Socialism Plus Racial Resentment Equals Ruin

John Noonan at the Weekly Standard has a long, sad look at the vibrant nation Robert Mugabe inherited and how he ruined Zimbabwe in three decades in office. As Noonan notes, Mugabe’s reign wasn’t always all bad, and the nation still prospered in his first decade in office, but the poison of Maoism and racial resentment was there from the beginning, and grew worse over time, as “the jewel of Africa” fell to a place so ruined that life expectancy dropped nearly in half, unemployment reached 95% and the government was powerless to prevent an outbreak of cholera. One wonders how many of Mugabe’s left-wing champions, like Jimmy Carter, would rather live the life of a black Zimbabwean in 2010 than a black Rhodesian in 1980. (On the other hand, the fate of Zimbabwe gives one a renewed appreciation, by contrast, for Nelson Mandela; Mandela has his own checkered ideological history, and like many national heroes his eventual presidency was not without its stumbles, but he successfully set aside the bitterness of his long imprisonment, steered clear of most of Mugabe’s sins, and left when it was his time to go).