Robert Mugabe vs. Ian Smith

[Indy Texas]

The one who didn't steal my great-uncle's farmland.

"...it should be noted that white people never amounted to more than 5.4% of the country's total population (that is, 270,000 white people divided by 5 million total population in 1970). Also, the white farming community never amounted to more than around 8% of the total white population and this proportion fell steadily after 1945 up to independence in 1980."

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The magnitude of land reform is always so misrepresented and misunderstood. I think conservative Americans are under some delusion that millions of white people were chased out of Zimbabwe at gunpoint.

So basically, we're talking about 4,000 households being affected by this in a country that had nearly 13 million people at the time this happened. That doesn't make it right, but I fail to see how it's any worse than getting your property seized via eminent domain, which happens in the United States all the time. I fail to see how it's worse than "land reform" in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or in China in the 1950s.

[Indy Texas]

I fail to see how it's worse than "land reform" in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or in China in the 1950s.

Lowest bar ever?

My point is that not only were the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans unaffected by it, the overwhelming majority of white Zimbabweans weren't affected by it either.

As to the original poll question, I vote Ian Smith because while I abhor his racial policies, he didn't turn his country's currency into the equivalent of packing material. Mugabe is a total screw-up as a leader, but the land reform is only a tangential issue in terms of how badly he has mismanaged his country and I don't think it's worth devoting the amount of attention to it that most people do.

[Indy Texas]

Mugabe's treatment of white farmers comes nowhere close to Idi Amin's treatment of South Asians in Uganda in the 1970s - he gave them a matter of a few days to leave the country with no time to sell anything and threw them out with little more than the clothes on their backs and the ones who didn't get out in time got shot. There wasn't a whole lot of outcry about that in the West when it was going on. In fact, we basically looked the other way since he was "anti-communist."