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I'm a member of the Rhodesian African Rifles Facebook group so that Chomp's mates have a means of getting a message to him via me.
The people who were in the RAR are people who, predominately, were born in Rhodesia when it still existed and have done a diaspora out to other nations of the Anglosphere.
A few of them were around when the Unilateral Declaration of Independence was sent to The Crown.
And they are all weepy about Queen Elizabeth shuffling off?
The same queen who let your asses hang out to dry over the matter of recognition which would have ended the bush war virtually overnight if the US recognized an independent Rhodesia (warts and all) and stood up support against the spread of Communism?
Their capacity for forgiveness impresses me.
Unfortunately, the US recognizing Rhodesia (or the UK accepting UDI) was politically impossible at the time. The US was in the throes of the last parts of the Civil Rights hullaballoo, with the news media 100% on one side (gee, that's familiar, isn't it?) and the UK was dominated by people who were all weepy and guilty about the bad ol' Empire. People actually familiar with the situation on-the-ground in Africa were ignored or shouted down, rather like Palestine after WWII.
ReplyDeleteQE2 was not her own mistress, and pretty much had to do as she was told by her ministers. She may also have been swayed by biased information. At the time, the "winds of change" thing was very much the "in" point of view among Africa-watchers, despite the fact that all the black ex-colonies had promptly devolved into hellhole dystopias for everybody but the dictators and their cronies. Whatever the rights and wrongs of UDI, the optics were very bad.