Zimbabwe: Unpacking Industrial Vs Mass Democracy

26 November 2009

By Reason Wafawarova

THOSE who believe that Zimbabwe is in so much democratic trouble that the country now epitomises a level of vulgarity and apologetics for mass suffering and human rights abuses that any respectable democracy in the West could never possibly reach might need to be disabused of such illusions when consideration is taken over the human rights record of the United States of America.

Zimbabwe has thrived towards mass democracy by embarking on the popular land reform programme so as to have its population directly involved in the economy, and we have seen the most hostile of responses from industrial democracies in the West.

These are the people who have, since the days of the Cold War, fought so hard against any policy or principle that seeks to empower indigenous peoples of former colonies, and that they did ruthlessly in the name of "fighting communism".

The victims are too many to mention: Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, Salvador Allende of Chile, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Simon Bolivar the Venezuelan liberator of Latin America, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Samora Moises Machel of Mozambique, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Pathet Lao of Laos and too many others to mention.

These are men whose vision for their peoples was not different from President Mugabe’s vision of returning the land into the hands of indigenous Zimbabweans.

Sankara was brutally killed when he was establishing popular social projects like adult education, localising of the manufacturing industry, empowering women, voluntary public works, building schools and clinics and supporting co-operatives by ordinary Burkinabe.

In 1953, the peasant population of Laos hardly knew what an aeroplane was when they one day woke up to see what looked like noisy metallic birds dropping lethal bombs all over their villages.

These were American Jet fighters sent in to crush Pathet Lao’s land reform programme.

Salvador Allende’s 1970 election win led to Henry Kissinger condemning the whole population of Chile as "irresponsible" and Allende was deposed by a ferocious palace bombing in a joint operation pitting the CIA and Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo and he was brutally murdered in a Belgium — United States joint lethal act.

Samora Machel was cut down in a plane downing by apartheid South Africa’s snipers in October 1986 for his role in pushing for the liberation of Namibia and South Africa, as well as championing the cause of socialism in the Southern Africa.

Iden Witherell of Zimbabwe’s weekly The Independent who writes under the name Muckracker will preach righteously in defence of all these atrocities because he reckons Western policies have created "comfort" zones for the rest of mankind.

He has on numerous occasions attacked this writer for "writing from the comfort of Australia". Last week he took exception to this writer’s ultimate resolve signature statement, "It is homeland or death!"

Muckraker charged that this writer was "inviting derision" through this call for the ultimate resolve in defending the homeland.

If this writer were to give a toss what Muckraker thinks and to be scared of derision from people of his kind then that would be the worst kind of insult to the heroes that were fallen by the brutal legacy of the people whose "comfort" Muckraker admires so much.

This writer is not resident in Australia because the country is a land of comfort as Muckraker will proudly preach about Western nations. Far from it. Neither is this writer here because he enjoys "freedom and human rights" as Muckraker keeps reminding us.

It may benefit Muckraker to know that this writer is in this country purely because he expensively shielded himself from deportation hawks whose only hurdle are competent legal practitioners defending the rights of this writer — otherwise the determination to victimise the voice of Reason is as resolute as was the resolve to kill Samora.

The character of this writer is being spared baseless slander not because this country is full of journalists who know too well how to respect the dignity of others but because this writer has sued some of the media attackers in the past and the protection is in the fear of litigation than in tolerance of divergent opinion.

This is what Muckraker proudly calls "comfort of Australia" and he even had the temerity to declare that this country was now this writer’s "homeland". What cheek!

Muckraker furiously attacked the indigenisation policies of Zimbabwe arguing investors will only go to those countries where they would be allowed "to keep their money while employing local people".

This is the understanding in the West.

It is the capitalist thought process.

People in the developing countries are lesser people who are only good enough for labour provision.

Their resources are there to give profits to investors and jobs to the locals.

Technology to develop these resources must stay where it belongs — in the West, and labour must come from where it must — from the Africans and other indigenous peoples of resourced underdeveloped countries.

Locals who desire to be part of the investment community are nothing but a tyrannous gang of obnoxious thugs that undermine democracy and human rights, especially property rights.

This is why Muckraker does not like Zimbabwe, or at least he says.

By the way, if Zimbabwe was that bad, why didn’t Muckraker leave as many who look like him did in recent years?

Or the flip side; why doesn’t Muckraker move to the West if he reckons there is so much "comfort" there?

Industrial democracy will fight to the bitter end any sign of mass democracy.

Industrial democrats are scared of people power, what Lippmann called, "the bewildered herd". This is why the land reform programme of Zimbabwe cannot not be a closed chapter for Western ruling elites. They simply cannot afford to lose to people power.

The white commercial farmers who lost out were an integral part of industry, and the corporate arm that sponsors Western democracies clearly felt harmed by developments that took place in Zimbabwe in 2000.

They have retaliated by fighting for a Western version of democracy — in reality corporate or industrial democracy that organises what Edward Herman called "demonstration elections" where the people are occasionally allowed to ratify leadership nominees as chosen and sponsored by corporate elites.

The MDC-T leadership is thought to be well in the scope of these criteria of leadership. They are considered respectful of "property rights" and well linked "to the civilised world".

These are terms that are carefully chosen to sanitise the increasingly apparent greed inherent in capitalism.

MDC-T has publicly boasted that they have "partners in the civilised world" and this is nothing but a propagandist approach in sanitising the human rights record of the West.

In 1986 the American doctrinal system told the whole world that no one so epitomised "the evil scourge of terrorism" as Muammar Gaddafi, the "mad dog" of the Arab world; and we were told that Libya under his leadership had become the very model of a terrorist state.

This was based on allegations by Amnesty International that Libya had killed 14 of its own citizens whom it was alleged, the Libyan government considered dissidents.

The other reason given for this description was that Libya had decided to retaliate after the Gulf of Sidra attack, when a US air and naval armada sank Libyan vessels off the coast of Libya with many killed.

The decision allegedly taken by Libya would be entirely legitimate, indeed laudable and very much belated, under the doctrines professed by the United States executive and often endorsed by respected Western commentators.

The US is, for example, fighting this "war of necessity" in Afghanistan because they believe they are "coming after Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda" who allegedly bombed the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.

Of course, Gaddafi was not entitled to any thoughts of such a "war of necessity" even after the US sank his country’s vessels and killed his own daughter and his people.

The AI reports that Libya was engaging in "terrorist killings" started in early 1980, at a time when Jimmy Carter was overseeing the escalation of the terrorist war in El-Salvador, with Jose Napoleon Duarte joining as a cover to ensure that arms would flow from the US to the killers.

While Libya was being accused of killing 14 of its citizens, that way earning themselves the tag "terrorist state", the US client regime of El Salvador killed some 50 000 of its own citizens in the course of what Bishop Rivera Damas (successor to the assassinated Archbishop Romero) described as "a war of extermination and genocide against a defenceless civilian population".

Duarte hailed the killers for their "valiant service alongside the people against subversion"; while in the same speech he conceded that "the masses were with the guerrillas".

The speech was actually delivered at the swearing in ceremony just after Duarte had been sworn in as president of the US-installed junta, in an effort that was designed to lend the military rulers legitimacy after the widely condemned murder of four American churchwomen.

Jean Kirkpatrick and Alexander Haig played down the murders and offered flimsy excuses to justify the actions of the junta but no such explanation would be acceptable if it was Gaddafi explaining himself after killing even one American.

The problem in El Salvador had been the 1970s rise of church-based self-help groups, peasant associations, unions, co-operatives and other popular organisations that the US sought to destroy in favour of industrial democracy.

When Ronald Reagan took over from Carter he declared that what was happening in El Salvador was "the real model for supporting the push toward democracy in our sphere". To him the continuing terror as documented by Americas Watch and AI (rarely though), was inconsequential and a matter of indifference.

During that time the US helped arming to the hilt neo-Nazi Argentine generals, Taiwan and Israel for the implementation of the slaughter plan that saw the killing of 70 000 Guatemalans.

Regan dismissed the documentation of this mass murder as a "bum rap" and extolled the killers and torturers for their "human rights improvements" and "total dedication to democracy".

Total dedication to industrial democracy is exactly what it sounds literally — kill the masses and promote industrial power and the rule of capital. This is what Reagan was talking about.

ZDERA is a US economic sanctions law, albeit illegal at international law, and it has been the tool for strangulating the Zimbabwean economy to the extent that it spawned epidemics like cholera and worsened pandemics like HIV and Aids due to shortage of essential medicines.

The sanctions are considered a total dedication to democracy because they seek to restore the old economic order before the land reforms, an order where in Muckraker’s words "investors keep their money while creating employment for the locals".

 

 

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