Robert Mugabe, Strongman Who Cried, ‘Zimbabwe Is Mine,’ Dies at 95 | Hacker News Reader

Robert Mugabe, Strongman Who Cried, ‘Zimbabwe Is Mine,’ Dies at 95

nytimes.com

53 pointsishikawa56 comments

The more I see the stories of these leaders who led their country to independence and then stayed on and became dictators, the more I appreciate how unique George Washington was. His single decision to retire after 8 years set up American democracy for success.

Even well before his presidency, right after the British surrendered, he had to quash small scale conspiracies to have the army take power. And they would have easily made him a military leader similar to Cromwell if he wanted.

Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newburgh_Conspiracy

Good point. The very fact that we even have an elected President owes a lot to him.

Similarly Nelson Mandela, although it remains to be seen how successful he has been.

Thing to consider is George Washington was a member of the Virginia General Assembly for 15 years before the revolution. And that body had been in existence for the previous 150 years (founded 1619, reorganized 1642)

So George Washington was first and foremost a politician.

Zimbabwe's trillion dollar notes are quite popular with numismatics. On eBay, single $100 trillion dollar notes go for $10-30+ American dollars! I think the most rare ones are $20 trillion dollar note, though.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trill...

Now I sort of want one.

I hope that the bills have to go away and that their economy can improve...

I used to have a trillion dollar note and a large stack of million-dollar notes before some idiot at work stole them. Instead of retiring early all they got was my eternal disappointment. I keep wanting to replace my cash but the price of Zimbabwe bucks keeps going up and up, 100-trillion costs $70+ now! And when the notes were officially abandoned you could get whole bricks of unused stacks of any denomination for super cheap! Someday I will just have to take my losses and buy my 100-trill back.

I have 100 sequential uncirculated and bound 100 trillion dollar notes that I bought on ebay ten years ago for probably $5. I remember when you could buy literally bricks of trillion dollar notes for a few dollars!

I've only got 50 Trillion...

Got it for AUD$2.10 (USD$1.44) in 2013. Maybe I should have invested more. :-)

Sometimes it seems there is no justice in the world. I guess because there isn't. Terrible people who do catastrophic harm to millions of citizens live in wealth and comfort to the ripe old age of 95. At the same time, innocent children lose loving parents to disease and accident every day.

I just hope that Zimbabwe will never again experience so terrible a leader, and that his legacy will live on as an example of how not to rule a country.

I guess that there is no justice and no unjustice. The world is just very random / complex.

Coincidentally, I'm actually in Harare, Zimbabwe right now. I was told earlier that there would be parties all over the city. Some will be celebrating but many others will mourn his death.

Pretty surprising for me, a white westerner to hear that people will be morning for the guy.

Even the worst dictators have fans, or they get overthrown.

I saw a documentary where doctors snuck cameras into NK. The doctors were doing free cateract surgery for people, and it was really prevalent because of how malnourished they were. The people getting surgery kept praising Kim Jong Il for saving their eye sight, even though he was the reason they needed surgery in the first place.

> I saw a documentary where doctors snuck cameras into NK. The doctors were doing free cateract surgery for people, and it was really prevalent because of how malnourished they were. The people getting surgery kept praising Kim Jong Il for saving their eye sight, even though he was the reason they needed surgery in the first place.

They had to give praise. They were on camera

They didn't know they were, but I think soldiers were in the room, so similar idea.

People mourned Stalin.

People still do. Arguably, more of them now than ever before. They call it "rehabilitation".

My great great grandmother was a staunch fascist (living in the US) and mourned Mussolini's death for a number of years, I'm told.

People don't understand why things are the way they are. Myself especially. It's a fundamental human bias to think otherwise.

Mugabe liberated his people, that counts for a lot even considering decades of dictatorship.

Of course he and his supporters have at times resorted to violence, but also it is to be remembered that he led the fight to end colonial rule in Zimbabwe, I remember during the Mandela memorial function many world leaders including Obama had made the appearance, Mugabe was the one who got the highest applause. IIRC Mandela didn't share the opinions of the western press regarding Mugabe. Perhaps it might even be said that esp the British Governments upto and including Tony Blair's didn't deal fairly with him for decades together, and that had a major role in what he eventually became.

https://www.thenation.com/article/robert-mugabe-and-the-pois...

The British government being “unfair” doesn’t excuse Mugabe’s tyranny or avarice. And tyrants are usually very good at generating applause while they are still in power.

> he led the fight to end colonial rule in Zimbabwe,

That overstates his role a bit. As in many 20th-century revolutions, the main thing distinguishing Mugabe from other leaders was not his actions vis a vis the target of the revolution (the Rhodesian government) but his ruthlessness toward his allies (e.g. Nkomo, Sithole).

Power is power. Never paid any price for the horrors he inflicted on millions.

He was an authoritarian dictator with terrible economic policies and no respect for human rights, but "horrors he inflicted on millions" is overstating it a bit. He's not Idi Amin.

He is much worse because his policies led to widespread starvation killing millions. Not just killing 100,000 people. Both are terrible of course, and should have died in a brazen bull.

Interesting to read socialists’ take on Mugabe: https://solidarity-us.org/atc/51/p4616/

The world was largely pro-Mugabe in 94. That's the year that the British gave him an honorary knighthood.

There seem to be a lot of people here perplexed about why, exactly, Mugabe is celebrated, when there's so much there to (rightly) condemn him for.

Read up on Rhodesia, and more broadly the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Africans weren't even second class citizens: the vast majority were given zero say in governance. Legal protections were de facto non-existent. And, in the midst of the bush war, tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the Rhodesian military.

Does that at all excuse Mugabe post-Rhodesia? Not at all. But it's important to contextualize him if you want to understand why many still valorize him.

As a point of comparison, Americans celebrate George Washington for leading a successful anti-colonial struggle and establishing a republic. But, a much darker gloss is that he founded a white settler republic that enshrined a brutal system of slavery in its Constitution and that regularly committed campaigns of genocide against non-dominant ethnic groups. Indeed, British restrictions on that was a substantial motivating factor for the white American settlers to have rebelled.

Reducing Washington to that would mislead more than it reveals, but people are doing the exact same thing with Mugabe. Focusing on Mugabe's very real sins to the extent it obscures what people find compelling about him is limiting your own understanding of the world.

I appreciate the attempt to bring another side to the debate but the point you are missing is that it is us black Africans who are being critical of Mugabe. We all experienced the oppression by the Rhodesian government. It his actions against fellow blacks after "liberation" that we are criticizing. He presided over the murder of 20 000 people[0]. A leader who presides over record inflation no matter the excuse has failed and should step down to give someone else a chance. He had to be removed through a coup as he was preparing to hand over the country to his wife.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukurahundi

Many Americans aren’t constitutionally capable of criticizing countries that aren’t America.

? Iraq and Afghanistan seem pretty criticized to me.

I think rayiner was speaking of the "many" Americans who complain about America constantly, but know nothing else well enough to really compare.

Which is probably sensible: for most people, criticism of their own country is the only kind of criticism that can be put into action. It's productive in a way that kibbitzing over Zimbabwe isn't.

It's tiring how any attempt to contextualize why some people like Mugabe (which I don't! I repeatedly criticize him in my comment!) needs to be represented as saying that he's not deserving of criticism or that the only people criticizing him are white imperialists. Yes, he did plenty of bad things, but someone who has only read a caricature of him will ultimately be flummoxed when they meet a fan of his.

If you've had many encounters with Zimbabweans, you've run into people who do think he is a hero. This would be perplexing to the average HNer who has only read (accurate!) stories of authoritarianism, human rights violations, and hyperinflation.

Makes me want to compare and contrast Mugabe with Idi Amin.

I understand the point you are making in this comment. The fervent support for Mugabe can be confusing. TO expand on your answer and to inform HN crowd here are some I think people support Mugabe.

1. Once a hero, always a hero. Africans struggle to turn on liberation movement leaders. We feel we owe them our freedom. For some people, liberation movement leaders can never do anything wrong. This leads to my point two.

2. Some families have always associated themselves with liberation movements. It maybe the father joined the party or a son, sister, cousin joined the party a long time ago and family feels obligated to support the party

3. Mugabe was gifted speaker who tapped into the anti imperialist/colonialist sentiment in Africa. He is loved by many Africans because he dared publicly speak out against the West. He always loved Europe until they put sanctions on him and then he turned towards the East.

4. Mugabe ran on a tribal ticket. You will find more supporters in certain tribes than in others.

The biggest reason he is still popular today is because of his anti West rhetoric. Which is a pity but to each their own. I hope this sheds some light to an HNer who encounters Africans who think the world of Mugabe.

The Westerners may well be aware of Mugabe's end of colonization. But, someone who has murdered is called a murderer. And should be treated as such. Stalin stopped Hitler and industrialized Russia, but he's a murderer. Lots of people in Russia adore him, and though I know full well why, I've never had anyone explain to me why that is. But we have here an African who killed Africans, so we are supposed to see the other side more clearly. Are the murdered Africans supposed to count less heavily on our conscience?

I totally get where you are coming from and I agree with you. I also see the point the parent comment was trying to make. If you meet 10 Zimbabweans you likely to find a few who adore Mugabe. The comment was just to inform those not so familiar with Zimbabwean politics and history. He is still a murderer but sadly there are fellow Africans some very close to me who only see the liberation hero. I just think it is important to understand where the other side is coming from. I strongly disagree and think some of the opinions are based on willfully ignoring facts but it is the world we live in.

The worship of the founding fathers... if you will permit me to generalize a little, I find Americans puzzling. When it is time to feel guilty, they are quick to put ash on themselves, and apologize for the racist, colonialist, genocidal foundations of their country. And in the next breath, they claim that to oppose diversity goes against the very ideals the country was founded on.

How can one simultaneously hold such conflicting beliefs?

Lots of Americans believe different things. The people who think of America as a fundamentally white supremacist state are not the same people writing slogans like "America Has Always Been Great."

I got the distinct impression that there is a lot of overlap between those most likely to decry US history, and those that invoke supposedly foundational multicultural ideals to promote diversity.

I do not have to think Thomas Jefferson was a saint to find value in the opening of the Declaration of Independence--when applied to all people.

You understand that one can be very, very in favor of the stated aspirations of the American founding documents while understanding that the people saying them both did a lot of bad shit and had a provincial and shitty understanding of who those stated aspirations applied to, yeah?

Those words are a call for us to do better, and part of doing better is understanding our often-shitty ancestry.

But I was not referring to only the declaration of independence, but to the US founding and history as a whole. For example, your naturalization acts were limited to "free white persons of good character", so it's pretty obvious the US was, for most of its history, a white ethno-state.

It's fine if you want to change that (well, by now it has been changed), but it's just that - a change, not the continuation of some mythical welcoming-to-all America that never existed.

strongman?

That's a funny way of spelling murderous dictator

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongman_(politics)

Another tyrant bites the dust, and good riddance.

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