Experience

Teaching Taiwanese since 2005 | FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Bernard English

Bernard English
FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Online English Tutor/Teacher

My photo
Native Speaker of American English Conversation practice. Chatting or in-depth discussion of news articles. TOEFL-IELTS practice / CV, SOP, journal paper, essay revision 英語家教 彈性排課, 免通勤, 托福, 職場英文, 履歷/論文修改…等。 請看我的學生推薦信。

Search This Blog

email: bernard.english@gmail.com

website: https://sites.google.com/site/taipeibm/
FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Friday, April 4, 2008

Zimbabwe and the new Cowardly Colonialism by Brendan O'Neill FROM Spiked

The media reports about Zimbabwe’s elections present them as a clash between the ‘evil’ Mugabe and the ‘heroic’ Tsvangirai, an electoral battle for Zimbabwe’s soul. Mugabe is depicted as having brought Zimbabwe to its knees, causing widespread poverty and enforcing terror and repression, and Tsvangirai is discussed as the harbinger of a dignified ‘revolution’ against Mugabeism (2). This is a fantasy. It ignores the key role played by Western governments and financial institutions in using sanctions, tough diplomacy and the proxy interventionists of the South Africa government and the African Union to isolate and harry Zimbabwe over the past decade. Such self-serving external meddling has contributed to Zimbabwe’s economic crisis - and it has dangerously distorted the political dynamics inside Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the south of Africa.

Over the past 10 years, American and European governments cynically transformed Mugabe’s Zimbabwe into the West’s whipping boy in Africa, the state they love to hate, a country against which they can enforce tough sanctions to demonstrate their seriousness about standing up to ‘evil’. The West has imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, warned off foreign investors, denied Zimbabwean officials the right to travel freely around the world, demonised Mugabe as an ‘evil dictator’, discussed the idea of military action against Zimbabwe, and used moral and financial blackmail to cajole South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki to ‘deal with’ Mugabe (3).

Followers