Re: Missing Episodes in Zimbabwe ?

On 22 Feb, 21:15, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On 22 Feb, 13:42, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On 22 Feb, 07:35, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"The Doctor" <doc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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In article <QM6dnUXUA-WJ-z3UnZ2dnUVZ8uSdn...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Agamemnon <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"US 71" <u...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
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http://www.hararetribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl...

LONG-lost Doctor Who episodes thought to be hidden away in Zimbabwe
may
never be recovered because despot Robert Mugabe hates the UK.

BBC investigators believe the troubled nation holds some of the
early
episodes of the cult series which are still missing.

But tyrant President Mugabe has banned the Beeb from setting foot
in
his

And do you really think that calling him a tyrant and a despot is
going
to
make him more likely to change his mind?

country. And diplomatic relations are also extremely tense -
meaning
researchers are unable to get into the nation's TV vaults.

The BBC destroyed early episodes of the sci-fi series in the late
Sixties
and Seventies to make room in its film library for new programmes.

But Zimbabwe is understood to have bought the first season of the
show
when it was still a British colony known as Rhodesia. It starred
William
Hartnell and ran from 1963 to 1964. The Beeb suspects the historic
series,
together with later episodes not held anywhere else in the world,
may
still be locked away.

Ag! Robert Mugabe is the ultimate feudalist!

No, he's the ultimate anti-feudalist. He's taking from the rich white
farmers who stole their land from the indigenous people and giving to
the
poor blacks who they used as slaves.

<<<You don't have a fucking clue, do you Aggy? And you really do lap up
tabloid headlines.

You know when much of the land Mugabe's seizing was given to the
whites? In the 1980s. Who gave it to them? Robert Mugabe. The guy who>>>

I can see that you've been totally brainwashed. The land was given to the
whites by the British colonialists over 100 years before Mugabe when they
invaded the region.

Aggy, look at the operative qualifier in the above - "Much of the land
Mugabe's seizing..." Yes, Aggy, the colonial founders of Rhodesia took
land from the locals (or in many cases tricked them into giving it to
them). And then, when Mugabe came in, guess what happened? He gave
even more land to them.

No. That is a load of brainwashing and propaganda. Mugabe legally sold land
to his white supporters.

No one said anything about legality (though bear in mind that he came
to power as the result of an agreement with the departing colonial
administration, which you seem to want to claim is illegal, then he
could never have had any legal mandate to be in power at all by your
criteria). The issue is that, contrary to his own self-promoting
propaganda, Mugabe has never had any interest in rectifying the
legacies of colonialism; like all the African Big Men, he demolished
the positive consequences of colonialism (educational and political
infrastructure, economic development), while retaining and in many
cases exacerbating the negative ones (wealth and land inequality,
human rights abuses).

The land which Mugabe is seizing back is land which
was stolen from the indigenous black inhabitants.

No, Aggy, it's land that happened to be in the position of supporters
of the MDC, which includes most white-owned land in Zimbabwe
regardless of how and when the land was granted to them.

<<<was busy committing genocide against rival tribes at the time.>>>

Rival tribes? Yes, why don't you continue using racist terminology and
demene the people as uncivilised by calling them tribes.

Am I imagining things or did you really say this? Are you genuinely
this isolated and unaware of cultures other than your own and the way
they define themselves? Or come to that the entire edifice of

They don't go around calling themselves tribes.

When they're speaking English they do.

They refer to themselves as
nations.

You're thinking of Native Americans. Or maybe the Welsh.

The MDC has nothing to do with it
other than standing for the British colonialist status que and allowing
the
whites to keep their stolen land.

Hold on, I just remembered - you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein
as well, weren't you? You really are a vile character - what next, an
impassioned defence of Than Shwe?

LIAR!

Still haven't got the hang of what a question is, have you?

<<<You know why whites in Zimbabwe had more land than blacks, other
than>>>

Because they stole if off the blacks and made the blacks who lived on the
land originally into their slaves.

Aggy, slavery was banned in Britain and its colonies about a century

Irrelevant.

Not if you want to claim the British were enslaving people in the
1880s.

before Rhodesia was even colonised. Incidentally, the 'blacks' in
question, the Ndebele, first arrived in the Zimbabwe area in the 1830s

That's the story the colonialists like to tell.

- they *did* conquer and enslave the native Shona population of
Zimbabwe.

Oh and the Shona were white right?

No; why, are you so racist that you regard conquering and enslavement
by people of one colour as worse than conquering and enslavement by
people of another?

Learn a bit of real-world history instead of your fantasies, Aggy.
Factions fight, conquer one another, and often enslave one another.
Whether the factions call themselves tribes, nations, empires or
whatever is irrelevant; the colour of the people doing it is
irrelevant. It's fundamentally the same process. The European colonial
adventure was no different than any conquest or subjugation of tribes
within Africa - the Europeans just had better weaponry and were in
some (limited) ways more enlightened in their governance. My great
grandfather served as one of Rhodesia's first colonial administrators,
and was so well-regarded for his fair-minded treatment of black
Rhodesians that the Zimbabweans named a bridge after him at the same
time their government was trying to force out white farmers.

You really buy into this politically correct anti-colonial guilt trip
crap hook, line and sinker, don't you? Like all political correctness,
it's just a thin veneer over a patronising, discriminatory (in this
case, deeply racist) mindset. If Africans conquer or enslave one
another, they do it because they don't know better, or were taught bad
habits by the Arabs, or something equally patronising. Or perhaps it
doesn't matter because black people all look the same to you, right?
If whites do exactly the same thing, suddenly the poor Africans have
had their lands illegally seized by vicious outsiders, because after
all *Europeans* ought to know better; we ought to be held to a higher
standard because *we* can help being savages unlike those poor
Africans.

That's what you think, isn't it?

<<<Mugabe selling it to them on the cheap? Because they're mostly
farmers. Lawyers and city professionals, the jobs largely reserved for
blacks, tend not to own as much land - in Britain, you'd find that>>>

Lawyers and city professionals? You are having a laugh. The jobs reserved
for Blacks under the white administration were domestic and farm slaves.

Um, Aggy? There hasn't been a white administration in Zimbabwe for 30
years. We're talking about the modern country; hence the use of the
name Zimbabwe rather than Rhodesia.

Irrelevant prpaganda. All these professions were taken up by whites and
blacks did not have the education to practice them. Mugabe sought to change
the balance by attempting to give the blacks an education, which they had
been denied in the past.

No, not true at all. In Rhodesia as in many British colonies education
was mandated for indigenous as well as immigrant populations (after
all, the major stated aim of British imperialism was the intensely
patronising desire to 'better' the indigenous peoples they ruled).
University education in Zimbabwe has been open to all since 1953.
According to a UNESCO report mentioned in Hansard, by 1964 (when the
country had illegally declared independence under Smith) 91.5% of
Rhodesia's school age population was in school, compared with less
than 40% in most African nations.

It is true that educational spending during the Smith regime
disproportionately favoured whites (by a factor of 10 according to
Hansard), but it is not true that the black population was not being
given an education that in at least some cases led on to city
professions.

<<<farmers own a disproportionately large amount of land as well. The>>>

Yes we know. It's was stolen by the Normans from the Saxons who impose a
system of Feudalism which made the original people who lived on the land
into their slaves.

You really don't understand this concept of time passing, do you?

You are a fool. The fact is that most of the land in this country was stolen
by the aristocracy in the Norman conquests and they still have it.

Um, Aggy, the point I made was that farmers own a large portion of the
land in Britain. They aren't all Prince Charles.

Feudalism has been gone for centuries in Britain. And farmers still
have more land than lawyers, for very practical reasons which are
obvious to everyone but you.

Well of course they do. They're farmers. And who owns this land. It's still
the aristocracy and most of the farmers a tenants.

You haven't ever been out in the country in Britain, have you, Aggy?
It's not really true that it hasn't changed in the past 300 years.
Most farmers own their own land, and very few people in Britain are
the tenants of aristocrats.

redistribution (especially when Zimbabwe lacks a workforce of trained
black farmers).

No it does not. It was the blacks who always worked on the land to begin
with.

That was over a century ago, Aggy - the same people aren't living
there now. Modern farms grow different crops, and use different
labourers to perform different tasks; some to operate the machinery,
some to collect harvest etc. Many won't have a good working knowledge
of how the whole system works. And beyond that, most of the former
farm workers who could eke out a living off the land were forced out
by the 'war veterans'

Now read this carefully, because it's the important thing: Mugabe did
nothing to change that. Nothing at all. Zimbabwe's wealth was based on
the whites' ability to produce enough food - and we've now seen just

All of Zimbabwe's wealth was in the hands of the whites and the black were
denied a part in any of it. They are no worse off now than they were before
Mugabe.

Aggy, this denial of reality is so spectacular I'm really not sure
where to point you as a starting point. Before Mugabe, the country
wasn't in the grip of an AIDs epidemic so severe that 4 million people
died between 2002 and 2006, with 565 more people infected a day.
Before Mugabe, the literacy rate wasn't declining from its high of
90%. Before Mugabe, universities weren't being closed or attacked
because of the potential for student protests, and teachers could
still operate in schools. Before Mugabe, famine didn't threaten 5
million Zimbabweans. Before Mugabe, people weren't being persecuted
for their political beliefs. Before Mugabe, the black population could
afford to buy bread and wasn't reduced to picking up scattered bits of
grain falling off passing trucks.

how quickly the country collapsed as soon as its white foundation was

Collapsed for the whites you mean. The blacks haven't seen any difference.

Quite the reverse - the whites have seen little difference because
they can mostly afford to buy food and, if all else fails, to get out.
You don't hear whites saying things like "A truck spilled grain today.
Without it we would have nothing to eat". It's not the whites who
suffer a 25% HIV infection rate. Whites aren't dependent on the
schools that have closed because there are no funds to pay teachers.
The black population never had to endure any of this even under
Smith's apartheid regime.

taken away. Mugabe had 30 years to improve the lot of the blacks, to

It takes time for change to take effect.

Change has taken effect. The problem is, the change has all been very
much for the worse. Yes, it has taken time - about 20 years between
Mugabe coming to power and the country collapsing. But that is not an
improvement.

from human rights abuses in the country. And a country that emerged
from colonial rule with functioning government institutions and one of
the healthiest economies in Africa now lies in ruin through a

Healthiest for the whites.

No, Aggy, healthiest for Zimbabweans - all of them. Most of whom were
black.

combination of forcing out the skilled workforce at the base of the
national food chain, mismanaging the economy, and turning a blind eye
to epidemics of AIDS and malaria that render increasing numbers of
people unable to work.

What Mugabe needs to do is to impose a system of communism and the country
will be sorted. And by communism I mean the scientific definition. Communal
farms all working together once all the land has been redistributed to the
people.

Having any farms and people able to work them would be a start.

You do know that communism by your "scientific" definition (actually
the technical political definition, nothing scientific about it) has
actually been tried, right? And you know that Cambodia hasn't
recovered from it to this day?

<<<whites were also the main source of employment for rural black
people,>>>

Slavery you mean.

No, Aggy, I mean employment - as in, paying people to work for you, as

It was slavery. The blacks received no education and had no property of
their own. They were practically slaves.

No, Aggy, they were educated (see above), were paid and had nothing
preventing them from owning any property they could afford. Why do you
insist on making things up on subjects you plainly know nothing about?

well as providing them with food, accommodation, all the things those
who survived Mugabe's attacks no longer have now their former
employers' lands have been seized.

They have the land, they have the buildings and they have the accommodation
which they worked for and which was never in their hands before.

The farm workers are all gone, Aggy. The ones who weren't killed and
weren't repatriated by their employers' expense were evicted by the
'war veterans' who took over the land, none of whom had any
agricultural experience - they were just Mugabe's hired thugs. I've
heard stories of war veterans appealing to the white owners of
neighbouring farms for help once it dawned on them they didn't
actually know how to farm the land.

Phil
.