so much as they just wanted to participate in war somewhat like teddy roosevelt for example getting excited about the spanish-american war the air force was a big component of how they contributed because as i've mentioned before it was a pretty small country at its maximum it only had about 250,000 whites so they couldn't contribute division after division to be fed in the fighting in italy or whatever they did have enough men to contribute a pretty large air force contingent however which they did and were quite successful at the Rhodesian spirit of inventiveness and being able to be self-sufficient and quite brave, I think helped them in their Air Force endeavors.

Ian Smith's story is quite fun. He was shot down over Greece or Macedonia and remained on the run from the Germans hiding in peasant villages for a while with, I think, a broken armor leg until he finally reached safety. The war then ended. The Rhodesian contribution had been large for the size country it was. And so the British offered them independence, which is the only way World War II really matters to Rhodesia, is that the British said that they could become independent if they wanted it under whatever conditions they wanted keeping their government. They declined because they thought being part of the Commonwealth would help them, and that really came back to bite them about 20 years later, which we'll discuss a minute, I guess. The other way it impacted them was that, excuse me, after the war, it was only in 48 that the South Africans built their apartheid system. which the Rhodesians disliked, and that ended up creating a lot of tension in the region and internationally. So that'd be the other way it affected them.

But Rhodesia was never invaded during World War II. They contributed men but didn't lose a ton of men. So it was something of a small war for them in which they got some more experience and close relationships with the empire, but was otherwise not overly impactful. What was the attitude of the world towards them after World War II? You know, World War II is an ideological shift. ethno states are looked down upon and yeah i mean you were talking about well you know what starts happening 20 years after but if that doesn't all just happen at once it has to build up so yeah there are a couple things one was that after churchill was thrown out and was it spring or summer

45 and replaced with atley as bad as looking back churchill probably was atley was just impossible he kept he nationalized the coal and rail industries along with other mining industries, kept rationing going for like five years after the war, something crazy. So England was just a horrible place to live at that time, and that helped Rhodesia and that people wanted to move from England's to Rhodesia because there they could just buy a farm and live a successful life without having to worry about the socialist taxation and rationing and all that. Tim Bax and his book, Three Sips of Gin, describes his family moving from Britain

to British Southern Africa just because it was so much pleasant. So there's that. The other thing was that the British Empire was bankrupt after the war. I mean, you remember in the beginning of the war, they were confiscating wedding rings to pay for American arms then they lost when they were treated from Dunkirk. So it was a mess. And they didn't really have the will or the resources to hold on to the empire anymore.

That mattered less to Rhodesia than it might appear at first glance just because they could hold onto it themselves, had it not been for later fighting. It was really that the British started seeing empire negatively rather than positively that hurt Rhodesia rather than say in Aden or Yemen when the British retreated that was a mess for the locals because they couldn't hold onto it themselves so they ended up having to bring in Sterling as a mercenary or in the Congo when the Belgians left that was a disaster for the Belgian Congolese because they didn't really have the ability to hold onto it so they're massacred

by the Simbas and during the Katanga unpleasantness but Rhodesia was different in that despite having a small white population it was able to fight and had good relations between whites and blacks in the country so they were able to fight the communists had it not been for the west looking at them negatively so a long way of saying that after the war it didn't matter as much that britain was giving up its empire if anything that would have been a net positive for them perhaps because it would have meant less ideological control what mattered was as you hinted at things like rodesia were starting to be seen negatively even singapore faced a good bit of resistance for its anti-communist policies as week one you talks about

rhodesia much much more so because it was mainly white rule through its landed voting system you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cooper plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and terramar now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply.

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Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Faragea. You mentioned that blacks live there too. So if there were, you said about a quarter million whites, how many blacks would that be? I think about $3 million, $4 million. Yeah, it's somewhat hard to tell because they lived in villages, and the government was investing heavily in the villages,

but you can only do so much being counting when it's quite undeveloped situation like that. But it was in the below $10 million, but well above like $1 or $2 million range. I can't help but think that even before tensions started to break, that there would have been some kind of lead-up. there would have been some kind of movement towards talking about how we shouldn't be ruled by these white colonialist suppressors. You see, it's interesting because it wasn't, that happened to some extent with Mugabe and Nekomo, who are the communist leaders later on. But really, that movement was quite small. I mean, far, far smaller than, say, in the Congo or in South Africa. because the whites and blacks in Rhodesia had quite good relations.

Ian Smith talks about various experiences with tribal chiefs and servants who worked for them. And they didn't really care that much about self-rule or mass democracy. The Western powers implied that they did because of America's experience with civil rights during the time period. But it wasn't really an issue. Most of the rebels, for example, who fought in the war were from outside Rhodesia. Some came from inside it, but generally they were from Mozambi, or Zambia or the Congo moving down and fighting and then when they moved into Rhodesia were handed over to the government by the black laborers so there was

certainly some of the well we need to get Whitey out of here because he's mean or whatever perspective but it was quite limited in Rhodesia's case it was mainly the country was defined by good relations between European and black so what was their main way of the government's main way of generating income what were there, you gotta have, if you're only importing, you're in trouble. So what were their exports? So this is something that came back to bite Mugabe later when he confiscated the farmland and destroyed the economy, is Rhodesia was able to subsist because it built foreign exchange

reserves by exporting agricultural products. It was industrializing and had an industrial economy, but really its claim to fame was being the breadbasket of Africa. It was quite successful at growing grain. It also was quite successful at growing tobacco. So Rhodesian tobacco, Rhodesian grain were well liked in the region and widely exported. That became a problem during the Bush War because of the embargo placed on it by the UN. But up until then, it was successful in growing cash crops for export, exporting before an exchange,

and then buying whatever it needed. It's somewhat like Russia or wherever when they exported grain before World War I. So it was the agricultural sector was really its cash generator on the international scale. Now it makes me wonder if there are any Rhodesian cigars sitting around in somebody's humidore, some billionaire's humidor somewhere. I hope so. That would be incredible to get to smoke one of this. I don't know if Zimbabwe can even grow tobacco anymore. Places a mess. But back in the day, they could.

And it was supposedly their wine and their tobacco was excellent when they could grow it. Yeah, I know a couple people who claim to have pre-revolution Cubans in their, in their private humidors. That's awesome. So how does it? It seems like they're doing well. It basically starts off as a

sounds like a corporation basically. And then it goes to private rule. It sounds like it goes to the kind of voting system that we had here when the country first started. You got to be a landowner. got to be white and then at some point things start going downhill so yeah is it the is it just the is it just the red menace just all the influence from from communism it kind of so that was

certainly a thing but the bigger aspect was earlier we're talking about world war two and i think one of the main outcomes of that war was the rise of egalitarianism as being the dominant ideology whether you're a communist or a classical liberal egalitarianism is really the key aspect of that. Not that we're all equal in the eyes of God, which I think is true, but equal in the eyes of being interchangeable economic units. And the West believed that after the war. So Rhodesia, though there was no qualification for voting that you had to be white, it was mainly white voters because they were the ones who they booth there and bought the largest states. They had the property. And they were the ones voting and running the government.

The Duke of Montrose, for example, is the agricultural commissioner, which when was the last time a Duke was in charge of anything in England? The Hotel Cecil in the early 1900s, it was a while ago. And so they hated that. They really hated that Rhodesia wasn't egalitarian and that instead of just letting everyone vote, they had this racial, or it wasn't a racial system. They had this economic system where you had to be a landowner pretty much to vote. You could also like shares in a Rhodesian company or whatever, but land was the big thing. So the West hated that. I really, really hated that, just for the ideological, egalitarian reason. That was the big thing going on with Rhodesia, which is why the West hated it. Meanwhile, you had the communist subversion in the region. The Portuguese, which bordered Rhodesia to its east in Mozambique, had been fighting the communist rebels there for a long time. Rhodesia was assisting in that war, and then there ended up being a large amount of rebels who fought in both conflicts, both against the Portuguese and Mozambique and the Rhodesians in Rhodesia. And so the communists were getting interested in the region. The Chinese ended up backing Mugabe and the Russians were the Soviets were backing Nkomo.

They were different ethnic groups. Mugabe was a Shona and Nkomo was in Nubele. And so there's some ethnic conflict between the blacks on that angle, but largely it was communist influence supporting these people, finding outside rebels to then attack Rhodesia. And the West was letting it happen because of egalitarianism. That started up in around 64, 65, really 65 is probably the more accurate start date. 65 was also when the Simba rebels in the Congo were having their run riot across the country, which for those who haven't read my course Congo mercenary, it's quite a fun book about how like 50 guys can defeat an entire army of African communists. But the problem with the Simba's was they just ran ride across the Congo immediately,

and they killed, raped, all the nuns. it was quite horrific. And the Belgians who had remained after dependents in I think 61. It was either 60 or 61 when the Belgians left, because they weren't putting up with that anymore. So during the Simba Rebellion in 65, the Belgians fled south and made it to Rhodesia and described what had happened in the Congo and how the UN and Americans really let it happen, where it wouldn't have had to had my Corps been brought in earlier or anyone competent been brought in earlier, but for ideological reasons, the Congo was allowed to fall apart. So Rhodesia saw that and that was when decolonization was really hitting the region hard because rather than just giving things up, the West was getting

involved in making sure the what they called majority rule and I think we'd call one man, one vote one time, pseudo-democracy was going on. So the Rhodesians decided we're not going to do this. The Portuguese are being damned by the West for trying to hold on to Angola and Mozambique. they brought civilization to those countries and now they're being damned for it. And meanwhile, the Belgians left the Congo, which was once the jewel of the subsarer in Africa. I mean, just as a side note, most of the claims about King Leopold were entirely made up and stuff going on just with the natives before the Belgians got there, despite the Belgians being there. It wasn't Belgian policy.

So the Congo was quite nice until the Simba's in 65 took over, it was temporarily took over, and the government just kind of dissolved. But so long way of saying, Rhodesia didn't want to deal with that. They didn't want an apartheid system like South Africa had because they saw it as immoral and unnecessary. But they also didn't want to go the way of the Congo because who wants to be hacked to death by a drugged up rebel. So they started petitioning Britain for independence, which is a reminder they'd been offered in 45, but decided against it. So with Harold Wilson in charge, who was a socialist, much like Attlee, he was even worse than that he raised the death tax rate to not. 90% in Britain, which really broke the back of any hereditary power in the country.

But so Wilson refused to let them leave the empire, have independence without what he called majority rule. So his slogan was Nimmar, or no independence before majority rule. The Rhodesians refused because they said, well, our landed voting system is fair. It's democratic. People can vote if only they prove they're capable. So we're going to keep that because it's a much better way of handling things. Wilson didn't like that because of the egalitarianism and all that. So Wilson refused in the Rhodesians in November of 1965 declared their unilateral declaration of independence.

It was modeled after the American Declaration of Independence. And from that point on, it was really the Rhodesians against the world. The West, particularly Britain and the United States, hated them for it for various ideological reasons. And the communists, as mentioned before, wanted to destroy the country for reasons of regional power. So they, with the exceptions of Portugal and South Africa, which were close allies and Israel, which supplied them with arms throughout the war, it was them against the world. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

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My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddhistorehouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, fizzotrware.com. Yeah, I think people would be surprised to find out that Israel was a supporter of Rhodesia. Yeah, I've been trying to find out about that because it's odd. I haven't found out why. All I know is that they supplied them with arms and that Israel has, had a connection with South Africa up until the end of apartheid in 94 because of

mutual reasons of wanting that with them and the Palestinians and the South Africans in apartheid but I have I mean the founders of South Africa are the founders of Israel the Rothschilds and the Oppenheimer family I haven't been able to find out what was gone on through Rhodesia some of it was that I think Israel just was mad at the UN at the time period and a lot of the sanction and embargoes were being carried out by the you or enforced by the UN so there was some of that But yeah, it's odd and I don't know. Well, it could also be tension with the reds, you know, so you know, they see somebody getting attacked by the Reds and they're like, okay, well, yeah, we'll back them up or something like that.

Right. So how do we, how do we start getting into where now it may not be so safe to be a white person in Rhodesia? Yeah. So in 65 or 66, the UN passed its first ever sanctions package. It was targeted at Rhodesia. It was different in terms of pretty much every sanctions policy that's followed afterwards and that it was mandatory. So to be a member of the UN in good standing, you had to go along with the sanctions. Everyone went along with it with the exception of Portugal, South Africa, and Israel for their various reasons. Portugal, as a reminder, was ruled by Salazar at the time.

that only really ended with the Carnation Revolution in 74. And Salazar was hated by the West, much like Ian Smith was. So at that point, they were surrounded. The West doesn't, the West doesn't like it when you win every election 100%. No. If you're going to rig your elections, you have to do it a lot better than that. Yeah. You have to buy those Dominion voting machines like Brazil did.

But yeah, yeah, so they hated Salazar. They hated South Africa. And Rhodesia was surrounded that point because Rhodesia had originally composed what's now Zimbabwe and what's now Zambia. The Zambians broke off in the early 60s and formed zone country. It's better now and was better in 79 when Rhodesia fell. But it was originally a communist style country. I don't know if it was overly ideological or if it was more like the Congo where it's just a mess. But anyway, so Rhodesia had Zambia to its northwest and Mozambique to its east and north.

and South Africa to its south. Those were the country bordering it. Zambia and Mozambique were full of communists, but because Mozambique was controlled by the Portuguese, it was really only Zambia through which the rebels could come up until 74. That was helpful to the Rhodesians because it limited the border size. As I mentioned earlier, they're only about 250,000 whites. So pretty small a number of men you can draw from that group.

And the blacks volunteered for a couple of units, but the Rhodesian army was still small. I think at most points it was under 20,000 people. So the Rhodesians were fighting in the Bush War, which mainly at that point consisted of the farms would be attacked, or the farming estates, like I talked about earlier, would be attacked by the rebels who would torture the black laborers and try and kill the white families with very limited success, up until 74, at which point the war went from being really what was described as a police action, somewhat like in Malaysia in the 50s, to a full-scale war because Portugal fell to the Socialists in the Carnation Revolution, and they instantly gave up their colonization. in Mozambique and Angola. So Mozambique suddenly became this large scale beacon of communism through which not only could the rebels could come into Rhodesia and attack it in much larger units than they had previously been able to, but also it was this huge country that they're able to rest in, rearm in, be provided with communist training and aid in. So that really became a problem for the Rhodesians. They, Rhodesia was somewhat like America and Vietnam where they won a lot of battles, all the battles probably,

but had trouble turning that into any sort of strategic success. The Mozambique operations, you read about a great example of that. I'm forgetting the names now, but there were a few where they would go in, and at the cost of one or two wounded, they'd kill thousands of rebels, but it also expanded the war and got the so-called international community even more angry at them. So it ended up being a wash in terms of effect. The other problem was that Rhodesia, if you look at it on a map from Zimbabwe now,

is it has no sea access. It's surrounded by land. So if they wanted supplies, particularly oil, the only way they'd been able to import oil was through the port of Biera in Mozambique, because South Africa has no oil of note. When they were sanctioned in the 80s and 90s, they were really making it out of coal, which you can't make oil out of coal and then supply another country with it. You can barely do that for yourself. The Germans found that out, I think, in the end of World War II. But anyway, sorry, that's off topic. But so if they wanted oil, they had to get it through Biera. But when Mozambique fell, they no longer had Biera through which they could import oil.

And that really hurt their war machine and agricultural machine. So the war escalated in 74. They had a lot fewer supplies with which they could fight it. Also, if you want to ask a question, please interrupt me. I'll just keep going. Keep going. Okay. So the war escalated in 74.

What became a problem for the Redisians was the oil situation. I mentioned a minute ago, that they had a much larger border now to defend, which was a problem for them because without oil, they really had to use horses to patrol it. They lacked planes. They lacked helicopters. They lacked reconnaissance vehicles. They had all of those, but oil was limited and numbers were limited because they couldn't import anything. So the Grey Scouts were patrolling the border on horses with FALs, which makes for some cool pictures, but isn't overly useful. So the war became much more of a problem for them. More rebels were coming through and attacking farms. More rebels were getting in large-scale firefights with them. They had a limited ability to respond with air power.

When they did respond with air power, instead of bombing or strafing or whatever, it was much more dropping in paratroopers to fight rebels, which, I mean, they dropped the same paratroopers like six, seven times a day sometimes, but still only so much you can do. So the war became a larger problem. The South Africans also started stabbing them in the back around that time. South Africa, as I mentioned earlier, had its apartheid system. The world hated it for that, for all the reasons you can imagine. So South Africa was trying to build some space for itself.

It thought the way to do that was by leaving the Rhodesians for the wolves to eat, which didn't help South Africa at all. The world still hated it. But it could say, oh, no, we're not like those evil Rhodesians. We're sanctioning them and going along with it. So the South Africans pulled out the armored police forces, the head station in South Africa to help it defend its borders and cities, stopped really supplying it with weapons for a while and started undercutting it in diplomatic negotiations that Smith was engaging in, largely in Britain. So Rhodesia had a much harder time fighting the war after 74. Then Jimmy Carter was elected in 76. One of his partners in crime was Andy Young, who was a fellow civil rights activist from Georgia.

Young was one of the main backers of the communists in Rhodesia. He particularly was close with Mugabe, but also supported Nekomo. So America up to that point had been really against Rhodesia, but it became even more so after that point. Kissinger had been somewhat playing both sides. Smith describes Kissinger well. If you read Kissinger's autobiography, he says he regrets demolishing Rhodesia,

He was being very disingenuous when he was dealing with Smith. But still, America hadn't been overtly hostile in the way it was under Carter up until Carter was elected. Because Nixon and Ford were somewhat ambivalent about it. That was in 76. Things kept getting worse during the war. A lot of whites started fleeing the country as things got worse. I think particularly that started heating up after 75 with just people up in leaving and moving to South Africa. So Rudy just started having a demographic crisis where it didn't really have the men to fight the war or the economy to support a conflict.

So Smith started really looking for a way out from what I gather in about 75 or 76. Couldn't really find a good one and things kept going back and forth. Then in 79, two big escalatory events happened. One was Nekomo. He was the one backed by the Soviets. Yeah, Soviets, excuse me. used two surfaced air missiles to shoot down civilian airliners traveling from Salisbury to South Africa. I forget the names of the flights, but if you just look up Rhodesian planes shot down, you can find it.

It was particularly horrific because they were obviously civilian airliners. And then when they crashed, instead of helping the survivors as a civilized force would have done, Nekomo's men tortured and vannettaed them to death. So it was horrific. And that really, that was in 79, and it really encouraged a lot of Rhodesians who had been trying to stay to just leave because they could really see what the rebels were and that the rebels looked like they were going to win. So that worsened the demographic crisis. Then the remaining oil the Rhodesians had was stored in pretty much stored in one central facility. And the rebels managed to blow it up. So at that point, the Rhodesians had to give in because the South Africans weren't being helpful.

Their oil was gone and most of their people left. So they gave in. And at first there was a non-Mugabe government. Mugabe said it was able to win in an unfair election. So they redid the election. Mugabe tortured people until they voted for him and sent his thugs to scare them into voting for him and ended up winning that. And then that's all she wrote and became Zimbabwe and that hell hole within a few years.

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Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. Well, they were still a part of the empire this whole time. The empire are not giving them any help? knew. So as I mentioned, the British really hated that Rhodesia wasn't an egalitarian society.

So when it unilaterally declared independence, the British claimed that independence was invalid, but then stopped providing any sort of help or aid or anything like that to the Rhodesians. They only restarted the aid or whatever they call it in 79 when majority rule happened. but in the interim, the 14 years, not so much. The empire abandoned them. And it was really quite the betrayal because not only were they not helping, but the United Kingdom's Navy, other than the Falklands conflict, its last real gasp was attempting to patrol the Port of Biera to stop the Rhodesians from importing oil up until the fell, as I mentioned, in 74.

For one, they failed at that, which is quite funny because it's the emperor, or the Navy that used to rule the waves now can't even stop Greek. oil transports from sliding into a port in southern Africa, but also it just showed the British were implacably opposed to Rhodesia's continued existence after 65. You've used the term egalitarian a few times. I mean, it can be used in a lot of different ways. How are you using it? I think it's the concept that in terms of policy and politics, it's viewing humans as interchangeable units that all ought to be treated as having the same exact capabilities and possibilities for their future. So like every, it's like we have here, you know, I just call it an open, open air strip mall,

where everything is about commerce and all we are are basically annuities going through commerce. And that's, that's our purpose, our purpose to these people. So this regime and definitely post the post-World War II, the post-Norrenberg regime. is that we are economic units, nothing more, nothing less. And if we have any kind of allegiance to anything historic or anything religious or anything about our family, our heritage, that would interfere with that commercial spirit, then we're the enemy, basically. Yes, I think that's definitely the majority of it.

adding to that, I think there are two things. One is just the idea that not only are re-economic units, but we're entirely interchangeable ones. It's like the idea that the guy who murdered someone at a 7-Eleven would have been an astronaut if you had like a better calculus teacher, which it's absurd, and we all know it's absurd, but it's government policy in Britain and America and has been for a long time. Adding to that, I think, is the idea that the government ought enforce equality or equity, really. And so instead of having the Duke of Montrose be your agricultural commissioner, he has to be cut down the size. So we're going to tax as a state until it's sold through various death duties and income taxes and capital gains taxes and that sort of thing.

Or he'll now be the same economic unit really and have the same potential in life as the peasant who's been a peasant for a thousand generations. Not just a peasant, but the recently imported Senegalese peasant. I think it's that idea as well. I think another thing that might be there is the idea that you care about others more than you care about your own. You're not supposed to have your own. I was talking to Josiah Lippincott yesterday, and he had it in his background. I think it's a brain scan of like someone who you consider, quote unquote, right-wing conservative. Have you seen that one?

Yeah, there's an other one. It's like liberal. Yeah. And it's complete opposite. that you care more about your own and your own family, and then they're, you know, like the shit lib would be cares way more about people that, that aren't close to them, that they've never meet and they will never meet, and they hope they will never meet, even though they love them so much. I'm not a huge Dickens fan, but he did have a great term for that sort of thing.

Now I'm forgetting, but it's like telescopic philanthropy or something where you're going to ignore the starving, like, day laborers that live half a mile away from you, but then you, you have to send all your kids' toys and disposable income to, you know, Guinea or wherever, where it'll do no good, but you feel much better about it because it's far away. And added to that, just on the Rhodesia note, is life was quite good for the blacks in Rhodesia, and they quite liked the Rhodesian government because of it. There's this story from the Great Betrayal where a longtime servant of Ian Smith's family had some tooth abscess that he wasn't getting taken care of.

So Ian Smith made him go to the doctor, made him go to the dentist. They tried to deal with it. The guy was difficult, so it didn't really work out. But they really tried. And similarly, the villages in which pretty much all the Africans lived, the government spent a great deal of resources investing in them and trying to make them better. To us, I think that can sometimes come across as cringe because we've seen how the great society worked out in America. But there they had the point that these people had been living in the Stone Age and were showing a great deal of capability to work well on farms.

and such and so investing in the area and you know trying to like make clean water wells or whatever had some point to it was going well and it really did go well the living standard for blacks from rhodesia was far better than it was in Portuguese Mozambique or god forbid the Congo it particularly after the communist rule in the Congo so it was an egalitarian it was a very paternalistic government it was much more like England before the first reform bill and i think 32 or America before Jackson and the 30s, and that only the best could vote. But then what they did with their votes wasn't what the current crowd does, which is globalization to become obscenely wealthy in some fake idea or company,

but rather improve the country and improve the lives of those living there, both black and white. And it worked quite well. But that was entirely ignored by the international community because it was paternalistic rather than just nonsensical government welfare policies. Yeah, I think a lot of people have a difficulty separating egalitarianism from good policy that keeps order. Yes. I think also a lot of people have, to me, the difference between right wing and left wing,

true right wing and left wing is whether one's egalitarian or one's not. And then you will have people who will argue that there are historic groups, we probably know who I'm referring to, who called themselves socialist. But because they call themselves socialist, that means that they're left-winger. And then I asked, well, were they egalitarian? And people are like, well, they were egalitarian towards their own. That's not called egalitarian. You're not, you're using that term wrong.

You're using that term. You're bending that term to make your point. There's a famous quote from Lord Birkenhead about the Cecil family, which was heavily involved in British politics from Elizabeth first up until the mid-20th century, that as in humans, as in race forces, there's a great deal of, there's a great case to be made for the hereditary principle. And I always think it's funny. But it also really is true.

If you look at Rhodesia as opposed to being like, yeah, they just like operated based on that. And the result was higher living standards in a successful country. And, you know, the same could be said of Singapore, probably. And Lee Kuan Yu was an egalitarian. And he just made it a successful country by operating based on, you know, rational principle. similarly with Buckele today where this gangster probably isn't going to be a good guy because he's been a gangster for his whole life.

So we'll just throw him in jail and throw away the key. It makes a great deal more sense than saying, well, I know this person is murdered like seven other people. But if we only let him out the eighth time, then that'll really be when he shines and takes us to Mars. It's absurd. But most of our policy today is based on the idea that for whatever reason it's true. Well, there's a certain group of a group of us. who, you know, romanticize Rhodesia.

I guess that's where we, what we should talk about next is that the legacy of Rhodesia that we look at it and, you know, I wonder how if, I know, I know it's pronounced different ways, but, you know, if 100 years from now, if Irania, if they're still around, if they will be looked upon in the same way. but there's a way of, you know, people who are educated in the subject look back and they're like, well, this is order, they were, everything was orderly. People got along, even though it was a multicultural society. And, yeah, and it wasn't until, of course, it's always outside influence, influencing people on the inside.

And yeah, so what is, why do we talk about Rhodesia? So there are a few things. One, and it has to be said, is that their aesthetics were incredible. Like, there's only so many places now where there are like skinny people wearing shorts that don't just horrify you to look at. In addition to that, they're carrying FALs, which is probably the coolest looking gun of the Cold War. So they really nailed it on that angle. And Rhodesian brushstroke is an awesome camo. So they have all those points in their favor where, you know, it's a lot, it's a great deal more fun to post a picture of a cellist scout or Rhodesian light infantrymen than say like a Portuguese private in Mozambique.

I don't think people, I don't think people really get how important aesthetics is. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it really is to to the right. Because, you know, if you look at, you know, if you compare the, you know, the Austrian painters crew, and Stalin's crew, or the way Lenin dressed on a regular basis. It's like, really, which one would you, how would you rather dress? Well, even using the Soviets, particularly later, like, their posters are pretty cool. I abhor the Soviet Empire and all that, but they did nail the pictures.

We're now, I think people feel less ridiculous posting a picture of a pretend Soviet coal miner than a picture of the real thing because they got the aesthetics right in the picture. Not that you're wrong about how they looked at your life, but, you know, like the, the, to use the term very, very loosely, the non-free countries, I think of the 20th century understood that and tried to look cool because, you know, it made people think they were cool. And Rhodesia was really the only country in the anglosphere to not slouch towards a unrespectability. Like if you go outside today, everyone you see dress would probably be arrested for indecency even a hundred years ago. They were men wore tails rather than t-shirts. And it's just, Rhodesia didn't do that. They dressed better and looked a lot cooler.

And I think that really is why a lot of, particularly people who don't care about it, ideologically love Rhodesia, is because they looked quite cool. Beyond that, the other thing is that it's really the counter example of what the West could have been, like had Jackson not been elected, had the first reform bill not been passed

because of the unpleasantness on the continent. England and America would have been very different places. all the problems we have with now would be replaced by different problems, but I think much more solvable ones. There are certain things that can be done in a country that's wealthy and ruled by the best, rather than obscenely wealthy and ruled by the worst, because you don't get welfare policies in a place like Rhodesia. You might get assistance to help build places up, but you're not going to have like social security or food stamps or Medicare and Rhodesia, because they have no reason to do it. It's a successful country, and everyone's expected to be a successful adult human being.

other than a modern mass democracy where I think because of the egalitarianism we talked about earlier the idea is that if someone fails it's society's fault rather than that person's innate flaws I don't really read Tom Clancy but in one of his books he described America as the land of pills for every problem and disorders for every character flaw and I think that really is true and Rhodesia is the counter example where instead of saying well you know we really need to hear from the convicted convict what he thinks of tariff policy regarding German automobiles or Italian suits or whatever. We should just have like a department that handles that and the people have shown themselves to be committed

citizens that are successful handle it. And that's what Rhodesia did. Their land policy, I know I've mentioned them a few times, but the Duke of Montrose developed Rhodesian land policy, particularly as regarding like what land would be set aside. It's somewhat like Indian reservations for the blacks to buy as they wanted to so they could become landed voters and have farms of their own and it was quite successful in getting the blacks on their side. It was about a 50-50 split of the arable land below where the say-sa-fly makes it more or less uninhabitable. And it was a prudent policy that now Americans would either on one side be uncomfortable because the government is selling land or uncomfortable on the other because it wasn't just given away free to the villages to be wasted.

But it was a successful prudent policy that I think split the middle and it made it where the blacks felt more like citizens that could participate in Rhodesian society and the white might still have land that they could buy the great estates and farm them for export. So it worked well, and that's the sort of policy you get from a place like Rhodesia. And I think when we look back at it, people see it and like it because they can tell just from looking at it and the aesthetics, but then also if you hear a speech of Ian Smiths or if you read about any policy they engaged in, it's a smart one. And it's one that you would never get out of D.C. today with either side in charge, just because it's like one that makes sense and isn't either ideologically captured or just meant to be pork.

for a base that doesn't really know what's going on. Yeah, I think, yeah, I've said this that I think a lot of, like, boomers and, yeah, I would say a lot of conservatives in general tend to be, like, pro-Israel, more so, yeah, maybe equal, you know, the whole eschatological, religious side of it, but, which is a complete falsehood, but also because they see a country where the borders are closed and they present as caring about their own people. They present as wanting to protect their own people. And I mean, you can just look around this country for decades and try to find that person. And even when you look back, you realize, you know, that wasn't Ronald Reagan.

No. You know, Ronald Reagan, you know, amnesty bills and machine guns and all these things that he did that, you know, really started the downfall. And yeah, I think that that's another thing that a lot of this regime, this post-war regime, hates is anyone who stands up in front of their country, especially if their country is predominantly European, white, or Christian, and speaks directly to the people and loves his, loves his own, loves his people. You know, you can say that Vladimir Putin doesn't love his own people, that he's lying, but at least it outwardly looks like he loves his own people. And I think that goes to his approval ratings, and it goes to how, you know, but that just seems to when you look at a place like Rhodesia where they loved everyone, they loved the whites there, loved the blacks and saw a, saw like a nobles obelage towards.

these people who are, you know, who have lower IQs in them. And it's like, you look at that and you're like, they could, that could have lasted, but it couldn't last in the post-Nurrenberg world. It just wasn't allowed. That's not a lot. You're not allowed to love your own people. You're not allowed to have pride because it's a danger to, you know, the line, the whole line go up crew, the whole, you know, where they were all economic,

we're all economic units crew. Yeah, like the post. Most World War II focus on the economy, Uberales, is particularly weird. But really, I think it's not just that. Like, he even had World War I and two not happened, I think we'd be dealing with a lot of the similar problems that we are, just because it's really at its root, the same thing that led to the reform bill and Jackson,

where we're supposed to believe that everyone just can be interchangeable, even if the focus is on national glory. or whatever instead of just purely the economy. Like if you read Barbara Tuckman's The Proud Tower, it's a very normie book. It's not based in any way. But there were a lot of problems before the Great War that I think were caused by democracy. So Rhodesia is useful as a counter example,

not just to the post-World War II regime, though that's startingly clear looking at it, but also the post-1836, 32, excuse me, world, just because they dodged a lot of those problems by not going along with it. They said, no, you're going to have to show some commitment to the country by owning land or property or business here. And only then can you vote when we see that you're responsible or able to manage money and not just lose everything. Britain, for example, didn't have the importation problem of various third worlders until it was wind rush and 48 or something. It was under Atlee.

And it's been a disaster since then, as anyone can tell you from the country. But it was also a shithole before then. Atlee had already made the country a hell and it had been horrible in the interwar period too, largely because they just taxed the successful and made the country a hell. I know like attacking socialism is cringe now on the right. But really, like it did make Britain just awful. That place was formerly the leader of the world in terms of industry and trade and making life bearable and good for all those living in it,

whether laborers or not. And they got rid of all that because of democratic impulses and made it just the nanny state that it is now. And that's far worse because they have like 12 million Pakistanis or whatever. But it'd be bad even without them. Well, somebody, I can't remember what this quote was, but it was very, very simple. It was Britain traded empire and glory for the NHS.

Yes. Yeah. That's a great quote. It makes no sense. Most of them don't even use the NHS. This is one thing, like when you travel to Europe, I remember talking to someone who had like a broken leg and she wasn't able to go there for two more months because there was no wait list. Yeah, not to rattle on about the NHS. Not really the point of this podcast, but it is really startling to look at Britain really before probably Winston Churchill and Boy, Georgia's Parliament Bill in 1911 or the People's Budget of 1909 that sparked it.

in the Britain that followed. It's entirely different countries. And one is the one we think of when we think of Britain. And the other is some like socialist hell that you'd rather live in Poland, then. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for the talk.

Do you, what do you have to promote? Oh, yeah. So follow me on Twitter. I'm at Will underscore Tanner underscore 1. That's where I post all my work and my ramblings on. The other is on substack, the American Tribune. news. I do other things as well, but those are probably the two of interest to people listening to this. On the substack, like I talked about earlier, I mainly focused on Europe before the Great

War and on decolonization and its horrors, particularly South Africa and Rhodesia, just because I think those are ones with which we in America can relate, particularly if you live in a southern city like Atlanta, something. You know what's going on in Johannesburg. I am not, I am, I no longer have to suffer that. Thank God. Now I just have to worry about bust loads of Haitians showing up. Which they might. But you know, get your undercar flame thrower like you're living in South Africa. We might as well embrace the Mad Max. I don't think I can pull off the shorts.

Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on.