Robert Mugabe dead at 95

[Darth Yan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/obit ... -dead.html

Honestly good riddance to bad rubbish

[ray245]

Being successful as a revolutionary does not mean they make an effective leader in running a country in peacetime.

[K. A. Pital]

Being successful as a revolutionary does not mean they make an effective leader in running a country in peacetime.

Yes. Also, while Mugabe is a traitor to socialism who degenerated to merely another cleptocrat quite fast, the colonial masters (who write these posthumous evaluations) can go screw themselves. „Ooh look at those primitives (we stole from them for centuries but look how barbaric they urrre, uuughgh white man buridan)“.

The real rubbish are the do-nothing descendants of the White Masters who were born into a life of wealth not lifting a finger, who are opulent by birthright from the global plunder of empire.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Mugabe was never a true socialist anyway, though he adopted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric for a time; by all accounts he was never sincere about that ideology.

That said, for all of his faults as a power-obsessed Christian tinpot kleptocrat, he was an incredibly important figure in the development of African nationalism and anti-colonial/anti-imperialist thought. His perception in the West is actually a very interesting case study of the residual impacts of colonialism on Western thought. The West didn't turn against Mugabe until the late 1990s/early 2000s, when the economy of Zimbabwe crashed and he started forcibly repossessing land from white landowners. These were apparently seen as greater crimes than the literal genocide he committed in the 1980s, slaughtering at least 20,000 (black) civilians during the Gukurahundi (using, oddly enough, an army unit trained by North Korea).

As is often the case, his legacy is very complicated.

[K. A. Pital]

One can fight for a noble cause (decolonization) and yet be a violent power-hungry person. The historical process works with real people and not ideal or best people.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I completely agree. He wasn't the force for decolonization that the world deserved, but he was the one we got. All of the horrible things he did are regrettable, AND also the completely predictable consequences of the way the colonial empires designed the power structures of their various territories.

[Darth Yan]

Being successful as a revolutionary does not mean they make an effective leader in running a country in peacetime.

Yes. Also, while Mugabe is a traitor to socialism who degenerated to merely another cleptocrat quite fast, the colonial masters (who write these posthumous evaluations) can go screw themselves. „Ooh look at those primitives (we stole from them for centuries but look how barbaric they urrre, uuughgh white man buridan)“.

The real rubbish are the do-nothing descendants of the White Masters who were born into a life of wealth not lifting a finger, who are opulent by birthright from the global plunder of empire.

Socialism has good elements but pure unbridled socialism doesn’t work. Every Marxist Leninist country became a shit hole eventually.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Marxism.html

[K. A. Pital]

It has given me enough and hasn’t left me indebted for life, so I‘m alright. Mileage may vary. I really have no fun right now to argue with Westerners about us, our lives and our past, anyway, likely to be futile. Suffice to say that Mugabe paid lip service to socialism, but did not effectively practice what he preached.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Glad the bastard is dead, he basically ruined his country.