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The Latest from Zimbabwe
Robert Mugabe is under house arrest by the Zimbabwe military, according to this article from the Guardian. Zimbabwe has been a mess of a country since Mugabe went about confiscating lands and inflating the currency in the early 2000s, taking it from what was once a sort of second South Africa, in terms of its economy and agriculture, into an absolute wreck of a nation.
When Zimbabwe was formed from the wreck of Rhodesia, it held the promise of an amicable, or at least uneasy racial peace between whites and blacks, and for the first 20 years of its existence it remained, while a dictatorship, at least a reasonably benevolent one. I remember, in reading Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs of her term as Prime Minister, the high hopes she held out for the peace and prosperity of the former British colony. In the last 20 years, though, Mugabe has essentially destroyed that nation, turning it into a net importer of food, and having a worthless currency, all in pursuit of a delayed racial reparations that was coupled to tribal cronyism and oppression.
We should now all hope and pray that Zimbabwe will eventually stabilize and transition back to the prosperous country it once was, and could well be again.
Published in Foreign PolicyZimbabwe remained in political limbo a day and a half after the military takeover that appears to have put an end to Robert Mugabe’s 37-year grip on power.
Talks between the president, who has been confined to his residence in Harare by the army, and senior military officers continued on Thursday morning, with senior church leaders and envoys sent from neighbouring South Africa involved in mediation efforts.
The Zimbabwean capital remained tense but calm amid the political uncertainty. Troops have secured the airport, government offices, parliament and other key sites.
The rest of the country has remained peaceful. The takeover has been cautiously welcomed by many Zimbabweans.
The military declared on national television in the early hours of Wednesday morning that it had temporarily taken control of the country to “target criminals” around the 93-year-old president. It now seems likely that the ruthless rule of the world’s oldest leader will be definitively over within days.
Just shows us how bloody abnormal America is.
Mugabe fired Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose winsome personality and general bonhomie earned him the nickname of “the Crocodile” two days ago. Mnangagwa is supposedly behind the coup. This is not an improvement.
Don’t bet on it. This is an intra-party feud about succession, i.e., next thief in line to get the biggest cut. Problem is, there’s less and less loot.
Skip,
It is hard for us who have all the blessings of Liberty to understand a situation where a military takeover might be an improvement. I don’t think it is a very common situation but I can think of two off the top of my head. First, the attempt to assassinate Hitler by elements of the German military, we would be forced to accept as an improvement. Many, many Jews were murdered in concentration camps in the last months of the war. They might have been saved and the allied casualties too. Second, I think overall General Sisi of Egypt has saved Egypt from the lunatic rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt is also now a partner in the fight against Jihadist terror. That too is an improvement.
Perhaps this too will be an improvement for Zimbabwe. We will wait and see.
Regards,
Jim
Mnangwa was also the chief of Zimbabwe’s intelligence service and is best friends since childhood of the head of Zimbabwe’s military. What they are doing right now is negotiating how to split things up and if the offer Mnangwa offers isn’t high enough, don’t be surprised if the general, Chiwenga, holds on to power. Chiwenga also just returned from China. So guess Xi gave them the green light.
Although he was a brutal dictator, many Chilean citizens say that Augusto Pinochet was better than Salvador Allende. Indeed, a military coup in Castro’s Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela would have left the people better off.
I worked with many people from Zimbabwe and South Africa when I lived in Australia. All of them had had to abandon their homes because of anti-white policies. I’ve given up most hope for Africa, sadly.
Mr. Steyn:
https://www.steynonline.com/8254/butcher-bob-out-of-his-job
Skipsul, you truly are a Renaissance Man. Needless to say I’d always welcome a post from you about voltage regulators, or edge mounted integrated circuits, or the fine points of restoring a classic Corvette. But between your recent post about Orthodoxy and this, I’d have to say you’re competing for Mark Steyn’s crown as “One Man Media Provider”. Please keep up the good work!
Oh, no! Whatever will the WHO do without its goodwill ambassador!!
One Man Global Content Provider, please. Although the sobriquet appears to have gone away.
John I you were on NRO they would fire you for that sort of talk.
If they start shipping good coffee again on a regular basis, we’ll know they have turned things around. One of the best cups of coffee I ever had was of Zimbabwe origin. That was back in September 2003. But the country is such a mess that their coffee isn’t cared for properly these days. (The country was already a mess in 2003, but sometimes good coffee would get out anyway.)
John,
This is immensely interesting. The pure pc assumption that IQ can be pushed aside as a bias of Western Civilization is directly challenged by this theory of Lynn and Vanhanen. As is mentioned in the synopsis, you can’t guarantee that somewhere they haven’t cherry-picked the data to make their theory look right. However, their hypothesis can be falsified by further research. This is well worth the effort. Wasting another gazillion dollars in funding on Man Made Global Warming research can wait. Has any more research been done on this idea?
Regards,
Jim
Thanks, but I owe a roundabout credit to @claire for this. You see, some years ago here she was lamenting the horrible international reporting done by US news agencies. So I asked her where we should look if we want any inkling on what is going on “out there”. She said Real Clear World was a great place to start, and that’s where I spotted this story.
Pinochet. He didn’t know what to do after kicking Allende out and purging the government of communists. The Chicago boys from Catholic U gave him a platform of total free market and he accepted it. The country enjoyed the only real revolution and resultant prosperity on the continent. Then he voluntarily stepped down to fair elections after which he was persecuted by the world’s left because a successful market revolution is intolerable to the left. Only the same sort of thing will work in Africa’s tribal societies where socialism has been an even greater disaster than in every place else. How likely is that in Zimbabwe?
About 5-10%. It takes leadership that is dedicated to Liberty for All and that is, unfortunately, exceedingly rare.
John,
The truth is that I like philosophy and history. I have always stayed away from hyper-statistical modern social science and certainly avoided the general subject of IQ. Yet, the current virulent strain of pc multiculturalism makes dogmatic assumptions and enforces them as if they were Chairman Mao’s red guard. In the face of dogmatic blindness and vicious tactics, nothing would be healthier than to look at a little real data.
Thanks, John.
Regards,
Jim
Are there studies relating general intelligence levels to the amount of freedom and the nature of the legal system. Sowell makes the point that waves of immigrants, even Jews, start out with below average I.Q.s. Adam Smith (and apparently Hume, listen to Econ Talk last month on Smith Hume) made the argument that commercial societies fostered a more virtuous population. They foster capacity and innovation as well so surely they would promote the things we’re capable of measuring on these kinds of tests. Give any country good governance, good law and freedom and it will transform itself. Are there any exceptions? We know there are no exceptions to the disaster of socialism.
Mental acuity is an asset, of course. But claims of superiority – mental, physical, whatever – can skate too close to master race style thinking for my taste. Give me opportunity coupled with a curious mind, desire to learn, and willingness to work your butt off over a genius any day of the week.
I kind of agree, but it would be interesting to explore whether intelligence or virtue plays a greater role in societal success. I suspect good ethics and the web of trust built by virtuous people practicing virtue is more potent. There are plenty of highly intelligent bad actors.
There exists a very detailed survey of precisely the relationship between mental acuity and societal success: The Bell Curve. First published in 1994. Updated a couple times since then. The basic theme of the book is that intelligence is the most significant driver of success, morality, and criminality in society, and that it is largely inherited. And the fact that it is largely inherited means there will be group differences in intelligence distributions where gene pools have been separated, in exactly the same way there are group differences in skin color, body types, hair color, eye color, susceptibility to various diseases, and a whole host of other genetically influenced personal characteristics.
The modern research cited in this thread is merely additional data piled on to that available in 1994, all of it pointing to the same conclusions. In addition to more data points across the world, estimates of heritability of intelligence have climbed since 1994, making the points on group differences even more significant. Reality is messy, regardless what we feel about “master race style thinking”.
The final sections of the Bell Curve discuss how government has made intelligence even more significant due to the mazes of regulations, innumerable tax breaks, and byzantine criminal codes. We can’t wave a magic wand to raise everyone’s intelligence to rocket scientist levels, and ignoring reality doesn’t make this problem go away. What would help the most would be to dumb down all of government, so all people would be equal before the law. Simple criminal code. Simple tax forms. Simple regulations. Gee, it sounds like small government!
Sir Thomas More was apparently very intelligent, and was also a criminal who was beheaded for his crime. Where does he rank on the scale of success and morality? Would you say he’s one of those outliers you have in every distribution? Or is there a discrepancy because the definition or morality at use in The Bell Curve is a very special definition? (I like Charles Murray and follow him on Twitter, but haven’t read the book except in excerpt. So I don’t know how he defines morality. Which is why I’m asking.)
True but also true that The Bell Curve studies were confined to the U.S. a paragon of personal liberty compared to most every other place and a very stark contrast to Zimbabwe over Mugabe’s time. It is my belief that people everywhere and at all times work much harder when they have reasonable expectations of keeping and/or keeping control of the wealth/objects they produce. The greater the degree those things are taken from them either by marauding neighbors or their own governments the lesser is their motivation to work hard and be productive whatever their innate capacities might be. So, can Zimbabwe be turned around? Maybe. It depends on what kind of leadership follows Mugabe. It could scarcely be worse it seems to me but there must be a vast improvement if they are to be considered successful in the modern era. The military can only be a placeholder in such a scenario and most military dictatorships do end badly.
Murray didn’t have enough data from outside the U.S. to draw any conclusions, but he did have some data to share, and what little he had left the impression the worldwide situation was much worse than in our melting-pot society. The collection of data since then has filled in some of those gaps, and support his pessimism.
Well, the Bell Curve is all about correlations and inferences of causation. Intelligence is correlated with success and morality and a bunch of other more or less measurable characteristics, and is more correlated than other potential causes of success or morality, particularly parental equivalents, but in no case is definitive. Smart people are simply much less likely to be criminals than less-smart people, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any smart criminals.
He doesn’t define it outright that I recall, but does use traditional family values as a placeholder. Babies before marriage == immoral, babies in marriage == moral, etc. I probably should re-read it. It’s been a few years. I strongly recommend it for anyone who really wants to make a positive impact on society.
Virtue plays a major role in societies with forms of govt similar to ours, I think, that depend heavily on the virtue of people to control government. Where/when that virtue breaks down, the separation of powers is supposed to place checks on govt. As virtue further erodes, I expect attempts to change the Constitution will be made. Madison on duality of human nature in Federalist #55:
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so also there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
EQ, Emotional Intelligence Quotient, is also considered an indicator of success. Social-emotional skills like motivation, perseverance, impulse control, coping mechanisms and the ability to delay gratification can be increased, unlike IQ.
No amount of hard work will overcome an IQ of 66. It just won’t.
Let me put it this way: No one who posts on Ricochet has an IQ below 100.
I imagine there are people in Zimbabwe whose IQs are above 66. Haven’t studied that country or its history, but I reject the idea that any people as a nation are so stupid they cannot function without an overlord. Disadvantaged, under educated, under developed, can be changed; though too often in history they’ve ended up subjugated by more developed or stronger nations.
There are countries with long histories of undemocratic rule that seem to gravitate toward that type of societal structure. When studying Russian history at university, I remember thinking — Mongols, tsars, soviet communists, etc. — Russians had been under undemocratic rule for so long it must be almost a way of life.
There are many factors/indicators of success, and success can be measured in multiple ways. Genetics drives IQ, true. It’s the idea great success can/will be achieved only by high IQ individuals that I disagree with.
There is a credible study in which the mean IQ is 66. Mild MR is 55-70 according to the DSM V. Have you worked with this population before? I have. Education does not change IQ by more than a SD. It just does not. You can reject the idea, but IQ test are one of the most accurate tests we have for predicting success in modern society. Maybe you don’t need it in rural, but it is critical in the modern world, and growing more so as automation replaces basic tasks. you have to be smarter to use a tractor than you do a hoe.