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Mugabe considers this land reform. He has taken to these methods because he failed to get the necessary votes to make it lawful for his government to seize land and distribute it according to what those at the top deemed right.

The fact that a small number of white people own a good deal of the land in Zimbabwe is inarguably obscene, the result of a colonial history going back to Cecil Rhodes, one of the prime swine of his time. Rhodes was an Englishman who felt that a white man should do whatever he had to do to expand the empire and bring blacks to civilized order. In Rhodes' view, the world existed to produce and work for England, the jewel of the British Isles. Any country that refused to submit to superior people would taste the lash, the truncheon, the rifle butt, the boot kicked deep into the recalcitrant buttocks of those known only for their savage wiles, their drums and their unwritten language.

That land now known as Zimbabwe was once named after this fellow; Rhodesia it was called. The colonial yoke under which the black population lived wasn't particularly different from some others. But what separates the Western world from just about any other place is the fact that moral concerns can rise so high and shed so much light that we are able to see through the thick rhetorical darkness imposed by historical complaints and the heated claims of duty performed behind the implacable wall of national sovereignty.

King Leopold, for instance, became a pariah in Europe for the slaughter of Africans in the Congo so that Belgium could take advantage of the market for raw rubber sparked by the creation of the rubber bicycle tire. Over time the Western world came to the realization that colonialism was wrong, and empires fell internationally.

Now that Mugabe is resorting to traditional totalitarian tactics, we are supposed to assume that anything goes because the white people should not have the land in the first place. If warned by Mugabe that he cannot protect them, the white landowners should either give up what they presently own or accept the consequences.

Next page | Is this supposed to be historical payback?