Here’s to you, Ian Smith

Let us say thank you for the life of Ian Smith, a hero and martyr of Western and British civilization who was “once the most hated man in Britain,” and even now after his death “is demonised as he was in life,” writes Steven Glover in the Daily Mail. Glover makes vivid for us the nature of the Rhodesia that Smith led for 14 years in defiance of Britain after it insisted that he initiate black majority rule. Glover too had shared the general contempt for Smith’s white-ruled Rhodesia, until he went to Rhodesia in 1978 and saw for himself what it was like:

I had been travelling around Black Africa for several months, having my camera stolen by a customs official in one country and being threatened by soldiers in several others, before arriving in Salisbury (now Harare), the capital of Mr Smith’s supposedly evil, white-ruled regime.

Black immigration officials welcomed me at the airport.

I found a well-ordered, very British place which, despite having been subjected to international sanctions for 13 years, was much richer than any of the independent African states I had visited.

There were many black guests in my hotel, and no evidence of apartheid.

After a few days it began to dawn on me that my liberal preconceptions were at least partly misplaced.

The moment the scales fell from my eyes came, oddly, at an agricultural fair.

A white farmer showed me a new type of high-yielding wheat seed developed by a Rhodesian scientist.

He could as easily have been at an agricultural fair in Shropshire or Wiltshire, but he was in the middle of Africa.

I realised then that, whatever might be said against Rhodesia, it had a sophisticated civilisation that was worth preserving. [Italics added.]

Of course, I was not blind to its faults. Out in the bush I was shocked by the way a white farmer treated his black workers.

Nevertheless, it was a country with an advanced infrastructure and first world standards, and it was surely highly desirable that these things should be maintained as it moved towards black majority rule, which came two years later in 1980. [Italics added.]

Where is my white farmer now with his revolutionary wheat?

His farm will have been confiscated by Mr Mugabe some years ago; there are no white-owned farms left in Zimbabwe.

Very likely it will be occupied by one of Mugabe’s henchmen, and have run wild.

A country that exported maize, wheat and tobacco 25 years ago does not produce nough food to feed half its population.

Why can’t Mr Smith’s critics admit they got things at least partly wrong?

Everything he said would happen has come about—only worse.

When he spoke out against black majority rule, he cannot have foreseen that within 25 years millions of Zimbabweans would be fleeing their country, and that many of those who stayed would be starving.

Life for the poorest black under Ian Smith was incalculably better than it is under Robert Mugabe.

Read the rest of the article. Glover criticizes Smith for not “encouraging the growth of a moderate, educated, black middle-class with democratic values.” But, frankly, given the average IQ of African blacks which is 70, the majority will never be suitable for middle class jobs and thus a sizeable middle class will never be possible. Without a middle class, democracy is meaningless. The question at issue, then, was not democracy, but civilization. Rhodesia had a civilization, from which all its people, black and white, benefited. That civilization depended on rule by Rhodesia’s tiny white minority. This was the ineluctable reality which Smith understood and on which he took his stand—and for which suicidal liberal Britain hated him then and hates him still.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 22, 2007 08:15 AM | Send