Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 109: Rhodesia

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

sorry for bad audio but everything went wrong, much like in the bad country we are talking about follow War Takes on twitter: https://twitter.com/War_Takes visit War Takes' webzone: https://wartakes.com/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

fucking dammit. Okay, we're taking a second run at this. Having done the first run and then, you know, all of us were in various horrible moods because we recorded at the day that the roe verdict came out. And so now we're taking a second run at this. But unfortunately, Justin has caught plague recovering from the novel Corona virus. You're recovering real good. It gave you it gave you Muppet voice. I'm sorry. As I just said, I assume this is what Jordan Peterson sounded like the day he woke up from his Russian medically induced coma.

I I I hope you get better soon. I you are my best friend. Yes. Yes. You're a different love for you in the world. But I also hope that this permanently changes your voice that you always sound like this. I gotta say, I feel much better today than I have any day in the past two weeks. I sound terrible. I have missed recording with you guys is the thing.

It's genuinely like it very enjoyable. And I've missed doing it. So it's not just the listeners. But this is sort of technically this is a bonus episode that we're releasing for free because everyone's been very patient with everyone with all of us dying of various causes. Yes, you know who all of all of us are. But we also have a guest. Hello, guest.

I go by Kubota dad or KD, but most people on Twitter are going to know me as or takes. I am an at sex shill and my pronouns are flash him. Thank you for coming. We've we've got you on for a second times. Take a second run at the story of this man in tiny shorts. This is the story of those shorts and the story of one of the last and hardest anti colonial struggles and how it came to devour its own heroes. And also the story of a doomed white supremacist last or other

that still resonates with racists to this day. We're talking about love it. They love it. We're talking about Rhodesia. Next slide, please. Boo. Country with the SS flags. Oh, yeah.

Except for the one on the bottom. Bottom center is pretty good. Yeah, this is. Yeah, that's my one. This is my theory of you can judge how, quote, unquote, normal a a country is by how many flags it has had over the course of its distance. And as you can see, Rhodesia is a very normal bird Zimbabwe rather now is a very normal country.

Absolutely. We start with the colonial thing. We end up with our modern and modern country of Zimbabwe, which I guess we can we can start with some ancient history, right? And we can explain what Zimbabwe is geographically and where it is. And, you know, when human civilization started there. So next slide, please. OK, OK, I'll bite.

What's a Zimbabwe? This is a ziggurat of some kind. Sort of Zimbabwe means like walled stone house. Or if you want to have a like a that's whatever, man. Yeah, if you have a loose translation, castle works. That's a Zimbabwe. There's like thousands of these across across the country. This is the biggest one.

It's called Great Zimbabwe. I recognize from Civ three. Exactly. Yeah. I'm an ignorant man. So if you imagine if you imagine Africa, right, this is directly north of South Africa. We're in the central bit of the sort of southern part of Africa. And so it's got it's got South Africa to the south.

It's got the Portuguese colonies and former colonies of Mozambique to its east. And it's like Botswana. Yes. Yeah, Botswana is dope as hell. I should have put up a map. Lovely, lovely place. It's landlocked, right?

Yes. Oh, yeah. So funny when your voice goes back to its normal range. So you get it's landlocked, right? You're just like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm up at Pal. Also, I think I fixed my. Yes, you did. Oh, thank God. Excellent. Oh, terrific.

I had to poke around in my logitech bullshit. But we do have G hub. I do, in fact, because I am a capital G gamer. Yeah, I'm also rocking the logitech headset. I probably sound like shit, but that's everybody else's problem. That's right. Oh, yeah, brother. You just you just get very crisp, very crisp balance in the meantime. I just want to I have thought about it out of an act of pure rage,

simply going back to the old Mike and pretending like nothing is wrong. I you should you should not do that. I've been I've I've been around listening to this part long enough that I can remember. I can remember O.G., Liam, Mike and, you know, those those were the days. Yeah, those are the real heads, real heads. No, I'm thinking I might start calling in from like a Motorola walkie talkie and just be like, hey, guys, so many bones ago and these old oaks were young.

It's on people. Alice is calling in on a motor order brick phone that she will then use to detonate an improvised explosive device somewhere in Afghanistan. That's right. That's right. I got all these containers of yellow palm oil and I'm just going to stack them all up on the roadside and see what happens. I actually called into the podcast using oral tradition. That was my stripper name in high school, not high school, college, college,

my bad. I cancelled, cancelled. Well, I'm the stripper. I'm the one getting exploited, certainly. Oh, so you want to deny it? You want to deny yourself your own agency? That interesting. Look, I'd say it's my logic. I'm saying that's Twitter logic. That's what would happen.

So so problematic. Yeah, we fucking know. So human civilization in Zimbabwe began with the Sun people who built these Zimbabwe's. They built these. This is a little soapstone carving of his Zimbabwe birds. We're not sure what type of bird it is. It has like a ritual purpose. It's on the flag of modern Zimbabwe.

The Sun people sort of then become succeeded by Shona people. And then you have a second ethnic group that comes north into Zimbabwe, the Dimbale, who this happened after Shaka Zulu, after he dies, one of his generals revolts in 1821. It sets off a process called the fecane, a bunch of people who used to be Zulu soldiers come north and settle. They're called the Dimbale or the Mata Bale, and they engage in sort of like on and off ethnic wars between the Shona and the Dimbale for years.

Until in comes next slide, please. Next one is Motherfucker. This motherfucker right here. Yeah. Of all of our motherfuckers, perhaps the most venal. You're allowed to throw tomatoes at these statues. You can do that. Yeah.

However, was that that woman posted. Don't don't like a statue. You could simply get rid of it. That's right. So you see this the strategic position of the British Empire in Africa is has well sort of except that there's no good links other than by ocean has a lot of territories in North Africa has a lot of colonies in South Africa and no real way of linking them other than by ship.

What Cecil Rhodes wants to do is to build a telegraph line. You can see there's a telegraph cable that he's holding and a railway that goes from Cape Town to Cairo. And that way you can just run the whole empire through this like central artery. I stand by my. Consider that he'd have to keep standing there with. Well, he was 800 feet tall. You know, some Victorian era dude saw this and thought I am oddly titillated by this picture

and I can't quite figure out why. I have a terrible erections back again. The white man's boner. I think part of it is also that like I am in favor of building the Cape to Cairo Railroad, but only as a porous narrow gauge railroad. Yes, I was about to say building a Cape to Cairo Railroad for imperialism. Bad building a Cape to Cairo Railroad because it would be fucking cool. Good.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you presumably want something that actually can move stuff and benefit people economically as a public works project. It's it's as a public works project. It's not it's not a bad idea. Inherently, anyway. But what he is doing it, it sucks. Yeah.

So if you look at Cessell roads is foremost boot. He has his foot on South Africa metaphor. Yeah, exactly. Immediately above that is Rhodesia to its east. You have Portuguese colonies, which that kind of sort of indifferent about to its north. You have the Congo, specifically Leopold II, King of the Belgians, personal extremely evil ghost. Personal fiefdom and the southern province Katanga.

I once got booted from a CS Go match because I wouldn't stop taunting our Portuguese teammates about how they lost Angola. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good, cheers. CS Go comp.

I want to point that out. So so so we have a bit of a colonial adventure because you have all of this good land as you saw in the the previous slide Zimbabwe is beautiful. And it's also for the most part, it's like very arable. It's good land for growing growing crops on if you want to do that. And so and for genociding all the white farmers, we'll we'll we'll get there. South Africa, South Africa is quite a successful colony, but it's sort of a victim of its own success in that now it has a bunch of failed sons who don't know what to do with themselves.

And the answer is go out and get more land. If you want to have a plantation, go and go and get it yourself. So this this forms into something called the pioneer column where they march north. Most of these guys think of themselves as South African rather than British, but they're still part of the British Empire. Anyway, they they march north. They find a place that they think would be a good place to start a settlement,

which they call which they call Fort Salisbury. And then they, you know, hoist the Union Jack, 21 gun salute, three cheers for Queen Victoria. And we get some just amazingly bad accents out of it. Yes, terrible. So I just so the so the paradigm for colonial exploitation at this point is you don't do it under the auspices of a state. Really, what you do is you have a company. So like the East India Company or the Hudson's Bay Company, you have sort of a corporation whose express purpose is to colonize this place.

And so what happens is that you have the British South Africa Company, the BSAC, which is horrifically evil. Yes, yeah. Also a little bit dated by that point, the whole concept of using it because by that point, you know, states were taking more direct control over their their their colonies. So using a company to do it because by that point, like the British East India Company was long gone. So they were kind of it was kind of like a return of the classics here. Yeah, playing the hits.

But so the the BSAC walk in, they colonized the place just in time to get into the middle of a race war, an ethnic war. The first, the first Massabaley war, which is an attempted genocide of Shona by Massabaley, the British South Africa Company is in the middle of this. They don't quite know what to make of it other than to put it down with their troops. But this allows them a sort of legitimizing factor, right? They can be like, we came in here as peacekeepers. We are helping these people to, you know, advance towards civilization and not murdering

each other by keeping our guns trained on them all the time. Then this this is not very popular. Can't imagine why not? No, and this this starts the second Massabaley war, which is the first use of Maxim guns by the British army against massed infantry and goes much as you'd expect. This is this is a specifically anti British rebellion that is put down as you can imagine. What is that a maximum gun? A maximum gun, first practical machine gun, let's say.

It's the first practical machine gun with a single barrel anyway. Yeah, and it would go on to be basically, you know, the standard going into to World War One designed by an American, who I believe I remember correctly is one of those many military inventions that that come across in my field where the designer thinks this will be so awful that it'll prevent people from going to war because it would be so so terrible. It never works, it always works, yeah. It never ever works. Never works.

So the second Massabaley war is sometimes called the first chumaranga, the first like resistance operation. It is crushed, Cecil Rhodes goes there and in the course of the peace negotiations, which are kind of a joke, he does a bit of self mythologizing because instead of sitting with all the white people, he goes and sits down with the black people to try and talk his way out of the rebellion. And this this is another part of the sort of foundational mythology of Rhodesia is, you know, he's like trying to peace keep himself, right? And the mode of colonization that we're talking about in Rhodesia,

initially, they go out there looking for gold, because there's gold in South Africa, there's diamonds in South Africa, they're like, there's got to be shit up here that we can mine. And they're kind of isn't there's, it's good land for agriculture and that's about it. And so stuff later, but at the time, they just don't have the technology or where with all to find it. So it's farman time. Yeah. And because like colonization is by definition, it's an extractive impulse. The mode of it is the sort of a familiar one for British colonization, which plantation, right? You don't have a lot of natural resources like to dig out of the ground. What you do instead is you have white agriculture with a handful of white farmers and a shit load

of black labor. And particularly, you're even farming tobacco, right? Oh, bring back all the classics. Exactly. Exactly. And if you want, if you want a good example of material conditions, whatever, this creates exactly the same kind of plantar aristocracy as it has everywhere else, this has been tried. I think it's some dude with the worst accent you've ever heard to play your old stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So most of this settlement, this happens in Southern Rhodesia, Rhodesia is bisected by the Zambezi River. Northern Rhodesia has more sort of like stuff you can dig out of the ground. So we're mostly going to be talking about Southern Rhodesia. Next slide, please. So we have a beautiful postcard here of colonial Rhodesia. And the mode of the mode of exploitation

here is forced labor, hot taxes, animal taxes for castle, but also, you know, for the legitimizing thing. Oh, we built railways and stuff in order to move all of this tobacco. Eventually, this sort of anomaly of company rule disappears, it's taken directly into British government control. And there becomes this sort of political question of whether Rhodesia is going to govern itself as an independent colony or join the Union of South Africa, which is whatever an expected to do. In the South African constitution at that time, there are like provisions for governing what becomes Rhodesia. But there's a vote and they vote for self government because the fucking the planters, the aristocracy, they don't like the idea of being South African,

they like the idea of being Rhodesian, they like this idea of like us against the world, us ourselves. A common theme in planter economies, it seems. They do not like anyone telling them what to do. Rugged individualism and shove it up your ass. Exactly. It's very easy to feel like a rugged individualist when you have a shitload of other people picking the tobacco. Yeah, when you have virtual slavery, maybe not official codified slavery, basically. But basically, as nearest makes no difference. The fun little thing about this artifact or company rule I like is when the British South Africa police are founded, which will retain that name even after this stops being called that, it was still founded under company rule, which basically means you

had this company running a colony that also had its own police force effectively making this the Victoria and equivalent of Robocop. Basically, omniconsumer products had to invent a mechanical Turk constable to keep ruffians from robbing the Salisbury general store. So, so World War Two happens. And one of the things about Rhodesia is that sort of unusually for a British colony, it provides a lot of a lot of troops, I think proportionally, more white Rhodesians get killed than like white British colonists of any other colony outside the, you know, the Dominions like Australia or Canada. They form sort of a relatively independent military as well,

which will come back to haunt us later. But this is another part of sort of like the national mythology is Rhodesians are patriotic, a martial, you know, will come off of the farm or whatever and trained to be a pilot and fly spitfires or whatever. It's a sort of like gentlemen scholar farmer philanthropist sort of colonialist thing going on. Yes. Yeah, exactly. But after after the Second World War, the British government, the new labor government pursues a policy of decolonization. Next slide, please. And I go to talk about some engineering for this one. There's some actual engineering or some stuff that got built. Oh, boy. So the UK wants to wants its colonies to decolonize, to become

democracies, right? They want to be independent, they want to be independent of the UK and to be governed under majority rule, which in Africa means black rule, right? Because that's how disparate the population is. It's like, you know, at most 10% white people, probably far less than that. If everyone gets a vote, then, you know, that that's a government that is, you know, it's going to elect black politicians. This is unthinkable to to colonists, to white Rhodesians. But so the UK creates this federation of Rhodesia to try and hold it together as a colony. And it doesn't work because there's internal contradictions, right? Northern Rhodesia, the one with all the minds. It doesn't have this sort of like plan to psycho shit. All of all of the guys, all of the

white people there, they work in mining companies, they can still do that, even if it's, even if it's a democracy, even if it's a nominal democracy. Whereas Southern Rhodesia, you know, that the farm that you have built using your forced labor is your your patrimony, right? And so Northern Rhodesia will eventually decolonize relatively simply and become Zambia. Southern Rhodesia does not. What it does do is it uses this time in Federation to take all of that copper and gold money from the north, line its own pockets and build this, the Cariba Dam, which is it dams the Zambezi. And right after they do this, the whole Federation collapses, Southern Rhodesia just becomes Rhodesia.

The Cariba Dam is like it's a metaphor, right, for the whole process of colonization. Because it's now falling apart. Climate change means that it gets drought and it gets flood, which are two things that you don't really want for a dam. It's very, very difficult to repair. Um, if you do repair it, there's a significant risk that you'll make it worse. Um, and if it, if it collapses, then kind of repair. Yeah, exactly. I just love the idea of like, yeah, we're going to fix the problem and make it better for everyone. And then you just kill 30,000 people. Yeah, absolutely. It's really fun here. If this collapses, it takes out another dam, downriver Southern Africa loses like 40 percent of its power.

And South Africa regularly flood like there is not a year that you do not read a news story about Zimbabwe in South Africa having a flood that kills people. It happens every year. Well, you got to assume that, you know, this project was used for the purpose of rural electrification and improving the lives of revisions everywhere, right? So about the, about this, um, so in order to build a dam, you have to move a lot of people generally because people live in the, you know, the river valley and they live in the bit that's going to be the reservoir. So they do a lot of population clearance, which is not done very nicely. But what they do do is they do a thing called, I think it's operation arc, they call it,

where they very nicely save all of the wildlife, you know? Oh, that's nice of them. They rescue all of the like little monkeys and zebras. As long as we get all the exterminating a bunch of people. Yeah, as long as we get all the dogs out of Kabul, everyone else will be fine. It takes like a year to fill the reservoir. The animals move anyway. You're just putting them just, yeah, I don't, okay. Well, yeah. Incidentally, it's really easy to do a project like that. You just say you did it and it happens. It's fine. Everything's fine now. Swear as you realize it's like slapping a bumper sticker over the dam. Just drop of the mission accomplished better.

You get some video of a helicopter coming in and picking a lion off of an island. Even though lions can swim. They literally have, there are still videos of like one sad gibbon that's on a little artificial island and it's like, okay, fine. Or incidentally, the word Kariba, which is what this is called, it means trap because that was the way they tried to explain it to people. We're going to catch and trap the river. Just the river, nothing else in no one else. We're still buds. Definitely not going to, don't worry about this rifle. That's my buddy Tim's. I'm just holding it for him. And now Zimbabwe is stuck with this 1960s dam

that they can't do anything with. I think they've gotten China to repair part of it recently, but it's still sort of a heavy candidate for a future episode, as well as a, you know, synactically. I look forward to it's inevitable return as a friend of the pod, the Kariba dam. An act, a mysterious act of God's love. That's right. I was in Schenectady last week. Why? Getting COVIDs. Yeah, getting COVID. That's where you go to get COVID at that point. I was only there for a second that was on the train.

Oh, okay. Off it. I was in Westchester County, New York yesterday, so that was fun. Hopefully not getting COVID. No, I don't have COVID. So, Ross, I'm going to come over there and breathe in your mouth. Then you'll also get COVIDs. Yeah, it's too late. I already have the COVID. You can't make it worse. I can make it worse. That is my skill in life is just making shit worse. Breakup, miscarriage, marriage, dating. Yeah, I can make everything worse.

Never a podcast, strangely. So, the UK has this one. I love you so much. Love you too. Has this rare based policy called Nipmar, no independence before majority rule? If you want to get rid of London, you have to become a democracy or else. Not just a rare based British policy, a rare based Tory policy. The winds of change was a Harold McMillan thing. He went to South Africa and said the party's over, which is back when the Tories

sometimes had a backbone about things. I think part of it was just being an outsider. I think if you were within the white population of South Africa or Rhodesia, genuinely, you could not process the idea that this was not a sustainable form of government. Then if you won, if you came in from the outside and you saw, wait a second, there's like 100 of these guys to one of you. You're making them do all of the menial labor and all of them hate you. This is going to end with either you resigning or them making you. People look at you like you were speaking Martian. Yeah, we're going to talk about the amounts of self-delusion and all the folksons that resulted.

Absolutely. Because of these processes, because of these humiliations and inequalities, this leads to, next slide please, African, national, liberation, decolonization, and very often communism movements. Good guys. Yeah, that's it. Communism is in in the 60s and particularly the really dangerous kind of communism, where you go around liberating the oppressed peoples of the third world. And so this leads to the formation of two groups. And these mirror splits both in communist and communist ideology and in then-Rhodesian society. So we have our two guys on the top

right here. I'm amazed that communists manage to liberate anything because they're always sniffing their own butts. Because what communists do is lick their own butts. This is my very sophisticated political critique. If we're talking about liberating Zimbabwe, we'll sort of judge how good a job communism made of that. But so on the left here, the guy with the glasses, that's Robert McGarbie. A picture here before the fall from grace. Yes, they're the very pronounced stiltrum. He should have stuck with the shorter haircut. He looks better with it. He's kind of handsome. I like the guy to his right, who just looks like he's sort of in total disbelief. Dr. Joshua Nakomo. Yes. Yes. So so so McGarbie is the head of an organization called

ZANU. Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe African National Union, correct. And this is Maoist, for the most part, because the Soviets won't give McGarbie the guns that he wants. So he just goes to the Chinese. That is understandable. I would do the same thing. And this also results in sort of a Maoist theory of how to liberate Zimbabwe, which is rural peasantry, same as what worked for Mao. You take a sort of a Chinese system of revolution and you apply it to the circumstances of Zimbabwe. Incidentally, that means that a lot of their support is Shona people, not exclusively. But later on, this will take on a sort of a more sectarian, more ethnic divide. On the right, you have Joshua Nakomo, who is head of ZAPU, the Zimbabwe Armed People's Union.

African People's Union, I believe. African People's Union. And they're mostly into Baile. And this is on the... Their sort of uncertainty is on the Soviet mold, because Joshua Nakomo is the Kremlin's guy. Like, because as we know, the Soviet Union never took a sort of chauvinistic or domineering attitude towards the Third World. It's certainly never considered that Moscow was the head office of the revolution, and therefore they got to decide who the branch office manager was. But if they had, hypothetically, they would have decided that Joshua Nakomo was their branch office manager. He was like the kind of guy that they wanted, and therefore they were going to like install him at the head of this, and they were going to like liberate it on a Soviet model

of revolution, which is urban factory workers. You have sort of a very mechanized form of war. You can sort of compare these two to like the sort of the North Vietnamese army compared to the Vietcong. What is the sort of main factory work that goes on in Rhodesia at this point? What kind of heavy industry? What kind of goods are they exporting? Curiously, there's a bit of chrome mining, which is like, or not mining, but processing. That's the major like heavy industry. And then you have a lot of like light industry, but you've sort of identified a serious problem here, which is that there are a fuckload more rural peasants than there are urban workers. I'm not familiar with like the huge like car factories of Rhodesia or whatever, you know,

like people working on the assembly lines. But it's one of the safari wagons that Renault put out in the 70s. Everyone knows that Salisbury was the Detroit of Southern Africa. The other sort of problem here is the Soviets don't really know how to do unconventional war in the same way that Maoists do. Their instinct is always to try and raise a conventional force as quickly as possible. How to stop doing that. Yeah. What you want is to make it, you want to make a little red army and you want to roll it straight in like it's Berlin. It's not really until sort of Angola later on and they realize that the Cubans have a better idea of how to do people's war than they

do. Still turning up at the fold of gap for some reason. Yeah. So, oh, also, I forgot to mention one of my favorite facts about Joshua and Coma, history's most radical Georgist. Of course he is. You didn't, you didn't really have to be a very doctor and air communist to be Moscow's guy. And so his thing was Georgism, you know? Sure. Why the hell not, man? You know what? Yeah, sure. Could have been worse. So we're setting the stage here for a little insurgency, a little bush war or series of wars. But what happens is there's there's a political decision made in 1965 where Rhodesia has had enough of this idea of majority rule in order to get independence. And our next slide please, Guy, conducts something called UDI,

Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Oh my God. Yeah. Hey, do you want to talk about Ian Smith? I'm going to need a fresh beer to talk about this, mother fucker. Yeah, we're going to talk about Ian Douglas Smith. With the ass in there. Yeah. And basically, he is going to be the author of all our pain here. He will be the prime minister of Rhodesia for almost the entirety of its, I might emphasize, unrecognized independence. No one ever recognizes Rhodesia, not even its so-called allies. It was a rogue state. It was a pariah state. Good. Yeah, he, yeah, no, right his dumb face. Yeah, exactly. You know, so just let no one never tell you, you know, anything other than Rhodesia was just a nothing that no one wanted anything really to do with.

So a brief summary of his life up until UDI is sort of, you know, he was born into sort of a well-to-do family. His dad, I think, saw that nice poster that Alice showed us and came there from, I think, Northumberland. He did, his dad did like basically, what I can describe shortly, his rich white landowner shit, farming, mining, business. He was a member of the local Mason's Lodge. God, rancid vibes in that, in that lodge, I imagine. Oh, it's got to be the most cursed Freemasons Lodge anywhere in the British Empire. Just a bunch of guys like sweating in these incredibly hot aprons in the middle of an African summer. He too was bad, just wait a second. So he goes to college and, and after World War Two has begun, he joins the, the Air Force,

gets sent to the Mediterranean, where he will unfortunately cheat death twice. First occasion, I believe, is 1943, when his, I think it was a Hawker hurricane, crashes shortly after takeoff in Egypt. He is, breaks just about every bone in his body, is horrifically burned, very nearly dies. Didn't finish the job. Didn't finish the job. Do I still, I do have to give critical support to the Hawker, to Hawker aircraft limited for almost killing him. Sort of John McCain level of combination of political inability and piloting inability. They have to reconstruct his face, which is why the right side of his face looks a little off. It will come more pronounced as he gets older. He did a good job considering,

like you look at some of the like early plastic surgery from the Second World War. Yeah. But that's the first time he cheats death. The second time is he gets shot down over Northern Italy on a mission in 1944. I'm not going to give critical support to German aircraft, anti-aircraft gunners, but I'm going to still wish that they, still going to wish that they finish the job. The important thing is that like, for so many times in World War II, there are guys shooting at each other going, but the important thing is we're both racist. Yeah. I know plastic surgery doesn't refer to actual plastic, but I am imagining they had to reconstruct his face. With the old kind of plastic that the exploding billiard balls were made of.

In Bakelite? Yeah. Yeah. Reconstructing your face out the same thing you make AK magazines out of. I mean, they used to do this in the First World Wars. They would make like facial prostheses with like out of tin and like. All those things that look creepy as hell. Like I think there was a guy that wears it in like Boardwalk Empire or something. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You look like a Cyberman out of Doctor Who. You guys are racist and not cool about it. Yeah. Could not emphasize enough how much Ian Smith is racist and not cool. He gets shot down. He does some like partisan bullshit for a while. Eventually he is found and rescued by the US military. Sorry. This guy and a bunch of fucking communist partisans, they're all singing Bella Chow and he's like, I can't wait to

get home and do racism. Which is what he does after the war is he gets set home and he does the racism by running for office and being elected to parliament. And for a while he's just kind of, you know, a nobody. He's just a backbencher. He doesn't really do a lot. What gets him his wings is basically when the whole discussion of decolonization comes about and he sort of becomes the voice in an already. He becomes the most right wing person in an already extraordinarily right wing country. Yeah. Like he becomes the guy who's basically not only know but hell know when it comes to decolonization. And he sort of gets a boost from this him and his party, which would eventually be called the Rhodesia Front, from essentially the crisis in the Congo

where you see a lot of dead white Belgian colonists in the streets that really freak out all the Rhodesian farmers. And it sort of propels his party into office right as the Federation of Rhodesia and New Zealand is falling apart. Yeah. And the awareness begins to strike and a little bit of like, not even guilt, but just awareness that like, Oh, all of this shit I've been doing for the my entire life could end with me getting hacked to death with machetes. Yeah. They've done a lot of sewing and he's starting to see the reaping on the horizon and his look at it is just, well, I would rather not. Yeah. So to the extent they sweep into power and then he even oust his own party leader for not being right wing enough dealing with the British in terms of the negotiating

there wasn't really much negotiating. It was just the British were like, you need to decolonize. And it was the Rhodesians going, No. So in 1965, you have the unilateral declaration of independence. Very immediately he outlaws and cracks down on the almost all the African nationalist parties after getting into power. And we just start on a path to unavoidable war. So basically, of everything that's about to happen, you can lay a good chunk of it at this man's feet. Yeah, the sort of dead hand of white supremacy clinging on. So we've talked about Zanu and Zafu who would like develop armed organizations as a response to this. Now we've got to talk about the other bad guys opposed to Ian Smith. Next slide, please. We're going to talk

about the Rhodesian security forces. Because of course we do. Because not only do we have to talk about them because this is what most people have. Yeah, it's a dumb. The terrible poster is the thing yet yet people just masturbate furiously to this goddamn thing. And and we have to talk about them not just because their image is so associated with Rhodesia's existence, but Rhodesia could not exist without the Rhodesian security forces because sort of a large hostage situation of a country. Well, it was unusual in that it was most British colonies at the time did not have its own military. Like you had some of the common wealth dominions that had their own militaries like Canada and Australia and so on. But by this

point by like World War Two, they're already functionally independent countries. They share a monarch, they have political economic military connections, but they are independent. Rhodesia was not, but it still had its own military. The most you had compared to this in other places where you had locally raised regiments like the King's African Rifles or the Gurkars and stuff, but they were still part of the British army. Rhodesia had its own military wholesale, like they would integrate at points during war, but it was still basically independent. They controlled their procurement and things like that. It was much larger. You have multiple regiments of infantry. You have a cavalry regiment, which is what we see here with the little armored cars.

Maintained by conscription exclusively at this point of white men who then went on to become reservists who could be called up. At this point, black and mixed race people could join, but it wouldn't be until later they would join the larger numbers and you get some interesting dynamics later on as the Rhodesians get more desperate. But at this time, it's predominantly white, small, but unfortunately well-trained, well-equipped. At the time of UDI, they have helicopters, they have jet fighters, they have jet bombers. They'll get more of those from South Africa as the war goes on. But having a military right off the bat when most colonies did not meant when they declared UDI, they could immediately protect themselves both against an internal

rebellion, but also basically created deterrent from anyone who might want to do an invasion to overturn UDI, which was something that, while it was a little bit laughable, was not completely out of the cars at the time. There were serious discussions among the British government of should we invade to force them to enact majority rule. We should have done it. Blow up a couple of these fucking armored cars. Blow up a few vampires or whatever on the runway at Salisbury. I'm not handing it, I'm not giving it to the British, but what I am saying, the logistics were not quite on their side because if you wanted to invade Rhodesia

and you can't go up through South Africa because they weren't going to fucking let you do it, you can't go in through Mozambique because the Portuguese weren't going to let you do it. And really that left going through Zambia by way of Tanzania, and I don't think either of them were especially eager to have thousands of British troops on their soil several years after independence. So they were kind of between a rock and a hard place, even if they wanted to do it. But yeah, depending on who you talk to on the internet, not that I think any of us are really talking to these types of people, this was one of the most elite military... Depending on what post you read, yeah. Depending on what post you read,

this is one of the most elite military formations that was ever raised in the history of warfare. Masters of counterinsurgency, masters of counterterrorism, to which I say, check the scoreboard. Count the rings. But yeah, these are just... They're known especially for some of their quote-unquote elite units, the Rhodesian light infantry, the Saloi, Saloi, Saloi, I never know about them. Seelis scouts. Named after Frederick Seelis, who was one of the scouts on the Pioneer column way back. Right. And then the Rhodesian SAS, who actually cut their teeth in the melee emergency. All bastards and all people who are going to make the next 10 to 15 years of living

hell for everyone who isn't white living in this country. Yeah. So of course, insurgency breaks out more or less immediately after UDI, so 65 or so. Yeah. And we'll get to that on, I think, next slide, please. Having just seen our contestants. So this is remarkably low scale. This is one of your small wars at this point. Right. Yeah, they don't immediately move into large scale arms. Depending on who you read, I tend to go with the school of dividing this war to three phases. And the early phases goes from 1965 to the early mid-70s. And Zanu and Zapu don't immediately move into large scale arms struggle. Part of this is they're still hoping the British might actually intervene militarily, which again, we kind of laugh now, but wasn't

completely out of the question at the time. As it becomes more obvious the British may not do anything, they establish their own armed wings to try and do something about this. So Zanu establishes the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or ZANLA, and Zapu establishes the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA. And they start doing some small scale operations. ZIPRA primarily works at a Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, and ZANLA mainly operates out of the areas of Northern Mozambique, which are controlled by Frelimo, which is the... The Rhodesians can't attack over the border except when they want to do a big set piece thing, which they will occasionally do later in the war for propaganda reasons as much as anything else.

But for the most part, it's a lot like Vietnam in this way, is that you have this border that Rhodesian troops are largely unable to cross, where you can just have a rear area for your insurgency, where you can train, where you can re-equip. All right. But at this point, they're mainly just doing... I'll show you my rear area of insurgency, then. Oh, baby. So the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Yeah. They're doing mostly just small scale infiltration, insurgency, sabotage, nothing huge.

The first real major... Yeah, you look at after action reports, and it's like a guy with an AK shoots at a farmhouse from the bush, hits nothing, leaves. And even the first major battle, quote unquote, major, is relatively small. You have a small column of a squad-sized element of, I think, Zanla forces who are trying to... I think they were trying to cut a pipeline, and they get intervened by a group of the BSAP, the British South Africa Police, mainly reservists, who are basically just farmers who also have a police uniform in their closet. And that battle, that first battle is a complete...

Don't get me wrong, the Rhodesians win it, but it's a complete show for everyone involved. It's a huge boost to the Rhodesian army, because Smith and others decide that this means that the police are inequipped to deal with an insurgency, which is true. They miss so many times. And then the Zanla guys basically lose because they run out of ammunition. Everyone's just firing wildly. It's like the A-team. They're just kicking up dust at each other's feet. There's a Rhodesian helicopter with a gunner who shoots at one guy, and I think they let off several hundred rounds of ammunition before they actually finally kill the guy. It's a complete mess, and no one really... These attacks are very much of a muchness.

They don't accomplish anything. And once the military gets involved over the police, the Rhodesians really have the upper hand in this period. You don't have to hand it to them, but they are effectively... They're winning the battles. Zippertries to get the upper hand by teaming up with the armed wing of the African National Congress in South Africa, the MK, where I'm not going to try and pronounce their name, because I will put you in... I'm in control with C's way is my effort there. Beautiful. You're braver than I am, Alice. Let me know in the comments if I've got that wrong.

And all that really accomplishes is it scares the absolute shit out of South Africa, and they send a bunch of troops. They call them police, but it's troops, and aid to Rhodesia to bolster them, which just makes things go even better for them in this era. This is a recurring theme, is that South Africa is always the silent partner at this point, because their view is... It's better to be fighting the insurgency there in Rhodesia than to be fighting it in South Africa, which was... Essentially, their feeling was, if Rhodesia becomes a democracy, it will then become the sort of over-the-boarder rear area for whatever insurgency happens in South Africa.

Exactly. So by the 1970, both Zippertries and Zandler basically pause their attempts at infiltration and just sort of like go back to the drawing board to rethink their approach. And the effect this will have in the long term is it makes the Rhodesians feel very overconfident, cocky, complacent. They're basically like, well, this is what the whole war is going to be. We got this. We can just deal with this indefinitely. And that basically is Rhodesia's strategy at this point, is they're just going to postpone majority rule indefinitely, which as someone who works with military strategy, I cannot emphasize to you enough how much that is not a strategy. You do quite literally the forever wall. You just keep making it happen, and then you never

have to do democracy. You open up the Rhodesian national security strategy and it's one sentence, and that sentence is, don't worry about it. They create a strong sense of security and confidence during this period, which makes what's happened next in the next phase of the war a real shock to the Rhodesians. Shame. They're going to get got by world events, which is one of the worst ways you can get got. Next slide, please. So you may notice that one of Rhodesia's borders to its east is Mozambique, which is a Portuguese colony. Portugal is run by a fascist military dictatorship called the Estada Nova. And things go a bit wrong with that. There's a peaceful revolution, an unambiguous win for socialism in 1974, the Carnation Revolution, where

a rare W, where you have a left wing, Democratic Socialist Revolution largely spearheaded by the army. The woke troops literally go, they them army. That's right. That's right. That one guy with the communism will win had at West Point. Imagine 50,000 of him. 50,000 of them with carnations in their heckler and cock G3 rifles. Yeah. And they're like, we will not maintain an African colony anymore. We will not do fascism anymore. We would like to do democracy now. And they oust the regime. This leads to the independence of Mozambique in 1975. It's the top right picture. And Frelimo, which is the communist insurgency in Mozambique, led here by an incredibly attired General Samora Michelle. He is working that Castro fit.

Absolutely. It gains control of Mozambique. And this leads to, instead of being mostly safe to run an insurgency from, Mozambique becomes 100% safe to run an insurgency from. And you guys don't have fun. We'll be here making dinner when you get back. Exactly. Because now the government is on your side. Yeah. And at this point, it's just such a huge deal for Rhodesia, because previously they only had to worry about one part of Mozambique. And now you have, their entire eastern border is now something they have to worry about, where Zanla has all these safe havens where they can train, equip, reorganize, all these things. This is a nightmare for the Rhodesians.

They also lose a source of their support, because they were getting supported by the Estavo Novo government, who were helping supply them with oil and other things. But that's not the only problem they're running into. Because South Africa at this point is increasingly becoming tired of Rhodesia's bullshit. We touched on this a bit earlier, but they never really quite liked each other. This is my big thing. Not everyone, anyone ever tell you that there's no such thing as right wing infighting and it's only left wing infighting. Right wingers fight with each other all the time. And this is an excellent example of it. Because even though they have things in common, they can't quite get over their hangups.

The Rhodesians don't really respect the South Africans a lot at this phase, because when the South Africans send troops, they're not very experienced, they're kind of blundering all over the Rhodesians, think they're a joke. Meanwhile, the South Africans don't like the Rhodesians, because they think they're too British. Oh, Jesus Christ. Bear in mind, a lot of white Rhodesian identity is based around not being South African, I think, which in every other respect you are. Yeah, like, they're basically, they see them as essentially just being like a Bush British. They're Savannah guys. Rack of me. Wait, that's Australian.

I often describe the Rhodesian accent as being like an Australian guy trying to sound like he's doing the South African accent. It's like a Bunta Vista guy trying to do a Jerk van der Klurr voice. Yeah, but there's also been a blockade of Rhodesia, which, you know, it limits their ability to obtain guns and planes and tanks. Like the South Africans send them, but there's they put caps on how much they're willing to send in terms of oil and supplies. They basically put a cap on how much they're willing to actually break the embargo. Yeah. And that cap is going to get smaller, because we have an unexpected intervention here by

friend of the pod, Henry Alfred Kissinger, the most ethical man in the world, who's basically come in here fresh off of, you know, as many other successful quote-unquote peacemaking efforts to solve the Rhodesia problem. And he comes in and the South Africans at this point, they're trying to cool things down too. They, you know, despite also being delusional about their long term survival, they also know they can't fight everyone at once. So they're trying to seek basically a détente with the other African nations in Southern Africa to sort of buy them some space and time. And Kissinger works with them to basically put pressure on Rhodesia to, you know, basically actually come to the negotiating table and do something serious.

And then this sort of drives down that despite their supposed, you know, anti-communist credentials, you know, which we'll talk about, Rhodesia is just kind of the kid in the class. No one really wants anything to do with if you're respectable. Like no one really wants anything to do with these guys. It's just they see it as an unfortunate reality they have to sometimes interact with. So in 1976, under pressure from the US, under pressure from South Africa, Ian Smith agrees to majority rule, quote unquote, in principle within two years. So we're done, right? Podcast over, right? No, because we go back to the big strategy that they have, which is keep putting it off forever. Exactly. So we're not quite done yet. And the Rhodesians are going to keep

doing all the things they have been doing and hopes it will it will protect them. One example of which is on the next slide. Oh, we get to talk about the big, the big set piece shit that they're special moves, the thing that they love to do. Oh, they're all. Yeah, everybody fucking if you if you talk to a guy who's a little too interested in Rhodesia, they are going to mention Fire Force, which I can only describe as a Rube Goldberg assway of doing counter insurgency. It's something that you can only do if you have an Air Force, a big country that you can't get around very easily. And an absolute necessity of maintaining settler colonialism. Yeah, it's like everyone acts like this is the greatest fucking thing ever. And I to see this as sort of

basically like if you look at it carefully enough is an indicator of all of Rhodesia's weaknesses, in which they don't have a lot of troops, they have a lot of territory to cover, and they have a lot of insurgents coming into their territory. None of these seem like good things. But you know, Rhodesia booze will act like this is the most brilliant thing ever. No, you don't understand. It's so sophisticated that first they have to drop paratroopers in because the helicopters will get there fast enough and that they have to do this and do that. This is one of the other problems is its sophistication. It's very sort of it's very elaborate, right? The idea is that you find insurgents who are trying to infiltrate the country

ideally you catch them in the open or in a village, and then you use a combination of dropping parachute dropping paratroopers on top of them or like sort of helicopter born infantry, and helicopter air support to like contain them and kill as many of them as possible. However, this takes for fucking ever. It's a huge deployment of resources. It works very well. But, you know, you might be killing a couple of dozen people at a time. And, you know, you could miss another three or four of these while you're engaging in this big sort of like ballet of moving your little counters around on a map. I also want to put out here, if you look at where that Alouette 3 helicopter is firing near

those huts, no, those guys appear to have weapons, those stick figures. Oh, well, yeah, this is hot hearts and minds is not something that is practiced in Rhodesia for a long time during the the virtual like this. This whole thing works initially in the initial phase because they're not dealing with a very strong insurgency. But this whole thing really falls apart from the mid 70s on as basically the tide of numbers. I mean, it makes me think of a quote I heard about the Vietnam War for an American journalist, which was basically we were fighting the birth rate of a nation. In this case, the Rhodesians were just fighting the entirety of the nation because they weren't really the

nation. They were just a bunch of guys who showed up inside of we own it. Yeah, for sure. This is written about so lovingly in like military history circles. If you just if you look at the Wikipedia entry for fire force, it has it has sentences on it like the plight of the civilians was most profoundly realized by the troops citation needed. Was it now? Well, I mean, citation needed white man's burden. So like you can talk for hours and hours and previously we did about the sort of Rhodesian military strategy and tactics. But next slide, please. That's that's sort of a problem because it always acts as if Rhodesia is a perfect test bed, right? Where, you know,

Rhodesia is just inventing counterinsurgency methods on a totally passive enemy, which they're not, right? They're fighting a serious insurgency that is doing an effective Maoist people's or especially in its later stages with some serious fits. Look at these incredible, incredible stuff. They're like yellow turtleneck. The guy just holding like what I think looks like a loose RPG round. Are you talking about that guy in the top left picture? That's an older RPG. That's the RPG to which is like the first generation, which is literally just like a tube with a rocket on the end. Well, incredible. And then you have that guy in the bottom left with the the pig sticker Chinese AK bayonet, just great stuff all around. So these

guys didn't get a lot of write ups about how cool they were for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on. And it is difficult to talk about or to write about because like very few of these guys wrote memoirs. Those of them that did tend to be quite heavily propagandized. But we have these two insurgency groups. We have Zanler and Zipra Zanler sort of operating a more conventional insurgency. Zipra is mostly waiting for Zanler to do the hard work and then drive in. I respect that work ethic. They have like a couple of BTRs like Soviet wheeled armored personnel carriers that they're just like keeping in reserve and they're just going to drive in over the border when the moment looks right. And bear in mind those armored cars from earlier.

I think if the Rhodesians saw sort of Zimbabwe and BTRs coming over the horizon, that would have been a wet dream for them. They did actually end up basically capturing a lot of Zipra's armored vehicles and just using them themselves because they didn't have a lot, which is hilarious. So your Zanler like offensive operation is exactly the kind of nasty insurgent guerrilla stuff that you expect worldwide. You know, you mine roads because only troops and white people are going to be driving. You do bombings. They bomb a Woolworths in Silverbury. Oh, God, the Woolworths has fallen. Oh, my God. Where am I supposed to get my discount scarves now? I think it was, oh, brother, where are thou? Just like a couple of bombers getting

thrown out of the Woolworths and stay out of Woolworths. But they do a little ambushes, sniping. Generally speaking, what you don't want to do is you don't want to fight the Rhodesian army, especially not in a pitched battle. You want to shoot one or two of them at a time and place of your choosing and then leave. Right. It's Mao's guide to insurgency, of which there are free phases and they're still very much in the first, maybe second phase, which eventually will culminate in a conventional war. The Soviets tend to just want to immediately jump to stage three. Mao's like, no, no, no, we got to take our time with this shit. Fold again, fold again, fold again. You also have attacks on isolated soft targets, like

white-owned farms, missionary posts, boarding schools even, which leads me to one observation, which is that this is not what you'd call a nice war, if there's such a thing. It's not a very Geneva Convention obeying war. It's a guerrilla war. On either side. That's a guerrilla. Yeah. Like, you know, both sides tortured, both sides killed civilians more or less indiscriminately, both used that as propaganda against the other. Possibly the only thing that separated Zanla from the Rhodesian security forces was like, they probably raped more people, but even that's not like a zero number on the Rhodesian side either. And to be fair, to clarify, not that, you know, I think any of us are saying this,

does it not mean that like, oh, both sides were just as bad? The Rhodesians were still absolutely the bad guys, but you know, you see the situation where this sort of settler cloning creates where everything is awful, even for the good guys. Yeah, absolutely. And also, this is like the method of war that they had been trained to pursue. It was a doctrine. It wasn't sort of like, it will discipline. It was explicitly a sort of a political and military objective. The cruelty is the point. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this sort of like, this affects their popular support too, you get into this situation where a lot like with the Viet Cong, it becomes questionable whether people are collaborating with them out of sympathy,

coercion, often the chance to like, use them against your own personal enemies. Like, there's a guy you don't like, you say, hey, that guy's informing against you and you send him off to get killed. And it's probably a bit of all of those. But so the sort of objectives of this insurgency are, as I say, you don't fight the army. What you want to do is you want to create a climate of hostility and terror that like, dries up their sources of information, no one talks to the army because you'll get killed, dries up their sources of cooperation, no one joins the army because they're going to get killed. It shuts down industry, especially tourism, like you shoot up a resort or whatever, no one's coming back for the next year. You raise white immigration

from the country. So you dry up their manpower and also you make the Rhodesian soldier even more racist and even more afraid and even more stupid so that they act in worse ways that you can then use against them that will then radicalize people against them. None of it's nice. But you know, I think one thing that's always missing from narratives about Rhodesia is that this was a strategy, it was pursued deliberately. Xanlua good at it and it worked. Yeah, so this is the, yeah, I guess this next slide then. I always like this poster. Make money, look for this. That post, I think that poster has the same energy as a poster you would see in the London

Underground. See it sorted. Yeah, absolutely. These are some of the things carried by terrorists. You will be paid up to that? Yeah, it's just, it absolutely just feels like something you would see in the underground of 70s. But so yeah, this is the final stage of the war, 1976 to 1979, where shit really gets real for Rhodesia and they start to realize we can't just wait our way out of this. Just noticed the first dollar sign in this poster has two lines, but the second one only has one line. That's true. Terrible type setting. It just goes to show how how standards were just falling out by the wayside by the later phases of the war. Xanlua had shot the guy who puts the second rush stroke through the dollar sign before he did the second one. What are you going to do?

Or is that or the guy decided to emigrate and they just need to get the poster out on time? But it escalates dramatically from 1977 on. Xanlua and Zipra Grillas are infiltrating in far greater numbers than they were before. The launch of the launcher. My favorite people we're recording, I don't know if it's picking up on my mic, it's just the screams of the nine other people in this house. You know, it just means that you're living in the hip happen in place to be. Some weird buzzing on your audio. Okay, let me go in the menus. But you're getting better. Worse. Yes. Yeah, it's just I think you're just

slightly too close to the microphone. Okay, it's a headset mic. Sorry, I'm a gamer. I need to keep that thing on me. What's your favorite slur? You don't have to answer that. No, it's a Oh, do you remember the time someone accused me of saying slurs that that's why we use the sensor thing? Because I was busy saying slurs. And it's like, no, it's because I'm busy telling I'm busy saying you should go to Brett. Yeah, I don't even know how I'm going to bleep that out later because Alice tried to bleep it out,

but I have to do it in post for it to actually work. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad

you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. Shit, shit, fuck. Look, look, it's still not as bad as the first time we tried to record this 25 minutes of actionable threats. Release the Liam cut. Let's get through this bitch. I would just want to get drunk, man. We'll get there. We're getting there. We're launching larger, more ambitious, more destructive attacks. They're killing more people. They're making things more unsettled.

The Radical Security Force is also escalating. They're launching cross-border raids into Mozambique and Zambia. They're trying to attack Xanlin Zipra where they're training. Doesn't work. Does it work? They try and fuck it up. Is this man wearing Chuck Taylor's in addition to his... Listen, I have a rant about this. It's going to delay the episode a bit, but I do have a short rant about this, which is wearing sneakers to the wall is one of the most effective methods of both insurgency and counterinsurgency. The Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded Korea wearing green canvas liberation shoes that were ripped off Chuck Taylor's.

Soviet special forces in Afghanistan wore sneakers. Increasingly, the US military has been trying to develop a tactical sneaker for years because boots are fucking terrible. If you want to run anywhere, you need to wear sneakers. Universally in combat zones, it just becomes adopted anyway. That's my favorite part of the news. I love the idea of just showing up somewhere outside Kabul, like in Kandahar or somewhere, just rocking like Jordan 11's, being like, all right, let's do it. The Taliban did. The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan wearing white high tops that they

imported from Pakistan. I would not have worn white if I were going to do an insurgency. At least not after Labor Day. At least not after Labor Day. My favorite part of the new spiritual successor to War Game Red Dragon, Warno, is that the Soviet Spetsnaz in the game are wearing Makvahs. This is the lines led by Donkeys. You'll learn about that. So the Rhodesians are doing cross-border raids, both on the ground and in the air. They even helped to start a right-wing opposition group in Mozambique called Renamo, the try and weaken the filibou government and prevent Zanu or Zanla from having a base there.

So they basically contribute to starting Mozambique's own, you know, basically 15-year-long civil war, basically to try and extend their own lifespan. I'm calling your like, sort of, Syop fascist career group Renamo, isn't itself very funny to me. They put down that it needed to be renamed and it just ended up getting put as the name as a typo. God damn it, dude. And the attacks get more and more, not only just like bigger in terms of how they look and scare people, but actually having effects.

Like they attack a oil refinery outside of Salisbury, which you see in the top right, in 1979, and actually destroy about a quarter of Rhodesia's oil reserves. And when you consider the fact that they don't have a lot of oil at this point, that's a huge blow to them. And also really dumb that they had a quarter of their oil reserves in one easy to access and attack location. I gotta tell you, so I stood up to get another beer and to get a Red Bull, and just because my butt's starting to fall asleep. And I feel like a businessman. I'm just walking around my room yelling about Rhodesia.

Bye, Sal. Bye, Sal. Dicks, dicks, dicks. You know, I think to get through this next part of the pod, I think you just remind me, I need a new Miller life. Whoever asked, you know, hey, can you shout out the names of the beers you drink on? Well, there's your problem. Yeah, I'm not gonna like it. I've got a truly strawberry, hibiscus margarita, two of those that I've killed. Mango chili margarita style hard seltzer that I've killed.

And I'm on the last one, which is classic lime margarita style hard seltzer. If this goes over, I will be drinking a two year old Java stout from Victory, which I don't think they make anymore. Roz, are you drinking or are you sober? The beer I am drinking is called Dayquil. You can do both, you fucking baby. Drinking, drinking Dayquil and Nyquil. Roz, you don't need a stomach lining, dude.

Stomach linings add weight. You want to be aerodynamic, bro. That's a good point. So we are drinking a Miller Lite, which I'm told is a fine pills in their beer because it says so on the can and their truth is in advertising. So I'm not going to interrogate that. Are you drinking or a Cherry Coke Zero? I thought you might be drinking one of those dark fruit strong bows. I've actually scheduled to take another Dayquil right about now.

I'll be right back. We'll take a break. Yeah, we could take a break if you want. All right. So what are the best slurs? Translate Googling slurs for Rhodesians. What I'm going to do is highly encourage every listener here to go to, what's your name? Amy Niconi, Barrett's house. And what you do is now that you've got...

I can't even beep it because of the... Now that you've got... What you do is you... And you... And then you... So it's a very Yukio Mishima there. Yeah, I believe that the four Supreme Court or the six Supreme Court justices shall be... I say that we should go the North Korean route and break out the anti-aircraft gun.

Yeah, I'm honestly fine with that. That wasn't the most fucked up North Korean execution method I heard of. All of these are, I assume, fake. I just can't imagine having to be the guy who has to roll out the AA gun. Like, I understand they're probably trailer pulled or they're stationary. That's on the back of a truck, for sure. Dude, that would suck. That's not the most fucked up North Korean execution method I've heard mooted.

One of the more entertainingly fake ones I've heard was execution by mortar. Like, they tie you to a stake and then they put you on a mortar range. No, exactly, you just sit there. That's gotta be agonizing because you're just gonna be sitting there because these guys are gonna probably have shit aimed with their mortars and just watching them. Just some dude flipping you off behind his handcuffs, like, turning around pulling his pants down on the other hand. Maybe it's fine to be executed by mortar because it's one of the only methods of

execution where the chance of the executioner getting killed by it is almost as high. The AA gun doesn't make any sense to me because it's like, that's not exactly torturous. I mean, the guy would just be vaporized at a short distance. Yeah, maybe that's supposed to be the point in that case where it's less about making them suffer or more about saying the message of will be vaporized. They're supposed to, like, in all of these stories, they do this in sports stadiums. I'm like, I'd like to see the sports stadium that has enough of a backstop to prevent a ZEDU-23 round going through a guy, going through a burn, going into the concession stand.

This just reminds me if you can stand me enough to ever have me back that we just need to do an episode on the Sgt. York. Oh, that's a good idea. That thing out Bradley's the Bradley, let me tell you. Oh, I was going to say mean things about Roz. I feel bad saying that. Can't think of any. I have nice things to say about Roz.

So far, I've missed recording with him, you know. You too, Liam. I've missed that. I've missed you too. I've missed that muppety voice of Roz's that he's famous for. Yeah, I, you know, we all love Roz, even if he does sound like horse Jordan Peterson. Yeah, Roz, you just say the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog for me. Up yours, woke moralist.

We'll see who cancels who. I forget how good of an impressionist you are. I almost killed Joe Cassabian with that voice when he was when he was streaming the rising storm for charity for families affected by Azerbaijan's attack on Armenia. Azerbaijan Muppet. God. I subsisted a diet it made entirely of meat. We're back.

The F1 race is outside my apartment. It's not very good there. No, it isn't easy being a right wing demagogue. Now that you said that, I expect you to cough up roughly a third of your lung. Oh, God. Not really. No, I took more day cool. Did you take more day cool?

Okay, so we did. Yeah, he did. So we finally get a showing from Zipra, the Soviet based one at this point, which is using Soviet surface to air missiles like man, possible air defense. They shoot down a couple of aerodesia planes in 1978 and 1979. Where are you guys for the fucking helicopters? Yeah, I know, right? The thing is, helicopters shoot back and like passenger planes don't.

This is one of the calculus, like one of the calculations you got to make in an insurgency. When the first one crashes, a bunch of people are left left alive on the ground. They get like very murdered. Extremely murdered. Yeah. The second one, I think, is pretty much white. It's called a double tap. The double doink is how the eagle snuck into the playoffs a couple of years ago.

Double doink attack. Yeah, yeah, the double doink. The first bomb bounces off the upright and then it goes across and the bears lose. You hear the drone coming and you just hear, is this the dagger? What's the military equivalent of icing the kicker? Shooting a civilian helicopter to show them you're serious. Joshua Como like lost this off today. I had to hear the fucking medivac every goddamn night.

And I just thought I've said this before. I thought to myself, 16 year old Liam, boy, if I could just get a goddamn RPG7 up here. You want an SA7? That's what you want. I don't need an SA7 from that distance, bud. So these these shoot downs, they have a really dramatic effect. Like, like Alex says, N'Kovo laughs it off. But in terms of in Rhodesia, once the white population,

this had a real shilling effect in combination with everything else. Because it sort of showed the Rhodesians a key thing after all their complacency that there's really no longer anywhere in Rhodesia, they're safe like stores. Yeah, exactly. While stores are getting bombed in Salisbury, planes are getting shot down. There's no safe zones anymore. This is where you get the rise of white flight, white emigration. Rhodesia's white population peaks, I think around 1974, 1975.

I think like maybe three and a half thousand. I don't have the numbers in front of me out of I think like four or five million Africans. And from that point on, it starts on a steady decline. Because people are like, fuck this shit. I don't want to have to deal with this. And this will really accelerate the sort of decline of Rhodesia in the end of the war. Yeah, absolutely. And we see the sort of Rhodesian military strategy is commit as many atrocities as possible,

photos of which make it into the press internationally. They become sort of the broader anti-apartheid campaign. Like those two things are very closely linked. And it's actually very successful at showing the Rhodesian military for what they're actually doing. Yeah, we decided not to show most of them in here because some of them are horrific. There's one that isn't as horrific, but it has an impact where they basically have a bunch of Africans in a front-leaning rest position while a Rhodesian soldier shoves a browning high power in their faces and interrogating them.

And that really tells you all you need to know. Yeah, absolutely. And it shows the sort of strategic, apart from anything else, bankruptcy of the Rhodesian military at this point is we're just all we can do is terrorize. And that leads us to the next slide, where, KD, I think you have a little rant about counterinsurgency here. This is my counterinsurgency rant. Yeah, I've written about this before about people who talk about coin,

both Netsick, Weirdos, and Armshare generals alike. Whether or not they mention Rhodesia and a lot of them will. During the peak years of Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were desperately trying to figure out how to win those wars, Rhodesia got seriously brought up as a study to learn from in positive ways. Count the rings. Count the rings. It's just like so many counterinsurgencies is an example where, sure, you might be able to win

even overwhelmingly tactical victories, but you'll still lose. And the reason you'll lose, and my whole point of why I kind of say that counterinsurgency is effectively, I don't know if it's really truly a winnable war. I think the only cases in which you could really win a counterinsurgency are really interesting in sort of specific exceptions. Because the whole reason- You can make some sort of measured concession to it like Northern Ireland. Maybe.

You can't win. All you can do- The North of Ireland. You can stab off the feet or you can lose. Maybe once in a while in some freak instance you can win, but the whole reason you can't really win as a counterinsurgent is because the reason that a counterinsurgency starts is because there were political grievances with a significant, if not majority of the population that they felt they could rectify to no means, that they had no avenues available

to them peacefully to do anything to improve the situation or get the government to address it, and that they had no choice but to take up arms. As long as those conditions exist, you're going to be fighting an insurgency forever. You're not going to win. All you can do is not lose or make concessions in which that's effectively kind of losing, because you have to see positions you could have just seated without fighting to begin with. It's like the tired saying in my field that it got drummed in me, the grad school is war, is politics by other means, blah, blah.

That's more true with coin because all the reasons that an insurgency starts are because of domestic politics that can't be taken care of peacefully, and all counterinsurgents throughout history is just people recycling the same attempts at doing counterinsurgency over and over, pretending like nobody's tried it before. Maybe we should do terrorism. Maybe we should do niceness. Maybe we should patrol Lashkargar and like Berets. You see this here, Rhodesia, when they tried doing protected villages,

which is basically just putting as many people as they can into effectively concentration camps. People love that. And they brought this up again in Afghanistan because everyone likes to point to the Malayan emergency as a quote-unquote successful counterinsurgency. Gerald Templer, one of the most fucking historically overhyped motherfuckers. And one, the only reason that was quote-unquote successful was, one, they basically did concentration camps, and two, a lot of war crimes, including by the SAS, including the Rhodesian SAS.

And two, it wasn't really a success because within 10 years, a new counterinsurgency started that went on for 20 and ended in a negotiated settlement in the 1980s. So it didn't really successfully win because they just started a new insurgency. And that's why I get a fucking vein in my forehead whenever someone talks about Malaya. Hey, we should really make this one doctrine the focus of our entire military to the exclusion of everything else. Surely nothing can go wrong.

That's right. Oh, no, it all went wrong. You've just described an average day for me at the office. So, yeah, I question whether a counterinsurgency is ever truly winnable. I don't want to say it is completely, but I want to say it's very, very, very rarely in 99% of the time. It is an unwinnable war that you should just fucking negotiate. Yeah, excellent.

Next slide. So we talked a little bit about Rhodesia becoming a pariah state, right? Well, we got to talk about international support for Rhodesia, which in this case is largely international white supremacist support for Rhodesia, right? See our ad in Soldier of Fortune. Soldier of Fortune was Rhodesia the magazine for a long time. Cannot stress it enough that for when Rhodesia, Soldier of Fortune started in like 1975, right up until the end of Rhodesia,

it was effectively Rhodesia the magazine. There was not a single issue that did not have a fucking story about Rhodesia in it, that did not have full page ads recruiting for the Rhodesian security forces, which is interesting because trying to recruit these guys from overseas, it showed really how desperate the Rhodesians were. But even then, they still turned down a bunch of these guys because even for the Rhodesians, a lot of these guys who were answering Soldier of Fortune ads were fucking insane. Oh, yeah. And people talk a lot about American volunteers of which there were some,

the overwhelming number of foreign volunteers were British. There was an independent French company that was then dissolved to ill discipline, and a bunch of its members tried to do bank robberies in Salisbury before becoming mercenaries. It just become a, it was a shower drain for some of the both weirdest and worst people in the world, not just French mercenaries and white supremacists and KKK members, but also interestingly enough, the Crown Prince of Albania, who, you know, he bounced around Europe for a bit after King Zog was kicked out of Albania. He got a little weird little hearts of iron reference at events firing, you know.

Yeah. He got kicked out of Spain for having mercenaries and illegal weapons. On his way to Rhodesia, he got basically ambushed at an airport. And I think it was Gabon by local, like, Ruffians that had been hired by the Albanian government. And allegedly he scared them off with an RPG. He got to Rhodesia, where he had his own personal guard who had Albanian flags on Rhodesian brush-trick uniforms and like protected them. And eventually in the 90s, after the communist government fell, he returned to Albania for a referendum on restoring the monarchy, and he returned to the capital wearing a full Rhodesian military uniform. Weird as shit. Totally fucking...

I love it. I just, I love the idea of fail-sutting your way through Rhodesia, only to return to fucking post-communist Albania to be like, everything's fine here. Shut up. Yeah. He lost, he lost that referendum, by the way, handedly. He said that there was vote rigging. Maybe there was, but you know, I can't be asked to care who cares. Yeah. You can see the sort of general themes of Rhodesian external propaganda here, which is self-reliance, small country, anti-communism. They've adopted the way of Juche. Yeah, exactly. I feel like some of these... My purpose is Juche. Some of these advertisements, this advertisement in particular is very pessimistic.

These women will die for Rhodesia. Not they might die, they will. You know, I feel like that's, that's not, you're not showing this to me. You know, the top right's like, mommy, can I go to Rhodesia, which just seems to suggest, yes, we will accept child soldiers. No, we'll take some child soldiers. We're desperate, actually. When I give your kid soldier of fortune magazine, it's like boys' life for grown-ups. Yeah, I plucked that one out of soldier of fortune. I mean, I cannot straight, like soldier of fortune is half psychosis and then just half ads, ads for guns, and really cool ads because they're 80s retro ones.

Oh, it's a perfect Bible of Fudd law. It's like, actually, you need a 45 for stopping power. If you read an issue of soldier of fortune from the late 70s or early 80s, you will 100% immediately understand, okay, I know now we're queuing on and Trumpism and all this stuff came from. It just didn't have legs yet because the internet wasn't a thing. Yeah, like the absolute bircher stuff. I want to know who L.U. was. What did he do? Political Cartoonist for Political Cartoonist for Soldier of Fortune magazine. That's a job description right there. It's a Twitter bio for some of the worst people you've ever seen.

Soldier of Fortune, I mean, like God, like between the ads and everything, one of my, the ad burned into my memory is one for what was called the Spotlight Freedom Tour, Spotlight being a weird super right wing newsletter that told you, quote unquote, the truth. And the Spotlight, quote unquote, Freedom Tour took you from Salisbury, Rhodesia to Johannesburg, South Africa, culminating in a nice trip to Rio de Janeiro in military junta era Brazil. Nazi birthrights. Yes. So just birthright. I went on, I can say it. Next slide, please, because we can talk about like all of this external propaganda differs a lot from Rhodesia's internal propaganda, the stuff they made for domestic

consumption, which is breathtakingly racist, but not in the same way. It's racist in a sort of more patronizing way of can't we all just get along from a position of like patrician white supremacy? It's almost Lib. It's like Lib white supremacy. Yeah, like it talks about Black Rhodesian soldiers, for instance, which soldier of fortune you would be forgiven for thinking they didn't have any, where like they became an increasing part of the Rhodesian army every year. But you can also talk about these psyops here. I love the sort of the anti work response here. Do not listen to people who try to stop you from going to work. They will make you lose money and jobs. If someone tries to stop you

from going to work, go to the police or the army. But also the sort of the very patronizing stuff, like you cannot chase to impala, follow the stronger, which gives you meet work, education, freedom, hope and safety. Its name is good government. The other impala leads you into darkness. It reminds me strongly of like how, you know, the American government, American government and officials would speak to Native Americans and sort of this patronizing tone, which, oh, yes, phantalyzing and it sort of became the basis of how we think Native Americans talk will know they actually spoke normally. They still do today. But there's the sort of patronizing dialect that came from, you know, Indian agents and stuff like that. And this has that but more

British. There's another great example of this, which is once, so the original Rhodesian psyop thing was if you go to one of these camps, you will be tortured, which was sometimes true, but not enough to make it like accurate. And so people would come back from these camps and not having been tortured, it would just discredit the whole propaganda. But so the last line of defense was to do more racism. And so I have a little passage here. They put these leaflets out in villages. Your tribal spirit has sent a message to say that your ancestral spirits are very dissatisfied with you. As a result of this, there has been no rain. Your crops have died and there could be great famine. It is only the government which can help

you. But you have to realize your obligation to help the government also. This is what I'm saying with just all counterinsurgency is recycling the same ideas over and over. Because this is literally just like we did in Vietnam, where we had guys going through the jungle blasting recordings trying to make the economy with their ghosts. Exactly. It's the counterinsurgency. It's just the same goddamn stuff reinvented over and over again with some general making it look like it's new and fresh so we can get a fucking promotion. You have a tiny bit of liberal representational politics on the bottom left here with black power against the terrorists, where the text there says liberation movements claim

they're fighting a freedom war against the white oppressors. Yet most of the men in the front line are black. By this point, that was true because the Rhodesians were so desperate they had massively expanded the army. And because of white emigration, they had to recruit more black soldiers. And honestly, like I can't entirely begrudge a black man in Rhodesia joining the army at that point because I mean, if you can't find a job elsewhere, what the fuck else are you going to do? So I can't entirely judge them. Yeah, but it's still like explicitly a white supremacist power. Absolutely. They're like elite units of the Rhodesian army remained all white until pretty much the end of the war. Yeah. Also, we got to talk about next slide, please. We're getting

the songs. Oh, the fucking songs. Wow. Can one small unrecognized settler colonial state create so many fucking awful folk songs? Not just awful, not just awful and that the songs themselves are awful, but awful and that they're awful in a catchy way. So they're going to be stuck in your brain. No thanks. Like I will have Rhodesians never die stuck in a part of my brain long after it is installed into a robot in like a container of some kind of liquid. It's just it's and it's all this emphasis on sort of that rugged individualism us against the world, you know, very traditional, very sort of conservative. And it's just it's just all this weird internet fascist white supremacist wet dream, which we'll go back to. But some of these fucking songs, I mean, I have a few listed

here, Rhodesians never die. The last word on Rhodesian, which is basically a love letter to Ian Smith, the leader, which is about a Rhodesian bombing raid that basically killed a huge amount of people. Oh, oh, it's funny, these songs kind of go through a the stages of grief. Because like you have the sort of, oh, God, but you have the different stages of grief, which you see Rhodesia go through. And I'll talk about this, but we're about to hit the bargaining stage. Exactly. Denial, you know, they sort of like, oh, we're great. We got this. Everything's fine. Anger. I think anger is expressed by the song called Another Hitler, which is basically the Rhodesians saying, you know, Robert Mugabe is basically Hitler.

And you're bad for not letting us do a settler colonialism. The last words of which are are basically, you know, this battle is not the last one. And we're only stepping stones. And finally, America will bleed. America will bleed. Which, you know, if you didn't know it was a Rhodesian folks on you, you would think it was like the sheet or something from ISIS. But yeah, no, there's just so many fucking songs by people like Clem Fully at John Edmond and just more masturbatory material for guys on 4chan. All right. Well, the good news is next slide, please. The war ends. Yes. All right. The war ends in a negotiated settlement in Britain. Zip for as big idea was to do a sort of big conventional last minute Tet offensive sort of thing. Probably wouldn't have

worked. Would have taken years anyway. Instead, what you get is this sort of very tenuous settlement of a country called Zimbabwe Rhodesia, which is sort of the bargaining stage. Yeah. That's the you wouldn't hit a guy with glasses of white supremacy, which is in this case, because you have the guy who was supposedly running it, which is Bishop Muzarewa on the right hand there. And the best way I could describe Zimbabwe Rhodesia is was a Pathebkin village, a majority rule where they tried to create the illusion that it was a majority ruled country would effectively Smith and all his white cronies still effectively ran everything behind the scenes. Yeah. McGarby called Muzarewa a black Smith, which was, you know, a decent pun, if nothing else.

They were the only party that had not been outlawed by Smith at the start because they were the only ones who didn't condone violence. And two, they were the only ones who were not communists. They were like liberals, I think. Yeah. But so eventually they have to sign the Lancaster House Agreement, which it makes Margaret Thatcher sick. She grieves over this, right? But it is something that her government plays a part in overseeing sort of against its will. The Rhodesians were really hoping once Thatcher got in the office that might save them, but even they were too much for Margaret Thatcher, which should tell you a fucking lot that they were too much for Margaret Hilda Thatcher. So yeah, they're out of the bargaining phase. Now they're

into acceptance and they're basically, they have no options left. They know they can't do anything left. You have to have an actual election in which black people are allowed to vote. Yeah. So they signed the Lancaster Agreement. You have Mugabe here on the right Lancaster. I know it's Lancaster in England about this being an asshole. We have all the parties here, including this guy sort of in the back row, second from left, who looks a lot like, was it Mr. Wint or Mr. Kid from Diamonds are Forever? He really does. Shit. God had meant man to fly, Mr. Wint. He would have given them wings. And would not have had them do a settler colonialism. That's right.

So what they what they agree to is a like British or Commonwealth militarily supervised election. They effectively go back to being a colony that for one six months, they revert back to being the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, while the British administer elections under the majority rule. They kind of know that Mugabe is going to win the Rhodesian military under this guy on the top right general piece of walls, considered doing a coup and killing Mugabe. I will say there's a little bit of debate here about, I mean, there's no question that these operations were planned. You had Operation Courts, which is basically going to be an attack on, that was going to be the effort to assassinate Robert Mugabe and leaders of Zanla and Zano P.F.

by rolling a bunch of tanks up to their election headquarters and then sending in the Rhodesian SAS. And then there was also, I might have these mixed up, there's Operation Hectic. One was an assassination attempt and the other is they were basically going to attack all the guerrilla forces in their assembly areas, because part of the election thing was the British were going to get everyone to assembly areas where they could keep an eye on them while the election happened. And it's questionable whether it was, they were going to do it regardless, like if they were going to do it if Mugabe won, or if they seriously had deluded themselves into thinking that Muzarewa had a chance and Mugabe might try to quote-unquote steal the election and

they were going to save it. It's also debatable to what extent walls was either advocating these or preventing these. It's still very unclear. At the end though, it became elementary or sort of superfluous because Mugabe won so handedly, like Muzarewa won like a handful of seats. Mugomo won the second most, but Mugabe in his party won an outright majority like right away. Yeah, landslides. So even if they wanted to do this, they sort of, one way or another, they realized this doesn't matter because Mugabe has won. Although Mugabe does find out that the military has tried to kill him and he does get more paranoid as a result of this. Yeah, it's good to have. It's yeah, he's not happy when he finds out about

this. Last through the next slide, a fine example of sign painting. Look at this cue. Oh yeah, this I put in basically just for Alice because I knew she'd appreciate it. This is basically that armband and patch was for the Commonwealth monitoring force, which was all the British, Australian and New Zealand, other Commonwealth forces that were sent there to basically make sure the election went off without any shenanigans. I love the sort of reversed browning high power on a lanyard for that cross draw. That's a rare late 70s British military fit. And obviously they had to have the Australians in on this because the Australians were the only military in the Commonwealth that had the infrastructure to ensure that

every voter in Zimbabwe would be able to get an election day snag from Bunnings. That's right. The democracy sausage. So Zimbabwe becomes a democracy. Maggabi is elected. Next slide please. And what happens is that as like, okay, Maggabi, like Robert Maggabi was for a long time considered sort of Mandela before Mandela, right? He had he had done the tour of like revolutionary and liberationist movements. He had been jailed by the British. He'd met the ANC leaders in the 60s and become a Marxist. And, you know, in terms of the way he spoke in terms of the way that he wrote and promised to govern was very liberal, right? Like a large part of sort of his initial program was we're not going to kill all the white

people. We are going to move forward together as a democracy. And, you know, you do not have to leave Rhodesia. It's debatable to what extent Robert Maggabi became a tyrant versus was always a tyrant, right? He like probably assassinated a lot of his internal factional enemies during the course of the liberation war anyway. But he became worse over time. In part, there are a lot of like demobilized soldiers around after the end of the war, demobilized careers who do what demobilized guerrillas always do, which is banditry. South Africa funds some of them just to stir shit up. There's there's a couple of of revolts, especially of of de Valle people against Shona people. This is the end to Barney revolt, which is the still white officer, Rhodesian army fighting for Maggabi

against Zipro. Yeah, the chief of defense staff for the Zimbabwe defense forces from 1980 independence to 1982 for about two years is still a white former Rhodesian security forces officer. Initially, it's walls. And then Mugabe finds out about operations hectic in courts and walls has to make a very heisty departure to South Africa. But for another like two years, like the Zimbabwe military in Mugabe is run by a white Rhodesian dude, and they still have a lot of white Rhodesian dudes in the ranks who are fighting for Mugabe. Yeah, like, essentially, what happens next is a sort of combination genocide purge where Mugabe like a limit. Yeah, exactly. We're getting we're getting we're getting you warmed up for Joe on this one, Liam. Yeah, he like eliminates all

internal opposition. He humiliates white MPs and white army officers, sort of removes them from power. But also he perpetrates a genocide against invading people called the Gokurahundi. This leads to him forming his own sort of paramilitary power base called the Fifth Brigade, which is largely trained by North Koreans. Weird vibes, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird vibes. Next slide, please. As we get into post war, Rhodesia and the weird vibes still God, that statue is very strong North Korean vibes off that statue because it was sculpted by North Koreans. That's that statue is pretty much direct from Pyongyang. I both hate it and love it at the same time. Yeah. So the way the way in which in which Mugabe governs Zimbabwe

precipitates what it necessitates land reform, right? It necessitates taking farms away from white farmers, which is initially done on a sort of mutual consent basis. And then very rapidly not that both as a way of securing power for Mugabe, but also as a way of bolstering the economy, which suffers very quickly from hyperinflation. You can see the $100 trillion note using the same font from the game Rock Battles. So Mugabe's sick jacket here. Oh, incredible work. Yeah. The thing is, Mugabe is genuinely very popular with a lot of Zimbabweans at this point, still, even still. Yeah, that's why when the coup d'etat happened back in 2017, the military had to phrase the coup, not that they were deposing Mugabe, but they were literally, we are getting rid of criminals

around Mugabe that are misleading him. Yeah, he's very tired and he has to like lie down in his house. Of course, it wasn't a coup because the nice general went on television to tell us it was not a coup in his military uniform. So it's not a coup. Yeah, absolutely. So at this point, also, I should say that Mugabe's attitude to democracy is no longer liberal. There's one television ad for the elections, which I come back to, which is it's images of a car crash. And the tagline is, this is one way to die. Another is to vote for the opposition. Don't commit suicide. Vote Zanu Piaf. I kind of wish the Democrats would do more of that, though. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And the question is, like, do you have to hand it to Robert Mugabe, which is

probably not. I tend to believe that he always had an authoritarian tendency. He was just better at camouflaging it. And he was, you know, he liberated his country by the means that were expedient to him and then centralized power totally became for fucking ever became insanely corrupt or so, which is a large problem. On the other hand, if anyone tells you there is a white genocide in Zimbabwe, they are lying or South Africa. It's just not a thing. There's still like, you know, thousands of white farmers. There's still like, I think 60 or 70,000 white Zimbabweans in Zimbabwe. Sorry, not that number was too high. It's like 28,000. But out of 300 something thousand, that's not an insignificant number that left behind. And, you know, in many ways,

the wolves who are left are still very, you know, closely connected into the economy, still very quite privileged. And so don't let them tell you that they're so fucking oppressed. There's sort of, you have to balance what percentage of criticism of Maghabi's unarguable abuses is based in actual concern for the people of Zimbabwe and to what extent is seething and coping from white supremacists who are mad that it's not them doing it anymore. And I mean, like most of them didn't suffer. Like there wasn't like a reconciliation the same way that was attempted at least in South Africa. Like most of these people did not suffer any consequences. Ian Smith lived out the rest of his day safe and happy in South Africa until he died

in like 2006 or seven. Like again, he lived for a long time. Yeah, fucking asshole. Like a lot of Rhodesians went to Britain or to South Africa or to Australia or to the U.S. And the key the key abiding factor about the Rhodesian, I don't even want to call it a diaspora, is that they never, ever, ever shut the fuck up about it. Like at this point in the 80s, British people of certain middle class circles talk about when we's expatriates in Rhodesia who constantly talk about like, you know, when we lived in Rhodesia, we had staff and we had a, you know, a pool or whatever sort of in quotes. Yeah, exactly. Postbellum Southerners saying, well, you should have seen that house before the wall. Exactly. It's lost cause shit.

You know, and that's what they say. That's why even during the war, they were trying to do that. Like, oh, no, this isn't about race. It's about communism. We're trying to prevent Oh, it's about race. Yeah, absolutely. Part of the other thing about like the war ending in the Lancaster house agreement is that it provides for a lost cause narrative in the same way that the end of the First World War did for Germany, which is, you know, the army that never lost a battle, but was defeated at a negotiating table. By the Jews. Again, it's another Hitler's, it's a, you see, you saw it in like that another Hitler song where they're basically blaming the British and the Americans and the Soviets and everyone else in the world for why won't you

let us do a racism? And it's like the Rhodesian army never lost a battle is a not true. They absolutely did. But B doesn't matter. They still lost the war militarily. Check the scoreboard. Yeah. You'll never be Jordan. You're more Patrick Ewing. White majority rule in Africa is now confined to razor wire circled suburbs of Cape Town in Johannesburg, all of them constantly driving themselves and each other completely insane through fear. It's an intriguing look into the future racial politics of the United States. We're almost already there. Yeah, we're getting there, bud. You see, they're trying to sell. They got a new big truck out now. Some companies trying to market

a consumer, a consumer oriented, quote, tactical urban vehicle. You're going to be able to put flint throwers on your car like you live in Johannesburg pretty soon. I can't wait. It makes sense. They made the civilian Humvee. It only makes sense that eventually they have to make the civilian MRAP. That's right. Incidentally, we do have to talk about whatever the opposite of a bromance is, which is that... So Robert McGarbie for no, I think we can say for very fair reasons, hated the British his entire life, but he also became more and more obsessive about it. Also about homosexuality. He thought all of his critics were secret homosexuals, but in particular, he really hated Tony Blair and not necessarily for the right reasons.

It was kind of mutual. Like when he was Prime Minister, Blair talked up over like invading Zimbabwe and instituting regime change overthrowing McGarbie by force until the chief of the defense staff told him he would make everything worse, which I don't know why he didn't do this about Iraq, but... Tony Blair inadvertently just creating a footnote in history that will eventually become a hearts of iron mod. There's no oil in Zimbabwe. They did eventually find some resources, which both the Chinese and the Russians are in Zimbabwe now, very aggressively trying to get. That's the pivot to the East, yes. But so that leads you to the modernization of Zimbabwe. Next slide, please. We're getting really, really close. My last couple of slides.

We got to talk about Rhodesia as a locus for Latter-day white supremacists. White supremacists love to have a legacy of being weird losers. They love to be victims. It's just like white supremacists and sort of Christian fundamentalists. They'd love to be like, even though they're anything but, they love to seek out narratives where they are the victim. Absolutely. In particular, this kind of like stab in the back thing of the Rhodesian army was based and they were chads and they wore the little shorts and they kept winning, but they were betrayed, right? It's not the case, but it's... Now the rings, the counter. Yeah, it's just these fuckers in their victimhood complex

ruining the FN file for me forever. Yeah, you see here Dylan Roof, the Charleston church mass murderer wearing a pre-democracy apartheid South Africa flag and a Rhodesian flag. You've got a little make Zimbabwe Rhodesia again, which makes the link with Trump nice and explicit. And if you want to see any shit like this, just go to the website, the Commando store with a K. Oh, god damn it. It just basically just makes its living off of people buying Rhodesian masturbatory material. Absolutely. The K border 4chan or 8chan, whichever is a magical place indeed is sort of a repository for this particular kind of military history inflected white supremacism. Personally, when I get nostalgic for the military

history of a country that no longer exists, it's the Soviet Union, because as we know, the Soviet Union, A, never did anything wrong. No. B, existed for 80 years and created stuff other than overhyped bicycle shorts and racist tantrums. And it was also recognized by the rest of the world, including their principal adversary. Yeah, so all I can say about Rhodesia is C cope. Next slide, please. My final slide. So much of this breathtakingly horny. This is this is a horrifying little vignette. I made myself, which I think neatly summarizes the whole process. This is a white Rhodesian woman wearing an anti emigration shirt because this was like a popular thing in Rhodesia was to try and like prevent white flight by saying, oh, well,

we're we're staying to create our ethno state. This was when it was really starting to hit the Rhodesian economy. Then we have a cropped and badly colorized version that got picked up on K, the firearms board. And then last of all, we have a lovingly, horrifyingly enhanced version to make her more trad looking. Yeah, they had to make her face thinner, make the lips bigger. She looks like Lana Del Rey. I found this on Tumblr. Oh, God, a cursor, a cursor place that won't just die. A tumbler of fascist aesthetics. Wow. Fascists are desperately, desperately weirdly horny. There are so, so many drawings of girls with big tits and Rhodesian military uniforms. There's a whole big bunch of listeners right now writing down and then a little their

little books. Reasons to cancel Alice goes on fascist aesthetic tumbler boards. I found it. I was looking for this and I found it. And I can say it's not just anime waifus. I can safely say as a furry, there are plenty of horny, furry, Rhodesian things to all I can say to this is it's not hard to be horny without being a fascist. I do it every day going back in time and showing a badly burnedy and smoothened hospital drawing of like a serval and brush stroke uniform. So he dies of his wounds. God, if if only. And I got it. I didn't even notice it first. For some reason, I didn't catch it that not only she have that shirt and shit, she has a fucking like what I can only assume is a browning high power and a holster there. Again, making a very

cool pistol unpissed uncool. But they ruined all those those those things like this is this is that this has been a brief positive history of Rhodesia. What have we learned? Don't do a settler colonialism or if you're going to do it, don't let your colony have an army. Sorry, go ahead. I'm a supremacist. Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah. That's a Maoism beats Soviet doctrine and how to run a counterinsurgency. At least at least in a country that doesn't actually have an industrial urban pass a tree to mobilize in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. What's one BTR to a bunch of guys like is the promo did have the better the awesome sort of swagger stick that he walked around with. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, bye. Yeah. Yeah. Our next episode

is on the Boston molasses disaster. We can know it. No, we'll do that later. Yeah. Next episode, hopefully featuring the other three quarters of my voice. We'll be back from sabbatical by then. Yeah. Katie, thank you so much for coming on and for helping me with the slides. Where can they find more Katie? Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on to to attempt this again during a period where no major historical events were happening at that moment in time. And second of all, if you want to hear me rant more about national security, you can find me at at war underscore takes on Twitter. I also have a blog where I write essays. That's just for takes.com. And if you want to just see me ship post or

post furry art or do other bullshit, you can find me at at Komodo dad on the Twitter dot com. And I think that's about it. Hell yeah. That's a podcast. We did it. We finally got that. Yeah. Did a podcast. All right.