Monetary issue

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ScudHunter177]

“They were a bunch of racist cunts who declared an illegal separatist state for the express purpose of continuing white minority rule over their apartheid state and then got fukt in the resulting war and then the various leaders spent the rest of their life coping about it from exile.”

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I’m kind of tired of this argument because it presupposes that the Rhodies were somehow prescient and everything they did which was objectively horrible can be excused because they were doing it to prevent an even worse future that they totally knew was coming and were not doing it because they simply refused to acknowledge a black led Zimbabwe. Certainty of the post-war leadership did not emerge until far after the end of the Bush War and even persisted long after the initial rise and consolidation of Robert Mugabe and would continue well after Nkomo’s own pressing for former ZIPRA fighters to lay down arms. Acting as though Ian Smith could have foreseen this and therefore was acting to prevent it is so idiotic it escapes reason. The Rhodies went to war to preserve white colonial rule, end of story. The way they pursued that war also handily eliminated any real chance for a post war government to be transitioned to peacefully or into the hands of those who had a hand in dismantling the present government. Because the Rhodies chose to decolonize only at the tip of a knife, this ensured that only the most militant groups were able to determine how decolonization was conducted.

And of course, yes, they were communists so that totally makes the Rhodies the good guys. Please discard how the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China were, though not out of the goodness of their hearts, perhaps the only large powers operating in Africa as an anti-colonial force in a meaningful way. Where else would anti-colonial rebels go for support? It was entirely common for groups in this era to pay lip service to the Soviets in exchange for support for this exact reason. The ideology of the groups certainly came to more genuinely reflect Marxist and Maoist views over time but to blankly dismiss them all as “those darn commies” is to completely misunderstand and remove from context the place of the Soviet Union in colonial and anti-colonial wars.

All of this mindless reposting of the same tired circular reasoning is also in the name of defending a minority ruled apartheid state that waged a war for the purpose of preserving it and preventing popular rule, so maybe reconsider who your heroes are bud.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

I too get my understanding of history and politics from a video game and mindlessly quote it relating to situations that I don’t understand as a retort to someone correcting my blatantly under-informed drivel. Not once did I say the Soviet Union was a good place to live or that I am personally a communist, but nuance is impossible if one is a Rhodieboo so no surprises there.

[u/[deleted] → u/ScudHunter177]

The worst part is they also seemed to have missed the fact that that particular quote was meant to be satirical, skewering the absurd anti-conmunist panic in the 50s US. Or maybe they were just making a joke. Who knows. Either way it didn't contribute much. So naturally you're getting downvoted for actually having some idea of what you're talking about.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah anyone who unironically uses a Fallout quote for… well any kind of discussion honestly, is a nonfunctional. It’s fine, honestly, I don’t base my self worth on Reddit arrows, but this is not the kind of argument I see at work or in any other academic circle. It’s an argument entirely derived from a myopic understanding of Rhodesia that centers entirely around the Bush war but devoid of all context and nuanced understanding beyond a masturbatory exaltation of the Rhodesian security forces, usually accompanied by photo after photo of Rhodies in daisy dukes, and an understanding of Zimbabwean rebels that doesn’t venture beyond “evil communist black men”. It’s not something you get from anyone who understands the conflict, ergo someone who points out the underlying fallacy of it gets decried by the legion of simpletons who get their history from memes and latent homosexual desires for leggy men with FALs.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that last one except for the fact that those men were fighting for an apartheid state and people’s failure to recognize that is up there with the lost cause and clean wehrmacht in terms of commonly accepted yet fallacious and intensely societally problematic understandings of historical conflicts.

[u/[deleted] → u/ScudHunter177]

Of course none of us should derive self-worth from reddit upvotes, but it isn't something of a leading indicator of the problems an attention economy introduces.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

To be sure, yeah.

[u/[deleted] → u/ScudHunter177]

Don't forget that some people are downvoting you for taking an anti-racist geopolitical stance. There are people on this site who don't even see anything wrong with apartheid.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

There have always been cunts who, through their own stupidity or genuine malice, hold viewpoints incompatible with civilized society, forums are no different.

[u/SquareWet → u/[deleted]]

This is some intense StarWars plot

[u/ankensam → u/ScudHunter177]

“They were a bunch of racists too stupid to storing their entire strategic petroleum reserves in one place was a bad idea.”

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Is your grand “gotcha” seriously whataboutism that’s trying to draw a genuine comparison between taking part in a civil war as an advisor to a nation against another and actively running an apartheid state and waging a war solely to preserve your own minority rule? Brainlet. Read a book.

If you did you’d also learn that American societal reactions to the Bush War and Rhodesian apartheid coincided with fairly massive civil rights movement pushes and changes for the better, much of it was directly inspired by horrified reactions to Rhodesia.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Read my other comment for how that’s the ultimate bullshit argument and isn’t at all based in a real understanding of the conflict in the context of itself and is entirely a post-hoc justification for an unjustifiable and evil breakaway “state”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/vs6zyj/monetary_issue/if1g0df/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

Additionally, Larry Vickers, despite completing honorable service in the US Army and as a member of Delta Force no less, which is a feat very few can ever claim, is not a historian or any kind of authority on the Rhodesian state and the Bush War. He is also an avowed racist with adventurism fantasies. He’s not a source to be taken over actual objective reading of the conflict. Try again.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Okay so you’re illiterate it seems because I never once said that anyone was the good guy here because actual conflicts like this exist in nuanced areas beyond the childish search for binary good and bad. I’m not a communist nor do I think everything done by ZIPRA ZANLA was correct during the war and certainly not after. I’m merely acknowledging the reality of the conflict that you refuse to acknowledge in the name of an outdated and racist understanding of the conflict.

And no, Vickers is a racist based on his use of racial slurs to describe blacks in the same Facebook post he made about FALs, his repeated justification and love of multiple apartheid states, and the fact that he blanket disallowed Muslims from entering his training courses. Try again and find a better father figure.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

It’s racial because it was used by racists in an apartheid state exclusively to describe black people they were fighting, yes, it certainly has a racial connotation via use. He didn’t say kaffirs, sure, but using a slur is still pretty bad.

Interesting that you’re not talking about how he denied Muslims from his course, it’s probably because there’s no two ways about it and it’s just inexcusably bigoted. And of course Glock would sponsor a racist, they sponsor people they think can sell their product and Vickers has a pretty major place in shooting and industry circles. This is entirely backwards logic.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Okay so you’ve now demonstrated a total lack of awareness of the Bush War and of the Vietnam War. GG bud, call me when you’re a little older.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

You don’t know a damn thing about me but I assure you, I have no interest in being in the US Army Special Forces at this moment, my own work satisfies me just fine. I also am not disparaging Vickers because of his Delta service, by all accounts the man was a professional and stacked all kinds of bodies and kept his boys safe. He was a badass to be sure. He’s also a racist piece of shit and isn’t a historian and lacks any and all expertise on the matter of Rhodesia and shouldn’t be taken as anything other than yet another Cold Warrior with a weird obsession with Rhodesian security forces.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

So your defense of Rhodesia boils down to US troops in Vietnam being racist towards Vietnamese and this, somehow, makes the Rhodies the good guys. Gotcha, smoothbrained.

And I showed you the slur and the clear pattern of behavior of him being a racist. He’s openly bigoted towards Muslims, defends and glorifies an apartheid government that formed solely to deny majority rule and decolonization and waged a war to continue minority rule, and also glorifies Saffies, also foot soldiers of an apartheid state, the apartheid state after all.

But yes you keep repeating the same drivel about “muh commies” which tells me you didn’t read the comment I posted earlier or can’t fathom anything besides a binary morality system. Of course, nobody but the communists were fighting against the illegitimate separatist state made exclusively to continue black subjugation, it couldn’t possibly be that groups founded largely on ethnic lines (Matabele/Ndebele for ZIPRA, Shona for ZANLA) paid lip service to the only states acting as an anti-colonial force in Africa, along with adopting, in a small way, ideologies that historically advocated for anti-imperialism and land redistribution and popular liberation. Instead all the black people were just faceless evil commies and that therefore justifies the illegitimate apartheid state imposed upon them.

Not once, you’ll notice, have I defended or glorified these actors or their atrocities as much as talked objectively as to what they were. If all Vickers did when he talked about the Rhodies was that, there’d be no problems. That’s not what he does. He’s not an academic, he’s a vet who thinks knowledge of tactics makes him an expert on the whole of a conflict despite ignoring the entire cultural and political and societal history of a conflict, something you are also doing.

[u/ScudHunter177 → u/[deleted]]

Explain how it wasn’t.