VIDEO: Tourism in Zimbabwe: visiting the ruins of Rhodesia

Earlier this month we posted "The truth about Rhodesia - a warning to liberals of the AABC", a video explaining how, in 1980, the British betrayed their kith and kin in Rhodesia, and gave the country, now renamed Zimbabwe over to the Marxist-oriented Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, whose ZANU-PF party has ruled the unfortunate country ever since.

"Majority rule" has turned the once-prosperous (pre-1980) country into the sort of place characterized by President Trump as a "shithole". It has been ruined by ignorance, incompetence and corruption. John Edmonds, In the video, John Edmonds presents a potted history of Zimbabwe, then embarks on a tour to see for himself the ruins of Rhodesia and the reality of the failed state today.

 

This video too can well be described as a cautionary tale. This is what happens when you hand your country or state (Hello, California!) over to letting loony lefties whose "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" (DEI) agenda is driven by anti-white racism, gender ideology and a complete ignorance of economics. Keep it in mind when you vote.

Beginning of the end for Castro Communist Cuba?

Agent 10 is excited this morning by the latest news from the People's Democratic Republic of Cuba. Minions of the Cuban government today warned airlines that there isn't enough fuel on the island for airplanes to refuel. Seems that POTUS, by cutting Cuba off from its Venezuelan and Mexican fuel sources, has driven another nail into the coffin of Castro Communism.

NOTAMs (notices to airlines and pilots) were published on Sunday night, warning that jet fuel won’t be available at nine airports across the island, including José Martí International Airport in Havana, starting Tuesday and continuing until March 11th... at least. After President Trump signed the executive order imposing a tariff on any goods from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, the country now faces an unprecedented energy crisis.

The desperate rationing of jet fuel may not disrupt shorter regional flights, but presents a significant challenge for long-haul routes from countries like Russia and Canada which have been mainstay's of Cuba's tourism economy. The fuel shortage deals another blow to a country that relies heavily on tourism, an industry that once generated $3 billion in annual revenue and served as a vital economic lifeline. 

But it's not only jet fuel that is in short supply... or no supply. Agent 10 reports that in her hometown, in the centre of the island (not Havana), there is no electricity for 20 hours per day. And no electricity means no water. This picture, of people cooking over an open fire in the streets of Havana, shows what things have come to for the ordinary people of Cuba -- victims of 73 years of Communist misrule.

Minions of the Cuban government announced yesterday that bank hours have been reduced and cultural events suspended. In Havana. The public bus system has effectively ground to a halt, leaving residents stranded as endemic power outages and grueling fuel lines reach a breaking point. 

The energy crisis has forced the suspension of major events like the Havana International Book Fair this past weekend and a restructuring of the national baseball season for greater efficiency. Some banks have cut operating hours and fuel distribution companies said they would no longer sell gas in Cuban pesos. Sales will be made in real money -- Yanqui dollars -- and limited to 20 litres per user. 

The latest measures add to others announced Friday, including cuts to bus transportation and limited train departures. Last Thursday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel delivered a two-hour televised address, acknowledging the impact and warning that measures would be taken in the coming days. 

American sanctions against Cuba have been in place for more than six decades and have long stunted Cuba’s economy. But they reached new extremes after a US military operation deposed former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and POTUS began to take an even more confrontational tone toward Latin America. 

For the ordinary people of Cuba, the crisis has translated into power outages lasting up to 10 hours, fuel shortages for vehicles, and a lack of food or medicine that many compare to the severe economic depression in the 1990s known as the "Special Period" that followed cuts in aid from what was then the Soviet Union.

This means things are going to get worse... much worse... before the Communist regime can be overthrown. But the ordinary Cuban people, such as Agent 10's family, say, "We are willing to pay the price. Bring it on!"

The truth about Rhodesia - a warning to liberals of the AABC countries

Rhodesia’s story isn't what you've been told! Today, it's barely mentioned at all. You would be hard-pressed to find, in the AABC countries (America, Australia, Britain and Canada), anyone under the age of 60 who could tell you what or where Rhodesia was. 

For 15 years (1965-1980), the world poured its energy into erasing Rhodesia from the map. But once it was gone, silence! Zimbabwe, like so many "decolonised" African nations, soon collapsed into chaos. Under Comrade Robert Mugabe, the dictator who ruled from independence in 1980 until he was deposted in a coup in 2017, and his successor Emmerson "E.D." Mnangagwa, the country was brought to ruin. Watch this video and ask whether the Rhodesians were really the villains history says they were, and what happens if people of that stripe come to power. FAFO!

Walt first visited Rhodesia, as it then was, some 57 years ago. As the narrator of this video says, the handwriting was on the wall, even then. When I returned to live in Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia had been renamed) in the 1990s, there were still many Africans (as black people like to be called) who said that things were better in the days of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. 

After independence, Zimbabwe quickly became a basket case, destroyed by the corruption, ignorance and incompetence of the Marxist government of Comrade Mugabe. One of Walt's agents, who left the sinking ship at about the same time, and now resides in the Disunited Kingdom, returned in January to attend to some legal matters. She reports that things have not got any better in the quarter-century since we left. It is not wrong, she says, to regard Zimbabwe as a failed state, which has hit bottom and can never rise again. What a pity.

Victor Davis Hanson: California's collapsing Blue-State Democrat model

Towards the end of last week, in "California pols: Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and now... Mel Gibson?" Walt marvelled that Hock Ptui is the leading contender to move into the California state house. It's just another sign, IMHO, that the Golden State is beyond redemption -- truly an exemplar of the "failed state".

Today, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson takes up that theme in "California and Its Collapsing Blue-State Democratic Model", on the American Greatness site. Secondary headline: California’s high taxes, crime, and regulations are driving an exodus, shifting political power to red states as the once-prosperous blue-state model collapses under economic and social strain. I've selected a handful of key excerpts but suggest you click on the link to read the entire article for yourself.

While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century. Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development. 

Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.

That, in Mr Hanson's words, is what Thomas Franks was saying in Listen, Liberal!, reviewed here earlier this month. Mr Franks predicted the downfall of the new woke Dimocratic Party, which (with a slight pause) played out in just the way Mr Hanson is now analyzing.

We are witnessing the greatest internal migration in U.S. history since the post-Civil War era. Millions are leaving California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, and other northern blue states. And they usually head to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and other red, low- or no-tax states. So large have become the dislocations that conservative red states will in the next decade grab some 10-12 congressional seats away from liberal blue states along with some 10 or so votes in the electoral college.

We also may be witnessing soon the de facto implosion of a once affluent California—its growing poverty already visible in its decaying roads and infrastructure, dangerous and substandard public schools, soaring property crime, overcrowded, dysfunctional, and dangerous health care system, ethnic fragmentation, and the general bankruptcy and medievalism of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In the current conundrum, we have forgotten completely the old themes of a blue-state Democrat Party. The 1996 Democratic National Convention manifesto that spearheaded Bill Clinton’s successful reelection emphasized secure borders, legal-only immigration, tough crime enforcement and punishment, balanced budgets, fiscal responsibility, and “personal accountability.” 

That agenda today in California would condemn any adherent as a racist, xenophobe, or MAGA fanatic. In its place, the party became more intolerant, narrower in its cultural emphases, and uninterested in existential crises such as housing, secure borders, power generation, infrastructure, and crime. 

Without answers or correctives to the damage it inflicted, it instead focused on what was largely seen as irrelevant to the state’s struggling minority populations—LGBT advocacies, transgendered men competing in women’s sports, racial reparations, DEI-mandated programs, and boutique environmentalism.

In addition, the growing dysfunction and irrelevance of the mainstream media—from network news to the old print conglomerates—of elite universities and of the federal government itself are, in part, due to their location in and symbiosis with the dead-end, blue-state model of culture, economics, and politics. In sum, America is entering a historic reversal. [The emphasis is Walt's.] 

Patrick Buchanan asks: Is America becoming a failed state?

America is unable to win the wars she chooses to fight.

She cannot or will not control and defend her borders from a mass migrant invasion.

She cannot halt an outbreak of criminality and killing in her great cities.

She has not run a trade surplus in four decades.

Her dependency upon foreign producers is unprecedented.

And her budget deficits continue to break records every year — as does her soaring national debt.

Is that not the description of a failed or failing state?

Excerpted from "Is America Becoming a Failed State?",  by Patrick J. Buchanan, Taki's Magazine, 10/8/21 (before the fall of Kabul but after the handwriting was on the wall).

Yes, I know many of our readers are getting tired of seeing pessimistic articles like this, not just in the conservative media but even in the controlled MSM. So let me add that if Mr Buchanan is right [Is there any doubt? Ed.], that doesn't mean the USA is doomed. Patriotic Americans can and must wake up, rise up, and do what must be done to save the country from implosion. 

A good place to start would be for those who voted Democrat in 2020 to realize that they made a huge mistake, and resolve to correct it, starting at the mid-term elections, or earlier in places where recall or other special elections will be held. If you love your country, you know what I mean. Do it!

Worth reading! "Endless wars = Endless refugees", by Michelle Malkin, in the UNZ Review, 17/8/21. Quote: "I want you to focus on what's best for Americans on American soil right here. Right now." 

Worth watching! "There is no way to more permanently wreck the country!", Tucker Carlson on Fox News, 13/8/21. Spoiler alert: He's talking about mass immigration, which is causing the most profound demographic change in the US of A since the 19th century. The new census figures show 5,000,000 fewer white people than there were ten years ago -- the first decline in the white population since the 19th century!

Quote from Pedro Gonzalez, Associate Editor of Chronicles: White people are being marginalized in America, and you're not supposed to notice that. You're not allowed to talk about it. And if you disagree, then you're a racist!