The Zimbabwean Crisis

wow steve.. can you be more of a dick please? i enjoy palpable ignorance, and you're just feeding my appetite.

Blacks have a gift when it comes to destroying what whites build. Here in the U.S. they're working over Detroit, Baltimore, and New Orleans pretty well. With the demographic trend the way it is, they'll have the whole country going down the tubes in the next 30-50 years. All this just in time to be enslaved by a rising Asian power or perhaps put out of their misery by some meteorite.

Jim has a compelling argument, but he didn't quite make the connection to Zimbabwe's problems being the fault of the United States, or more specifically, GWBush. He is showing his leftard tendency, though.

Tony raises an interesting theory, but I'd like to expand it and stay away from the traps of racial-oriented explanations. Yes, prima facie evidence does lend itself to asserting that "something" must be different about the African people themselves. I'll offer that perhaps it's not the people's genetics (their intelligence, their race, or whatever) that has hampered their ability to self govern, but rather a lack of "western experience".

The great Western Democracies were based on 2500 years of cultural foundations from Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, &c. There were a whole lot of successes, failures, and ultimately learning about how to run a government that happened during that time. Most of Africa missed all of it! We expect them to act like we do when the population is largely illiterate and almost wholely ignorant of what took us a couple millenia to pick up ourselves.

Literacy is the first step to resolving their condition. WIthout literacy, learning is forvever handicapped. Without learning, a people will live in perpetual ignorance and the problems never get solved -- they'll only move from one strongman/dictator to the next without ever achieving peace or achieving living standards close to the developed world.

Straight talk from Sid.

Thanks for posting the Mugabe Mansion, Alex. It's not quite Versailles, but it might earn Mugabe an eventual "necklacing".