Nothing to celebrate

This author woke up today to find in his copy of The Japan Times one of those paid puff-pieces written by the Embassy Staff of a foreign nation to celebrate said country's national holiday. The day before, there was one from the Pakistani Embassy with two pages-full of paid advertising from Japanese businesses and Pakistani expatriate firms.

Well, today is "Zimbabwe Independence Day". We got the Ambassador's puff-piece, promoting tourism and hoping to reestablish the business ties between Japan and his country that were a big part of the 1990's "Zim-boom", now but a distant economic memory. He got a grand total of two small supporting advertisements, by the way. Fair enough. He was just doing his job to write it. My hackles stood up trying to read it without throwing the paper across the room, but restrain prevailed...

(Regrettably, the JTimes does not make such National Day messages available on their on-line edition, so no link is possible.)

Until now.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday congratulated the people of Zimbabwe on their Independence Day and urged the country's transition government to continue moving toward reforms.
"The United States has long stood with the people of Zimbabwe in their times of need and will continue to do so," Clinton said in a written statement.

Madam Secretary, the one thing indisputably clear about the American role in forcing the Lancaster House Agreement that overturned Rhodesia's own choice of democratic reforms and handed the nation over to the so-called "Patriotic Front" was that the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. at the time, Mr. Andrew Young, spiked any possible resolution other than selling out the nation of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

Unless, in your inexplicably ill-informed opinion, you actually believe that what "...the people of Zimbabwe in their time of need..." needed was the mass slaughter of the population and the almost complete annihilation of any meaningful economic activity over the course of more than two decades.

Is that what you really believe? Is that the position of the State Department of the Obama Administration?

Of course, if *that* is what you really meant to say, Madam Secretary, then I retract the accusation calling you ill-informed. In *that* case, I'll just call you a wilful collaborator in the massacres and looting.