Topic: Decline of the West
So Jimmy Kimmel got all choked up on the air while discussing the sad demise of Cecil the Lion. What a sensitive guy!
Here I should stipulate my own indignation over Cecil’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis dentist who, apparently, has read too much Hemingway. Shooting lions and tigers and elephants may have been the mark of a pukka sahib but come on—the sun has set on the British Empire! Speaking of which reminds me that Cecil’s home country of Zimbabwe was once a British colony, Rhodesia. Back in the Sixties the white settler minority took Rhodesia out of the Empire to avoid black majority rule. After a long insurgency the white minority threw up the sponge and Rhodesia went back under British sovereignty for a brief interlude pending elections and the installation of a black majority government. In 1980 the colony became independent as the Republic of Zimbabwe.
I mention this history because of the results of thirty-five years of misrule by Zimbabwe’s grotesque strongman, Robert Mugabe. As a principal leader of the struggle against white minority rule he was hailed as a freedom fighter. But from the moment of his election as prime minister of the new nation, Mugabe unleashed a reign of terror. Whites were purged from the armed forces, the police and the civil service. Black political and tribal rivals were (and are) viciously persecuted. To take a single example, from 1982 to 1985 some 20,000 members of the minority Matabele tribe were killed by government security forces and thousands more were mistreated and tortured in concentration camps. The Matabeleland Massacres, as they were called, set the pattern for Mugabe’s treatment of his tribal and political rivals.
Mugabe and his kleptomaniacal regime also destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy, particularly its once-vibrant agricultural sector. Under white minority rule agriculture supported 400,000 jobs and agricultural exports were the country’s main source of foreign exchange. But after 1980 “land reform”—actually the confiscation of white-owner farms and their handover to Mugabe’s cronies—wrecked the agricultural sector and transformed Zimbabwe into a net importer of foodstuffs. Today, much of the country experiences “food insecurity”: chronic malnutrition sometimes rising to the level of famine.
With these sad facts of history in mind I asked myself if Jimmy Kimmel has ever shed a tear for the people of Zimbabwe. Theirs, after all, is a tragic story. In 1980 the black majority greeted independence with high hopes for the future while the white minority seemed prepared to cooperate with the new government. There was every reason to believe that Zimbabwe would flourish as an independent, democratic nation. Instead the people, black and white, got misgovernment, economic decline, corruption and despotism. By every measure—human rights, living standards, public health, economic development—Zimbabwe is far worse off today than it was in 1980.
But it’s hard to envision Jimmy Kimmel choking up over the sad state of affairs in Zimbabwe. Chances are he knows next to nothing about it. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people can be killed, tortured, starved, infected with AIS and cholera, made homeless, etc. without eliciting a peep of protest from our celebritocracy. A Matabele tribesman, reduced to skin and bones by famine, is a victim best ignored lest awkward questions be raised. How much less awkward it is to emote over the death of Cecil the Lion, to revile his killer, to demand that the hapless Minneapolis dentist be arrested, extradited, made to face Zimbabwean justice. Ah, what Evelyn Waugh could have done with that scenario!
Thinking about all this brings no tear to my eye. But it does turn my stomach with the nausea of disgust.
