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MUGABE - On my way from Harvard back to England I stopped in New York and late one night was photographed sitting in Walter Cronkite's chair in the CBS office.
It was certainly an acknowledgment of the incumbent but even more of his predecessor, Ed Murrow. I was brought up to admire Murrow's courage not only in London in the Second World war but more so in standing up to Senator Joe McCarthy in his witch-hunt against so-called 'Communists'.
I was reminded much later, as all journalists need to be, that while Murrow's ghost may flit in the Upper East Side it is McCarthy's ghost that still haunts Washington DC. the occasion of my reminder was unlikely, not arising from a post mortem on Vietnam nor a prelude to the next talks with China. One very early morning as I was waiting for the red eye flight from Grenada to Barbados there was a storm of gunfire. The plane was taxiing in so we grabbed our luggage and sprinted along the tarmac. the shooting stopped. We didn't bother to look back. The pilot was as anxious as anyone to be off. I thought that someone had robbed the duty free shop but when I reached Barbados I discovered that Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement (it sounds more like a Swiss watch than a revolutionary cell) had overthrown the justly hated Eric Gary. At an American Embassy reception a couple of nights later I heard from the British High Commission staff that Bishop had requested development assistance from the State Department but had been turned down. This surprised me as what Bishop wanted was nugatory but then an American official clarified the situation by asking me whether there was any difference between socialists and communists.
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These democratic agitators were branded as "Revisionists" which is the term used by Eduard Bernstein in his book justifying the gradualist position. So, at the Embassy reception I pointed to the difference in contemporary France between the Socialists and the Communists, noting, incidentally, that even the Communists, when pushed, resort to the ballot box for success.
The trouble with diplomats not knowing the difference between a socialist and a communist, apart from demonstrating appalling ignorance of their craft, is that you don't know a real communist when you see one. They are rightly feared because the scientific apparatus into which they stuff their creed tends to make them as fanatical, blinkered, unreasonable and ruthless as their fundamentalist and Fascist cousins. It is not the creed that matters. Old Testament vengeance, Nazi eugenics and Marxism-Leninism purges have little to divide them. All three codes believe that the end justifies the means. Beside them the sins of democratic corruption on the part of bankrollers and politicians are small.
Last Saturday (1.iv.00.) we saw such a ruthless Communist in action. The 'Security' forces and plain clothed ZANU PF Party workers of Robert Mugabe deliberately intimidated and smashed in the skulls of peacefully demonstrating citizens of every race that lives in Zimbabwe. The story began when successive British Governments could not bring themselves to impose serious sanctions on the then Southern Rhodesia, rebelliously governed by the white Ian Smith. To make matters worse, the United States positively resented and connived at the busting of sanctions. The black pro independence movement, led by Mugabe and others, naturally turned to Communism. What choice did they have? When I sat in bleak Ministries in Harare after Mugabe's victory it ws immediately obvious that the Marxist rhetoric was exhortatory not, well, rhetorical
We should not be distracted by two red herrings that have been introduced
into the post mortem. the first, obviously felt deeply in countries where
white people predominate, is that the attacks were racist, aimed at white
people in particular. that, however, was just a piece of cynical
scapegoating. Plenty of black people ended up in the hospitals and
scapegoating tends to be sequential rather than obsessively focused. We
should, of course, condemn any racism but not lose sight of the bigger
picture, that all minorities, not least the minority Ndebele tribe, better
watch themselves. The second distraction is the theory that Mugabe is
senile. He may be but still he commands unscrupulous armed force and the
central point is that he is prepared to use it in what he sees as a just and
honourable cause. People who do not understand the inexorable dynamic of
'Scientific Marxism' just do not understand this. It was, however,
understood by Hitler and it would have been understood by the leaders of the Movement for the Ten Commandments of God who have caused hundreds to be slaughtered in Uganda in the past two weeks.
The point of these warnings is simple. Western diplomats should, to borrow a military term, be clinical in the way they strike at unpleasant and unfamiliar regimes. Mugabe deserves all the opposition and awkwardness we can muster short of a military invasion but there are many other self-styled 'progressive' regimes, such as South Africa, with which Zimbabwe must not be confused. If that principle had been understood in Washington two decades ago Mugabe would not be with us now, trailing a bloody hammer and sickle into the 21st Century.
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