Sixty Joyless De-Britished Uncrowned Commonpoor Years (1949-2009)

Elizabeth II Vice-Regal Saint: Remembering Paul Comtois (1895–1966), Lt.-Governor of Québec
Britannic Inheritance: Britain's proud legacy. What legacy will America leave?
English Debate: Daniel Hannan revels in making mince meat of Gordon Brown
Crazy Canucks: British MP banned from Canada on national security grounds
Happy St. Patrick's: Will Ireland ever return to the Commonwealth?
Voyage Through the Commonwealth: World cruise around the faded bits of pink.
No Queen for the Green: The Green Party of Canada votes to dispense with monarchy.
"Sir Edward Kennedy": The Queen has awarded the senator an honorary Knighthood.
President Obama: Hates Britain, but is keen to meet the Queen?
The Princess Royal: Princess Anne "outstanding" in Australia.
H.M.S. Victory: In 1744, 1000 sailors went down with a cargo of gold.
Queen's Commonwealth: Britain is letting the Commonwealth die.
Justice Kirby: His support for monarchy almost lost him appointment to High Court
Royal Military Academy: Sandhurst abolishes the Apostles' Creed.
Air Marshal Alec Maisner, R.I.P. Half Polish, half German and 100% British.
Cherie Blair: Not a vain, self regarding, shallow thinking viper after all.
Harry Potter: Celebrated rich kid thinks the Royals should not be celebrated
The Royal Jelly: A new king has been coronated, and his subjects are in a merry mood
Victoria Cross: Australian TROOPER MARK DONALDSON awarded the VC
Godless Buses: Royal Navy veteran, Ron Heather, refuses to drive his bus
Labour's Class War: To expunge those with the slightest pretensions to gentility
100 Top English Novels of All Time: The Essential Fictional Library
BIG BEN: Celebrating 150 Years of the Clock Tower

Tuesday 27 November 2007

“It was better under Smith.”

In its obituary The New York Times, reliably enough, calls him a white supremacist. The London Times was more balanced in its appraisal, citing the complexity of the land he ruled. The question that will always hang over the memory of Ian Douglas Smith (1919-2007), the eighth and last Prime Minister of what was officially known as Southern Rhodesia, was whether he was a bigot. Proclaiming that “the white man is master of Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep it,” tends to suggest a rather unenlightened view on race relations. Yet Barry Goldwater said: "We need more men like Ian Smith, I think, in the world today. We have too few leaders and I'd like to see him multiplied a little bit, and spread around." Henry Kissinger, who escaped from Nazi persecution, wept as he told Smith that the United States would force him to accept black majority rule.

Settled in the final years of the nineteenth century by the British, Rhodesia was named in honour of the legendary imperialist Cecil Rhodes and encompassed, at one point, areas of what is now Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Southern Rhodesia was created as a self-governing colony in 1923. From its inception the stark demographic and economic fact of the young state's existence was that its tiny white population's - 5.5% at its height in the early 1970s - controlled most of its land and wealth. Ian Smith's father, an immigrant Scottish butcher, was fond of remarking that "we're entitled to our half of the country and the blacks are entitled to theirs." The black "half" was often its poorest and least fertile lands. While shocking to modern sensibilities the Rhodesia that Smith was born into in 1919 had many similarities to the frontier societies of Canada, Australia, the United States and Latin America. The meeting of technologically and politically advanced societies, with those scarcely out of the stone age, produced similar inequities everywhere it happened. It was the hard luck of 'old Smithy,' as he was fondly known to white Rhodesians, to lead a frontier European society in the age of de-colonization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1960 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, visiting Cape Town, gave his "Winds of Change" speech, advising his audience of the inevitability of independence for Europe's African colonies. For most British possessions on the continent this was to be largely straight forward process, at least from the perspective of the Colonial Office in London. British rule in India was a Byzantine, quasi-federal structure, from which, somehow, a new nation state was to emerge in a matter of little more than a dozen months. The problems confronting Whitehall in Africa were simpler, its rule more recent and the natives' pre-existing political structure mostly tribal in nature. There were small white settler populations in, mostly, Southern Africa.

In Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania these were little better than a scattering. Rhodesia and South Africa were the exceptions. White populations had achieved an economic and social critical mass, they had developed an advanced First World society in the midst of poorest areas of the Third World. It was, in the wake of Macmillan's speech, the fond hope of Whitehall that Her Majesty's white African subjects would accept the new realities quietly and sensible. As early as 1948 South Africa had embarked on a policy of Apartheid, sensing the potential loss of power to an increasingly political aware black population. While Rhodesia never adopted policies as draconian as Apartheid, the fear of being "overwhelmed" by the black population was acute and came to a head in 1965. Britain would only countenance granting independence to the colony if black majority rule were accepted by the white leadership. This, the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and the vast majority of the country's white population, refused to do. On November 11th of that year Smith read out a unilateral declaration of independence, the first in British Imperial history since 1776:

We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity, and in this belief we have this day assumed our sovereign independence. God bless you all.
International recognition did not come and the new nation remained a pariah. For the next fifteen years Smith, and the approximately quarter of a million Rhodesian whites, found themselves in the glare of the world's media. Denounced as bigots and exploiters, a last hold out, save South Africa, of white misrule on the continent. For seven years the British government attempted to negotiate an end to what was technically a rebellion. Harold Wilson was told by his advisors that military intervention might provoke a mutiny among British forces. He responded by inviting Smith to two meetings in Gibraltar, at the first of which he attempted to berate the Rhodesian PM into accepting black majority rule. In 1972, after a last ditch effort by the Conservative government of Ted Heath, negotiations collapsed. Two years later Smith, under international pressure, released several black nationalist leaders, whom he had arrested nine years earlier. This, probably, served as the catalyst for a guerrilla war that was to last until the end of white rule in 1980.

The myth, spread by a sympathetic western media, emerged during the Bush War, that Robert Mugabe, an African Castro, lead his nation to freedom. The future tyrant, however, was only one of the more prominent of a series of guerrilla leaders vying for control of the country. It was a fight, incidentally, the Rhodesian Army was winning, but at an enormous cost to the country's finances. Facing the beginnings of an international campaign against Apartheid, the South African government of John Vorster began to withdraw financial and military support in late 1974. The real beginning of the end for Rhodesia, however, was not on the African veldt but in the streets of Lisbon on the morning of April 25th, 1974.

Since 1966 the United Nations, backed by the United States and Britain, had maintained a policy of sanctions against the rebel state. South Africa, and several large international companies, had engaged in extensive sanctions busting. Less well known was the support lent by the Portuguese colonial government in Mozambique. The shortest supply route between the Rhodesian capital Salisbury (now Harare) and the outside world lay along the railway line to the port of Beira. The Portuguese Imperial government, fighting its own counter-guerrilla campaigns in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, was more than willing to support Rhodesia's own efforts. With the overthrow of the country's fascist government in 1974, the colonies were quickly abandoned. Mozambique, under Communist rule, became a haven for anti-government forces in the Rhodesian Bush War. With South Africa now seeking detente with its new neighboring governments, Rhodesia was alone. Near bankrupt, Smith faced Henry Kissinger at the American embassy in Pretoria in September 1976. Kissinger's message was blunt, black majority rule in two years.

Smith's contention, derided as bigoted rationalizations at the time, that black rule would lead to chaos and tyranny proved itself correct, not only in the new Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia was renamed, but through out the continent. In his 1998 book Smith concluded, perhaps somewhat smugly: “I think I can correctly comment: I told you so. History records that my predictions have materialized.” In a 1983 interview he noted: “We gave Rhodesia 15 wonderful years extra, then this sort of scene would have come earlier.” In 2004 he observed:

There are millions of black people who say things were better when I was in control. I have challenged Mugabe to walk down the street with me and see who has most support. I have much better relations with black people than he does.
Unlike Mugabe, who lives in armed compound, Smith, even in the bloodiest years of the Bush War, lived with little in the way of police protection. In his last years perfect strangers would often wander into his house asking for help. “It was better under Smith," said even some of his former enemies.

A clue to the nightmare that has become Zimbabwe comes from Theodore Dalrymple, who worked as a doctor in that country in the last years of the Smith regime. From an article in his collection Our Culture, What's Left of It:

Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy(whites first, Indians and colored second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which escaped me at first; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family.

[...]

It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were suppose to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, of every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do they very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes. Viewed in this light, African nationalism was a struggle for power and privilege as it was for freedom, though it co-opted the language of freedom for obvious political advantage.
Dalyrmple then turns his attention to the Europeans themselves:

Perhaps the most baleful legacy of British and other colonials in Africa was the idea of the philosopher-king, to whose role colonial officials aspired, and which they often actually played, bequeathing it to their African successors. Many colonial officials made great sacrifices for the sake of their territories, to whose welfare they were devoted, and they attempted to govern them wisely, dispensing justice evenhandedly. But they left for the nationalists the instruments needed to erect the tyrannies and kleptocracies that marked post-independence Africa.
I would like to make clear that I don't regard Ian Smith as an advocate of such views. What I wished to highlight with this post was that Smith, despite the bigotry of many of his supporters, represented the values of freedom and civilization. There is simply no comparison between the American South and Southern Africa. Black Americans were born within an essentially free nation, though one which denied them full status as citizens until very recently. They accepted, overwhelmingly, the values of that society as far as their situation allowed. To imagine that a thug like Robert Mugabe somehow exists on the same moral plain with figures like Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington or Martin Luther King is blasphemy. Ideas matter and the culture that propagates them matters.

A better solution to the Rhodesian crisis would have been, to offer merely a suggestion, voting qualifications based on education coupled with a massive literacy and educational campaign among the black African population. While such qualifications have a dark history as one of the pillars of Jim Crow, limiting the franchise was one of the keys to Britain's peaceful transition to mass democracy in the late Victorian era. The better Rhodesians, I believe, had the same vision as the British Liberals of the nineteenth century, educate, liberate and then extend the vote. Democracy as the last stage in the development of liberty.

35 comments:

Sir Edward Heath said...

"I don't believe in black majority rule - not in a thousand years." - Ian Douglas Smith.

He ignored Her Majesty's Government.

He ignored Her Majesty's Commonwealth.

Why is this post on a blog called The Monarchist?

Ian Smith didn't take much notice of the Monarchy.

Kipling said...

He reluctantly ignored Her Majesty's government after they proceeded to hand him and his countrymen out to dry. He was a monarchist and did believe in the Commonwealth, sadly London didn't believe in him.

I understand that he was, technically, a republican but like much of what else he did we must understand the context.

To answer your last question Beaverbrook asked me post to this here at the Monarchist. It was originally over at my blog, The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

Anonymous said...

Can I just point out that the UDI was no the first unilateral declaration of independence in British history since 1776. Ireland did it in 1916, even though it took a while for the message to get through.

Don

Sir Edward Heath said...

I wonder what the Queen thought of him.

Ignoring Her Government.

Ignoring Her Commonwealth.

The Monarchist said...

This is scholarly writing, Kipling. I think you have struck the right context and provided an honest portrayal of the man. A scholastic achievement.

For Mr. Welton's edification, this blog was never intended to be just a narrow focus on the merits of monarchy versus republic, but more on the cultural, institutional, political and historical legacy of our shared British Commonwealth heritage. That means that in addition to posts on Her Majesty, there will be posts on Churchill, Thatcher, Borden, Smuts and Hughes; on Burke, Kipling and Rhodes; on Generals Booth, Botha and Baden-Powell...you get the point.

Carry on handsomely.

Sir Edward Heath said...

Oh, yes, I get the point.

Yet I think you've missed the point.

I was wondering what the Queen thought of him.

Ignoring Her Government, ignoring Her Commonwealth.

:-)

The Monarchist said...

I don't think there is a soul on this earth that knows what the Queen thinks on anything. She's an extremely well guarded secret. That she will never grant an interview to a prying media largely explains the success of her reign.

Sir Edward Heath said...

Indeed.

Makes you wonder though. I wonder what Her Majesty makes of what you, you alone call, "our shared British Commonwealth heritage"? You know like Churchill and then those people like Smith and "the T".

Especially as it involves ignoring Her Commonwealth.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, the title of the article is probably right. "Better" does not imply any specific level of "good" on the part of those being compared. 0.01 is still always smaller than 0.02.

Lord Best said...

Sounds like Smith saw de-colonialization for what it was, an ill planned attempt to jettison the increasing sense of guilt and responsibility the West had towards its colonies. Look at the results, barely a functioning state or society amongst them. And who do the LEft wing blame for the failure of this predominately left wing policy? The conservatives of course. A well intentioned policy fails through poor planning and disastrous implementation, ergo, the conservatives must have sabotaged it.
Bah. I wasnt even born when all this happened.

J.K. Baltzersen said...

Great obituary, with which I basically agree. I just have one little point to make:

Democracy as the last stage in the development of liberty.

I agree that it is better to eat a rotten elephant in small bits and pieces over quite a few meals than all in one meal, but eating a rotten elephant is a bad idea none the less.

It is probably true that the relative success of democracy in the West, and in the Commonwealth Realms in particular, is partly due to the piecemeal implementation of democracy.

However, we must also remember that there is a greater cultural heritage that democracy has done much harm to, but not totally destroyed.

I have my reservations about unqualified voting rights in the West of today, even if it was better to introduce them piecemeal than all at once.

Democracy is not liberty, and modern, unchecked, full-fledged democracy is certainly not.

A rotten elephant is a rotten elephant, even if you eat it piecemeal.

Sir Edward Heath said...

However, you dress it up.

However, you avoid the question.

I guess it boils down to just one question.

Black majority rule.

Do you believe in it?

Her Majesty's Government and Commonwealth do.

Do you?

Anonymous said...

This is a great piece of writing and an interesting piece.

"I don't believe in black majority rule - not in a thousand years." - Ian Douglas Smith.

I think it's obvious what he meant. And obvious Neil above couldn't care less what he actually meant by it - even if its playing out live now, regardless of what Her Majesty's government hope (not believe)

Anonymous said...

Very interesting. Well written too.

Thanks

Anonymous said...

While we may never know exactly what the Queen thought of Smith, I'm pretty sure her late mother sympathized with him.

Sir Edward Heath said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sir Edward Heath said...

As Beavers would say - whose to say?

Yes, the piece is very well written but I prefer rounded pictures, as opposed to square ones.

Some very unkind person might say that the problems we have now are as a direct consequence of Ian Smith.

I think it is called "a backlash".

If only the Commonwealth had been listened to...

Anyway, black majority rule.

Do you believe in it in principle? I do. But do you?

Now, all don't rush forward.

The silence is deafening.

Kipling said...

One of the fun things about this blog is getting to debate Neil. For anyone interested please refer to my previous two-part post Men and Principles, Mr. Welton was in fine form then too.

"Black majority rule.
Do you believe in it?"

Old debating trick that. Getting your opponent to accept your premises. I don't think anyone here believes democracy is a value in and of itself. It is tool, a means to an end. Understanding this as such, its value depends on the context.

Black majority rule was a good thing in Botswana but a bad thing pretty much everywhere else in Africa. It has not lead to social collapse in Alabama or Mississippi, it has in Zimbabwe.

As for the backlash, is that why virtually every nation in sub-Saharan Africa is such a bloody mess? Is the disaster of Zimbabwe really vengence for the policies of Ian Smith? The whites have treated us badly, let's trash our country? It does not follow.

The two nations in sub-Saharan Africa not to have been colonized by Europeans, except very briefly, are Liberia and Ethiopia. Have they fared better than the average?

The issue is not black majority rule but whether it is prudent to entrust the right to vote to people lacking in even functional literacy? Who have no understanding of the values of liberty and public discourse? It does not mean that they are not entitled to their individual rights, but they are deprived of one civic right until they have the tools to exercise it.

Hopefully the above helps to reduce the silence to a dull roar ;)

adams said...

Niel

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

That is why every thoughtful writer on politics has advocated some form or attenuation of the polular will. The House of Lords, the US Senate, separate executive, legislative, and judicial organs. etc.

So to answer you directly, I think the voting system in place in Rhodisia in 1964 was quite justified.

Anonymous said...

Simply saying "you can't vote because your skin doesn't look like mine" isn't "an attenuation of the popular will," it's trampling on the popular will.

Things may have been better under Smith. That doesn't make what Smith did right.

"I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years."

Why is a monarchist website celebrating such statements? This kind of posting just leads to the (unfounded) accusations that all monarchists are white, christian, ethnic supremacists. I'm only the first of those, and I resent the assumption that I must be the other two because I think the current constitutional monarchy is the absolute best system there is.

Kipling said...

Anonymous,

"you can't vote because your skin doesn't look like mine"

It's a little more complicated. The 1972 deal worked out between Alec Douglas-Home and Smith to end UDI and bring Rhodesia into the Commonwealth was somewhat more subtle. As Wikipaedia explains:

"The Conservatives won the 1970 British general election and the new British government reopened negotiations with Smith. In 1971 the British government offered the Smith administration even more generous terms to end UDI. In particular, the Rhodesian land apportionment which reserved 50% of the country's land for white ownership would be allowed to continue in perpetuity. British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home privately warned Smith that it would be unwise to do this. The electoral system would be modified to allow black representation in the assembly to grow in line with voter numbers rather than contribution to the fisc and there would be no equal representation cap. However, education and wealth qualifications in the electoral roll would keep black representation very much in a minority for an extended period. Smith stated that this settlement allowed that "racial discrimination may continue as long as it is justifiable and reasonable" and he accepted it."

Not exactly the words of an arch racist "as long as it is justifiable and reasonable." Not segregation now, segregation forever. If you could sum up Smith's views on Rhodesia's blacks it would probably be the phrase "have devil, half child" from Kipling's a White Man's Burden. Patronising yes, but more humane than the alternatives.

The Monarchist said...

Why is a monarchist website celebrating such statements?

Nobody here is celebrating such statements, so drop the accusation. If anyone does, I will be the first to delete it.

Anonymous said...

Not segregation now, segregation forever.

What else does "I don't believe in black majority rule in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years." mean? I know 1000 years isn't technically "forever," but it might as well be.

Sir Edward Heath said...

Something I said. :-)

Anyway, I've made my point.

As always.

"Black majority rule. Do you believe in it?" - this is not an "old debating trick". It is a question on a matter of principle demanding a very straight yes or no answer.

Indeed, I feel rather sorry for you if you can't answer it.

I gave my answer - I believe in it. I stated that here because as a monarchist I do believe in it. I believe in it most passionately with all my heart and with all my soul. As a monarchist community, I like to think that we all believe in it too. If you don't believe it, then you'd better start believing it - or, better still, stop claiming that you speak for the monarchist community. For by so doing you are just doing enormous harm and damage to our great cause. Those you alienate will not "like it or lump it" - they will go elsewhere. They will go somewhere where they feel at home and more properly valued - they will support the republican cause. For life wasn't "better under Smith". Life is always better in a free, fair and open democracy - with all its faults.

Thanks Anonymous for restoring my faith in humanity.

Now, don't forget - all those people lacking in functional literacy (you know, those with no understanding of the values of liberty and public discourse) will one day be voting in your next referendum on the Monarchy.

Trouble is - most of them will be white.

:-o

Sir Edward Heath said...

Oh, I agree.

http://themonarchist.blogspot.com/2007/06/men-and-principles-part-one.html

Excellent debate.

adams said...

Niel the reason asking a question like that is a debating trick is because it leaves the context undefined.

Do I believe in majority rule black or white?

It depends. Are those who will wield the franchise educated reasonable men?

If so, then of course yes. If not then no.

Vox Populi Vox Dei is no more a true principal of government than the divine right of kings.

Popular government is better than constant coups, but it is not more important than individual rights and the rule of law.

J.J. said...

It’s really a classic example of a “problem of one’s own making.”

The 19th Century British colonial policy (and indeed the colonial policy of practically all of Europe at the time) was to basically treat Africa as some sort of glamorous country club for white settlers. No one really cared one iota what the Africans wanted or thought; the social Darwinism of the time had firmly established that they were a fundamentally backwards and stupid people whose role in life was to harvest and care for the members of the superior society.

It was thus more than just an incidental fact that by the time the 20th Century anti-colonialism movement came along the blacks were unqualified to run a competent government. This was in fact the deliberate result of decades of deliberate colonial policy to keep them in (or at least make no effort to alleviate them from) a state of servitude and ignorance. It’s similarly not a coincidence that the governments many Africans established in the post-colonial period were military regimes, as the military was one of the very few sophisticated “white” institutions they were allowed to fully participate in during the colonial times.

I do have sympathy for the white populations of Africa, and I have known many of them in my short life, as my community seems to have a rather large ex-pat population of Rhodesians and Afrikaners. But the only reason these people don’t have a country today is because they were such selfish, racist, spoiled, ignorant slugs during their time in power. White governments may have generated some short term material successes, with the “breadbasket of Africa” and all the rest, but any regime founded on a constitutional principle of keeping the majority impoverished and uneducated is a regime that is actively sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Shaftesbury said...

We cannot really judge the events of 1965 fairly here, as this all occured during the Cold War and in the wake of decolonisation.

I think we would all agree that representative democracy works best and is the best of systems for Britons & those of Western European cultural descent and those influenced postively by Western European enlightenment ideals.

Can we say that Mugabe and his brand of Democracy have been good for the former Rhodesia? I think not.

What is interesting is that Smith was able to walk around without any fear in Mugabe's hell-hole, and was actually looked upon with respect by many Africans when he ventured into the former Salisbury. If he was such an obvious and detestable man, then I am sure someone in that lawless country would have slaughtered him years ago. But they didn't.

I suspect that many in Zimbabwe came to see him as more of a paternalist than a racist - which is what I believe he really was.

As someone who grew-up in a household that venerated Crown and Commonwealth, we always respected Smith and detested Labour for its naivete on the issue of Rhodesia.

Of course, I also think Smith should have accepted Heath's terms, but that is another story.

J.K. Baltzersen said...

I think we would all agree that representative democracy works best and is the best of systems for Britons & those of Western European cultural descent and those influenced postively by Western European enlightenment ideals.

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "all," among other things.

Personally, I believe there are substantial admirable features with European absolute monarchy, while not being the preferable form of monarchy, makes this form of monarchy superior to modern, representative democracy in Europe, republics and modern monarchies alike.

I am, though, some sort of paleomonarchist, not an anglomonarchist, nor a neomonarchist. Besides, I am not a subject of HM in a Commonwealth Realm, nor have I ever been, nor have I ever lived in one. I have lived in the Commonwealth though.

It all depends on the definition of "all."

I am, as far as I can tell, the only one honored with a non-Anglo flag in the sidebar outside of "The Queen's Cousins," for which I am flattered.

All this said, I do agree that, in comparison with Africa, the West comes out as a winner when it comes to representative democracy working well.

The Monarchist said...

All good comments. Yes, Smith was not a racist or a white supremacist, but more a paternalist or patrician in the mold of his colonial forebears, for which the world would no longer tolerate. And yes, JJ is basically right to say that the conditions for black enfranchisement were not ripe for the taking in the 1960s precisely because of hitherto imperial attitudes which prevented those conditions from being attained.

The tragedy is not that attitudes eventually changed, but that the population was not permitted to progress to responsible government. And the blame for that I suppose rests with both the old Darwinian imperialists who denied such progress because of their social values, and the new anti-colonial, guilt ridden liberals in a hurry because of their social values and instant gratification impulses.

The social revolution denied this progress because it was a revolution. The times were a-changing, but they were changing too fast.

The Monarchist said...

Mr. Baltzersen, you are an esteemed member of the English-speaking world, as evidenced by your presence here today. The English-speaking peoples are naturally all those who are English-speaking, regardless of country of origin.

Sir Edward Heath said...

Excellent post JJ.

Not just scholarly writing but, more importantly, scholarly analysis and thought too.

For the first time ever - I agree with you!

Unknown said...

Thank you sir. We may agree on more than you know!

El Jefe Maximo said...

A splendid obituary, which I am linking in my own.

mrcawp said...

JJ needs a haircut.