Archive for the 'Politics' Category

The psychology of Robert Mugabe

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-17
in Africa, History and Politics
. Closed

I wondered here whether Robert Mugabe had been an informant for CIA in the years prior to Zimbabwean Independence in 1980.   If so, many strange events in Zimbabwean politics, before and after Independence, would be explained.   The thought has now occurred to me that such a relationship, if it had existed, would also explain an odd trait of Mugabe’s personality in the period after his return from exile in December 1979.    I realize my thoughts here are pure speculation, and, moreover, speculation about another person’s personality.  

Because informants working for espionage agencies provide information on a regular basis to an employee of that agency, informants and their agents often develop quite close relationships.  Each has a secret which he or she usually cannot tell to other relatives or friends or colleagues – informants cannot usually divulge their information-passing actions to those around them, and agents usually do not divulge the names of their informants to their fellow employees.   Each also has to trust the other to some extent, and so the pair can develop quite a close relationship with one another; examples can be seen in Larry Devlin’s account of his close relationship with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Robert Baer’s account of his time working for CIA in the Middle East.

If our Robert had indeed been an informant (paid or unpaid) for CIA, then we would probably expect the agency to release him from that relationship when he was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.  If he had developed a close relationship with his agency handler, then becoming PM would mean he would no longer have a close, neutral confidant.     Is this then why Mugabe became close to Lord Christopher Soames, the temporary Governor sent by Britain to oversee the election and the transfer of power at Independence?  Their relationship became so close that Mugabe asked Soames to stay on (as Governor? as President?) for a couple of years after Independence, a request Soames declined.   Is this also why Mugabe met weekly with his political enemy, Ian Smith, for about 18 months following Independence?    Until it fell apart in 1981, their relationship was sufficiently close that they were able to dance with each other’s wives at official functions, such as the ball held for the African Parliamentary Union meeting in Zimbabwe in 1981.

The closeness of both these relationships (Mugabe-Soames, Mugabe-Smith) has always struck me as odd.   But, if true, an ex-informant seeking another regular confidant could explain them both.

References:

Robert Baer [2002]: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Crown Publishing Group.

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

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Animal Farm: The Limerick

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-30
in Politics and poetry
. Closed

The superb winning entry of a competition run by New Statesman magazine (2009-12-14) to summarize a work of literature with a limerick, due to performance poet and photographer Anneliese Emmans Dean:

From the farm they banished the people.
“Hurrah!” cried the beasts. “We’re all equal!”
But superior plotters,
With trotters, the rotters,
Took over. The End. (There’s no sequel.)




Political activists of renown

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-20
in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics
. Closed

Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire.  I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire.  Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.  

Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.




Heroes: the underground railroad in Rhodesia

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-15
in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics
. Closed

Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute.   These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, usually to Botswana and Zambia.   The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral.  I knew a couple of these railwaymen:  AP (”Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he later tutored at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence.     Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman, father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman.   These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.




Lancaster bombing

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-14
in Africa, History and Politics
. Closed

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony.  Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status.  From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership.   These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here.  Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.     

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Next, the Literature Nobel

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-16
in History, Obama speeches, Politics and Rhetoric
. 1 Comment

Robert Draper has an interesting essay in GQ on Barack Obama the writer.  As I noted before, Obama shares this characteristic with Teddy Roosevelt (and with no other US President).  And like TR and JFK, Bam is also a cosmopolitan urbanite. 

“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’

“I also have to say, one of the great thrills is to watch him work on a speech. It’s not just the content—he’s very focused on that—but more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he’s focused on the rhythm of the words. Like, he’ll invert words. He’ll say, ‘I need a one-beat word here.’ There’s no question who the best writer in the [speech-writing] group is.”

Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1953, after writing – or perhaps supervising the writing of – his History of the English Speaking Peoples), so there’s hope yet for Bam’s next Nobel.

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Two Nations

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-10
in Culture, History and Politics
. Closed

Ian Jack, writing in the UK Guardian today, describes the southern bias of the British Conservative Party leadership, particularly when contrasted with the present British Labour Party Cabinet:

To historians, the interesting thing may be that for 13 years spanning the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries Britain was ruled by a party born inside and chiefly supported by the Northern Metaphor, whose second prime minister wore so many of its qualities. Look at the constituency names attached to the members of its cabinet: South Shields, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Blackburn, Normanton, Leigh, Pontefract, Edinburgh South West. Out of its 20 members elected to parliament, 13 have seats north of the Trent.

The shadow cabinet tells a different story: Arundel and South Downs, Chesham and Amersham, Surrey Heath, Beaconsfield, South Cambridgeshire, Chipping Barnet, Havant. Twenty of 28 members have seats in southern England. England north of Birmingham is represented by George Osborne (Hatton in Cheshire) and William Hague (Richmond, North Yorkshire).

Jack also quotes Australian journalist Donald Horne (Disclosure:  whom I once shared an evening in a bar with), writing in 1969 about Britain’s competing metaphors:

In the Northern Metaphor, Britain is “pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and believes in struggle“. In the Southern Metaphor, Britain is “romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition“. The winner in this contest was decided at least a century ago when, in Horne’s words, Britons decided it wasn’t “for what they did but for what they were that destiny had rewarded them so lavishly“.

 

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Congratulations, Bam!

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-10
in History and Politics
. 2 Comments

Congratulations to President Barack Obama for the award of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace!    

Former speechwriter to President Jimmie Carter, James Fallows, analyzes Bam’s speech yesterday here.   The Peace Prize is yet another commonality between US Presidents 44 and 26.

I am stunned that much of the commentariat seems to think Obama has not done anything to deserve this, as if ending the Bush-Cheney doctrine of global bullying was nothing at all.  Let us not forget that an unelected US Administration made, in August 2002, a decision to invade Iraq, which decision said administration and their allies refused for several months to provide the public with reasons for (a refusal which led the Australian Senate, for example, to pass its first-ever and so-far-only motion of censure against a sitting Prime Minister, and which led to the largest public demonstrations in Europe for four decades), and which decision was then justified to the public on grounds the justifiers appear to have known at the time to be misleading and possibly also false.  For 8 long years, the US Government was led by a secretive, macho, power-hungry, war-mongering, torture-mongering, jingoistic, neoconservative cabal, and as a consequence the peace and safety of all us around the world was lessened.   The prospects for global peace improved dramatically at 12 noon on 20 January 2009, immediately upon the removal of that cabal from office, a removal that was itself also a major achievement, and the Nobel Committee has recognized that real achievement for peace with this award.   

Among the churlish commentary, I was most surprised by former Polish President Lech Walesa’s reaction, who apparently said, “So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far.  He is still at an early stage.”   But the Nobel Prize for Peace is sometimes awarded to people or groups as a statement of solidarity by the Nobel Committee, and thus the world, for the person or cause receiving it.   Recent examples include a courageous national political leader under house arrest (Aung San Suu Kyi,  1991), a courageous dissident scientist also held under house arrest by his Government (Andrei Sakharov 1975), and the leader of an outlawed trade union, whose cause appeared at the time not only to have failed completely but to have been entirely counter-productive, leading as it did to martial law and more political repression in response than would otherwise have been the case (Lech Walesa, 1983). 

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan quotes an anonymous correspondent:

Remember how Obama should have stepped aside and let Hillary win the primaries? Remember how America wasn’t ready for a black President, of course, so why didn’t he just realize it and wait his turn? Remember last summer when the candidate went to Germany and gave speech before hundreds of thousands of adoring fans?  How arrogant.  Who does he think he is?  Only a president should do that.  He should have at least waited until he won. And then he did win.  And he took a world tour and gave a game changing speech in the Cairo.  Who did he think he was?  A rock star?  The arrogance and audacity – it’s breathtaking. If the man would just wait his turn, dammit.

 

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Public lectures

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-08
in Africa, Politics and Rhetoric
. Closed

I expect that Bertrand Russell is the only person in history to have given public lectures to both TS Eliot (in lectures given at Harvard University) and Mao Tse-Tung (in a lecture series given in China).  With youtube and the web, we are in danger of forgetting how special an occasion a public speech can be.  And so I decided to list the people whose public lectures I have heard.  I’ve not included lecturers and teachers whose courses I attended, the most influential (upon me) I have previously listed here, nor talks given at conferences or in academic seminars.

Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Gough Whitlam, Elizabeth Windsor, and Andrew Young.

Continue reading ‘Public lectures’

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Two kinds of people

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-01
in Heroes and Politics
. Closed

 K. Kram in Glee and Disaffection (translated by Mark Kaplan):

When I was an adolescent it struck me, rather narcissistically, that there were two kinds of people, politically speaking. On the one hand, there were those who had realised, at first dimly and intuitively, that there was something profoundly wrong with the social and political order in which they lived. It was wasteful, unjust, amoral and much more besides. Its language seemed formulaic and false, a screen of clichés and convenient fictions. Following up these dim intuitions, turning them into genuine understanding, would be no easy task. One had been thrown into this world, grown up with its assumptions and habits of thought, and these had (to use a phrase I would learn later) deposited a kind of inventory, and this inventory had to be painstakingly scrutinised and thought through. This thinking through would involve dragging into visibility and naming the whole social order. It would be a long game. One would have to relearn how to think and speak. But only fidelity to this project was worthwhile. And this type of person pledged that they would never succumb to the easy rewards of this social order, they would do everything they could to maintain their critical distance. Otherwise, they could not live with themselves. From this social order which they had not chosen they would at least win for themselves insight into its workings, and would attempt to prepare and imagine alternatives.
And the other type? These consisted of those scandalised by the very presence of the first type. For these people, the mere fact that a form of life existed seemed to be sufficient proof that it should. And for them, the first type of person could only be motivated by resentment or fashion.”



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