00:01:24.880the dark continent of Africa stood as a beacon, welcoming explorers, expansionists,
00:01:30.460and adventurers. While the world was modernizing, all the British Empire's most talented,
00:01:36.260risk-taking entrepreneurs ventured south of the equator for a land of opportunity and deep
00:01:41.240enchantment. Their goal was to settle, exercise dominion, and establish outposts of Christian
00:01:47.300society in otherwise tribal domains that had not yet seen the roots of advanced civilization take
00:01:53.260hold, lands that lacked sustainable food supplies, let alone civil order. But as the old world in
00:01:59.740Europe industrialized, it also became safer, more bureaucratic, and more politically correct.
00:02:06.160Just a few decades into the 20th century, the seeds of self-loathing among colonial empires
00:02:11.280found fertile soil. This self-loathing proved to be a bitter nightshade, leading to the suicide
00:02:17.100of the West by self-administered poison. World War II would be the death of old world colonialism
00:02:23.300and the rise of statist Marxism, as well as a different brand of globalist egalitarianism
00:02:29.100that hated, perhaps above all, white men. Within a few decades of the war's end,
00:02:35.020decolonization and egalitarian globalism would demand cultural self-immolation
00:02:39.780as a chief national priority. But before all that happened, daring empire builders would go to one
00:02:46.500of the few remaining frontiers left to explore, Africa. One of those men was Cecil Rhodes,
00:02:52.520a British magnate who obtained mineral rights from local leaders in 1888. Rhodes Company was
00:02:58.520the British South Africa Company, and it was awarded rights to the territory from the Limpopo
00:03:03.920to Lake Tanganyaki. The territory would be named Rhodesia after Rhodes in 1895. Rhodesia would
00:03:11.600become a white-ruled nation with expanding wealth, agriculture, and societal stability.
00:03:16.920Blacks and whites got along just fine. Ian Smith is a prominent figure in the history of the country,
00:03:22.880having served as prime minister from 1964 to 1979. A former British politician, farmer,
00:03:29.680and fighter pilot in the RAF, Smith would lead the effort to declare independence from Great
00:03:35.080Britain in 1965. At the time, the global civil rights movement was underway, and the writing
00:03:41.340was on the wall for those with eyes to see. Far from a push for simple justice and equity,
00:03:46.960the civil rights movement would ultimately grow into a radically anti-white, anti-colonial,
00:03:52.620anti-western, and even anti-civilizational movement. What you might call in the 1960s,
00:03:58.700stage one egalitarianism, would ultimately metastasize into a terminal illness in Europe,
00:04:04.460the UK, and the US, dissolving the vital fibers of nations in ways still unfolding today.
00:04:11.340Refusing to yield to international pressure to adopt these egalitarian principles, Rhodesia became a target marked for destruction by the ruling nations on the global scene, including the United States.
00:04:23.200A 15-year Bush war ensued with liberal democratic powers like the U.S. backing communist guerrillas against Rhodesia.
00:04:30.840As Smith famously said, it was the national will of Rhodesia to remain more British than the British.
00:04:37.320Like the old Narnians living in the wilds under Telmarine rule,
00:04:41.060the Rhodesians hoped to keep the torch of their old civilization burning there in Africa.
00:04:46.040Despite their valiant resistance, and thanks to UN sanctions and international pressure,
00:04:50.760the country of Rhodesia, along with Smith's government, would fall apart.
00:04:55.480After these years of Bush War, the country could no longer continue as it was.
00:05:00.260One of the last bastions of Christendom would become the Black-ruled Zimbabwe in 1978,
00:05:05.400with Robert Mugabe taking control of the country.
00:05:09.360Backed by communists, including Chinese and North Koreans,
00:05:13.040Mugabe would spearhead the effort to eradicate other tribal opponents,
00:05:17.280leading to the death of tens of thousands.
00:05:20.320As a result, the country would be put on Genocide Watch
00:05:26.280Today, Zimbabwe is a third world hellhole at best.
00:05:30.000As we look into this sad tale, serious questions arise.
00:05:33.780If the Western powers after World War II were supposedly anti-communist, why did they support the communist efforts to overthrow white rule in Rhodesia?
00:05:43.740Why did Jimmy Carter and the CIA work so tirelessly to see Smith and his nation fail?
00:05:50.440What can we learn about this episode in Rhodesia?
00:05:52.780In this episode of the King's Hall podcast, we sit down with Will Tanner, co-founder of the American Tribune, Proud Wasp, and the man behind an incredible X account that focuses on many things, including the history of Rhodesia and why it matters today.
00:06:08.800As Will reminds us in this episode, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
00:06:15.800We'll talk about the history of Rhodesia, the Bush War, and why it all matters.
00:06:20.720The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.
00:06:38.060Well, welcome to this episode of the King's Hall Podcast.
00:06:41.020Today, I'm joined by a very special guest, a rare in-studio appearance, Mr. Pastor, songwriter.
00:06:48.920some people call him the songbird of his generation brian so vey i only think you've
00:06:55.580ever called me the songbird of our generation and only in podcast interviews but it's good i mean
00:07:01.080i'll take it yeah here i am joined by my good friend eric khan who many say is probably the
00:07:09.540most gifted person of his generation at enraging others that as that might be true that could
00:07:15.240definitely be true what a what an honor we are a team a match made in heaven you know what i'm
00:07:20.380saying yes i bring the warmth you bring the sharp yeah acerbic biting edge yes uh to a to a great
00:07:27.240subject today rhodesia rhodesia yeah uh we don't have pastor dan no we don't we lost him on a golf
00:07:33.420course can't even find him he's still trying to find his ball he sliced it 300 yards to the right
00:07:38.800um, across a river. And, and he, he set off into the wilderness and said, I'll be back if I'm,
00:07:44.920if I make it. Poor pastor Dan, he's actually doing like good pastoral work right now.
00:07:50.880He's doing better than me at golf. So I have to, when he's not here.
00:07:54.480So we thought, yeah, you know, we're going to do this intro. We talked to Will Tanner.
00:07:58.400Yeah. Fascinating conversation about a fascinating subject. This is really one Brian, where, uh,
00:08:04.480I think particularly on the right wing, there's a couple of things, uh, reading about the Spanish
00:08:08.220Civil War, reading about Rhodesia. There's something about this subject matter that gets
00:08:14.380people fired up. So I first heard about it from kind of the military community with the Rhodesian
00:08:20.060SAS and the Sela Scouts. And it's like, wow, this is, this is fascinating. We talk about the Bush
00:08:25.040War. You mentioned that in the open, but there's so much about this story. We'll unpack some of
00:08:30.760it. Hope to do more content in the future as well. But why do you think Rhodesia is, I guess,
00:08:37.400one of those gathering points for people on the right at this moment it just so many of the threads
00:08:43.140that we're still tugging on today in in our social political discourse are deeply connected to that
00:08:49.740story you see so many of the same themes and it's it's honestly a warning tale uh you look at it and
00:08:57.260you say this is what happens when you impose ideology on reality and you attempt to make
00:09:04.420reality bend to your ideology instead of paying careful attention to reality. How did God make
00:09:13.180the world? What's his law? What's in nature and in scripture? And in the story of Rhodesia,
00:09:18.960what you see are people who are driven by absolutely insane political ideology
00:09:23.980and attempting to force a nation and a whole people to function in accordance with their
00:09:31.560ideology that just fundamentally is anti-nature doesn't work is it's communism all over again,
00:09:39.480just a different flavor. Well, it's so interesting because you can read Ian Smith's biography,
00:09:44.280you can read the histories of Rhodesia. And if you read it today, you're like, oh, this is
00:09:50.060seed form and not even really seed form, but this is what we now call the woke left.
00:09:55.720So it's interesting. Civil rights is going on in the sixties. As you mentioned in the cold open,
00:10:01.560there becomes this desire to destroy oneself and one's own civilization.
00:10:07.740It's also interesting, Will brought this up in the interview and we'll hear this,
00:10:12.160but there was a civil rights leader in America named Andrew Young,
00:10:16.420and he was appointed by Jimmy Carter as sort of the ambassador to Rhodesia.
00:10:22.100He was also a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr.
00:10:26.080and was deeply involved in the civil rights movement.
00:10:28.760and so you know as will has some pretty strong words for jimmy carter uh in the interview as
00:10:35.880you read this story you can start to understand maybe why jimmy carter by some was so hated and
00:10:41.120rightly so um this idea that we're an anti-communist nation who is actually supporting
00:10:48.400the communists in destroying a white christian rhodesia yeah who is really trying to stand as
00:10:53.840sort of the last bulwark of the old christendom yeah um but the idea that the cia and jimmy carter
00:10:59.760and andrew young were all working for the overthrow of a sovereign nation so they had
00:11:05.580un sanctions they had basically the whole world against them and going back to ian smith's comment
00:11:11.920we're more british than the british what he meant i think was we're trying to embody the things that
00:11:17.760britain used to stand for that made britain truly great right that made britain a global
00:11:23.540superpower, Britannia rule the waves that made Britain, not just a global superpower in the
00:11:29.540modern woke left narrative of the, you know, these evil colonizers who came and disrupted these
00:11:36.540utopic civilizations with their white ideology. These were the British brought order. They brought
00:11:46.000stability and peace. They brought economic prosperity. Um, in Rhodesia, the, the average,
00:11:52.680I think it's like the GDP, each household's annual basic economic performance.
00:11:59.740It was something like $1,200, you know, adjusted for inflation at their peak.
00:12:03.860And then it tumbles all the way to half or a third of that just within years of imposing this evil ideology and destroying the nation.
00:12:12.420So, I mean, there's an example of even in the 20th century, England, the British people's bringing economic prosperity, civil rules, stability to a place.
00:12:21.980rhodesia was a great place to live under white rule yeah in in 2008 the we were just talking
00:12:29.800about this the inflation rate in zimbabwe was like nearly 90 sextillion percent which is just
00:12:38.240i mean it's a number so big you you can't even comprehend a number like that their currency was
00:12:43.680completely worthless so they they totally destroyed um the nation of people prosperity
00:12:49.800in the name of evil ideology. And it reminded me of something that was going around Twitter today
00:12:57.260because England continues to do this. They're nothing like their former selves. I mean,
00:13:03.360they're now just absolutely in self-immolation mode. But this British journalist was interviewing
00:13:08.880some African immigrant. He looked like Somalian or Kenyan or something. He was in England.
00:13:14.240And he was asking him, you know, to this immigrant, why should British people buy you a house?
00:21:30.640New York Times on Mugabe, there's all sorts of articles.
00:21:33.560And they're like, this has been an unmitigated disaster.
00:21:38.060Could we please go back to the way it was?
00:21:41.480And that's, you know, the New York Times is not a bastion of conservatism,
00:21:44.720But you can look at the facts. One other thing that I would point to that Will has recently posted on his Substack and also on his X account is the truth about Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela was also a communist and a terrorist. They committed heinous atrocities in South Africa. We just watched a video of a black South African talking about, well, I can't promise that we won't be killing whites.
00:22:10.940yeah he they said the the reporter says do you have any plans what it was it for like white
00:22:15.420genocide kill whites to genocide whites and he said uh we do not at this time it was something
00:22:22.120like that i make no promises about future about the future and it was like and then the guy said
00:22:27.200well like what would you say to someone who who heard that and said well it sounds like you're
00:22:30.220keeping your options open and he goes cry babies that's how much these people hate you hate the
00:22:38.060West. Yeah. Interestingly enough, Nelson Mandela's wife, Winnie, she had publicly advocated for
00:22:46.460neck tying political opponents, which is to take a car tire full of like diesel fuel with a living
00:22:53.080victim and put it around their neck and light it on fire. These are the kind of people you're
00:22:58.300dealing with. And so this whole Invictus garbage that we've been told, oh, Mandela was a great
00:23:02.920man of peace. He was a wicked, horrible man. And the things, uh, you can read Ernst Rode's book,
00:23:09.320uh, kill the boar. I could not read that book, but for like a couple pages at a time because
00:23:16.300of the atrocities committed against white farmers in Africa. And by the way, like white Christians.
00:23:23.020Yeah. What we're talking about, these are our brothers in Christ.
00:23:25.880and it's just astonishing the level of self-inflicted stupidity yes that the west has
00:23:33.220that americans that you know even christians have adopted and absorbed as their default
00:23:39.020programming so that and i mean we're getting to the point now where we've made some progress
00:23:44.700in in discourse where it people are pretty comfortable now saying that of course we can
00:23:51.300measure cultures against one another and of course we would say that it's like we're returning to
00:23:55.640reality yeah the rhodesian culture was superior it attempted to impartially impose a civil a
00:24:01.980system of civil rule on black and white and everybody like they they all were supposed to
00:24:07.120obey the law and they came and enforced the law blindly as god's law would require for true
00:24:12.640justice okay so you'd say that's a superior culture and that's the this is the play that
00:24:18.640i think everybody just needs to start seeing clearly when it comes to like ethics 101 is
00:24:24.080that we've been trained to immediately knee-jerk to believing that an injustice has been done or
00:24:30.820is in the process of being done whenever you say that that some group a is superior to group b
00:24:36.840you say like and and they're they're they're better than they're superior and before you
00:24:42.620freak out you should ask well superior with respect to what and then show me the evidence
00:24:48.120okay like is culture a or people group a superior to people group b with respect to this thing
00:24:55.260and it's like as soon as you get out of your marxist ideological training that's not a very
00:25:00.960scary question to ask no because we do it all the time you could say it is um group a athletically
00:25:09.660superior on the mean or on the average compared to group b when it comes to some can they jump
00:25:16.140higher, run faster? Are they stronger on average? You'd be like, yeah. Are they taller? Are
00:25:21.000Scandinavians on average superior with respect to height to Vietnamese people? Well, yeah,
00:25:27.860like we can do this calculation all the way down. I keep harping on it, but the problem is that we
00:25:33.300have been trained to impose ideology as a filter over reality to prevent us from reaching real
00:25:40.440conclusions about reality. And we're doing it in service of what we believe is a kindness
00:25:45.300but what it ends up doing is give evil people manipulative tools politically to destroy whole
00:25:51.380nations well this is one of the things i think that we've seen this rise of the you know absolute
00:25:58.560loser mentality of the people pushing the woke right thing and i think what it is is you have
00:26:04.340the old trotskyite neocons that's that's what they are they were trotskyites historically but
00:26:11.180you have like the guys who want to enforce the liberal order as though it were orthodox
00:45:59.660that there are many people who are non-European by race and even non-Anglo by race who lawfully
00:46:06.880and truly belong to this American ethnogenesis. I'd say Clarence Thomas is an example that
00:46:12.880Stephen Wolf gave his Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Like, is he a good American
00:46:17.840man? And Stephen would say, yes, there's a, there's a good example of an Anglo Protestant
00:46:22.960is the funny thing is what Stephen says. And he's Catholic. So it's like, he's neither white
00:46:28.540nor Protestant. And yet you can look and say, so there's something complicated about that.
00:46:33.760People often veer towards highly simplistic answers to complicated problems that are absolutely
00:46:40.440untenable in reality. And you know what that is? It's just another way of trying to impose
00:46:44.580ideology on reality. So I'm not advocating, for example, that the solution is that we should
00:46:51.160genocide anybody in America and an ethnic cleansing. Like that would be an example of
00:46:55.300something that would be contrary to the American Anglo-Protestant spirit that actually is good and
00:47:03.220a result of our Christian heritage. Well, I think even in a place like South Africa, I know a lot
00:47:07.240of people have wrestled with this and I've seen, they've had maps where part of the solution could
00:47:12.680be, it's actually not, South Africa is not black versus white in terms of the clash. It's like
00:47:19.320there's, I don't know, I'll probably butcher this. One of the South Africans will correct me later
00:47:23.500and that's great but maybe let's say there's like eight different black tribal groups and a lot of
00:47:29.000them don't get along right totally but what they had advocated was maybe one solution is let's let's
00:47:33.980break the one country up into different ones maybe they can be unified under some sort of
00:47:39.700south african banner maybe not but like the africaners like we get our place you get yours
00:47:46.660yeah let's see how it turns out because the the trying to do business together is not working
00:47:51.940Right. I think that's lawful. I think that's a solution like that. But to your point, it's complicated. I think in some ways, OK, people are here and there are people here lawfully from other, you know, different ethnicities. That toothpaste is not going back.
00:48:09.020no but i also you can get rid of illegal immigrants here absolutely you can stop this
00:48:16.560insanity of continuing to flood haitians into ohio yeah you can absolutely deal with that
00:48:22.220exactly you can stop doing the bad thing that's destroying you you can undo as much of it as
00:48:27.160possible from the recent to medium term folly and then you have to deal with reality yep and one of
00:48:33.280the you know to your point i think it was someone on twitter um grew up in a missionary family and
00:48:39.000they had been in some country where there was a situation similar to that, multiple tribes of
00:48:44.560people, all non-white people, like Africans or something like that, that didn't get along or
00:48:49.700Pacific or something like that. And forever, the society had basically been broken along two lines
00:48:55.080where there was harmonious, commodious living in both of these groups, and they just remained
00:48:59.780fairly distinct. Now, they were able to have societal interaction, commercial interaction.
00:49:06.140they weren't at openly hostile to one another there would be small instances of of one group
00:49:13.460or a person coming and maybe going to church from the other one or something like that
00:49:16.860but generally speaking there was voluntary segregation where they were like we want to
00:49:20.880be our people over here and you want to be and what what modern west anti-western ideology would
00:49:26.820want to do is do government enforced um forbidding a voluntary association in that way
00:49:35.140and force those two groups and say we're doing something evil you must now associate with one
00:49:41.400another on all societal levels and we're going to force this by law well this is this is the crazy
00:49:48.140thing like if you look at civil rights and it's forced desegregation yes the problem is you have
00:49:54.360the first amendment which is the right of the people to gather and meet in public or private
00:49:58.280to express promote or defend their ideas beliefs or causes voluntary assembly it's voluntary
00:50:03.240assembly the right to assemble the way the constitution is written it you are allowed to
00:50:09.440segregate meaning like we can say like hey we're christians we're gonna we're gonna gather here
00:50:14.900we're not lawfully required to have everyone else welcomed into our midst and it's such a clear and
00:50:20.900obvious principle that accords with god's law and with nature when you look at um the print like if
00:50:27.320you think of a household of course a household ought to have the right to voluntary assembly
00:50:31.280where they shouldn't have to open their door their dinner table to and if the nation is the
00:50:35.240household writ large it's like there are many in principle you know overlap and uh extensions where
00:50:40.720there's there's analogy between the two there's discourse between those two concepts so what
00:50:46.320we've done is in the name of an ideology that is false um we have violently imposed this ideology
00:50:53.660over reality and trained people as their default programming to filter their interaction with
00:51:01.180reality through the sieve of their ideology and the problem is that the ideology is false
00:51:07.760it's in denial of nature so we actually have to fix that yeah and and one of the things we have
00:51:12.480to do to fix it that's why it's so important like why i push back on this stuff when when
00:51:16.360joel berry or someone else you know freaks out when you say something quite pedestrian and mundane
00:51:21.240in terms of logic and observation of reality when people freak out and they immediately
00:51:26.800they psychologize you and they call you names. I'm very interested to help observers see what's
00:51:33.140happening. That there is an ideological filter that is allegedly like what Joel would say is
00:51:40.540it's Christianity, but it's not Christianity. It's actually a foreign ideology that he has
00:51:47.500conflated with Christian ideology, with Christian doctrine, and he's imposing it over reality and
00:51:53.560then enforcing the rules of that ideology artificially on everybody around him even on
00:51:57.840the level of discourse i think it was helpful when he he kind of had a debate with dave green
00:52:02.260i didn't watch that one it was good because basically dave forced on the point so he was
00:52:07.960like okay all these things you're saying that's not what the founding fathers believed so you
00:52:11.920have to say that they were racists right and he was like whoa i i don't know i died and he just
00:52:18.440kind of like froze again that's another point where it's like the same people who claim to be
00:52:23.740defending the constitution then okay but let's go back to what the founders believed right what did
00:52:29.160they and it's not what you claim to believe what did they understand themselves to be doing in
00:52:33.680terms of a legal construct did they think that they were imposing post-civil rights act no
00:52:39.580ideology on america obviously not they obviously didn't think that that was what they were doing
00:52:45.740since society was so fundamentally different and they didn't see a problem with it it's it's just
00:52:52.140nonsense like that's the problem this fundamentally why caldwell will call the civil rights amendment
00:52:57.180era and legislation a second constitution what's the name of that book again i was trying to recall
00:53:03.960the age of entitlement yeah great book if you want to read about the civil rights act in the
00:53:09.28060s and what came out because so much of the rhodesia story um the reason it's it matt like
00:53:13.920we went into it in the cold open a little bit like civil rights acts like stage one cancer of a lot
00:53:18.640of these issues and then what happened to rhodesia is just a fast forwarding because it was such a
00:53:23.100small group and small nation easy to be bullied um so we need to study these kinds of things and
00:53:29.300we need to do it with our ideological glasses off the other one i would say on especially on
00:53:33.520immigration and in the cultural melu is um jeremy carl's book on anti-white racism absolutely i think
00:53:41.840like i don't know if i'm assuming joel barry hasn't read that or a lot of these people haven't
00:53:46.720read it um but but the issue is when you're looking out at the cultural context and you're
00:53:52.880trying to deny that there's been a war on white people right where it's like a black kid can stab
00:53:58.440a white kid and get a trust fund basically out of it and there's like zero repercussions versus like
00:54:04.640just what happens if a white commits a crime against black which is far less statistically
00:54:09.360likely to happen but it's like the way that that's responded to kyle rittenhouse all of that
00:54:14.720we've been living in this war on white people yeah and so i just think it's part of it pastorally
00:54:21.360like you have to know the people you're ministering to you have to know your context these things are
00:54:25.900evil i actually think that there are great injustices being done a lot of them are being
00:54:31.740done against whites yeah and because they're whites and and these are the types of things
00:54:37.980were again ideology reality martin fact check me on this post-production fact check me and you can
00:54:43.920put up whether i'm correct or not i saw this on a tweet i didn't fact check the statistic
00:54:47.760but the statistic was that one third of adult black males are felons fully one third of all
00:54:55.760black males in the u.s adult black males have a felony charge well this is i'm giving you the
00:55:04.220gemini okay yeah so it says it's technically inaccurate to state that one-third of all black
00:55:10.580males are felons however it is true that a predominant proportion of black men in the u.s
00:55:15.140have felony convictions what is predominant i don't know that would be more than half studies
00:55:20.000show that approximately okay so it says it's it's inaccurate to say a third then it goes on to say
00:55:25.100studies show that approximately 33 percent of african-american men have been convicted of a
00:55:29.720felony okay so the math equation on gemini is not it's perfect they bake the ideology into the ai
00:55:34.800and maybe the ai is wrong whatever the point is that 30 33 percent of adult black men in america
00:55:41.080have a felony so there's lots of statistics like that whether i'm exactly on the nose about that
00:55:45.260one or not the there are many statistics like that that the knee-jerk response of most fox
00:55:52.100news conservative men or of men and women would be to say you have done something wrong by merely
00:55:59.180saying that out loud right what is that it's ideological programming even this and the ai
00:56:06.200it goes on this is where you get your dei wokeness said this disparity is based on systemic
00:56:11.900factors including potential racial bias of course policing and the problem with that like the problem
00:56:17.360with this is the woke left answer to black data also doesn't show that by the way the problem is
00:56:22.440that we should then expect that as societies become more colorblind and less racist um that
00:56:28.920they like that would change that bias changes and yet study after study has demonstrated that the
00:56:35.100west in general in america in particular is the least racist by their own measures society that
00:56:41.100has ever existed in the history of the of the world so you you know you've seen these studies
00:56:46.320people have been floating them around about like how different racial groups rate other racial
00:56:50.080groups and whites tend to rate their own race lower and other races like it's a very tight they
00:56:56.920kind of race everybody pretty much equal. Asians, blacks, Mexicans, whites, we're all about the
00:57:00.900same. Ask any other racial group. The blacks were the, the most had the strongest spread and they
00:57:07.060rate whites basically as, you know, they get a D minus and blacks get an A plus. And so every other
00:57:12.920racial group in America rates their racial group disproportionately higher and other racial groups
00:57:17.940lower. So they, they're very tribal and they basically practice what, you know, we've been
00:57:22.000trained to think of as identity politics so if it were true that all of that crime statistics
00:57:29.660amongst black community was because of racism from whites why is it the case that as society
00:57:34.900has become to an art to an artificially imposed degree did you see not racist why isn't it getting
00:57:40.960better why didn't it get better did you see the chart somebody had published this uh within the
00:57:45.460last week or so but they were rating like self like giving people self-assessment like which
00:57:51.620cultures are the most racist yeah and it was like you know sorry martin mexicans were really high
00:57:57.640the mexicans were just like we don't like you know fill in the blank we don't like asians we
00:58:02.180don't like black people but it's funny because then the asians were fairly you know that's part
00:58:07.400of their culture but it was really funny because then you got to whites and they were the one like
00:58:12.480there was they were like the least racist because we've been trained in that they've been trained
00:58:16.980that they've committed a thought crime or a word crime if they say anything different to the point
00:58:21.980where i guarantee you and well and this is one of the things that joel berry got mad at me for
00:58:26.260saying i merely stated that in 2021 at weber state university which is the local university here in
00:58:31.440ogden it's a public university it's where i got my associate's degree before going into ministerial
00:58:37.160training the in 2021 someone put on a public bulletin board where you're allowed to post like
00:58:43.200notices or whatever, they put just a piece of paper that said the sentence, it's okay to be
00:58:47.300white, which was kind of a thing that was going around. People were doing as a test of the
00:58:51.840blasphemy laws in our culture. Um, Weber state publicly posted the picture, the surveillance
00:58:57.000footage of the person. I don't think they ever found them. And they launched a police investigation
00:59:01.560with the charge of criminal mischief. So they found a way to like attempt to make this a police
00:59:06.780charge. And, uh, they said, we're going to invest basically if they had found out who it was,
00:59:12.140you can believe they would have absolutely murdered this person in public opinion made
00:59:17.020them unhirable and put them in jail if possible for saying it's okay to be white so this is that's
00:59:23.340the level of anti-racist deep programming that we've had in our culture these are the ideological
00:59:29.020default programming that all of us have grown up under and most of us are insufficiently and
00:59:33.780inadequately aware of how that has shaped the way that we respond on an instinctual level
00:59:39.240to various aspects of this racial and nationalist discourse.
00:59:44.220It's why it's so difficult that even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonable guy
00:59:47.820and can have a pretty reasonable conversation about with people I disagree with,
00:59:51.360talk with Mormons, pickup artists, atheists, a bunch of stuff in public, abortion clinics,
01:05:09.500your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com.
01:05:20.400It's going to be great. It's going to be great. Yeah. So we'll jump in now to the interview with
01:05:25.720Will Tanner. Hope you enjoy that. We'll have more content coming down the pipeline on Rhodesia as
01:05:31.300well. Sign up for Patreon. You can get a lot of access to that as well. One thing we're going to
01:05:35.760do is book lists. Awesome. People ask for that. We have a lot of resources on Rhodesia. So if
01:05:40.740you're looking for book lists and conversations about those books, sign up for Patreon and you
01:05:45.400can find that information. Enjoy the interview. Cool. Well, thanks for joining us for this episode
01:05:52.720of the podcast. I am your host, Eric Kahn, and today we have a very special guest, Mr. Will
01:05:57.660Tanner. Will, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to it.
01:06:01.760so well uh for our listeners i want to introduce them to you i found you on x um you've had a lot
01:06:08.020of historical stuff that you've posted in your feed which is really excellent we'll provide links
01:06:12.660to in the show notes to your ex so people can follow along with that but for people who don't
01:06:18.380know just tell us a little bit about yourself what you do all the the writing the research
01:06:22.480uh and just just kind of about you yeah for sure so i'm originally from georgia i've spent more of
01:06:30.400my life since graduating high school in Virginia and North Carolina, though, just for school and
01:06:34.140life. I went to law school, recently graduated. And after coming out of that, I'd started a
01:06:40.740digital marketing company with a few guys called the American Tribune while in law school.
01:06:45.200And coming out of it, I was like, well, Twitter's more free now. I can see what I can post on here.
01:06:49.200And I had a few threads on Rhodesia take off, which X has kind of been suppressing threads
01:06:53.700algorithmically for the past few months, just promoting other content. But regardless,
01:06:57.520For a while, threads were doing pretty well, and so I had some threads on Rhodesia, South Africa, and the English nobility do pretty well on there, and that's kind of what I enjoy reading about and writing about and what did the best.
01:07:09.820So stars aligned on that front, and those are kind of my main focuses.
01:07:13.920I find them effective ways of critiquing mass liberal democracy, egalitarian democracy.
01:07:21.960And so that's what I really focus on is the devolution of Southern Africa in the Cold War and why the U.S. advanced that.
01:07:29.080And then similarly, how a similar, though less bloody, process played out in England over about the half century before then and how many of the root causes were the same.
01:08:09.460Was it just personal reading or other stuff?
01:08:11.820yeah it was very random i uh i found a book in barnes and noble called blackwater by jeremy
01:08:19.340scahill and it was supposed to be like this oh this company is so evil they like shot terrorists
01:08:24.580in iraq and that's mean a type thing but i've just found it to be like a 600 page book of the
01:08:30.280coolest things ever and thought those guys are awesome yes it is yeah and so through that i found
01:08:36.120uh, Eric Prince's autobiography, civilian warriors actually found it under a table the
01:08:41.520night before it was supposed to be released at Barnes and Noble, but they bought, they let me
01:08:44.640buy it anyway. Um, and I thought I was like, well, this is awesome. And then, so through that I found
01:08:49.320soldier of fortune magazine, of course, cause that's effectively where you end up if you're
01:08:53.400interested in that sort of thing. And yeah, around the same time, Robert K Brown, who founded the
01:08:58.640magazine released his book, uh, dancing with devils. And in it, he describes, uh, like his
01:09:04.380friend worked at the local airport and security. So he would smuggle duffel bags full of Ruger
01:09:08.940mini 14s and banana mags for them onto the planes and then fly to South Africa and then
01:09:14.660South Africa to Rhodesia to arm the farmers. And then he describes patrolling with, I think it was
01:09:19.980effectively second tier Rhodesian military units rather than the frontline guys, but looking for
01:09:25.320terrorists around the farms and helping the farmers defend themselves and all that. And I thought it
01:09:29.640was really cool and wondered why he had to smuggle guns there. Cause it's like, well, this seems like
01:09:33.540cause America should be supporting since they're fighting communists. And then so that kind of led
01:09:38.900me down the rabbit hole of U.S. Cold War policy. And I was broken up a bit by college. But then
01:09:45.060during law school, I had more time to read and kind of pursue that. So I just ended up reading
01:09:50.660about Rhodesia through First Prince and Blackwater and the soldier fortune. So yeah, that's how I got
01:09:57.020there. Yeah, it's really interesting. I want to ask you on the threads particularly. You said
01:10:03.320Rhodesia has done well. I've noticed that as well, uh, in some of our content, but I'm curious why
01:10:08.140you think for guys today, uh, particularly in America, why care about Rhodesia, uh, outside of
01:10:14.240the, you know, the movie clip that people know with, I think Jennifer Connelly and Leonardo
01:10:19.280DiCaprio, uh, she calls them South African, actually Rhodesia. Uh, but, um, outside of that,
01:10:26.020what's the interest? Why do you think so many people are intrigued by this?
01:10:28.980Yeah, I think there are a few things. One is that as a really Anglo-Saxon country, rather than French or Belgian or Dutch, it strikes home with many Americans just because they can see themselves as being there and really had their ancestors left a couple centuries later.
01:10:49.500perhaps they would have been there. And so you can relate to it more than if you read about
01:10:54.140South Africa or the Belgian Congo or Portuguese Mozambique. It just doesn't relate because it's
01:10:59.960such a foreign thing. The system's a little bit different. The people are far different. The
01:11:04.240cities are different. It just doesn't really make sense. So I think Rhodesia strikes home just
01:11:07.580because it's America in the middle of Africa in terms of what it could have been, or really
01:11:12.940Virginia in the middle of Africa. And related to that, the kind of self-conception of the
01:11:19.540Rhodesians as settlers who were more British than the British, I think also kind of gets to
01:11:26.180Americans because, of course, we fought the British as the Rhodesians did as well. But
01:11:30.740the Virginians and really the early leaders of America, whether from New York or from the Old
01:11:37.380Dominion were somewhat British in their self-conception and certainly in their like manners
01:11:43.420and in just the way they saw themselves as needing to act. So I think a lot of the threads of the
01:11:50.260core heritage American spirit are very similar to what they were in Rhodesia because it's
01:11:55.480preserving this civilization that's very unique and individualistic and hierarchical on the
01:12:02.080frontier where you're having to battle these vast hordes of savages. And so it provides a lens
01:12:09.360into what America could have been like had it been born in the late 19th century, which is
01:12:15.260interesting because it's a thought experiment. And then from there you go to, well, why didn't
01:12:18.200this succeed? Why was America able to thrive in the way that Rhodesia wasn't? And for one,
01:12:23.040there's resources. We can be autarkic, whereas the Rhodesians never could. But more than that,
01:12:27.880It's that the spirit changed and it went from this world ruled by really people like George Washington with varying degrees of wealth and title to one ruled by people like Hillary Clinton that are just awful no matter – really no matter their wealth and title.
01:12:41.640And that's why Revision was crushed is just because of Jimmy Carter and Harold Wilson and these evil, evil people that really represent a changing of the guard much for the worse.
01:12:54.520And it's far easier, I think, to see that through the lens of something like Rhodesia in which very few people who read it were involved because there are only ever 300,000 or so whites there.
01:13:06.320So you can view it a little bit more dispassionately than if you talk about, say, the civil rights movement in America or the Rosenbergs.
01:13:14.380I think the anniversary of their execution was recently.
01:13:16.260that tends to rattle people a little bit more and it's harder to have a productive conversation
01:13:21.580than with something like Rhodesia where it's more or less is relevant because the culture
01:13:25.960and history are so similar but separated by notion so you can talk about well why were we
01:13:32.260backing these race communists more or less purely because they hated white people this makes no
01:13:36.840sense it also made no sense that we're doing that in America but it's a little bit easier to talk
01:13:40.700about in the context of Rhodesia. Yeah, it's really interesting too, because I think, you
01:13:46.600know, I've heard people talk about this with the South, particularly Virginia, Stonewall Jackson,
01:13:53.020the brotherhood, the love that they had for each other. I've heard people refer to it as sort of
01:13:57.320the last death throes of Christendom, at least the old world. Rhodesia feels a lot like that
01:14:03.080when you read about it. Particularly, you know, the picture I had in school of Rhodesia was these
01:14:10.120are just a bunch of racists who don't like black people kind of the end of the story they were bad
01:14:13.940and good thing we got rid of them but you can also fast forward and you can look at the current
01:14:18.700government in Zimbabwe and you can look at what's happened even in South Africa a lot of people are
01:14:25.520kind of you know sounding like now but it's a little bit too late those same people I think
01:14:30.020even Henry Kissinger was involved in some of the stages of what was going on in Rhodesia
01:14:33.760Um, so as you look at that, it does seem like that because there's a revival in America
01:14:41.160of sort of some call like Christian nationalism, but just a love for people in place, it's
01:14:47.000something about that in Rhodesia seems to speak to us.
01:14:51.960Do you kind of see crossover with some of those trends happening?
01:14:55.380Yeah, it's, um, I think for one, they avoided some of the pitfalls Americans who are interested
01:15:03.360in these things fall into. I mean, as much as I love posting the pictures of Bill the Butcher
01:15:08.980in that movie, Gangs of New York, it's somewhat like an unhelpful ideology. And the same could
01:15:15.060be said of the Confederacy, which was kind of odd because it has this hierarchical vibe,
01:15:20.740but they're also all Whigs or Democrats. It's not like these were high Tories or Cavaliers,
01:15:25.120really, at least most of them. And kind of the same with, you know, like Christian nationalism
01:15:30.720or white nationalism, I really don't think they've fit the American spirit or self-conception
01:15:38.040particularly well. And they kind of have their individual pitfalls. Christian nationalism is,
01:15:42.180of course, somewhat different than a lot of those. Whereas Rhodesia, I think, avoided a lot of that
01:15:45.940and not really being particularly racial. I mean, they got tarred and feathered as this racist
01:15:53.020country in the middle of Africa, but that wasn't true. It was more just a pragmatic, effective
01:15:59.020government. It was much more like Singapore than the Confederacy. And I really think that's what's
01:16:06.080like kind of interesting and appealing to it because I think it gets to the thought of what
01:16:10.540Americans kind of on average want from government in terms of like not, it's not a tyrannical one
01:16:17.060or really an ideological one. It's more just one that kind of allows people to prosper if they're
01:16:21.300so able. So there's certainly some similarities, particularly with Christian nationalism and kind
01:16:26.020of this love of place and love of God, but I, I don't think there's much of a direct comparison
01:16:31.080between it and any, uh, like organized political force in America now or really in much of the
01:16:37.860past, if that, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, it's helpful to
01:16:43.500historically to learn lessons from that, like what worked. I think I remember reading to like
01:16:48.020part of the success that they had in the early formation of the country was they really treated
01:16:53.500the indigenous peoples differently than say America did in America when the white people
01:16:59.920arrived. I guess to that point, just talk through the origins of the country. Where did it come from
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01:19:17.760the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Yeah, so it begins with Cecil Rhodes, who is this
01:19:23.780famous promoter of empire. A lot of people in circles on the right dislike him. I think that's
01:19:29.820often wrongheaded. And amongst his many goals, one was building a railroad from the Cape to Cairo,
01:19:35.900so from South Africa to top of Egypt. And to do that, he needed the middle of Africa because the
01:19:41.220British kind of had going on down into Uganda and going up into northern South Africa. But they
01:19:46.880didn't have Rhodesia or the Congo, and they never got the Congo, but they did get Rhodesia because
01:19:51.840of Cecil Rhodes. So he organized the pioneer column, which was a group of, it was over 100
01:19:57.740men, but not a super large force. And it was different than what you might think of in that
01:20:03.100it wasn't really the rogues of empire. It wasn't these freebooters or pirates or whatever. It was
01:20:07.580much more like people from across the social scale. So kind of from the bottom class and
01:20:12.240not many on the upper class, but some kind of of that vibe and running the gamut who were educated,
01:20:19.200really shockingly educated on a percentage basis and competent and just they were going to
01:20:27.940build something rather than just try and loot something. So he sent them north and they came
01:20:34.000through just the country moving up through South Africa and they found that Rhodesia,
01:20:39.580they were hoping to find minerals like gold or diamonds as were in South Africa and being
01:20:44.140discovered at the time, particularly the Rand mines. They didn't really find that. They found
01:20:47.600some gold, but they did find that the soil was very fertile. So, the British South Africa Company,
01:20:52.920which is what was organized, funded, and promoted to create this venture, instead of setting up so
01:20:58.940many mines, really started selling off the land, quite like the Virginia Company in America,
01:21:03.820where it's this company-organized country, really. And they found that that worked well,
01:21:09.300because there were no traditional constraints on agriculture like in, say, England, where all the
01:21:13.600fields had been subdivided by stone fences for centuries at that point. So, you can't really
01:21:17.500take advantage of efficiencies of scale. Instead, it's just unplowed land, as far as the eye can
01:21:22.520see, that was really good for growing tobacco. So over the next few decades, Rhodesia became
01:21:26.740this incredibly successful agricultural colony. And what really helped it along was that the
01:21:32.700British at the time, thanks to Winston Churchill, were pushing disastrously high death taxes on the
01:21:38.900wealthier subjects of the king. They claimed it was for fairness or whatever, but really it just
01:21:44.620chased capital out of the country. A lot of that capital went to America and some of it went to
01:21:49.860Rhodesia because unlike, say, America where they'd be buying a mine they'd never seen, in Rhodesia,
01:21:54.780they could just buy a farm and farm it essentially better than they would in England, but it was
01:21:58.300more or less the same agrarian sort of thing with fertile soil, unlike the more worn out soil of
01:22:05.060America, which had the Dust Bowl and had just the worn out tobacco fields of the south. So we've
01:22:10.300repaired that somewhat, but Africa didn't have to deal with those things, so they could just take
01:22:13.520advantage of it. And they did. And a lot of people moved there. It became this really successful,
01:22:17.720thriving colony. It became independent of the British South Africa Company in 1923, I think.
01:22:24.800And so it became locally self-ruled part of the Commonwealth. And that continued on until the
01:22:29.40060s, which I suppose we'll get to in a minute. In the interim, it kind of continued on the same
01:22:34.620path of success. Unlike other colonies, it had a very strict immigration policy where they only
01:22:42.880wanted people who would become part of the local Rhodesian culture to immigrate there,
01:22:48.060no matter how wealthy they were, because they didn't want it to just become some hodgepodge
01:22:52.420thing. They wanted it to remain more British than the British. And they were successful
01:22:56.760in that immigration policy, which people who say you can't have a subjective immigration thing
01:23:02.220don't like, but they succeeded wildly in it. And Rhodesia was really a strong place because of it.
01:23:07.980And they fought in World War II. A lot of the Ian Smith generations, the people who were leaders
01:23:12.520during the Bush War, fought in World War II. Smith was a spitfire pilot in the Mediterranean,
01:23:18.400got shot down and was on the run. It makes for an exciting read in The Great Betrayal.
01:23:23.060And that leads into decolonization in the 50s and 60s, which is where the British,
01:23:29.440somewhat at the urging of America, though also on their own initiative, decided to shed their
01:23:34.060empire. Particularly after the Suez Canal crisis in the mid-50s, they said they'd shed everything
01:23:39.340east of Suez, which they proceeded to do over the next couple of decades. Lee Kuan Yew writes about
01:23:44.140that process really well and from third world to first. In Africa, it was less organized than it
01:23:48.880was in Asia and it was just a catastrophe. So Kenya fell, Uganda fell, the Federation of Rhodesia
01:23:55.300and Nyasaland, which now encompasses Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi broke apart. First Zambia and
01:24:02.160Malawi went communist, then the Congo fell when the Belgians left it. And if you haven't, if anyone
01:24:07.360listening hasn't read about the belgian katanga crisis and simba crisis or simba rebellion they
01:24:12.820really should because it shows what decolonization was actually like in that it wasn't this flowery
01:24:18.160process where like martin luther king gives a speech about feelings or whatever and then like
01:24:23.440everyone sings kumbaya and talks about fairness instead it was just rape and murder on like a
01:24:28.100continent wide scale and in the congo worst of all because the belgians get a bad rap most of
01:24:34.400the accusations against them are just spurious, totally. And they had sent nuns, priests,
01:24:42.740people like that to build schools all across the country. They built probably the best
01:24:46.820infrastructure other than maybe Rhodesia or South Africa in the continent, just in terms of rail and
01:24:52.300roads. They were never thanked for that. Instead, the Simbas just like tortured people to death,
01:24:57.920raped nuns to death, looted everything in sight. It was horror. It just absolutely horrible.
01:25:04.060Eventually, that was put down by Mike Hoare and his Five Commando along with Bob Dinard.
01:25:08.980But in the process of that, the UN got involved and with the UN came America and Britain and kind of the other petty states.
01:25:16.660The Indians were famously involved in the Congo and they were all just horrible because they didn't care about the fate of the Europeans or the Congolese villagers.
01:25:23.880They just wanted the perception of egalitarianism and democracy.
01:25:27.740So anytime the Belgians tried to reassert control, as they did in the Congo, they were crushed by the UN.
01:25:33.260And any time the mercenaries gained the upper hand on the rebels, they were told to pull out by the UN because it was racist for them to be restoring order.
01:25:41.140Really against the wishes of the Congolese government, which is just the astounding part of it.
01:25:45.060But it happened in the Congo, turned into this disaster zone.
01:25:49.000And Rhodesia, particularly at the time when Zambia was still part of Rhodesia, was right below the Congo.
01:25:53.860So the refugees from this crisis are pouring in and they're saying, this is like really, really bad.
01:26:00.080And so Rhodesia is one of the last colonial states in Africa because it was part of the Commonwealth, not independent of Britain yet, said, well, we're not going to do that.
01:26:09.000We want to be independent of Britain so we can be independent of the decolonization process and the horrors it brings.
01:26:16.060They then started negotiating with the British, and this is in 63-ish, 63 to 65.
01:26:21.160That's around the time the Federation's breaking up, and they're trying to get the British to just let them leave.
01:26:25.820The British won't do it because at the time, the labor prime minister is Harold Wilson, who's one of the great devils in British history.
01:26:32.880If you read about anything he did, it's awful, like an unqualified just disaster on every level if you're a normal person and not some bitter race communist.
01:26:52.520And part of that was he wouldn't let the Rhodesians leave until they agreed to mass democracy, which the Rhodesians didn't do because they said, we don't have apartheid.
01:28:56.720The Portuguese helped until 1974 when Salazar fell in the Carnation Revolution, and the South Africans helped until around that point, at which point they tried a detente policy like Carter's, and it was equally a mess.
01:29:08.940so the rhodesians for really that whole time but particularly after 74 were battling the whole
01:29:15.520world and the main rebels were mugabe who was backed by the red chinese and joshua nikomo
01:29:21.180who was a nebele rather than a shona the two main tribes and he was backed by the soviet union
01:29:27.100and america was interfering trying to stop them from importing exporting and britain's navy was
01:29:33.320sent to stop them from importing anything so it's this free and communist world effort to destroy
01:29:38.220the country. That leads to the 15-year-long Bush War, which is really how most people know about
01:29:43.200Rhodesia because it's this famous conflict. Yeah, I want to ask you on the change of will
01:29:49.600for the British Empire. What was driving the decolonization efforts? Obviously, it's not just
01:29:54.920them, but what had changed in the will to no longer have a colonial empire? Yeah, it's an
01:30:01.900interesting question because there's a lot that goes into it. I think there are two things. One
01:30:07.540is that America was extremely hostile to any form of empire as was the Soviet Union. So throughout
01:30:13.700the Cold War, and I won't do my whole spiel on this, but just kind of a basic version of it,
01:30:19.020you get this concerted push by both sides for egalitarian policy. America called it liberal
01:30:25.020democracy and that's ostensibly what we preferred. If you look at who we backed, it was never like
01:30:29.580democracy except in Germany, I guess. And the Soviet Union said they wanted communism and were
01:30:34.460a little bit more honest about it. But that's really what you get in every conflict. So the
01:30:39.360British like won Malaysia, but then pulled out and it became a hellhole. Same thing happens in
01:30:43.280Africa. Indochina is really the clearest example of this because first we say we're gonna help the
01:30:48.400French and then we yank the rug out from under them at the last minute. So they lose. Then once
01:30:53.920we get all the Catholics and aristocrats and kind of like that type of person crowded into the
01:30:58.960southern half of the country, we put Diem in charge where the Catholics are more prominent
01:31:02.900And then we assassinate him and let the Vietnamese government butcher the Catholics and the aristocrats.
01:31:09.100So at that point, there's no domestic support for anything other than communism.
01:31:12.760And then after we've finished with that, we pull out and let the communists take over the country.
01:31:17.180I don't know if it was a conspiracy or if it was just ineptitude paired with our biases, but it's what happened a lot in the Cold War.
01:31:23.900Really, the same thing happened in Algeria, in some of South America.
01:31:27.840It's just this mess where the same thing gets promoted at the end of the day regardless of which side is ostensibly backing the winning side, at least until Reagan when things changed a little bit.
01:31:39.480And so you get that where America and the Soviet Union are the two real powers of the day and they're both backing decolonization because they both hate it.
01:31:46.500That was the case that really as soon as FDR and Stalin were chatting up each other during the three conferences and Churchill was kind of pushed out.
01:31:56.740You see Churchill fight it a little bit in Greece, but – and he kind of won there.
01:32:00.640But other than that, the attitude wins.
01:32:03.000So you get huge powers pushing decolonization.
01:32:06.580The other thing is that Britain didn't – it didn't have the resources or the men really to make it happen anymore.
01:32:14.780The big change you see from maybe the agricultural depression in the 80s on, but really from the parliament bill and people's budget, which were two things pushed by Winston Churchill and Lloyd George in 1909 to 1911.
01:32:28.360Those raised death taxes to 15% and took away the power of the House of Lords to really do anything.
01:32:34.740And that's important because it demolished the economic system that had supported England up until that point.
01:32:39.580Before then, you have a small government.
01:32:41.620It's kind of the people who ruled the colonies or possessions were just gentlemen adventurers who wanted to do it and thought it was their duty to do it.
01:32:49.620After that point, they don't really have any wealth anymore because it's taxed away at increasingly just onerous rates.
01:32:55.800Instead, you have this bureaucratic class that just wants to carve out its own little niche of support for itself and burrow in the system.
01:33:02.460Government becomes hugely more expensive.
01:33:04.020You just get ever more taxes, but get ever more taxes, but get ever more expense, but get ever more taxes.
01:33:09.260kind of that just disastrous cycle. And so by 1950, Britain has no national wealth anymore.
01:33:15.580All of its main industries, coal, steel, railroads have been nationalized by the government and run
01:33:20.660into the ground. It hasn't really started importing many third world immigrants yet,
01:33:25.080but it's getting there. And all the men who in the past would have run the empire are either
01:33:31.220dead because of World War I and to a lesser extent World War II, or they're broke and have
01:33:36.180to get like a banking job because the government has confiscated all their wealth. So the people
01:33:41.780who in say 1870 would have been fighting for the Rhodesians against the communists are at this
01:33:47.040point either stuck in London, like doing accounting work, or they're just dead in Flanders, which is
01:33:52.740a real tragedy, but it was a major shift. So those are really the two things. One is the government
01:33:57.760is run by these spiteful mutant bureaucrats. And the other is that America is breathing down
01:34:02.340britain's neck and demanding it decolonize because it's racist for it to have colonies
01:34:07.280so you those twin forces i think are the main two things though there's of course far more that was
01:34:12.540going on yeah it's really interesting that was one of the things i got from reading the history
01:34:16.920of rhodesia was again you can read like the death of the west pappy cannon or something like this
01:34:21.680or any any criticism of critical race theory wokeness today and then you go back and read
01:34:26.380that story and you're like these ideas aren't exactly new they're just sort of maybe advanced
01:34:31.600in the way that they play out in culture.
01:35:30.200Eventually, the war expands to Mozambique, where the Portuguese were also fighting communist rebels and also under attack by America for doing so.
01:35:38.600The Portuguese lost that war in 1974 because of the Carnation Revolution at home, which overthrew Salazar and put a socialist government backed by the CIA in charge.
01:35:49.620At that point, Mozambique becomes, for one, communist rule, but also a place the communists attacking Rhodesia can infiltrate from.
01:35:57.220so there's this much wider territory troops from Mozambique and Zambia generally don't attack
01:36:05.080the Rhodesians but they do provide safe haven for the communists aiding the Rhodesians first in
01:36:10.960addition to the Portuguese or the South Africans so from 65 to 74 the war is somewhat slow it's
01:36:18.720mainly like small scale light infantry infiltration and counter infiltration tactics
01:36:24.900where you see rebels trying to attack farmsteads or plant mines in the roads
01:36:30.300and the Rhodesians trying to catch them as they get into the country.
01:36:33.500It's an interesting war but relatively small scale.
01:36:37.280In 74, that changes when the South Africans back out and Mozambique opens up.
01:36:41.760At that point, it's on the rebel side much larger incursions into Rhodesia
01:36:48.940And on the Rhodesian side, it's eventually preemptive retaliatory strikes into Zambia and Mozambique where they attack these rebel base camps that have thousands of communists in them.
01:37:03.540And that's really for what the Rhodesian security forces are known.
01:37:07.340If you ever see those Wikipedia graphics that go around Twitter where it's like Operation Elend where I think four Rhodesians were injured and they killed like 2,000 communists.
01:37:15.800Um, those were successful tactically, but kind of renewed international attention on
01:37:22.440So they weren't, they were very large failures strategically.
01:37:25.580And, uh, that's really what the war was for most of the time.
01:37:28.780There are a few big battles where the Rhodesians attack inside rebels strongholds, but really
01:37:34.580it's just small light infantry fighting, um, some artillery, some aircraft, some helicopters,
01:37:41.500But at its root, it's a light infantry war, and the Rhodesians were undoubtedly more effective man-on-man fighting than the communists, but they were really overwhelmed by rebel numbers, and the Rhodesians just didn't have the equipment they needed for the war because of sanctions.
01:37:59.680They were scrambling to get helicopters.
01:38:02.080They could never really import more planes other than two squadrons they got in in the middle of it.
01:38:07.800They needed fuel the whole time, and that was a perpetual constraint.
01:38:11.180They just really didn't have the equipment they needed to fight.
01:38:14.560So that's why you see the Grey Scouts, which are those really cool pictures of Rhodesians in their fatigues with FALs or PTR or G3s, I guess, on horseback shooting at communists.
01:38:35.680But it would have been a hard war for them to actually win.
01:38:39.580The Rhodesian grand strategy really was holding out until Western governments became saner because when they started the war, it was Wilson in the UK and then in America, it was Lyndon Johnson.
01:38:53.140Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter were all awful on the Rhodesian question.
01:38:58.380They all backed the communist rebels more or less wholeheartedly.
01:39:01.760Carter, most of all, he was the Georgian really involved with the civil rights movement, but all of them did to some extent.
01:39:07.120And Reagan was friendly to the Rhodesian cause, actually.
01:39:11.400I'm not a huge Reagan promoter, but this issue is pretty good and talked about it some.
01:39:15.040And had they made it to 81 or 82, perhaps he could have helped.
01:39:19.140But they really gave up when Thatcher won in 79 in England and replaced Wilson.
01:39:23.520But instead of helping, even as they did what the British government requested, she and I think it was Lord Carrington was her foreign secretary, just stabbed them in the back and handed the country to Mugabe, kind of regardless of what they tried to do.
01:39:35.460So, their strategy of holding out didn't work, and the rebel strategy of just wearing them down with sheer mass eventually won.
01:39:43.460So, there's no big battles to describe, really.
01:39:46.160It was really a country-scale war of attrition in which the civilian population was involved.
01:39:55.320Talk a little bit about Ian Smith, kind of his role in this.
01:39:58.280I'm sure you've mentioned the autobiography.
01:40:02.200It's changed titles, I think, at least once.
01:40:04.240But the significance of him, of course, I think I've read he was one of the ones that would say that they were more British than the British.
01:40:27.680Originally, the Rhodesians farmed tobacco and cattle.
01:40:29.840And then during the war, because they couldn't import food, they switched to grain and cattle, which, because that lasted for a bit after the war, they became known as the breadbasket of Africa.
01:40:43.680Somewhat like Cincinnati or George Washington, you see his desire to just go back to farming as he's continually put in charge just happen, where he'll be like, I just want to go back to my plantation.
01:40:54.860But instead, he's stuck in Salisbury running the government.
01:40:59.840He's very much the sort of leader you'd want to have who's just a once-in-a-century type figure.
01:41:05.340He, as a young man, joins the Rhodesian Air Force.
01:41:09.720It later became known as the Rhodesian Royal Air Force, or Royal Rhodesian Air Force, and mainly fought in the Mediterranean during World War II.
01:41:20.440He was shot down over, I think, Italy and had to remain – it could have been Greece, but it was Greece or Italy – and remained on the run from the Germans hiding out in these villages for months.
01:41:28.620He did that, so he was something of a popular war hero because of that.
01:41:32.460He came back and got involved in government, and originally, Rhodesia, like Britain, had
01:41:37.780the conservative labor divide in terms of parties, from what I remember.
01:41:42.920He pretty quickly, after becoming a popular figure, changed that, and his party was the
01:41:49.420Rhodesian front, which somewhat transcended the traditional Tory labor divide in that
01:41:56.440It was really a party for those who wanted Rhodesia to remain Rhodesia, which white rule isn't the right term because the black village chiefs backed Ian Smith.
01:42:08.680They were kind of integral to running the government on the ground, which always sounds like a cop out because it's like, well, look at these village chiefs.
01:42:16.200But it's really not because they were very important to how the government functioned and they almost unanimously supported Ian Smith, Shona or Nebele.
01:42:24.400So it's an interesting government because it represents, on one hand, the will of this 250,000 to 300,000 person, depending on what year you're looking at, strong white settler population.
01:42:38.100But then on the other hand, really largely the large couple million strong mass of black Rhodesians.
01:42:44.780And they controlled most of the government for really the entirety of the Bush War.
01:42:50.360their main issue with smith at the helm was in independence with what they called responsible
01:42:57.160government which meant the keeping of that property voting system because they said well
01:43:01.420if you look at anywhere else in the continent uh either they have apartheid which is in south
01:43:06.480africa which we don't want because we we just don't agree with that philosophically and or
01:43:12.400they get one man one vote one time dictators like those in the congo or anywhere else you look or
01:43:17.720It's just a pretend vote that leads to a dictator, which of course happened in Zimbabwe a few years later, but they tried to prevent.
01:43:25.100And so you don't get these debates over like tax policy really like you do in the UK at the time or nationalization.
01:43:31.280It was really the Rhodesian front's goal was ensuring independence to the country.
01:43:37.140And Smith remains at the helm for the entire period in which it's trying to do so.
01:43:41.200So he's in charge, or he's the prime minister in 1965 when they declare independence, and that lasted until 79.
01:43:48.920When first he stepped down to share power with Bishop Abel Murozawa, I can never pronounce those African names, but it was like a moderate black leader, and that's when they were trying to deal with Thatcher.
01:44:00.460It didn't work, but Smith did that, and then he stepped down fully, and Mugabe took over.
01:44:05.760And really throughout that period, Smith was the one who dealt with the British, dealt with the Americans, and tried to present Rhodesia's cause and explain why it was important to fight.
01:44:18.440That's where you get like those videos of his debate with William Buckley where Buckley is like, well, don't you care about equality?
01:44:24.840And Smith's like, we don't want people eating each other, so no.
01:44:28.200And I forget his exact words, but it's something like that.
01:44:31.040Buckley's like, well, but in America, we have one man, one vote.
01:44:35.760Um, so yeah, Smith did that. He, uh, led the country throughout the war. A few supporting
01:44:44.620characters helped him. PK Vanderbilt was a Boer from South Africa and really a South African
01:44:50.000aristocrat in spirit and in wealth who came to help the Rhodesians out. Also involved kind of
01:44:56.680on that front was the Duke of Montrose, who was one of the British who left really for tax reasons
01:45:01.680and became a large landowner, and he helped Smith continue to win over black support with
01:45:08.500agricultural policy in terms of setting aside land that no one owned for them to farm, and that
01:45:13.740helped a good deal. And that was kind of the Smith government. They were never particularly
01:45:18.680ideological. They were pragmatic. They really just wanted the country to function as it tried
01:45:23.540to fight for independence, and in that, they were quite successful. You can read, it's an article
01:45:28.220in City Journal. I think it comes from his book, The Man's Dreams and the Masses, but it's Dr.
01:45:31.940Theodore Dalrymple. And he describes being in Rhodesia as a doctor in like 76 and 77. So towards
01:45:37.580the end of the Bush War, as it's really heating up and the roads were good, the schools were good,
01:45:41.940the hospitals were probably the best on the continent for blacks and whites alike. The
01:45:46.540country just worked and they did a pretty good job running it, but they lost the war.
01:45:50.520So Smith, to finally answer your question in conclusion, he was this titanic figure.
01:45:57.880There's no real way to describe him other than that, who represented the Rhodesian soul of this more British than the British settler conquest vibe and really did it well.
01:50:15.500And for whatever reason, during that period, Mugabe was pretty moderate in his purchases of farmland and handing it out to people, though the British were paying for it.
01:50:24.360So it's somewhat limited and things are okay.
01:50:26.460That's really the period where Rhodesia is known as the breadbasket of Africa because it's producing all this grain from the war and everywhere else in the continent is a wreck.
01:50:33.120So it has the ability to export again and does well.
01:50:36.000That leads into the 90s where the veterans, it's been about 10 years, 10 and a half or 15-ish years since the war.
01:50:43.460They want what they were promised, which was land and wealth.
01:50:48.300So first, Mugabe loots the treasury to give them all like 50,000 Zimbabwean dollars or