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Zimbabwe awaits news on Mugabe's future
Zimbabweans are waiting to see what steps the military will take next after seizing control of the country. President Robert Mugabe is said to be under house arrest but the whereabouts of his wife Grace, who was bidding to succeed him as president, are unknown.
South African ministers have been in the capital Harare meeting the army and political parties. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc will hold emergency talks on Thursday.
President Mugabe, 93, has been in control of Zimbabwe since it gained independence from Britain in 1980. But the power struggle over who might succeed him, between Mrs Mugabe and her rival former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa, has split the ruling Zanu-PF party in recent months.
More about Zimbabwe and former President Robert Mugabe.
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CNN: Zimbabwe: Talks underway to form transitional government, source says
NYT editorial: For Zimbabwe, a Coup Isn't the Answer
Extras from BBC: Zimbabwe: Did Robert Mugabe finally go too far? - BBC News
Zimbabwe latest: How can you tell if a coup is happening?
Update: 'Mugabe Must Go': Thousands in Zimbabwe Rally Against Leader
Zimbabwe: Zanu-PF leaders meeting to decide Mugabe future
Pressure weighs on Mugabe to quit after mass protests
Update 2: Zanu-PF has removed Mugabe as party leader, and he may be impeached if he does not resign the Presidency by Monday.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday November 19 2017, @04:43PM (21 children)
I have always been a strong proponent of multi-ethnic democracy. I take it as an article of faith that more viewpoints makes for a stronger labratory of ideas.
Zimbabwe, however, is a very stark counter example. That country was vastly better off as Rhodesia under white rule. What happened after the Zanu-PF took over is exactly what Ian Smith warned would happen. Rhodesia went from being the bread basket of southern Africa to a basket case.
I am still working out what that means. At the moment i'm thinking race doesn't matter, but culture does. Culture in the very broad sense of "how things are done." A country can be a strong, multi-ethnic enterprise, as long as the superstructure of the rules remains sound. If that superstructure is compromised, any rich, powerful country can quickly lose everything. And a country whose superstructure is a priori compromised by a sub-optimal culture (acceptance of corruption, etc) will defeat any natural riches or human capital that might make it rich.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 19 2017, @04:47PM (5 children)
*Anonymous Coward comes along and urges you to take the red pill*
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @05:10PM (4 children)
Undoubtedly that is exactly what some readers were thinking, I bet quite a few chortles went into some coffee mugs seeing Phoenix666 talk about failed cultural mixing.
The US is a great example of how culture mixing can work pretty well. There are millions of muslims, jews, christians, buddhists, and even more esoteric religions / cultures living together mostly fine. I credit our strong governments (fed/state/local) that are able to enforce our relatively decent laws that support freedom. Yes there are massive problems, but I'm talking about the day to day stuff for average citizens. If some muslims want to enforce sharia law in the US they are going to get a pretty good dose of cultural intolerance and in some cases will get a good dose of our worst system: prison.
We don't have to like each other, but we are not allowed to let that extend into violence or persecution.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @10:34PM
When your country USA collapses financially you will see civil war.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @05:04AM
The muslims are not mixing. They still control their own, keeping them in the fold.
They don't get far with sharia... yet. There is now talk about doing official sharia for some parts of France, which is a quarter muslim. Perhaps it won't happen until France is a third muslim. Ultimately, it will happen.
In the history of the world, how many places can you find that have escaped islam? I can only think of southern Spain and most of Israel. Lebanon was Christian, Afghanistan was Buddhist... and the cancer grows to conquer the whole earth.
Muslim population in the USA is rapidly growing. Once it reaches a certain level, it will demand and get a special status. Once it solidly dominates, the genocide of non-muslims begins.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 20 2017, @01:48PM (1 child)
Indubitably. But as those chortles issue from the reflexively racist, they don't bother me much.
And that is the cultural mixing that has been my baseline. America has done a great job incorporating influences from every part of the globe, and that makes the country stronger. That's as long as the superstructure of mores has remained intact. But that superstructure is nearly done in, now. Most of the damage has been from the inside. The powerful and connected have made a mockery of the rule of law. The average citizen has been complacent and allowed those trends to continue. So America has lost its sense of self, and strange, marginal causes and systems have been able to seize center stage in the national discourse.
If we don't have a conservative revolution ("conservative" in the political science sense of restoring what was before), the rich, powerful country America has been will quickly lose everything and the world will be much the poorer for it--imagine a world dominated by China, and shudder.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @05:01PM
You're confusing conservative with reactionary.
They aren't incompatible, so it's an easy mistake to make.
Reactionary: seeking the status quo ante, trying to restore what came before.
Conservative: changing things by slow, incremental changes.
Conservative contrasts with radical. It's quite possible to have a radical reactionary.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Sunday November 19 2017, @05:03PM (2 children)
Well, maybe some guy who has led a very bloody revolution in the past may not be the best choice to lead a country.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @05:11PM
Some revolutions are just bloody. The issue isn't just Mugabe, it's the people that supported his junta all the way and the voters of that country that only cared about what they were given and not how it was being come by.
Stealing from the rich is a lot easier than taxing the rich to pay for the things necessary to build a strong economy where everybody has what they need to thrive.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @06:45PM
That's why most violent revolutions end up as dictatorships. And that's why Marx and Engels were idiots/evil.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @05:09PM (5 children)
The issue here is that the government was being run by a populist that didn't care at all about the consequences of his policies. You see something similar in Venezuela where Chavez burned that country to the ground appealing to people who had nothing by taking away things from the rich without any sort of restraint on his part.
That's not to say that there shouldn't have been any redistribution in those cases, but it has to be done with some degree of restraint and with a plan in mind. You can't take productive farmland away from farmers and give it to people who just use it for housing and expect that there won't be massive consequences in terms of access to food and economic activity. Likewise, you can't nationalize all the businesses and expect that there's going to be foreign investment or any meaningful effort put into running businesses.
The multi-ethnic part of this has more to do with the specific gasoline being used.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @06:03PM (4 children)
In the US the will of the people has been clear for a long time now. Fix election funding and tax the rich. This simple plan would fix a LOT of our problems and allow capitalists to continue doing their thing, but the greedy fuckers bribe and propagandize their way into stealing more and more. I am actually getting a bit nervous that people will actually start trying out violent solutions and I'm not excited about living in that future.
Please please PLEASE AI bot / NSA sucker let your masters know that shit is getting out of hand. Might want to lead off with some short blurb about how clamping down on the populace will only delay and make worse the inevitable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 20 2017, @02:08AM (2 children)
So what? Even if we ignore that these "people" have an extraordinary difficulty in voting for people who would do the above (which strongly undermines the claim), we need to recall that we have laws. Past attempts at this fixing have been pretty clueless about that. If you repeatedly break laws in order to get what you think you want (for example, the McCain-Feingold [wikipedia.org] campaign finance law that has been mostly repeated by the Supreme Court), then it's likely that what you'll have at the end is worse than what you started with. Rule of law is more important than minor issues with election funding and envious tax the rich mentality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @08:28AM (1 child)
Laws are to serve people, people aren't to serve the laws.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 21 2017, @06:55PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @05:07PM
Fix election funding ... right, because Trump bought his way into the White House, waving all those moneydollar benjamins around to hypnotise the rubes, where poor Hillary's broke campaign could hardly afford a coffee break.
... wait, what's that?
OK, hold everything guys, this just in: Hillary outspent Trump pretty much two-for-one. Holy shit, maybe election funding doesn't explain how we got what we got?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @07:35PM
Culture and genetics are in a feedback loop. Evolution can be weird.
Given a fictional static culture, it should be clear that some people will produce more descendants than others will. This isn't completely random. There are thus some traits that, if inherited, lead to more of the same. These traits spread through the population, so the gene pool isn't static.
Given a fictional static gene pool, it should be clear that culture will change with time. Styles change. Popular ideas spread, so the culture isn't static.
Oh dear. Neither culture nor the gene pool is static, and each influences the other. They're going to change and be changed by each other. We will fail to distinguish them when we compare different groups of people, since one can't change without changing the other.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday November 19 2017, @08:13PM
" I take it as an article of faith that more viewpoints makes for a stronger labratory of ideas."
Less faith and more fact-based evaluation of the world around you, please.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday November 20 2017, @04:09AM (2 children)
A scenario being replayed in South Africa even as we speak.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pr on Monday November 20 2017, @06:29AM (1 child)
Interesting comment. There are many similarities between the two countries, and as someone with family from SA, I hope there are sufficient differences for this not to happen there.
PR
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday November 20 2017, @06:42AM
I'm in touch with people in SA and have been following the mess about as closely as one can from the U.S. One can hope, but it doesn't look good. :(
https://nationunderassault.weebly.com/ [weebly.com]
This might interest you:
https://nationunderassault.weebly.com/campaign.html [weebly.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Monday November 20 2017, @08:40AM
Zimbabwe is an example of what happens when a foreign culture rules a nation until it finally gets deposed for good after a long guerrila war. The leader(s) who emerge after such conflict invariably are used to getting things their way by brutal coercion.