Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Evil tyrant extraordinaire

Evil is a dangerous word, coming as it does with so many overtones of religion, but at the end, it is a moral word, rooted in the need to respect other’s lives, and do no harm. Robert Mugabe, petty dictator of Zimbabwe, has further thrown his people to the wolves:

Bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean’s diet, have vanished, seized by mobs who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is virtually nonexistent, even for members of the middle class who have money to buy it on the black market. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.

Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.

The chaos, however, seems to have done little to undermine Mr. Mugabe’s authority. To the contrary, the government is moving steadily toward a takeover of major sectors of the economy that have not already been nationalized.

“We are at war,” one of Mr. Mugabe’s vice presidents, Joseph Msika, said in a speech on July 18. “We will not allow shelves to be empty.”

And so, I’m sure the US Government, and the United Nations, will sit by, and watch as yet another African nation falls into complete and total failure. The signs of Mugabe’s gigantic ego and brutal dictatorship have been there for years, but we have ignored it, as we ignored Rwanda and continue to largely ignore Dafur. Why? We could speculate, but it doesn’t truly matter why. It simply matters that if a nation deserved to be freed from a tyrant, Zimbabwe certainly does.

A vast majority of Zimbabwe’s population lives in total and complete abject poverty. They are starving, and whether tens of thousands die of hunger and malnutrition, or they die at the hands of marauding lunatics with machetes, they die none the less. They die, while we mire ourselves further and further into destroying another country for questionable reasons and petty ego.