The Rhodesian Dog Whistle – The Introduction to the Introduction
Rhodesia’s second most famous settler, Doris Lessing, couldn’t stomach the place. Here’s why.
Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack where an audio version of this article is also available.
It will not have escaped the attention of the two avid readers of A Plague on Both Houses (yes, I recognise that may be an overestimation) that their inboxes have not been plagued by my tender literary ministrations for well-nigh on two months. An explanation is warranted.
I started writing an article in early December with the good intention of making it my Christmas pressie to you. No frankincense and myrrh on Christmas day for you, my friends. Oh no. Just a lengthy missive about what a turd-fest Rhodesia was. But then something terrible happened. It turned into a bloody book. That was not the plan, and I’m frankly disappointed with myself. I let the spirit of Christmas down, I let my two avid readers down, but most of all…I let myself down.
But this is where we are. The past cannot be undone. I have been given a lemon, and I will now try to give you lemonade.
Why even bother?
So why in the name of all that is good and holy am I writing about Rhodesia? Well for starters, what on earth could I possibly say about Venezuela, Iran, Israel and Greenland that you haven’t already heard a thousand times over? Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) on the other hand – there’s tons you don’t know about, right?
But there is another reason I’m delving deeply into Rhodesia: it irks me to see people who get their history from YouTube and Reddit going on about how misunderstood Rhodesians were, and I am fed to the back teeth with it.
Let me be a little more forthright about my position on Rhodesia – it was a colonial racist shithole run by fascist blockheads. To an extent, I sympathise with the sentiment that our time is not well spent in dusting off the cobwebs of colonial history. But we all know what Orwell said about controlling the past, and there are people trying to repackage the Rhodesian nightmare as a dream. This mangling of history is dangerous, and grotesquely incongruent when done by people purporting to love freedom and truth.
So maybe this bit of colonial history does need some telling with a very specific focus on the Natural Law violations that colonial Rhodesia meted out on a massive scale. You cannot complain about today’s violations of Natural Law, and then expect to be taken seriously by people who know something about colonial history. You will rightly be accused of being a hypocrite.
If I were the lazy type who gets all their history lessons from YouTube or BBC articles, I’d just say to you: trust me on this – even Rhodesia’s second most famous settler, Doris Lessing, couldn’t stomach the place, and she was well qualified to opine. Here’s what she had to say about her flight from Rhodesia:
“Obviously it was very painful but I could not stand that society. You have no idea of the awfulness of it, I was going completely mad and I wouldn’t have stuck it so I knew I had to leave… no one who hasn’t lived in one of these colonies knows just how stultifying they are…”
So, who was Rhodesia’s most famous settler? The clue’s in the name. Yep, that bastard – Cecil John Rhodes. And don’t anybody try to lecture me about speaking ill of the dead. If Rhodesia was a shithole – and it was – then it stands to reason that the man who made it happen – and he did – was a bastard.
And again, if I were the lazy type, I’d try to convince you that you’re not in good company when you try to defend Rhodesia’s record. Dylann Roof, the White supremacist mass shooter who killed nine African Americans in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, was very fond of Rhodesia.
But I’m not the lazy type, and I wouldn’t dare try that sort of cheap manipulation on a savvy audience. Which is why I’ll be throwing the kitchen sink at this nonsense.
Now, I am fully aware that a sizeable proportion of the YouTube subscribers who think Rhodesians were misunderstood also think Hitler was misunderstood. Think Dylann Roof and his Deliverance pals. But if it were only neo-Nazis and other primordial slime who had a hankering for Rhodesia, I obviously wouldn’t be wasting my time writing a book to disabuse them of their primordial slime-drenched arguments.
The curious thing with the Rhodesian Dog Whistle is that it’s being blown in places that shouldn’t, in theory, attract lobotomised Neo-Nazis. I can assure you, I am not looking for this kind of shit. It is finding me. That’s why it’s got my attention. The final straw for me was seeing it in this Unbekoming piece.
The Rhodesia Myth – Oh what a tangled web of contradictions they weave
So what is the Rhodesia Myth? According to that Unbekoming piece, the conventional mainstream narrative that Rhodesia was a colonial racist shithole is simply not true. That reality is, according to Unbekoming, a myth. To paraphrase Unbekoming’s defence of Rhodesia, he’s effectively saying:
“No, Rhodesia really was different! It was the only colonial land theft and exploitation project that actually benefitted the indigenous locals. As such, we should hold it up as a shining example of what colonialism could have been if only the ungrateful natives hadn’t petulantly rejected the good graces of the visiting colonial social workers who were hell-bent on educating and generally civilising the natives.”
Dear Reader, what Unbekoming describes as a myth is in fact reality. To be clear, the official narrative – Rhodesia was a colonial racist shithole – is actually the reality. What’s more, the deeper you dig into that reality, the more horrific it gets.
From this point onwards, in defiance of Unbekoming’s inversion of the concepts of myth and reality, I will use the term “Rhodesia Myth” throughout this series of articles to describe the phantasy of Rhodesia that he projected, since his phantasy is the myth. Just so we are all clear on what I mean, you can refer back to these simple definitions:
Reality = Rhodesia was a racist colonial shithole.
Myth = Rhodesia was a beacon of light in the otherwise grim annals of colonial history.
Starting with the above definitions I toyed with the idea of calling my series of articles, “The Myth of the Rhodesia Myth”. But then I didn’t want people who subscribe to Unbekoming’s definition of the myth (which is the opposite of my definition) to think I was validating their myth. Confusing, right? So, instead I opted for something grittier, which calls out any defence of Rhodesia as a Rhodesian Dog Whistle.
When I read that Unbekoming piece, I desperately wanted to believe it was satire. Alas, it is not. A very odd thing about that piece appearing on Unbekoming’s Substack is that he has demonstrated a lucid understanding of British colonialism in an essay on colonialism in India. That essay is based on a book that, in his words, “systematically dismantles the mythology of benevolent British rule.” So you’d think that Unbekoming would have done some head-scratching and conducted a modicum of research before trying to argue that colonialism in Rhodesia was benevolent, especially when so much of the Rhodesian colonial system, and its political and social ideology, was imported from South Africa. In 1922, Rhodesia came very close to becoming a province of South Africa. That was the medium- to long-term plan from the get-go. Almost no-one doubted it would happen, but then Rhodesians made history for being bloody-minded, not for being nice.
For the record, I subscribe to Lies Are Unbekoming, and I think it is, generally speaking, a very useful resource. He has now featured me twice in his posts, and I’m obviously grateful for that. Ironically, if he had not featured my writing, our paths might not have crossed, and I might therefore never have seen his post misguidedly extolling the virtues of Rhodesia. Do you see what I mean about Rhodesian shit finding me?
So I rolled up sleeves and began working on a rebuttal. And midway in, I was starting to think that perhaps I was wasting my time, and generally taking life too seriously. “Do something more light-hearted”, I thought to myself. You can’t make the punters laugh at Rhodesia; Rhodesia wasn’t funny. Not even a little bit. Believe me, I know, and I got off lightly. And then, out of the blue, another author struck me with the ugly Rhodesia stick. There I was smack in the middle of John Hamer’s The Falsification of History, and apropos of completely nothing, he drops this:
“…Rhodesia and South Africa, two nations which were not ‘politically correct’ and so, were systematically taken down. The Elite run-UN spread vicious lies about Rhodesia and crippled the nation economically, finally turning it over to the Communists led by radical tyrant Robert Mugabe, who renamed it Zimbabwe and has done everything in his power to rape the country… In South Africa, its capital Johannesburg is now the most dangerous city in the world…”
He did not, repeat not, develop that argument. In all of the 733 pages of hit-and-miss theorising about everything from the faked death of Jesus to the extraterrestrial origins of the human species, the above quote is all you’re going to get on Rhodesia.
I mean, just re-read it. Slowly. South Africa and Rhodesia were “taken down” because they were not ‘politically correct’. He’s right to group them together because they were both racist shitholes, and throughout Rhodesia’s history, both had a close relationship in many different ways. But, apartheid was not ‘politically correct’? From the perspective of comedic delivery, there is absolutely no need to add anything to that statement to make it sound any more ridiculous.
What do you say to someone who thinks it was a bad idea to end apartheid because he is now unable to enjoy a safe holiday in Johannesburg? How safe does he think it was for the 5,000 Black people in Sharpeville who decided to peacefully protest against Pass Laws in 1960, only to have the police fire 1,344 rounds of live ammunition into the crowd without warning? Was the Sharpeville massacre, and indeed the whole barbaric architecture of apartheid, simply “a vicious lie”?
It’s disturbing that Hamer doesn’t acknowledge the existence of apartheid as problematic. This minor omission then allows him to use post-apartheid problems, like high crime rates or economic mismanagement, to justify the status quo ante of apartheid. Rhodesian sympathisers do the same thing. “Aha!”, they cry, “Smith was right! Better to have the trains running on time under a racist system than poverty under universal suffrage.”
Even if they did acknowledge that the previous systems of Rhodesian racism or South African apartheid were problematic – and there is zero evidence of that in the Unbekoming or Hamer takes on this topic – it would amount to the equivalent of berating a victim of severe relationship abuse for failing to make a success of their life after they’ve escaped the abuser, and then telling them: “You may have been in an abusive relationship, but at least you had a roof over your head.”
So what do you say to an educated adult who thinks that the entire colonial history of Rhodesia can be reduced to “the Elite run-UN spread[ing] vicious lies”? Perhaps you start by saying there are hundreds of incredibly well researched books on the history of Rhodesia. One such book is a 872-page tome on The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia 1888-1965 by Claire Palley, a constitutional law expert. It is the book on colonial Rhodesia’s legal system. Read a few of these books, and ask yourself how they match up against the accounts presented by YouTube ‘historians’.
That law book is not a light and breezy read, but it made me realise how little I knew about the inner administrative workings of that shithole called Rhodesia. You see, despite being a little screwed up by Rhodesia – countries like that screw up everyone to some extent, except the psychopaths – I was still one of the lucky ones. My parents had it within their power to shield me from a lot of it. I knew all I needed to know from an experiential point of view, but you don’t know the history of a place just because you grew up there.
So I read more. And more. And more. And I matched this new knowledge with my lived experience. And it made sense. Some might say I merely confirmed my bias. Fine. Tell me that after you’ve read the series of articles I am going to post. Tell me all the good things about Rhodesia that completely cancel out the nightmare I’m going to share with you.
The more I read, the more I was able to confirm that the historians weren’t spreading “vicious lies”. In fact, the people who condemn colonial Rhodesia the most are not the historians – it’s the nasty people who created the mess, ran the place, and left a meticulous record of what they were saying and doing.
More contradictions
So, regarding the ludicrous Hamer claims, the question that remains is: if I’m so convinced I’m right, why argue with such foolishness? And again, exactly as with Unbekoming, the answer that keeps me in the Rhodesia rebuttal game lies in the contradictory position taken by Hamer. Elsewhere in his book, Hamer writes:
“This then was also the real reason for the huge expansion of the British Empire from the eighteenth century onwards, to gain control of and suppress the indigenous populations and take control of a country’s natural resources and its peoples with a view to appropriating them for and on behalf of the British Elite families in their pursuit of profits. Britain and other dominant European countries literally stole these resources…” [emphasis added]
And in another passage in Hamer’s book, we see this:
“In third world countries, where people live on the land and by their wits and have not been subjected to our western ‘education’, we take away their lands and their forests by force and coercion and thus, their culture and way of life destroyed, they are then forced to embrace our own insidious consumer culture and ‘educational’ programmes, perpetuating and extended [sic] the corruption system exponentially. This is just another way that the system devours more and more until eventually there will be nothing left to consume.”
But that is exactly what happened to the indigenous people of Zimbabwe when Rhodes’ brigands trundled, uninvited, into Mashonaland in 1890, and planted a Union Jack for Queen and country!
Again, just as with Unbekoming, we see evidence of a clear understanding of the Natural Law violations underpinning Empire and colonialism. But failing to see Rhodesia in this light is a contradiction, and these contradictions tell me that something else is going on, and that it may be worth engaging with a rebuttal.
So! What is it about Rhodesia that is hypnotising people who seem to have more than two grey cells firing away in their skulls? Why does the Rhodesian Dog Whistle call some and not others?
Perhaps the problem for a certain group of intrepid Truthers is that the history of Rhodesia is actually too well-known. And being too well-known equates to downright boring for the intrepid Truther who lives for the thrill of excavating another rabbit hole. I get this; I too am partial to a lively rabbit hole. At any rate, before you know it, familiarity breeds contempt – old, dull and boring becomes equated with wrong. If something is too well-known and therefore boring, it can’t possibly be true since the Truther was not the one who discovered this truth. You see, only Truthers, by definition, can arrive at the truth! Everyone else is a Pretender. “Step aside, Pretenders!”, declare the Truthers, “Leave it to us.” And before you know it, a colonial racist shithole is getting a makeover as a beacon of light in the otherwise grim annals of colonial history.
The fact that the new-found and exciting alternative narrative completely ignores the vast libraries of dull yet irrefutable evidence compiled by those evil mainstream historians does not seem to make the defenders of Rhodesia blush in the slightest.
Look, jokes aside, I get it. Readers of A Plague on Both Houses are by now familiar with my frequent delighting in revisionist histories that expose mainstream omissions or outright lies. That’s part of the raison d’être of A Plague on Both Houses. But for me to get excited about the revisionist narrative it has to contain a barrage of facts that render the official narrative untenable. This requirement has not been met in the defence of Rhodesia.
With all that said, I still feel that writing about Rhodesia is such a weird turn to take that I must supplement the explanation with a formal sales pitch. So here’s the sales pitch.
The sales pitch
What you’re going to get is a partial history of Rhodesia. It’ll be structured to rebut five material claims made by Unbekoming in his defence of Rhodesia. If you’re interested in history (we should all be), but have never read anything about colonialism in Southern Africa, I’m hoping you will find this an interesting and, above all else, credible start.
While this piece might serve as a case study in colonialism, for me it is actually more important than that. The existence of colonial fetish clubs peddling ‘The Rhodesia Myth’, especially in circles dedicated to exposing lies, is testimony to the prevalence of the greatest impediment to a freer and more moral world – the colonised mind. As I will try to show, the work has been done by historians and, to the extent that there is anything new in the coming pieces, it will be to show how nearly every step taken by the actual colonisers and their descendants was a violation of Natural Law.
In fact, the most serious violations, particularly those taken at the start, did not even pass the test of colonial legalism, which was designed to legitimise violations of Natural Law. Sadly, I only came across the term “Natural Law” once in all the books I read. It was in the law book – just one brief sentence saying that it didn’t matter because it was unenforceable. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. It is not that too many historians don’t have a sense of right and wrong, although a few don’t. Rather, it is not considered to be within the professional’s remit to opine too strongly on morality. This withholding of moral condemnation can cause lingering doubts as to whether a particular action was morally reprehensible, or how reprehensible it was.
The simple truth is that most historians and writers don’t have a Natural Law paradigm on which to base judgements about the past. And this is the biggest problem we face in building a freer world. Natural Law is not even understood, let alone at the forefront of our paradigms of analysis. Six years ago, I was as guilty as anyone in this failure, but I have now come to understand that all solutions to current problems have to be framed through the lens of Natural Law if evil is to retreat.
At the outset, I want to make it clear that these pieces are not an attempt to elicit guilt for one very simple reason — unless the reader is 150 years old, no-one alive today is responsible for the colonial crimes of the past. At various times in the more recent past, countries with colonial histories have made efforts to come to terms with their past. This process invariably splits the psyche of the nation, if it is in fact possible to split the psyche of a nation any more than it already is. The homogenous nation is a fiction. The rending of national garments during debates about genocide or marginalisation of indigenous people is the manifestation of the conflicting psychic forces of repression and the need to acknowledge what was done.
But we must all acknowledge what was done for the simple reason that grand Natural Law violations reverberate through time. The most dangerous reverberation of colonialism is the colonised mind itself – the mind that accepts that what was done is simply the way the world works, and therefore all efforts must be directed at ensuring one remains on the right side of the colonising force. We all remember how those of us who did not comply with global tyranny in 2020 proudly proclaimed that it was a test to see who would have gone along with Hitler’s Nazi Germany had they been a German citizen. Smugly, we declared that we had passed the test while the vast majority had failed.
And yet today there are publishers who can look back at colonial Rhodesia and nonchalantly declare that they wouldn’t do Covidian bullshit, but they would do that. If they’re making that declaration with a clear knowledge of the horror of colonial Rhodesia, then we must ask: what were they really objecting to in 2020? And the answer is that they did not object to tyranny; they objected to tyranny directed at them. In other words, their minds are colonised – they don’t object to the colonising force; they just need to avoid being on the sharp end of it.
This series of articles is a ride through history and an invitation to those who need to be invited to simply acknowledge that colonial settler projects were, by their nature, gross violations of Natural Law. All political positions, all belief systems, all thought or absence of it, all action or absence of it, is underpinned by one’s spiritual position. And one’s spiritual position is underpinned by either an acceptance or ignorance of Natural Law. Natural Law is quite simply the foundation of the spiritual shift that needs to take place to get us out of this mess. Natural Law is the be-all and end-all of individual and collective freedom.
To be clear, the most important discovery I have made in the last five years is Natural Law. The widespread ignorance of it is the cause of the mess that humanity is in, and widespread knowledge of it is the solution.
Having acquired some basic facts about Rhodesia, if you choose to simultaneously believe that Rhodesia was all right while purporting to understand the tenets of freedom, then George Orwell himself could not have constructed a more comprehensive manifestation of double-think for you.
I experienced a deep sense of revulsion when I read Unbekoming’s defence of Rhodesia, and the passage in John Hamer’s book declaring in all seriousness that the crimes of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa amounted merely to being “not politically correct.” The real point of my rebuttal is that, regardless of our skin colour, the world is not going to get better until we all experience the same revulsion, because we will all then be on the same Natural Law page.
The dark forces that are driving the world down the path of destruction today are the same forces that drove colonialism. Gaza screams out to the world that colonialism is not over. The final anti-colonial battle we now face is the battle to decolonise the West itself. You cannot be serious about that battle if you are apologising for Rhodesia. If you think those past violations were acceptable, you have, with a colonised mind, granted your consent to be violated today.
Being right about everything is neither possible nor a prerequisite for loving the truth. But thinking that colonial Rhodesia was a beacon of light in the otherwise grim annals of colonial history is a pretty serious error, particularly if we claim to love the truth and to love freedom.
What to expect
One always has one’s work cut out when doing a rebuttal; or at least a good rebuttal. That is because it is all too often much harder to prove a lie than to perpetuate one. You cannot make the same mistakes as the originator of the lie – that is to say, merely stating opinions. You have to throw the whole kitchen sink at it or you end up looking not much different than the rubbish you’re rebutting.
One of the reasons it takes far more work to disprove nonsense than it takes to produce nonsense is that the nonsense almost never starts at the beginning of the story, or, if it does, it glosses over important details and events. The result is this kind of phantasy from Unbekoming’s defence of Rhodesia:
“European settlers transformed an undeveloped region into a prosperous society with justified causes”.
There was a great deal of animosity between Black and White Rhodesians between 1890 and 1980, and yet Unbekoming’s piece totally omits a description of the circumstances under which European settlers ended up “transform[ing] an undeveloped region…with justified causes.” Anyone vaguely familiar with Natural Law understands that the question: “Who started it?” is critical to understanding who is doing the violating, and who is defending against the violation. And despite the horrifying crassness of the statement above that appears in the Unbekoming piece, there are some obvious clues in the statement itself as to who started it.
The people doing the ‘transforming’ were from Europe, and they did not do the ‘transforming’ in their own backyards, where I am certain that much beneficial transforming would have been welcomed at that time. They did it in Africa, and what’s more they were not invited to undertake these transformations. But then those were the good old days when Europeans decreed that uncontrolled immigration was a Good Thing because it was taking place in the ‘correct direction’, and there was no uncontrolled immigration from Africa into Europe, which is most definitely the wrong direction when discussing uncontrolled immigration.
The point I’m making is that to rebut these false arguments, you have to present a detailed account that starts at the beginning, proceeds to the middle, and finishes at the end. Otherwise you run the risk of presenting an account that looks like what you are attempting to rebut.
That is why I make no apologies for the next eight – yes, eight! – pieces to follow. Each piece is essentially a book chapter and, at the end of it, I will probably put it into one pdf and publish the book. If defenders of Rhodesia happen to read my piece and don’t like the information presented, then, regardless of whether I astral travelled to gather my facts or read Palley’s The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia 1888-1965, they will have to ask themselves:
- Is the information presented materially correct? In other words, does the information consist of facts?
- Do the facts support the interpretations I have formulated?
- Are there material omissions and, if so, how do they change the narrative I have presented?
The combustible mixture of greed, racism and sheer stupidity that characterised the Rhodesian regime’s mindset is quite stunning once you conduct in-depth research into Rhodesia’s history. However, the basic pieces of the historical puzzle for understanding the Natural Law violations that took place have always been widely available.
And, unlike much of, say, World War I history, the narrative that many ‘mainstream’ academics have presented is not a tapestry of lies. Nor are there any material omissions that would substantively change the narrative of colonial conquest and exploitation of the indigenous people of Zimbabwe.
Readers familiar with my writing know that I am not suggesting that mainstream academic historians have never failed to present a fair account of historical events. I have expressed harsh opinions on what I believe are academic failures. But those failures have been exposed by credible revisionist narratives supported by compelling evidence. In the case of Rhodesia, the historical record is overflowing with the patently undeniable stupidity and evilness of the Rhodesian regime using that regime’s and the imperial government’s own legislation, records and statements. The deeper one digs into the historical archive, the more awful Rhodesian history gets.
Not only is it all out there in the open, but the results of that evil were plain to see in the lives of those most affected. If one is not prepared to take a teleological view of social and political systems, then one must be prepared to entertain phantasies.
Finally, while small miracles are possible, I have absolutely no delusions of being able to convince unreconstructed Rhodesians that they should abandon their precious Myth. These are people who worshipped abusive power because it worked for them. They lost that power and they are bitter. They are beyond salvation. I hope to reach people who may have come across the Rhodesia Myth, don’t have time to do the required deep reading, and are tempted to believe that the unreconstructed Rhodesians selling lies, omissions, and half-truths might actually have a point. They don’t.
In the next instalment, Part I – The Introduction, I will set out the material claims made by Unbekoming in his defence of Rhodesia and I will outline my approach to deconstructing them. I will do some preliminary deconstruction of the claims based on the contradictions within the claims themselves and between the claims.
If you liked this article but don’t want to commit to a paid subscription, please consider rewarding my writing using the BuyMeACoffee link below. Thank you!
Comments are closed.