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 Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: OzPar  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 07:51

A truly evil dictator is dead. A monster of a man who should have been kicked out of power 30 years ago. He had no right to a long life and a peaceful end.
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: Parsbilly  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 08:26

hopefully it wasn't
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: Captain Desmond Fancey  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 08:48

If only Zimbabwe was oil rich he might have been taken out a good few years earlier.

They say you shouldn't wish ill on the dead, but I really hope a special place in hell is waiting for him.
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: ipswichpar  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 11:22

I only caught a bit of radio 4....it really sounded to me like they thought he was great but the last couple of years were a bit iffy.

Hopefully I misheard.
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: Captain Desmond Fancey  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 11:24

There is even a #RIPMugabe trending on Twitter today with people paying sincere respects to the 'man'.

Unreal.


The good old days
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: sammer  
Date:   Fri 6 Sep 17:13

Mugabe’s record is poor, very common in any leader who stays in power too long. The ‘evil dictator’ tag in his case has a fair amount of supporting evidence, although it is worth remembering that much of it comes from white racists who are still weeping over the loss of Rhodesia.

Mugabe comes across as one of these highly intelligent but cold-blooded men who eventually loses any meaningful contact with those who originally put him in power. He will always suffer in comparison with Mandela whose intelligence was matched by a natural generosity of spirit. Mugabe’s worst crimes went largely unreported in the western media, back in the early 1980s when he turned on previous ally Nkomo and wiped out around 30,000 of his opponents in a political genocide. The howls of western anguish were much louder in the late 1990s when white farmers were being thuggishly driven off their farms or even murdered by a rabble claiming to be veterans of the civil war. Needless to say once these marauding bandits took control of the farms the country suffered from a food shortage.

So, not many will mourn for Mugabe. His role in the struggle for independence will of course be airbrushed from western history even if recognised by many even of his enemies. However he was needlessly ruthless in his handling of opposition and brought a potentially thriving country to its knees economically.
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: OzPar  
Date:   Mon 9 Sep 15:40

<<Mugabe’s worst crimes went largely unreported in the western media, back in the early 1980s when he turned on previous ally Nkomo and wiped out around 30,000 of his opponents in a political genocide. The howls of western anguish were much louder in the late 1990s when white farmers were being thuggishly driven off their farms or even murdered by a rabble claiming to be veterans of the civil war.>>


sammer, I find it slightly chilling how you have a tendency to rewrite history to suit your own ideology. You claim that our media largely ignored the genocidal atrocities of Mugabe's so-called Fifth Brigade who systematically murdered, pillaged and raped their way through the Ndebele tribelands of Matabeleland back in the early 80s.

This is nonsense. It was all over the media at the time, certainly enough to prompt my wife and I to join a massive crowd of many thousands in Hyde Park protesting these actions by Mugabe's louts. There were many well-known speakers at that protest - MPs from all parties, including Michael Foot who I remember, spoke really well, TV personalities, journalists like Sandy Gall and John Simpson, etc.

You are being disingenuous to claim these matters "went largely unreported" as there was some white racist agenda going on at the time. There was not; there was a lot of anger and outrage - both black and white - about what was going on in Zimbabwe.



Post Edited (Mon 09 Sep 15:49)
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: Wotsit  
Date:   Mon 9 Sep 17:24

It's interesting how folk react to the death of a decisive figure.

When Thatcher died a lot of the folk in this thread would have been horrified that anybody would deign to speak ill of the dead, yet here they are doing just that.

I'm not bothered myself - I think it's reasonable to celebrate the passing of somebody who had a negative impact on your life.
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 Re: Mugabe is dead
Topic Originator: sammer  
Date:   Mon 9 Sep 18:40

Ho Ozpar,

I was certainly generalising and did not want to question the efforts of those like yourself who were raising the issue of ZAPU supporters being slaughtered at the time. I remember the Observer newspaper at the time highlighted what was happening, but your reference to Michael Foot (and presumably Jeremy Corbyn was there too) only reinforce my feeling that so long as Mugabe, despite his earlier class war rhetoric, kept his hands off the rich, white farmers then he was given a free pass by mainstream media. Lord Carrington, a central figure in the transfer of power in former Rhodesia, was fulsome in his praise of Mugabe in his memoirs in 1988, a good few years after the genocide. Carrington would not have done this had Mugabe’s victims been white farmers obviously, so yes, I think there was a racist aspect to how Mugabe’s rule was reported.

What was skirted over in Mugabe’s obituaries was the fact he spent a fair number of years in Rhodesian prisons for the crime of being opposed to white minority rule. He was locked up for being a member of the awkward squad in a country with which we had very strong ties, one which we were persuaded ‘shared our values’ in modern jargon. Many of those who were lining up to condemn Mugabe last week are re-writing history far more than I can ever do: they were suggesting that Rhodesia was a land of milk and honey under white premier Ian Smith (of Scottish descent) until the murderous Marxist Mugabe seized power. Smith was the equal of Mugabe in the ‘evil dictator’ stakes but never referred to as such in western media. Too many crocodile tears were being shed last week for black victims of Mugabe, tears which were not being shed when the same groups were being attacked by Smith, and which were largely absent in 1981. You are exempt from that criticism since you were demonstrating against the slaughter in Matabeleland when it was unfashionable to do so. You said, with good reason, you wanted him out of power 30 years ago: but there are many of his critics who never forgave him for overturning white minority rule before that.

Wotsit,
I think the comparison with Mrs. Thatcher’s death is quite an apt one, albeit there were very few state political murders under her rule. The media were draped in sackcloth and filming a state funeral while in former mining villages they were burning effigies to the backdrop of the nation’s biggest selling record, ‘Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead.’ Both responses were genuine reactions to her passing.
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