Crush Liberalism

The same left who shilled for Mugabe now having “buyer’s remorse”

Better late than never, huh, leftists?  From Protein Wisdom:

There was a good essay about Robert Mugabe in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, pointing out how all the Left-wing journalists, politicians, and academics who were Mugabe cheerleaders from the start are now trying to cover their tracks.

Some samples:

As Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, presides over what might be the most rapid disintegration yet of a modern nation-state, it has become de rigueur for journalists, politicians and academics to offer what has become a near-universal analysis: Mugabe, who has ruled his country uninterrupted for 27 years, was a promising leader who became corrupted over time by power.

This meme was popularized not long after Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms in 2000. Four years ago, in response to these raids, the New York Times editorialized that “in 23 years as president, Mr. Mugabe has gone from independence hero to tyrant.” Earlier this week, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that “I’m just devastated by what I can’t explain, by what seems to be an aberration, this sudden change in character.”

…

But this popular conception of Mugabe — propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s — is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state.

…

And over several years in the early 1980s, Mugabe executed what arguably might be the worst of his many atrocities, a campaign of terror against the minority Ndebele tribe in which he unleashed a North Korean-trained army unit that killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people.

Yet, even in the midst of these various crimes, Mugabe never lost his fan base in the West. In 1986, the University of Massachusetts Amherst bestowed on Mugabe an honorary doctorate of laws just as he was completing his genocide against the Ndebele.

…

In 2000, at the start of Mugabe’s seizures of white land, New York Times columnist (and early Mugabe fan) Anthony Lewis admitted, on behalf of quite a few journalists, diplomats and academics in the West, “how wrong we were” about Mugabe. But he offered the qualification, “at least over time.” Lewis, and everyone else who ever feted Mugabe, was not just proved wrong about the despot “at least over time.” They were wrong the minute they endorsed him.

PW has a commenter who gets this 11,242% (accounting for Zimbabwean inflation) correct: the left has a track record of supporting maniacal genoicidal tyrants who lean to the left (Castro, Che, Mao, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, etc.) but getting their San Fransicko leather #ssless chaps in a bunch if George Bush wants to listen to a phone call between terrorists.

Case in point: Sean Penn (whose role as a mentally retarded man in I Am Sam was more insightful into his real-life persona than we ever knew) demonstrates, leftards are more than willing to accept…nay, embrace…totalitarianism, so long as it’s left-wing totalitarianism.

October 3, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, Hollyweirdos, hypocrisy, moonbats, Mugabe, socialism