Part Two: Ian Smith: The Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Robert concludes the life story of Ian Smith by explaining the Rhodesian Bush War, and how prejudice led to military disaster.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
This is the part two of our series on Ian Smith,
the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, a country made by racists,
for racists, and of racists. Here to talk to me
about racists. How are you doing?

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Becca? Love it?

Speaker 4 (00:27):
I do feel like it is an area of expertise
I have as a one of color in America.

Speaker 5 (00:31):
But you know, what can you do?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
What can you do? I mean, these are these are like, uh,
these are the racists who like trained a lot of
the racists who came after. Although they're still standing on
the shoulders of great racists like Cecil Roads and the Confederacy.
But you know, if they could be more racist, it's
only because they stood on the shoulders of racist giants.

Speaker 5 (00:53):
They learned from the racist before them.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how
else to talk about.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
Loving them, loving their brand of racism. It actually does
remind me of Puerto Rico a little bit. Yeah, just
in the way that they I'm like, how do I
put this? The colonial status of Rhodesia is kind of
similar to I feel like the way the United States
utilized Puerto Rico where they colonized Puerto Rico and then

(01:22):
they called it an unincorporated territory and then they're like no, no,
but it's not a colony though, and like if you
work really hard, you can maybe become a state and
then you know, it's never gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
So denying Puerto Rico any kind of like real autonomy
is just the same as the like, well, we don't
want their votes to mean more than like white votes.

Speaker 5 (01:45):
So they don't even have representation.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Mm hmm, you just take that away from them basically, Yeah,
like it's it is. It is interesting because yeah, the US,
the US answer to like what to do with with
Puerto Rico was just like let's obscure it a little
more than the Rhodesians. We're going to write. Yeah, like
but it is always the fundamental issue is always okay,
but like, yeah, if we give back power to these

(02:12):
people in a democratic system, they're going to vote for
stuff that's good for them and maybe not good for
like the forty of us who own everything.

Speaker 4 (02:19):
Exactly and contextually, this is happening similar timelines, you know,
like the Jones Act happened early nineteen hundreds, you know,
so it's like, at this time in history, globally it
is not cool to be a colony, which is where
I feel like Rhodesia and Puerto Rico are learning how

(02:40):
to navigate their own political systems. While it's not saying colony.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, we're not saying and that's that is exactly kind
of the and both their their kind of mother countries
are trying to deal with the same problem. Right, The
US and Great Britain are both dealing with the fact
that globally it doesn't look good to be pro colonially
some in pro colony in this period, but we don't
want to give up our stuff entirely, so I mean

(03:07):
that's less of the British by this point are kind
of accepting we're going to have to give up a
lot of our stuff, so it's for them, or how
do we avoid like embarrassment, right, how do we avoid
being like shamed over like the fact that things are
going to fall apart once we leave or whatever. Whereas
the US is like, well, what if we just call
them a cult? What if we just make up something

(03:27):
for them that means they're technically members of the state,
but they don't get to like vote in a way
that matters right exactly, but it's still like the same
fundamental issue is like, well, we want a colony, we
can't call it that. How do we make sure these
the majority of the people who live in this area
don't get to actually make decisions because we want their
stuff still yep. So in Central Africa, the first way

(03:59):
that this is the white people attempt to maintain their
power in the post colonial era is this dream that
Ian Smith signs on too, called the Central African Federation
or CIF. This was established in nineteen fifty three as
a sort of bulwark for British white supremacists in Central Africa.
The Federation, as I noted last episode, consisted of Southern
Rhodesia than a self governing British colony, and the British

(04:20):
protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and nyassaland each territory remained autonomous
and subject to a representative of the British Queen's Government,
as well as an African Affairs Board, which was meant
to protect indigenous people from discriminatory laws. You always had
to have that in there, right. This is part of
the ploy, that's part of how they want to dress
up the CIF is like, and there's this whole board

(04:41):
dedicated to making sure we're not mean to the black people. Right,
don't you want to give us our independence? Now? Doesn't
this sound good? And this is all a show. The
board and this fiction of a federation are all meant
to exist as long enough as it takes to get
the international community in Britain to recognize them as an
independent state, at which point they will revert to being

(05:04):
what they always were, which is a way for rich
white families to get cheap labor. Right now. This whole
idea of the Central African Republic was the brainchild of
a Northern Rhodesian politician named Roy Wolinski. And Roy realized
that the only way to get England to support the
independence of a white led Central African state was to
dress it up as something other than that.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
And Ulitski himself is a fascinating example of the bizarre
racial politics of colonial Central Africa. He was the son
of a Lithuanian Jewish refugee and an afrikaaner woman who
had been born and he was born into the poor
white community of Salisbury. Unlike Ian, he's like a poor
Rhodesian right, which white which still aren't like really poor.

(05:46):
But it means that he's going to have to work
harder as a young man to get places. And it's interesting.
It's like, because he's Jewish, when he's younger in the
pre World War two days, a bunch of like fascist
South Africans to face his office with anti Semitic griff
and so he's both has this experience of like being
a member of an ethnic minority who has had to

(06:06):
escape a genocide and also you're actively trying to create
a racial apartheid state. It's a really fascinating position for
a man to be in. Well Lisky finds himself in.
And Frank Barton, former editor of the Central African Post,
later wrote that quote, it is curious that a man
who has endured such discrimination should be the main pillar
of the discrimination practiced against millions of non whites in

(06:28):
the Federation. And it is interesting.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Weird we see this, Yeah, this is like a this
is like a consistent pattern that we see a lot,
not just you know, throughout history, but in modern times
as well. I think you can dot the i's across
the t's on that one.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
But uh, yeah, so the whole point of this federation
is to convince the British government that they could leave, right,
and that if the British government leaves, everything will be okay.
We'll have a state. It's not going to be mean
to the Africans. No one's going to get angry the
British Empire for leaving us in charge. You guys will
be fine. This won't be a shame to your country

(07:05):
for the rest of time that you left us racists
in charge of this part of Africa. Right, you will
never regret this, That's what That's the whole idea behind
the Central African Federation or is like you don't have
to worry leaving all this shit in our hands, will
take care of it for you. But London they're not
quite willing to take that right. In part, you've got

(07:27):
a left in British politics who has for the last
several decades been like, we're going to decolonize as soon
as we get any power. We're kicking you assholes like out,
this is bad. We don't want to do this anymore.
And you also, even among the larger chunk of the
British government who are not fanatics about decolonization, these guys
still are like, well, we don't want to be embarrassed

(07:47):
if you turn out to be a bunch of monsters,
which we know you're going to be because we know Rhodesians.
So we need to have before we'll cut you loose.
You need to give us some guarantee that the majority
of people who live in the Central African Federation want
to be part of the Central African Federation. Right, you
need to provide us some evidence that the black majority

(08:09):
of the country wants to be a country with you guys, right,
And they can't prove that because they don't because they
like these people are awful, Like the black people don't
want to live under the commands of these assholes who
have been ruining their lives for decades now. Right, there's
never been any chance of like even getting enough of folks,

(08:31):
like tricking them into backing this republic to get the
British government on board with anything. And so by nineteen
sixty the dream is in free fall. You know, after
about seven years, it becomes clear to everybody this is
never going to take off. They're never going to get
the majority of the population to support this idea, and
so the British government's never going to support this idea.

(08:52):
In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold McMillan gives a
speech called the Winds of Change Speech, which is very
famous because he's talking about how like Africa is going
to change, This massive change is sweeping Africa right now
and all of these colonial states are going to be
gone soon. That's the Winds of Change speech. And so
Harold gives Rhodesia a two year ultimatum and he tells,

(09:16):
you know, Wolynsky, basically, you've got two years to get
your ducks in a row and come up with some
way to convince the international community that the majority of
black people living in this territory want to be a
part of this federation too, right, And Wolynsky fails. There's
never any chance of succeeding in this and so right right,
because they don't want to, because these people suck. So

(09:38):
by nineteen sixty two, his failure is evident, and the
car whatever kind of falls apart as a dream. A
big part of why is that there are major black
led liberation movements in Nyassaland and Northern Rhodesia by this
point in time, and they're big enough that like number one,
every time this guy claims no, really they want to

(09:59):
be a part of federation, there's like large groups that
have international recognition that are like, no, we don't. We're
actually like talking for ourselves now and we don't want this.
And they've gotten enough for a recognition in nineteen sixty
two that Niasland and Northern Rhodesia are obviously about to
become independent black led countries, right, And so Southern Rhodesia

(10:21):
has just been is now sitting alone. This dream of
a federation is dead, and they can kind of see
the writing on the wall if the British have backed
like black majority led governments in all of the surrounding
post colonial states, to us, they're not going to let
the white people continue to own everything in Rhodesia before

(10:42):
they give it up, right, And this is where we
return to our pal Ian Smith, who is smart enough
that he can see the writing on the wall. Right,
friend of the pod, enemy of the pot. Yeah. So
again Smith had been a big backer of Wolinski's Federal
Party and in nineteen fifty eight become the chief government
whip in Parliament. Because there's like the Federal party in

(11:04):
Southern Rhodesia, that is the party that supports this dream
of a federation, and Smith is with that until nineteen
fifty eight when the Federalists, as part of an attempt
to like get black Africans to support the federation, they
start pushing this new constitution that guarantees black people a

(11:25):
set number of seats in the Rhodesian Parliament, and Smith
gets furious at this. His number one issue is there
should never be any meaningful degree of political power handed
to black Africans in Rhodesia. And so he's like, you
guys are just doing this because you think it'll convince
the British to make us a dominion. But they're never
going to do that. They're never going to give white

(11:46):
farmers a free state. And so if we just handing
over political power to the black people who live here,
is just going to encourage them to rebel against us
and make them think they can get even more. So
we can't do any of that, and that's when he
breaks from the party. He leaves politics for a little
while because he's like Smith is, he's he's looking at
what's happening in Africa, you know. So he's a monster

(12:09):
and a racist, but he's also not blind. You know,
in seventy or in sixty two, sixty three, sixty four,
Belgium's pulled out of the Congo by this point, and
that's gotten really violent. Nyasaland, which is about to become Malawi,
has a majority black parliament, and the British government is
very clearly as Smith's He's that he's just trying. They're
just trying to keep us white farmers from panicking before

(12:31):
they abandon us. All they're waiting for is an excuse
to kind of carve us up the way they have
these other territories, and then once we have no more power,
they'll hand things over to the majority population who will
take our land from us. Right, So that's what Ian
Smith realizes in fifty eight, and he's like Wolinski is
incapable of seeing the situation as it is, and so

(12:52):
I have to take action. So he leaves the party.
He spends a year or two kind of bumming around,
and he meets up with the leader of this conservative party,
the Dominion Party, a guy named Winston Field, and Winston
is sort of he has been gathering all of like
the right wing Rhodesians to him, and Smith decides like
this is the path forward for the independence like wing

(13:15):
of Rhodesian politics, and so he starts a new political
party with Winston Field that's specifically white supremacist and that
is aimed at creating a new right wing government to
take power from the United Federal Party, which was Wolinski's party,
and oppose majority ruler decolonization. Right. This new party is

(13:36):
called the Rhodesian Front, and this is Winston Field and
Ian Smith creating a white supremacist far right political party.
That's whole goal and its whole promise to white voters
is we will stop change right right. And the reason
Front does very well. They sweep the nineteen sixty two
elections that December. They're big like motto for like the

(13:59):
election campaign they run is vote Rhodesian Front for a
white Christmas, and they're it's not the snow in Rhodesia.
They're very much talking about for like a white like
in the most literal senseport right.

Speaker 6 (14:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
A Time correspondent covering the sixty two election described the
Rhodesian Fronts platform as scarcely distinguishable from the apartheid practiced
across the border. In South Africa, and this is a
noteworthy change. Rudesia has always been racist, it's always been
an apartheid state, but it's also always sought to be
different from South Africa and not look as race. They

(14:35):
don't want to. They certainly don't want people to see
them as as racist as South Africans up until nineteen
sixty two. And when the Rhodesian Front takes over and wins,
and when Ian Smith's party starts dominating things, that means
it becomes like the Norman Rhodesia to be like, no, no,
we're like the South Africans, but even more racist. Right, Like,
we're explicitly accepting that about ourselves now. We tried to

(14:59):
deny it for years and we're no longer doing that.
So that's what's happening. There's a good there that Times
correspondent that I quoted from earlier. The way he summarizes
one of the Rhodesian Front's most popular campaign ads should
make it clear what this party is all about. Quote
under posters showing the legs of white and black schoolgirls

(15:20):
standing side by side. The front blared Rhodesia is not
ready for this. That's their big scare. Ad it's like, look,
white and black kids at the same school, Like, you
know what that Let's let's fight a war to make
sure this never has to happen. Like that is The
Rhodesian Front's direct promise to voters is you will never
have to send your kids to an integrated school. The

(15:41):
Front promised to maintain white Rhodesian interests and argued that
majority rule would destroy the economy and lead to the
creation of a communist regime. Ian Smith's new party had
a couple of main catchphrases. When was their promise to
preserve civilized standards? He uses that term a lot, and
it means white social norms right there, civilized standards. And

(16:01):
his other term is responsible government and that means white
minority control of the government. Those are Smith's two big
talking points. Is we're going to keep white people in church.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
It basically just made like a year round white Christmas.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, year around white Christmas, Yes, exactly so, because white
Rhodesians are by this point out numbered thirteen to one.
The Front also encouraged outreach to other white people in
Africa and urged them to immigrate to Rhodesia if their
own homes had fallen victim to the evils of decolonization. So,
if you're a white person in Africa and the colonial

(16:36):
government is leaving and there's about to be like a
black majority democratic government, Rhodesia's putting up propaganda that says,
move here, join the Rhodesian Army. You'll never have to
give up power if you stay here. So basically, we're
trying to pull in all of the white people in
Africa who want things to stay they were the way
they were under colonization. Move to Rhodesia. That's their big

(16:58):
pr pitch to the of the continent. Now, in their
first couple of years in power, the Front has to
govern as part of a coalition, right, they're not initially
in total power. And I want to quote from an
article on history Rise dot com here summarizing this period
of time. Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front claim that
they based their policies, ideas, and democratic principles on meritocratic

(17:20):
ideals and not on color or nationalism, stating that these
policies and what he called separate economic advancement would ultimately
result in an equal partnership between black and white as
an alternative to majority rule. And that's interesting I love
how often meritocracy widens up as like a white supremacist
talking point of like, oh no, we don't want a

(17:41):
white state, we want a meritocracy. And that just means
that the best educated people and the richest people should
govern things because they've already proven they have the most merit,
you know, like that's the again. They just try to
be a little more subtle than well, we just don't
like black people, right, they have to be a little
more subtle than that. So Winstonfield leads the Front for

(18:03):
its first two years in power, but he's far too
milk toast and moderate to hold on the power for long.
You know, he's one of these guys who's Winston. His
name is Winston. He just doesn't have a lot of
juice to him. And so in April of nineteen sixty four,
Ian Smith engineers a change of power between the two
and he steps into the role of Prime Minister for
what's going to prove to be the rest of Rhodesia's

(18:24):
life as a country. And at this point in sixty four,
when he takes over as Prime Minister, the Rhodesian Front
is the only party that has any power in Rhodesia.
Now they've successfully done that, and he's basically a dictator
from this point on. He has no real opposition, he's
able to the government does whatever Ian Smith wants. It's

(18:46):
usually not discussed that way, and he does come to
power democratically, but he's a dictator in every way that matters.
Nobody's questioning Ian who has power within Rhodesia, right, it's
like his and so what's everything that's going to happen.
Rhodesha's whole war for independence is entirely based on what
Ian Smith wants and thinks is a good idea, and

(19:07):
that's really important to keep in mind here. There's almost
no one else who's able to like, counter him or
push for any other state of affairs in Rhodesian politics.
So Smith comes to power with an understanding that under
previous negotiations with the Crown, Southern Rhodesia had been promised
dominion status when they wanted it. I talked about this
last episode, but that wasn't an actual promise that the

(19:29):
British government had ever made. Like Rhodesians convinced themselves that
that was the promise the British government made, but the
British government was like, we never said that. What the
fuck are you talking about.

Speaker 6 (19:41):
You're not obligated to do any verbal non agreement, right right, yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Get better representatives. This is not you need the lawyer.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well that's what they've gotten Smith. That's at least that's
what they think because Smith in sixty four and sixty
five there's this big debate between the British Prime Minister,
Harold Wilson and Ian Smith over what is going to
happen to Rhodesia, and Smith is like, you're supposed you
said you'd make us a dominion, so just do it,
whereas Wilson argued that like, no, no, no, we agreed

(20:20):
we might do something like that if the independent state
that we would be creating would be acceptable quote to
the people of the country as a whole. And Smith
is like, well, everyone I know is fine with Rhodesia
being a country, to which Wilson is like, but you
only know white people, and like there are at this
point African nationalist Rhodesian leaders and they're African nationalist Rhodesian parties,

(20:42):
and some of those leaders whore speaking up and being
like we like, we actually don't agree with this guy
at all, Like, we don't like fuck this dude. So
it's very obvious that, like, and it's obvious two British
people in London that Smith is full of shit about this, right,
and so this is the kind of thing where there
there's never this point where the rest of the world

(21:02):
plays along. This is purely how Smith and the Rhodesians
pretend things are working, but everyone is aware that, like, no,
you're just gangsters trying to take everything for yourselves. Right.
So Wilson's government ultimately settles on a hard stance no
independence before majority rule, which for some reason gets then
acronym NIBMAR. I don't know why you give an acronym

(21:25):
to that, but they're like, no, we can't. That's too
long to say. We got to have an acronym nib mar. Right,
no independence before majority rule, which means we won't let
Rhodesia be its own country unless you have an actual
democratic government where the majority of people get to vote. Right.
And Ian Smith and the rich white farmers he represented
are really shocked by this, and they're shocked by how

(21:46):
much mockery they get in mainstream British society. Again, we're
in the sixties, there's like mainstream there's like main like
modern media. There's like people are talking about this whole
debate and they're talking about what Ian Smith is claiming
and the obvious realities on the ground in Rhodesia that
are very different, and it becomes sort of like Rhodesians

(22:08):
become how you in sort of like British political society,
how you make fun of someone for being like an
old racist throwback, like that is the Rhodesian in British
Like it's they're not wrong, right, but that really pisss
off the roodies. This paragraph from a relevant article in
The Independent by Rupert Cornwall gives you an idea of

(22:30):
how the Rhodesians are discussed in like popular British society,
Old white Rhodesia. The joke ran was a Surrey with
the lunatic fringe on top. And Surrea is like a
suburban part of England, right, so it's like this chunk
of like British suburbs that's entirely run by the lunatic fringe.
To continue with that quote, whether it was lunatic was

(22:52):
a matter of opinion, but suburban Surrea it did resemble
in its parochiality. It's golf club outlook on the world.
It's unquestioning certainty in its own value. The white population
never exceeded three percent of the total and no more
than a decent English provincial town, but they believe they
had created God's own country. Right. So the idea over
in England is these are all a bunch of like
rich suburban maniacs who don't actually understand anything but like

(23:17):
playing golf and like games and stuff, but think they've
created like a perfect country by virtue of the fact
that they've got everyone else who lives there working for them.
And that's accurate. That is in fact what Rhodesia is.
And it's very funny that Smith and the other Rhodesians
have to see this great British world that they love
immediately turn on them and all and it is. It's

(23:41):
kind of interesting too, because, like all, Smith and his
fellow Roadies are a product of the British world and
its education system and everything it had tried to make
its colonial white citizens into. And it's really funny to
me that in the space of what seems like an afternoon,
this goes from being how the the entire country is

(24:01):
trying to like encourage its young men to be to Oh,
these people are idiot throwbacks. Look at these dummies. Look
at these dummies and their old, outdated ideas that like
we were teaching them twenty years ago. But it is
funny to be How quickly that happens. And the Rhudesian
men never get over that. There's this sense of deep
whiplash where they're like, but it was cool to be
a racist really recently. Why are you treating us badly now?

(24:25):
Like they never fully understand why their government has abandoned them,
and it's just because they're obviously a bunch of maniacs. Wow,
good stuff. You know who else is obviously a bunch
of maniacs?

Speaker 3 (24:38):
The sponsors of this podcast.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
That's right, that's right, that's right. Let's listen to them
and we're back. So for his part, Smith and his
fellow Salisbury Conservatives reacted like paranoid old fuddy duddies to
the fact that they're not cool anymore. As Ian Smith

(25:00):
wrote in his autobiography, Within Britain Itself, we were landed
with a socialist government hell bent on appeasing the cult
of Marxist Leninism. At the expense of the old traditional
values of the British Empire. Very funny bunch of Marxists
in London running everything in fucking nineteen sixty four. It's
very much like it's there. It's always the way these

(25:22):
people go, right, is like, oh, somebody like, people don't
like us. People have realized that we're like a bunch
of gross race. It must be Marxism, that must That's
the only reason why we're not popular. It's the only
reason why people don't like me is the Marxists stole
their brains. And Smith just absolutely cannot understand why people
are pissed that as they look at it, this country
where like three percent of the population owns everything and

(25:45):
controls everyone else, he sees anyone being angry at this
is just like left wing propaganda now sane, Yeah, it's
and it's it's very If you look at how Rhodesians
talk about things in Rhodesia during this time, it's very
normal for white Rhodesians to refer to the black people
who make up the majority of their country is are

(26:06):
black people in a way that implies both ownership and paternalism. Right, well,
these are our people, and so Obviously we take care
of them. They're like family to us, and one of
these days maybe they'll be able to take care of themselves.
We have to raise them up right. And Smith would
be like, and obviously this is better for them. Rhodesia,
Smith says, is home of quote the happiest black faces

(26:27):
you ever saw, you know, like because they don't have
basic human rights, they're not worried about voting. They can
just enjoy their lives working for us, you know. And
that's very much how Rhodesians talk about things internally, and
that's how they that's how they attempt to portray themselves
to the outside world.

Speaker 5 (26:44):
It's not they rationalize it to themselves as well.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Exactly exactly they need this. We're doing good for them, right,
and they have to believe that because what they're actually
doing is incredibly brutal. It's obviously brutal. Once in power,
the Rhodesian Front works feverishly to pass laws denying black
people with little freedom and autonomy they'd previously enjoyed. Smith's
party supported the existence of two separate electoral roles. In

(27:09):
order to qualify to vote or hold office, you had
to meet certain property income and educational requirements. Now these
are the same requirements for Rhodesians of any race, but
the requirements were deliberately written out to exclude black Rhodesians, right,
so anyone so crazy, But like, also we built these
based on like, Okay, how many black people have this

(27:30):
much property? Is it none of them? Then that's how
much property you got to have to vote, right, Like,
it's very obvious what they're doing. So nineteen sixty three
saw the formal dissolution of the Central African Federation, followed
by months later in nineteen sixty four, Britain granting independence
to Malawi and Zambia, which are like had previously been
part of these like colonial protectorates around Rhodesia. So now

(27:53):
Rhodesia is surrounded on at least one side by independent
like Democrats countries that are like run by the black
majority of the population, and then there's just South Africa
on one side that's like the only white governed state
still around them. Now, London continues to hold the line
on Nibmar during independence negotiations, and they also start offering

(28:17):
buyouts to white members of the Rhodesian armed forces because
they're just the British armed forces. So part of what
Britain's doing is like, okay, Ian and his guys are
going to try to delay. How about we just buy
out the whole military so that there aren't white people
with guns in Rhodesia anymore, right, And if we can
do that fast enough, maybe the white Rhodesians who don't

(28:39):
want to give up will just leave afterwards when they realize,
like we've bought the army out from underneath them. But
Smith and his friends, they're not quite that stupid. They
see what London is doing and they realize they're trying
to like take our military and our way to defend
our independence away. And around the same time they can
see that these militant African nationalist groups in Rhodesia are

(29:01):
increasingly organizing and advocating for power, but they're also clashing
for themselves. And there's there's two different main nationalist groups.
There's ZANU and there's ZAPU, and they're they're both.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Like that, don't call themselves do that shit.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Everyone needs Everyone needs an acronym for your polinical They don't.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
What do they what makes them feel more official if
they have an acronym that it sounds real.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
What did I stand for, Robert Jesus.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
ZANU is the Zimbabwe African National Union, right, and ZAPU
is something else, right, but both with Zimbabwe, which is
the name that Rhodisha's going to have after independence? Right,
this is like the name that the people who had
lived here were already calling it, right, Rhodesia was just
what the white people called it after a racist they
particularly liked. So sixty three and sixty four you've got

(29:51):
ZANU and ZAPU, these two different like black independence groups
starting out and started to like arm themselves and agitate,
and their initial initially, both Zano and Zoppo are primarily
aimed at and agitating for independence from Great Britain. They're
not fighting the Rhodesian state initially, right, because they don't

(30:12):
see that as like a big deal. Like their assumption
is that it's going to happen like it happened in
all of the surrounding countries, where the British will leave
and we'll just kind of roll over these folks when
we win the election. Right. So, in an article for
Small Wars Journal, William Turner summarizes what happened next the
internescing struggle with petrol bombs, intimidation, blackmail, and murder lost

(30:33):
the support of much of the innocent African population who
were dedicated to the nationalists' inns but suffered by their
violent means. Neither Zapu or Zanu emerged dominant. And so
because these two different You've got these two different nationalist groups.
They're both opposed to the British Empire, and they're also
both opposed to each other because they're both like communist
but different kinds. And in early on in sixty three

(30:56):
sixty four, they're not really fighting Smith's government because they
don't see it is relevant. So they're kind of murdering
each other, which causes a lot of alienation from like
the majority of the population. And it creates a situation
that if Smith hadn't been so racist and had been
more intelligent and creative, he could have taken advantage of
You've got these like most motivated and organized chunk of

(31:20):
the Black population who want independence are in one of
these two groups, and they're both fighting each other. If
I make friends with one of these groups, I can
take advantage of that conflict and have an alliance of
convenience and you know, push for independence, and some sort
of a state in which we share power. But Smith
cannot accept sharing power. He cannot accept the idea that

(31:41):
any group of Africans will organize to insist on their
own rights in future. And so even though he has
a chance to co opt one of these nationalist parties
and destroy the other, he bans both and arrests leaders
of both and forces both out of Rhodesia, which ensures
that in the future the only forward eye option for
their cause is going to be armed resistance, and often

(32:03):
armed resistance where they're kind of if they're not directly
working together, they're at least tacitly working together. They will
fight sometimes too, but Smith kind of ensures that they're
never going to They're going to consider him a threat
before they consider each other a threat. He has the
opportunity to have his enemies fighting each other, and he
turns them together into fighting against him because he's just

(32:26):
such a bigot. He can't even make use of what
could be a good situation for him. And it's interesting
because like the British Empire got everywhere by doing that,
by being like, okay, we've got these two different local
or three different local militant groups fighting each other for power.
If we back one, then we get to stay in
charge and we eliminate most of the resistance to our regime.

(32:49):
Smith can't even conceive of that because his first principle
is only white people should have power. Like he can't
even do the thing that's best for the white people
in his country because he's such a racist, which I
find really interesting. That's like the whole why the Rhodesians
lost their war writ large, as they're too racist to
ever do the smart thing. So he cracks down on

(33:12):
these local groups. He imprisons their leaders, including a guy
named Robert mcgabe, who will talk about in a little bit.
And then in November of nineteen sixty five, that's the
year after he cracks down on these nationalist groups, after
one last fruitless phone call with Harold Wilson, Ian Smith
decides it's time to stop arguing about independence with England.

(33:32):
It's time to just take it. So he gets on
TV and he gives what becomes known as the Universal
Declaration of Independence or ud I. And here's how Samantha Power,
writing for the Atlantic, describes the UDI. The mantle of
the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders. He said, calling
on white Rhodesians to maintain standards in a primitive country.
Smith saw himself as an apostle of Cecil John Rhodes,

(33:55):
the British magnate who gave Rhodesha his name and who
in the late nineteenth century duped black tribal leaders to
signing over the fertile land to white pioneers. Although Rhodesia
in nineteen sixty five was home to just over two
hundred thousand whites and four million blacks, Smith shared Rhodes's
belief that the black majority rule would occur never in
one thousand years. And that's pretty biting. But Rupert Cornwell,

(34:17):
who is another historian who wrote an analysis of this declaration,
gave an even more biting description of it that I
want to quote from. The UDI proclamation was itself a
parody of the American Declaration of Independence, full of lofty
whereases and therefores, but in practice a charter for white rule.
Each member of the cabinet approved it and signed it
before Smith made a radio broadcast for the nation, telling

(34:39):
Rhodesians they had refused to surrender to communists in Africa
and Asia. We have struck a blow for the preservation
of justice, civilization and Christianity. He declared, right, because if
we hadn't done this, there would have been an a
fair election and communists would have won.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Sure, pal of course, yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
It's always communism. And again, like if he had allowed
an election, if there had been an election, there's actually
a very good chance because of how much power the
white Rhodesians had and money they had, that there would
have been like a coalition government. Because of the war
he fights, there is going to be a communist government
in Rhodesia, but it's entirely a product of the fact

(35:16):
that Wilson refuses to negotiate with any of these nationalist groups.
He just murders them and exiles them, which makes them
even ever more. Both of these groups that he's kicked
out get closer and close to the USSR in China
because of what he does, like he creates this thing
that he's terrified of, in large part because he's not
willing to do anything more reasonable. So Rhodesia is now

(35:41):
calling itself an independent country. And once they do this,
the government in London has a choice. Because Rhodesha is
a crown colony, it's not legally an independent country, it's
not been recognized by the UN as one, and so
it's effectively all these white people just broke the law,
British law, in order to create their own country, in

(36:01):
order to force a racial caste system on the majority
of the people living there. And so the Prime Minister
of the UK has every right to use the Royal Army,
the Royal Air Force and the Royal everything else to
treat this as an insurrection and return Rhodesia to the
Fold before dissolving the colony. Right, what Wilson should do,
as the Prime Minister of Great Britain is send in

(36:23):
the military to stop the Rhodesians from stealing the state,
which is what they're doing. However, that would mean fighting
a war against a bunch of white people in the sixties,
and no British prime minister is going to agree to
do that, like you not like not in not in Africa.
Maybe in Ireland, right, but not in Africa. So instead

(36:45):
Wilson reaches for that most beloved tool of lazy statesmen, sanctions.
That'll solve it, That'll solve all the problems. I'm gonna
throw some sanctions on Rhodesia and then we'll just walk away, right,
So Wilson announces sanctions upon the former crown property that
are primarily going after, like tobacco and their other cash crops,
and he predicts that this udi, this independent Rhodesia, will

(37:08):
last weeks or months, and then Smith and his fellows
are gonna come crawling back for help. That's not what happens. Now.
These first sanctions are pretty you know, they hurt a lot,
they're bad for the economy, but they don't bite as
deeply as Wilson hoped. Because South Africa is right there
on Rhodesha's border and they hate the Crown. They're happy
to trade with Rhodesia as are Portugal still controls a

(37:32):
whole bunch of Africa and is governed by a fascist,
and fascist Portugal is happy to trade with Rhodesia. So
initially these sanctions don't hurt too bad because they've got
allies in their immediate area who are willing to help
them get stay propped up. Now, other leaders of newly
independent African states call out London for the cowardice that
they had displayed in not taking out Rhodesia. President Kunda

(37:55):
of Zambia said what manner of dealing with such a
serious problem as this. Today you brand someone as a rebel,
a chap who has committed treason, and tomorrow you declare
publicly you will embrace him. A rebel according to us
here is arrested, tried by a military court, and shot dead. Right, Like,
these guys are committing treason. Why aren't you punishing them
for their treason? Why are you just like leaving them

(38:16):
to be Africa's problem, which is exactly what London does,
is like they'll figure it out. Like they'll figure it out.
We don't have to. It's not on us to do
anything here. It's not on us to fight a war
against what we're our own people who we raised to
be like brutal colonial oppressors, and then just decided we
didn't want to do that anymore. It's not our responsibility
to clean up. We'll let the Africans handle it. And

(38:38):
that's what the next fifteen years of Bushwar are going
to be. The Rhodesian Bushwar, which starts after this point
in sixty five and inns and seventy nine, is just
the result of Africans cleaning up Great Britain's mess. Right,
So this is all a Cold War conflict, and because
of that, it's going to be wrapped in Cold war terms.

(39:02):
Sometimes to an extent, that's reasonable, right, because a lot
of Rhodesia's neighbors are getting military aid from the USSR
in China, right, Zapu and Zanu are both getting guns
from the USSR and or China, depending on their allegiances.
But it's also not like most of these nationalist groups
are not primarily motivated by Marxism. They become Marxists or

(39:26):
are start spreading Marxist talking points because those are the
people giving them guns, But they really just want independence,
that's the primary thing. And so he's going through Smith
is going to really frame this as a fight against communism.
This is like part of the global Cold War, but
it's not really like not in any meaningful sense of

(39:46):
the way. Like he makes communism be central to it,
and he makes sure that the people who overthrow Rhodesia
ultimately will be communists, But this isn't really a Cold
War struggle in that way. This isn't the result of
like the USSR and the United States wanting to like
having these like competing power areas. They're trying to prop up.

(40:08):
This is the result of a bunch of white people
not being willing to hand over the shit that they
stole and then declaring anyone who wanted to take their
stuff back from them communists. Right, That's really what's happening here.
So after sixty five, once he's declared independence, Zano and
Zappu officially start acting as insurgents, right, and their goal

(40:29):
is to create enough violence that they force the Rhodesian
government to either capitulate or make the West intervene and
force the Rhodesian government out. Basically, if we just keep
fighting long enough, this will get ugly enough that the
Rhodesian government will fall apart and then we'll be able
to have black majority rule. And that strategy, in short,
is going to work. Like this is a very effective

(40:51):
way to do things. Smith never quite catches up to
what the real fight is about, and there's as a
result of this, there's going to be kind of two
narrative approaches to this war. Right. The Rhodesians are going
to from what they're doing is fighting communism, which is
really just like black people running their own affairs in Africa, Right,

(41:13):
And as a result of the fact that they see
it that way where this is a very I mean,
if you'll forgive the term black and white situation. They're
not able to deal with any of their enemies in
a nuanced way. They're not able to be like, well,
are there guys we could work with? Do we have
neighbors who would be willing to like, partner with us
in exchange for something. It's purely comes down to this

(41:34):
racial struggle because of the way Ian Smith's politics are,
and there's no way to negotiate a settlement out of that.
There's there's nothing but like increasing levels of bloodshed as
a result of how Ian Smith and the other white
farmers in Rhodesia's see the world. So in two thousand
and seven, Michael Evans wrote a study on Rhodesian tactics

(41:57):
for the journal Small Wars and Insurgencies, and he can
included quote. The Rhodesian Front's ideology based on settler status
anxiety upheld a conspiratorial interpretation of modern politics that emphasized
virulent forms of anglophobia, anti communism, anti internationalism, and anti liberalism.
The Smith government portrayed African nationalism not as an indigenous

(42:17):
political phenomenon, but as an external instrument of world communism
and Western appeasement. So that's part of what's going to
destroy Rhodesia is they're never able to look at the
world as it is. They have to create this fanciful
alternate reality as what's happening is not we took everything
from these people and they want some of it back,

(42:38):
and instead, no, no, no, there's this world communist specter
that's trying to destroy the West, and we're the last
men on the wall stopping communism from breaking through and
taking all of Africa. That's very much how they have
to look at it, and so again they can't think
about what's actually happening. They can't deal with any of
these communities as real people. They have to treat them
as these like conspiratorial sit shadows on the wall, and

(43:01):
that means they're never able to effectively have a strategy.
They're never able to really wrangle or build power in
a meaningful way. All Rhodesia has is the ability to
kill people militarily. They don't have any ability to actually
build a base of power or expand the stability of
their government. All they can do is kill large numbers

(43:24):
of militants until they run out of guys to do
that with, right, And that's kind of the short story
of the Rhodesian Bush War. So the long story is,
you know, as I've stated, you've got these two different groups,
Sanu and ZAPU, that are like these, you know, fighting
for a black like majority ruled state to succeed Rhodesia

(43:47):
that they want to call Zimbabwe. ZAPU's militia is called
the Zimbabwe Independent People's Revolutionary Army or ZIPRA. And I
know there's so many pain in the ass acronyms here.
What you need to know about ZIPRA is their mostly
made up of Nobelee tribesmen, right, and they're armed by
the Soviet Union in Warsaw PAC nations. So one of

(44:07):
these militias is USSR backed and made up of Noblee tribesmen,
and the other militia, ZANDLA, which is ZANU's militia, is
made up of the Shona tribe and it's mostly armed
by China. Now again, on paper, these are both communist
militant groups, but they fight each other as often as
they fight the Rhodesian state. Because this isn't really about communism,

(44:30):
it's not even about the differences between the USSR and
the People's Republic of China. It's about the fact that
the fact that these two militias are made up of
two different tribes that have hated each other for a
very long time, and so they wind up shooting at
each other all the time. And again, great situation to
be in if you're Ian Smith's government, to have your
two enemies primarily fighting each other, and he just can't

(44:52):
take advantage of it because he's such a stupid dummy,
Like it's a very This is an easy situation for
a smarter man to get some sort of benefit out of,
and he just cannot stop fucking up here because he's
such a bigot. A competent counterinsurgent force would have made
a lot of hay out of this, but Smith's white
supremacist front cannot abide nuance. All Black Belishes are communists,

(45:14):
All communists are the enemy, and so we can't work
with one above the other. Per that article in Small
Wars Journal that I quoted from, earlier Rhodesian military sit
reps designated all gorillas as communists trained terrorists ctts, and
few white Rhodesians could even accept that they were involved
in a civil war for black emancipation until the late
nineteen seventies, Rhodesian Foreign Prime Minister P. K. Vanderbilt said

(45:37):
this is not a racial war, but black terrorists and
white skinned communists on one side, and a multi racial
army of black and white soldiers fighting shoulder to shoulder
on the other side. In contrast, a Zandla training document
characterized the war as follows. The principal objective of our
revolution is the seizure of power by means of destruction
of the racist political military machine and its replacement by

(45:58):
the people in arms in order to change the existing
economic and social order. So again on the side of
the Rhodesians, this is a fantasy. It's not a race war.
We're fighting a war against communism, and we actually have
a multi racial army. It's just that all of the
black groups are communist, right, Whereas the militias have this
idea that like, we're fighting a racist state and if

(46:19):
we break down that racist state, we're going to replace
it with something. So fundamentally, Zandla and Zebra are looking
at the world as it is in some way, and
the Rhodesians are looking at a fantasy of the world.
And that's I think fundamentally, why Rhodesia is going to
lose is they're never really looking at what's actually happening
in the world. And this is enough. This this, the

(46:41):
fact that they they're operating from this point of delusion
is enough to overcome some major advantages they have. Not
only do they have an army at the start of this,
and Zandla and Zepra don't. They've just got some guys
in the woods at the outbreak of hostilities. Both Zandla
and Zeppra are training for wildly different purposes, right, because
the USSR and China have very different military theories. Right.

(47:04):
The Soviet Union is a big believer in advanced weapons systems.
We're going to get you guys the right weapons, and
you'll use those to destroy the Rhodesian military, and then
you'll take power. The Chinese instructors are very much they're maoists, right,
and they're talking about you're going to build this people's army.
You're going to like very methodically take and gain support
in these little villages, and once you get the support

(47:24):
of all of the people living in this area, then
you'll form these kind of like people's militias in order
to take back territory from the state security forces, which
is going to work, like ultimately that is the strategy
that works a lot better than the USSR's strategy. But
they're not really able the Rhodesians aren't able to look
at either of these groups is as different. Even so

(47:45):
they're not able to actually see like how they're gradually
starting to lose this war over time, as Zandals starts
training and recruiting networks of informants and getting you know,
support from all these villages across rural Rhodesia RODJ, which
is intelligence operations, which had been good at the start
of the war, they start losing all of their insight
into what's happening on the ground as people, you know,

(48:08):
their spies get murdered and as their enemies get better
at actually like building a ground game and building like
a like an intelligence network. And so the first thing
that happens to Rhodesia is they lose their eyes and
ears on the ground these networks of Maoist informants that
are spreading across rural Rhodesia, which means they start they

(48:29):
become increasingly blind to what life is like to the
majority of people in the regions that they're fighting over,
and so because they don't know any of that, all
they think about is in terms of how many enemies
are we killing, and like how many battles are we winning?
And not well, are we like winning battles that matter?
Are we winning the support of the people, Are any

(48:50):
of these villages coming over to our side? Or are
more and more of them becoming sympathetic to the enemy
Every year and so on paper, Rhodesia's winning every year
of the war. They never lose a battle. They damn
near never lose a firefight because they've got all the
advanced guns, they've got the armored cars and tanks, they've
got helicopters and planes, and so for a long time

(49:12):
Rhodesians and people internationally look at the conflict are like,
look another battle where the Rhodesians military one. Obviously they've
got to be winning this struggle, when in reality they're
winning nothing. All they're doing is killing people, and they
can't see that that's actually taking them closer to defeat
because they're running out of ammunition, they're running out of men.

(49:33):
You know, they don't have much of either. And as
they make more and more of the majority black population
deliberately hostile to them. Those people fall into the arms
of these militias that they're fighting, which just keep getting
bigger and bigger, and they're just like, well, but we
keep killing them every time we fight them, and that
doesn't negate the fact that they're getting larger still and

(49:55):
to the point where they're getting larger than you can
fight back. And so it's just this process of Rhodesia
winning on paper until they lose after about fifteen years.
It's a very like fun war to look at from
that standpoint, and very much the Rhodesian Bush War is
the war that presages all of like the twenty first

(50:16):
century great power conflicts that the US has been in
where you've got this advanced military with a lot of
special forces guys, and it seems like they're always winning
and then we lose the war. How did we lose
the war? It's because no one is ever looking at like,
what would it take to win the war? Right and Rhodesian, Yeah,
it's about winning the war. It's not about killing guy.

(50:37):
That's the thing people still fuck up is they're like, well,
you win by killing the enemy. No you don't, No,
you don't.

Speaker 5 (50:44):
Any real sanity.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
You win by having the stuff. You win by having land,
you win by having food, You win by having territory.
Sometimes cleaning the enemy is helpful for that. But if
you're just kind of what the Rhodesians are doing is
they're they're creating what they call like these fire force
missions where they'll find a group of gorillas in the
woods and they'll get a bunch of them to gather together,
and then they'll wipe them out in a set piece

(51:06):
battle where they send in a bunch of guys and
they'll kill like a thousand dudes, and then they'll leave
and they still don't actually hold anything, and they haven't
won any hearts and minds. They just killed people. But
because they're good at this, we're really good at these battles,
and it's really easy for a general to make a
case for themselves and to get promoted by luckily, at
how many of these battles I've won that Smith and

(51:27):
his generals become convinced these things that we're good at
are what means we're winning. Because we're good at this
part of the war, that must be the part of
the war that we have to be good at to win.
As opposed to is does it matter that we're good
at this part of the war. Doesn't matter that we
never lose a gunfight if we don't actually take anything.
It's the fucking it's the problem. In the US ran

(51:49):
into an Afghanistan. We've got all these great special forces,
they're the best in gunfights of anyone in the world.
They never lose in a stand up fight. How could
we have lost, Well, because we never took anything. We
just killed people for a while and then left.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
It also turns out that like senseless violence, not really
a thing that wins people over to join your side.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
No, no, not at all. So as the war goes on,
it becomes clear that the Rhodesian military is going to
rely more heavily on black soldiers than they had hoped.
Smith's party grudgingly offered mild concessions to black citizens in
order to try and convince some of them to join.
In nineteen sixty nine, a reformed constitution guaranteed six million
Rhodesian Africans sixteen seats in the Assembly. Rhodigia's two hundred

(52:33):
and seventy thousand white citizens got fifty seats. That same year,
Smith's party introduced a land tenure Act that equalized the
amount of land reserved for white and black owners. And
again none of these are really very equal. But this
shows the desperation he's in. He doesn't want to be
doing any of this at all. He just has to
because like we like I need, there's this, there's this

(52:55):
slow understand that we need to do something to win
hearts and minds. It just always way too slow and
never like he's never will He doesn't actually care about
these people, who just hopes they won't notice that sixteen's
a smaller number than fifty. So the first stage of
the Bush War ends in nineteen sixty eight, and it
looks like Rhodesia's winning at this point. They kill a

(53:17):
lot of They kill so many insurgents that for a
brief period of time in sixty eight and sixty nine,
there's not really any insurgents left in Rhodesia itself. They
all have to flee to like bases in the neighboring
countries in order to like avoid getting massacred, and because
the neighboring countries are like South Africa and Portugal's African Empire.

(53:37):
For the most part, this is pretty good for Rhodesia initially,
but then in seventy two, Portugal's African Empire starts to
fall apart, and Mozambique over the next couple of years
is going to like Portugal is going to lose control
of Mozambique, and then it's going to become like like
it's going to get taken over by the people who
live there and they're going to create a communist state,

(53:58):
and those folks are going to be willing to provide
aid and support to these like Rhodesian insurgents when they
leave Rhodesia and need to rebuild their strength. So the
fact that they were really good at killing these guys
initially looks like it's working, but all that really does
is it causes them to like set up bases in
areas that Rhodesia can't follow them into and start building

(54:20):
their power from there. And when the Rhodesian government realizes
what's happening, they start launching attacks into neighboring states, which
pisss off everyone else in Africa and leads to their
increasingly getting separated from the allies that they'd had, and
it leads to a further escalation of violence. So all
they're doing by killing all these people and then moving

(54:41):
into these other countries to kill the rebels that had
fled to these neighboring countries. Is isolating themselves and burning
more and more of their fairly scant resources, killing people
that it doesn't benefit them at all to kill. So
the situation spirals out of control pretty quickly past this point.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
It's just incredible that we've like learned absolutely nothing.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Oh no, nothing, this is still how does Western military
speak of counter and.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
See this is what this is very similar to what
Trump's doing right now.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
Well, it's very similar. At the Rhodesian military is the
first one to figure out, like, okay, well we've got
these we've got these forward operating bases that are in
basically enemy territory that need to be supported by these
caravans of armored vehicles. Will design these armored vehicles that
are meant to take road side bombs because the enemy
is setting up a lot of roadside bombs, and so

(55:31):
they're built. It's very similar to what the US is
doing in Afghanistan. You've got these big route clearance type
vehicles and armored vehicles driving from posts to posts, trying
to hold these posts and occasionally doing these fire force
missions where they massacre a bunch of insurgents, but they're
never actually owning or holding anything, because the populace is
never anything but held at gunpoint. Right. So, because all

(55:55):
of this all is increasingly falls down to just like
how many people can we kill? And that comes the
only language that the Rhodesian government talks to about talks
about the war to itself in, and the only language
the Rhodesian government talks to the outside world in is
body count. And I'm gonna quote William Turner's piece again here.
Body count became a political drug that Ian Smith wielded

(56:17):
as a negotiation tactic, thanks in part to a robust,
albeit hollow, counterinsurgency strategy. And that strategy is we find
these different militia encampments, we send in these fire forces
to spark fights with them, and we wipe out a
bunch of guys, and then we crow like we killed
another thousand guys. Clearly we're winning. Why don't you come
to the table and negotiate with us? Right? And none

(56:40):
of this works because the enemies of Rhodesia understand that, like, yeah,
you're good at killing us, but we always have more
people because ninety seven percent of the populace is more
or less supportive of what we're doing. So all we
have to do is keep them fighting us until they
bleed themselves white. And this is why anytime in the

(57:00):
modern era too, if you see like an advanced military
fighting an insurgent war and they start bragging about body counts,
they're losing. You can refer this to the US in
Iran whenever you have a military that's bragging it by
look at the list of guys we've killed. Look at
how many guys we're killing, and that's all they're telling you.
That means they're losing, because killing guys doesn't win wars.

(57:22):
Oh no, you know what does win wars? Products and
services kind of we're back. So Rhodesia has gotten locked
into this by the early seventies, this disastrous strategy of

(57:45):
carrying out these missions, killing as many guys as they can,
and then bragging about it on the news, basically and
hoping that that's going to eventually make the enemy stop
fighting them. And this is all a direct result of
the political ideology create crafted and touted by Ian Smith.
This strategy is based entirely upon the Rhodesian Front's politics

(58:06):
that Smith had authored per the Journal of Small Wars
and Insurgencies. After nineteen seventy two, when Rhodesia faced a
protracted insurgency, many of the principles of Rhodesian front ideology
were applied to counterinsurgency warfare, with disastrous results. Because the
Rhodesian government viewed African guerrilla warfare as unrelated to domestic politics,
Rhodesian counterinsurgency lacked a realistic political dimension. The dictates of

(58:29):
settler ideology blinded the Rhodesian government to the vital need
to wind hearts and minds by applying timely principles of
political pacification and reform to its counterinsurgency effort. Instead, a
Rhodesian counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force was pursued. Because they
can't see these as people with legitimate grievances that need
to be met and solved. They only see them as

(58:51):
the sinister communists who have to be destroyed, and that
means they're never able to gain any actual ground. In
nineteen seventy five, Smith's government launched Operation Hurricane, carrying out
attacks that reduced the number of gorillas in Rhodesia again
to less than one hundred. Several times they wipe out
basically all of the insurgents in Rhodesia, and hey, look

(59:12):
we're on the verge of victory. And then a year
or two later there's thousands of more insurgents and they're
fighting their backs to the wall again, because all people
are doing is like leaving and recovering their strength nearby
and then moving right back in. Now, that same year
that Smith declares this victory, there's a coup in Lisbon
that permanently ends Portugal's African Empire, and a Marxist government

(59:35):
takes power in Mozambique after that and starts providing insurgents
with open aid and assistance. By this stage of the war,
Rhodesia has transitioned fully to a military that very much
resembles our own in some ways. At the start of
the war, Rhodesha had had their kind of special operations
units which were there to support the regular army. By
seventy four to seventy five, special forces are doing nearly

(59:58):
all of the killing in fire, supported by these like
elite armored and airborne regiments that the regular military is
there to support. So it goes from special forces are
there to carry out missions the regular military can't do.
It's all about special forces because we're really good at
training these small units of killers up and having them
do these like very complicated missions, and we don't really

(01:00:22):
know how to do anything else. So we're just going
to assume that that's going to win us the victory
because look at how impressive these special forces guys are.
They can carry out these missions so well. It doesn't
no one ever. It's the same It's the same thing
with the US right where we're like, look at how
scary our navy seals are. Look at how good at
these guys are at like killing or capturing the leader
of this country. Maybe we don't need anything but special

(01:00:43):
forces and air power to win a war. And then
you wind up in the situation like Iran where you're like, like, no,
you need quite a bit more than that, actually, right,
But Smith is trying. The reason why they like relying
on special forces is that you can you don't need
a lot of guys, so you don't need as many
soul soldiers, and they're less likely to die in the
field and so you have less casualties. You have to

(01:01:05):
explain to these grieving white families. So in the mid
seventies they move over to this concept of what they
call pseudo operations, which is the term they have for
these special forces raids they're going to increasingly be be
reliant on. Here's how Ian Martinez described pseudo operations in
a two thousand and two analysis published for Third World
Quarterly Security Personnel addresses insurgents and infiltrate rural communities, seeking

(01:01:30):
out real insurgents. When they found the real insurgents, they
could opt for an engagement or call in their position
and allow other army units, notably the Rhodesian Light Infantry
to come in. At first, highly trained white officers of
the SAS were used for the operations, but language barriers
and the distinct physical facial features of the whites necessitated
the use of black Zimbabweans. And this is something if

(01:01:50):
you read current day Rhodesia defenders, they'll be like Rhodesian
Special Forces were integrated. They had white and black soldiers
fighting alongside each other. Right this, How could they be
a racist state if they have black Special forces guys. Now,
the reality is these special forces guys and most of
them are in a unit called the Sellu Scouts, which
is a mixed race unit. But that's a unit. It's

(01:02:13):
a mixed race unit because they need black people to
infiltrate rural communities and carry out terrorist attacks. Basically, that's
why they've integrated their special forces, is that white people
can't hide.

Speaker 5 (01:02:26):
But you could also say this about all army for
all of time.

Speaker 4 (01:02:30):
You know, well, yeah, just because there are people of
color in any military matter what count, does not mean
it's not racist.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Yeah, but it's like it's particularly rap because the pro
Dasha propaganda is always But of course, like all these
black people wanted to join the military, how how could
it have been a bad state if they were willing
to volunteer for the military, And that is a lie,
as Martinez his piece makes clear, injured or captured in
surgeons were turned and made to serve the Sellu Scouts.

(01:03:03):
Thus compromised, they could never return to their villages and
were beholden to the regime for their lives. The new
recruits were able to provide intelligence and the latest call
signs used by the real insurgents. The British had made
a similar pseudo op'd used a similar pseudo ops concept
in Malaya and Kenya. The Selu Scouts were housed at
a secret facility near Mount Darwin within the Hurricane theater
of the war. The Selu Scouts proved extremely effective and

(01:03:25):
providing the security forces with useful and timely intelligence and
were responsible for a staggering sixty eight percent of all
insurgent kills and capture in their areas of operation. But
if you look at that, if you dig into that statement,
what's happening is they're taking injured and captured insurgents and
they are making them carry out what are effectively war crimes.
These people are often wiping out whole villages and in

(01:03:48):
order to stay alive. Basically, we'll pay you and will
give you your lives in freedom if you carry out war
crimes for us. And as a result, the folks who
do join the Sellu Scouts, like the Black Soldiers who
agree to be a part of this unit, are being
made into like this is just a war crimes unit.
They're doing the most nightmarish crimes against humanity imaginable, and
they can never go home again. Right. This is not

(01:04:11):
a these people believed in the Rhodesian cause thing. This
is a you capture these people and basically tortured them
until they agreed to fight for you in a lot
of cases, and then made sure they had no life
outside of committing war crimes for the regime. Right, that's
the reality of these mixed race units in the Rhodesian military.

(01:04:31):
So the Sellu scouts are effective fighters, but they are
also primarily effective at carrying out horrific war crimes, primarily
war crimes using chemical weapons, which the Rhodesian government comes
to love in the late state of the war, chemical
and biological weapons. They're huge fans of that. So if
you want an idea for how a lot of these
raids tend to look from a casualty standpoint, forty RHODISA

(01:04:55):
launches like forty raids into Mozambique between February and June
of nineteen seventy six, and the largest of these rage,
Operation Eland, ends with a little over one thousand gorilla
fighters killed. These like these are Zandla guerrillas killed and
zero casualties for the Rosi Dision military, right, And that
sounds great on paper, but it also like the fact

(01:05:18):
that these are individually successful operations on the ground doesn't
mean they're successful strategically. Because operation A land pisses off
South Africa, Rhodesians sending special forces into an independent country Mozambique,
and South Africa is currently dealing with the fact that,
like Mozambique is a geopolitical enemy of theirs that's being

(01:05:40):
supported by both the Soviet Union and the Cuban government,
and so they have issues if, like if Rhodesia is
invading this country and it pisses off Mozambique and that
increases the operational tempo and brings in more foreign assistance
to Mozambique, it creates problems for South Africa, right, and
so the South African PM so pissed at Rhodesia after

(01:06:01):
this successful raid that he withdraws all South African soldiers, pilots, mechanics,
liaison officers from Rhodesia and by nineteen seventy six, half
of Rhodesa's defense budget was paid for by South Africa.
It's a great example of how on paper we carried
out this massive attack. We killed one thousand enemy guerillas
and none of our own guys even got injured. What

(01:06:23):
a success. No, you pissed off your ownly allies so
much that they took away all of their assistants that
made your war possible. Right, It's like one example writ
large of how stupid this strategy is, of all we
need to do is be better at killing. Well, no,
because you ignored the political dimension. You pissed off. You
were too racist for your own racist allies, and they

(01:06:43):
took their ball and went home, and now you're fucked. Right,
that's what brings down Rhodesia as much as anything. Right.
You know, they'd been flat footed after their collapse of
their Portuguese allies in seventy four, and then after seventy
six they don't even have South Africa to rely on.
Smith has to call on reservists and draft ever larger
numbers of like the shrinking white population. Because it's also

(01:07:06):
pretty dangerous to be a normal Rhodesian soldier. Most of
them are not these elite special forces units. Most of
them are hanging out in these like isolated like forward
operating bases or getting bombed on road sides, and so
they are dying and getting wounded at a high level.
And so young Rhodesians are fleeing the country. They're going
to other western countries where white people are able to move,

(01:07:29):
and they're bouncing from Rhodesia because they don't want to
fight and die in this increasingly feudal war. So by
the end of nineteen seventy six, Smith is fucked. Not
only have all of his allies backed out, but the
Prime Minister of South Africa BJ Wooster had called for
majority rule in Rhodesia.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
So now South Africa has gone from arming Rhodesia and
supporting them to saying, you guys really need to give up, right,
And this is this is the thing that kind of
fucks it for Smith. You know, he had been Kissinger
been pushing him at this point to you know, open
up to majority rule. The great the British government had
been pushing him. But it was when South Africa was like,

(01:08:09):
you have to accept majority rule that he knows Rhodesia's
goose is cooked. So he knows that by seventy six,
but he doesn't accept the reality for more than two years.
In seventy seven and seventy eight, Smith poured all of
his nation's hopes and dreams into special forces operations that
he knew were already failures, and increasingly these special forces

(01:08:32):
units are only maintained by bringing in foreign born volunteers.
And so in the late seventies, Rhodesia starts a major
ad campaign. They're putting ads on all sorts of right
wing papers in the United States, in Britain and all
across like the Western world, basically being like, hey, are
you a racist in another part of the West. Come
to Rhodesia. You can fight to put you can fight

(01:08:54):
a war against those like scary black communists, and you'll
get to live in like a white apartheid state afterwards.
It'll be just like the Confederacy was. That's like the
pitch Smith is making to white Americans largely is if
you moved to Rhodesia and join our army, it'll be
like the South never lost right. And that's that's kind.

Speaker 4 (01:09:15):
Of like him.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
It's crazy stuff. Now, this is all match the fact
that like this pitch to come and join us you'll
get to be part of like a white state, is
matched with this propaganda about how good the Rhodesian military is.
There's all these books about these fire force attacks, which
they're still legendary, and like white supremacist propaganda is like

(01:09:38):
these are the best warriors the world ever produced, These
great Rhodesian soldiers they killed twelve hundred men and didn't
lose a single man, because you know, Rhodesians were the
best fighters of their day, and the reality is that,
like no, they were picking fights they knew they could
win and not fighting fights that they knew they were
going to lose. And they lost the war because of that,

(01:09:58):
because like the fights that they were didn't matter, like
they were not. They couldn't win any of the fights
that mattered. They picked a bunch of useless fights that
looked good on paper to convince racists to join their army. Right,
That's what Rhodish's kind of doing at this point in time.
By the end of nineteen seventy six, Rhodesian military planners
had started admitting privately to each other that victory was

(01:10:20):
no longer possible. All their army could do was stave
off defeat. From that point forward, Smith told the army,
the gloves are off. You can do whatever you need
to win the war. There's no any crimes against humanity
you want to commit. Give it a shot. We have
no other like we've got nothing else in the tank. Basically, so,
Rhodesia's Psyops unit creates a plan to kill and capture

(01:10:42):
terrorists to win over the local populace. And in practice
this means they start executing prisoners in the field and
assassinating ZANU officers abroad in you know, independent countries, and
this disrupts the organization enough that like ZANU actually does
suffer a lot from the casualties of like their high
ranking leaders. But Zandla, the other militant organization, is still

(01:11:04):
doing just fine. And that just means that like they
get stronger by comparison. And at the same time, Smith
and his generals are so convinced that this is working
that they start escalating their dirty tricks campaign and really
pouring all of their military effort into that. Martinez summarizes quote.
The techniques used were poisoning wells, spreading cholera infected clothing

(01:11:26):
used by terrorists, and using anthrax to kill cattle and
thus deny food supplies to the guerrillas. By nineteen seventy five,
clinical trials were being performed on humans, a clear and
recognized crime against humanity, provided by Rhodesia's answer to the
CIA and the Sellu Scout's secret attention center in Mount Darwin.
The doctors would administer various agents to the prisoners experimenting
with agents and dosages. The CIO, which is Rdigia's CIA,

(01:11:49):
then disposed of the bodies of the victims down mind shafts.
By nineteen seventy six, deployments of the agents were ready
and carried out by Sellu, Scouts and South Africans. The
CIO and the Scouts used thoual. At first, thallium was
injected into canned meat, and through the use of pseudoops techniques,
the poisoned meat was given to insurgents who believed they
were being resupplied by other friendly insurgents. In one instance,

(01:12:10):
because of a shortage of food and the tribal trust lands,
another deliberate tactic of the Syops unit, the gorillas gave
their thallium laced food to innocent villagers, thus killing them.
So this is like these last acts are these biological
terrorist attacks where they're basically giving guys, like giving it
groups of insurgents clothes and food that they're supposed to

(01:12:32):
hand to either other insurgents or just starving people in
these tribal reservations that the Rhodesian state created where the
land doesn't grow enough food and so when these gorillas
start giving food to starving villagers to try to get
them on their side. The villagers get poisoned and die.
And that's part of the plan is maybe they won't
like these militia as much if they think the militia's

(01:12:54):
poisoning them. Let's give the militia poison to give to
our own civilians, right like, that's the Rhodesian operating strategy here.
Another brilliant scheme involved drilling holes into bottles of water
and lacing them with cyanide. On another account, the Sellu
scouts laced a well near the Mozambiicon border with an
unknown poison, killing at least two hundred civilians. Rhodesha Offer

(01:13:16):
also operated a plan with South African help to supply
guerilla fighters with poisoned uniforms. And these are all of
these are like horrific war crimes. They're all based on
the fact that we don't have bullets anymore because we're
not getting trade like we used to have from like
South Africa. So all we can do to kill large
numbers of people is to poison them, to starve them,

(01:13:36):
to like spread disease around them. And as their military
techniques are growing, increasingly war crimeing and desperate. Smith also
starts making increasingly desperate political moves. In March of seventy eight,
he allowed the election of a black prime minister. Now
this was for show. The fact that there's a prime
minister of Rhodesia who's black. Note doesn't mean that Smith

(01:13:56):
isn't still in power, because he still controls the military
intelligence agencies. Right, This guy's just there for show, and
it doesn't work. The international community still fails to recognize Rhodesia.
That summer, militant shoot down a commercial Rhodesian plane and
the surviving civilians are butchered by insurgents. Smith's government responds
by invading Zambia and Mozambique that October with Rhodesian forces,

(01:14:20):
and again the military parts of this seem to go well.
They kill thousands of gorillas, and again they piss off
everyone around them and earn international condemnation that cuts them
off even more from the food and the arms that
they need from the people that they had been buying
them from. And so outside of the year yeah, huh,

(01:14:41):
seventy eight, seventy nine. By seventy nine, the whole Rhodesian
Special Forces are just poisoning for people?

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Are people not that people? And are people not just
like livid about this? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
Yeah they are. There's noreen than ever. They're outnumbered badly.
The regular Rhodesian army keeps shrinking because they're getting killed
and like they don't have the weapons that they need
anymore funding in the country who like they don't have
any money anymore. That that's why the war has to end, Right?
Is that because they're not right? Because they've he's broken expensive, right,

(01:15:23):
war's expensive. Eventually, rebels destroy the entire Rhodesian strategic fuel stockpile,
which is all kept in one place, and Ian Smith
does not and his government just do not have the
gas literally and figuratively to continue fighting after night.

Speaker 3 (01:15:38):
Written in all this.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
Kind of sitting back and being like, you guys got
to stop doing that. You're using a lot of war crimes.
Are those chemical weapons? You guys really better stop? But
like they don't you know, send in the RAF or anything. Uh,
And yeah, I think it's it is as horrifying as
that is, and as many people as they kill, it
is worth noting because there's always this thing whenever you

(01:16:00):
talk about like these wars that are kind of done
similarly or that like that field very similar to the
Rhodesian bush were like Vietnam, where like there's a lot
of Americans will be like, oh, we would have won
if we could take the gloves off. It was just
those damn liberals in the media didn't let us like
fight that we should have fought. There were no gloves
for the Rhodesian military. They used all of the forbidden weapons.

(01:16:20):
They used anthrax like, they used fucking thallium, like they
were poisoning wells. They did everything you're not supposed to do.
They did all of like the hardcore stuff that these
like fascists think will make sure they win. If they're
just tough enough, we can win a war. And they
lost really badly, like because they didn't. They never knew

(01:16:41):
how to win. They never had a plan for winning.
All they had a plan to do was kill people
until they stopped fighting. And that never works, right. So
as things start to collapse, Ian Smith reaches out increasingly
to what had become his most reliable foreign supporters, the
global white supremacist far right. By the late nineteen seventies,
the white population of Rhodesia was already a diaspora composed

(01:17:05):
not just of British colonists, but Portuguese and afrikaaners who
decided that their own homes weren't quite white enough, and
that Rhodesia was the place to fight for white Africa.
And so Smith's idea again was like, why can't we
try getting other white racists. We are there enough of
them to fill out our country, right, And so he
takes advantage to the fact that both there's a lot

(01:17:27):
of white journalists in media in like the US that
will report the way he likes to frame the conflict
is if this is really an anti communist campaign, right,
And you can see that even in the New York Times.
I found a nineteen seventy six article by the New
York Times that's not like super pro Rodesia, but here's
how it describes like Ian Smith's Rhodesia in nineteen seventy six,

(01:17:52):
the white Rhodesian resents any comparison between the race attitudes
in his country and those of the powerful africaner run
Republic of South Africa. In the Rhodesians have the paternalistic
view of the non European which allows in the very
long run, for black participation. When he has reached our
standards in a century or so, not for Salisbury or Bolowio,
those nasty whites only signs and hotels and other public institutions.

(01:18:14):
Instead the more discreet right of admission reserved, which any
black Rhodesian ignores at his peril. Most true Rhodesians will
insist that the harsher racial attitudes are the monopoly of
the newer immigrants, those who settled to take advantage of
the post war bloom in the tobacco industry in Rhodesia. Basically, Oh,
the racists came in after Ian like started opening it
up to the rest of the world. Like, we weren't

(01:18:35):
as racist until like the late stages of the war.

Speaker 5 (01:18:38):
Also different because we infantilize them.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
So because we different. Yeah, we didn't.

Speaker 4 (01:18:44):
Hate them, We just didn't believe that they were real
people that could govern themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
Yeah, and it was it wasn't until later that the
racists came in, you know. And for an idea of
the ads that Ian's putting out desperately in this period
of time, Sothy's going to have one on the screen
that's a very famous Rhodesian army ad from the late seventies,
and these would run in US magazines like Soldier of Fortune.
It just be a man amongst men, And there's like
a guy in Camo with a rifle and it says

(01:19:09):
Rhodesian Army. You know. That was their motto, like be
a man amongst men in the Rhodesia. You could really
be a man in Rhodesia, you know. And this takes
off really well within like the US far right. There's
like a cottage industry and people coming back from Rhodesia
with their stories of Oh I fought for this unit,
or I participated in this firefight, and you know, I

(01:19:30):
got to fight the communists, and people will write these
these like like honestly, these kind of like pornographic stories
of like participating in violence on behalf of like this
colonial settlers society in Africa. And it was very much
the appeal to a lot of these American racists is
this is a place that's like the Confederacy would have

(01:19:51):
been if it were still around. Right. There's a good
article in Jacob and by Kyle Burke on all of
this that looks at that kind of describes a little
bit like the American friends of Rhodesia in this period
of time, William F. Buckley had even helped organize a
propaganda campaign noticed known as the Friends of Rhodesian Independence,
which worked hand in hand with the Rhodesian government to

(01:20:11):
popularize Rhodesia's cause in the United States, but nothing seemed
to work. The growing war, coupled with US, British and
UN sanctions, imperiled Rhodesia's future. If it fell, then communists
would take over as an Angola. That alone troubled right
wing Americans, but perhaps even more disc againstconcerting was the
result of the US government, especially the CIA, which had
been hamstrung by a series of scandals and investigations that

(01:20:32):
rocked the intelligence community in the mid seventies. The state
appeared both unstable and unwilling to reverse the spread of
communism in Africa. When the CIA had mounted a covert
action against Angola's Marxists in late nineteen seventy five, Democrats
and Congress shut it down within a few months. The
West isn't doing its job, when American Mercenary lamented, the
US especially isn't doing its job. If they're too scared
to fight the Communists, then people like me have to

(01:20:54):
act independently. I consider it my duty to fight in
Rhodesia after Vietnam and Angola. We can't afford to lose
any other countries. Wow, we did, we did, We just did.
None of these guys, these handful of white Americans who
came over to None of this was enough to prop
the state up. It never could have been. That was
always a fantasy. For one thing, Ian was reliant upon

(01:21:15):
there just being this massive population of Americans who were
raised the way he was on, like heroic stories of
colonial warriors fighting crowds of Zulus, and those people just
didn't exist. You know, there's some racists, but even most
of the racists didn't want to move to Africa to
die fighting in a bush war, like for your stupid

(01:21:36):
racist country. By nineteen seventy nine, an estimated forty thousand
people had died in Ian Smith's Bush War, tens of
thousands had been imprisoned. Margaret Thatcher, the incoming British Prime Minister,
made it clear to Smith that it was well past
time he and his compatriots fuck off into the sunset,
and ultimately they did. The plan was for a freely

(01:21:56):
elected parliament, and with universal suffrage, whites would guaranteed twenty
of the hundred seats in Parliament, which is not you know,
even free right. That's still unfairly biased towards the white people.
But they're still unhappy with this right. And you know,
the man who replaces Smith ultimately is an equally ill
omened monster. Rabut Mugabi wins the first Zimbabwe elections in

(01:22:19):
nineteen eighty. You've probably heard of his name. He is
not a good guy. He's a he was originally a
school teacher, but he becomes like a Marxist organizer and
gets locked up by Smith in sixty four, and he
goes on once he takes over. He's a horrible dictator
and he destroys a lot of Zimbabwe as a result.
A lot of like the society that exists, is ruined
by his kleptocratic regime. However, his regime number one when

(01:22:43):
it comes to power inherits the security state that Ian
Smith had set up. All of like the guns, all
of these different like legal institutes that had been created
to allow him Smith to lock up his political enemies.
All that still in existence when mcgabi gets into power,
and mcgabi uses a lot of the state that Smith
had built to create his own dictatorship right now. The

(01:23:05):
other thing is that mcgabi himself was partly a product
of Smith's horrific war. Mcgabi was arrested in nineteen sixty
four and spent ten years brutally imprisoned by the Rhodesian
government because he was a political organizer advocating for like nationalism, right,
And he's even like three years into his prison sentence,

(01:23:26):
Mcgabi's young son gets sick and is like and dies,
and Mcgabi begs to be given leave to attend his
boy's funerals, like three year old kid's funeral, and in
Smith is like, now, fuck you. Right. So when mcgabi
gets freed in seventy four, initially as like a peace
overture by Smith's desperate government, he's not super happy or

(01:23:47):
is he like a really well adjusted guy. And by
the time that he swept into power in nineteen eighty
both he inherits this like brutal and powerful police state
built by Smith to wage the Bush War. But he's
also become like very much an angry brutal man himself
in the process of surviving and winning this Bush War.
And so yeah, his dictatorship is pretty brutal and terrific

(01:24:09):
and is also part of the dictatorship in a lot
of ways that Smith establishes right. The fact that Mugabi
is so awful and ruins the country even more is
a continuation of the desperately bad policies that Smith had
pushed that started ruining the country. Right. For his part,
Smith spent the rest of his life living in Hirare,

(01:24:30):
which had been Salisbury and is the capital of now Zimbabwe.
After Mugave wins and Mugabi actually leaves him alone, like
he's allowed to live his life. He keeps a nice
house like ten years on his land gets appropriated by
the government, but he lives out his life for years
in Zimbabwe as a freeman. Periodically Mcgabi would like threaten him,

(01:24:54):
you know, to be like, oh, I'm going to prosecute
him for war crimes or something whenever his own popularity
was low. But you know, he's able to live out
his life and he never apologizes. He never apologizes for
the atrocities. Yeah. Yeah, And in fact, when he was
interviewed in the year two thousand in The Guardian by
Sandra Jordan about like do you feel bad about all

(01:25:17):
the people you killed. Smith said that he had no
regrets about the thirty thousand or so Zimbabweans killed during
his rule. Quote, the more we killed, the happier we were.
We were fighting terrorists.

Speaker 5 (01:25:27):
Yeah, happier you were cool.

Speaker 2 (01:25:29):
Yes, Yes, the happier you were, which is why you
lost the country because most people weren't happy. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
Yes, city at least die of something horrific.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
Hey, he dies like he does forever. It's yeah, he
doesn't live forever. I can give you that much. Is
he He does not wind up being like our first
immortal cool, but he has like a long retirement. Yeah,
he travels again, he's a free person. He gets to
visit like South Africa. He lives into the fucking tooth.

(01:26:00):
He dies in Cape Town in two thousand and seven
at age eighty eight after a stroke.

Speaker 3 (01:26:04):
Right, so it's too long, you know, he lived too long.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
Yep, he lived way too fucking long.

Speaker 3 (01:26:12):
Anyway, it was buddies with Kissinger.

Speaker 6 (01:26:16):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
Well, he didn't like Kissinger, but he didn't like anybody,
you know. Yeah, he's he's a real piece of shit. Anyway.
How are you feeling?

Speaker 3 (01:26:26):
Yeah? Bad, lovely?

Speaker 2 (01:26:29):
Yeah, Well that's the story of how Rhodesha became Zimbabwe
and how Ian Smith became a dead person. Becca, you
want to plug your pluggables at the end of here.

Speaker 5 (01:26:39):
Well that was a lovely episode. Thanks you guys for
having me.

Speaker 4 (01:26:44):
You can find me and follow me at bex peccs
ramos on all platforms, and you can find my podcast
Welcome to al Barrio wherever you stream your podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:26:55):
It is not video, it is audio only. I should
say when I say stream.

Speaker 4 (01:26:58):
But and you can can find and follow us on
Instagram at Welcome to El Barrio and you can email
us at Welcome to El barriogmail dot com with any
if you have Puerto Rican guest suggestions, your own barrio
stories and etc.

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
Awesome, well check that out and uh yeah, folks, we'll
be back next week with something I don't know what yet.
Don't don't hassle me. I'll figure it out in time.

Speaker 3 (01:27:22):
Maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:27:26):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes,
but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping
every Tuesday and Thursday. Pit Remind me on Netflix you
don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,

(01:27:49):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,