Whites Who Bleed

A TRUCK pulls up in an African village in Zimbabwe and out jump black “veterans” of the 1970s Rhodesian civil war, all coincidentally supporters of President Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party. Armed with automatic weapons and studded clubs, they spread through the huts looking for leaflets, banners, or other evidence of opposition-party loyalties. When they find it, they beat up the unfortunate dissidents, burning some, raping others, murdering the supposed ringleaders, letting some escape in the general mayhem.

Hours later in a New York television studio or print newsroom, an analyst explains these scenes as a regrettable abuse of human rights, of course, but in part an understandable response to the seizure of African land by white farmers several generations ago, and anyway terribly complicated, something to do with decades of entrenched hatreds, like Yugoslavia.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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A TRUCK pulls up in an African village in Zimbabwe and out jump black “veterans” of the 1970s Rhodesian civil war, all coincidentally supporters of President Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party. Armed with automatic weapons and studded clubs, they spread through the huts looking for leaflets, banners, or other evidence of opposition-party loyalties. When they find it, they beat up the unfortunate dissidents, burning some, raping others, murdering the supposed ringleaders, letting some escape in the general mayhem.

Hours later in a New York television studio or print newsroom, an analyst explains these scenes as a regrettable abuse of human rights, of course, but in part an understandable response to the seizure of African land by white farmers several generations ago, and anyway terribly complicated, something to do with decades of entrenched hatreds, like Yugoslavia.