From what little I've heard I get the sense that it's something "bad" but my knowledge of it pretty much starts and ends with this meme I posted.
By the way, here's the source for the meme.
Rhodesia was the apartheid state of Zimbabwe, named after Cecil Rhodes. People who fly it's flag are calling for a return to apartheid
Or worse. It's become an icon for white supremacy. Also beware people who talk too much about the gun FN FAL. That's another giveaway.
Yeah and he posed with the flag in one of the photos that got dug up
what is a Rhodesian?
okay so imagine a white south african :british-maw:
now imagine worse :evil:
Eh, Rhodesia was awful, but never once tried using biological warfare as "population control" against the natives like South Africa did.
Rhodesians only didn't resort to such tactics because they were preoccupied with slaughter by conventional means :theory-gary:
jk i didn't know about SA's biological warfare, what'd they do?
Project Coast. The idea was to get a force multiplier to "thin the herd" of the black majority. AIDS was also on the table, if some ex-mercs are to be believed.
Rhodesia's government was operating under more of an old-school paternalistic colonialist sort of white supremacy as opposed to the Hitler particles the almost-fascist National Party was emitting.
Now Zimbabwe, former British apartheid colony that broke away but was still racist. There was a civil war in the 1970s and the apartheid state called for an international brigade of mercenary white supremacists to join their side. Now 4chan dorks like to pretend they would have fought in the war
At some point they were too racist for Apartheid South Africa. How much of a piece of shit do you have to be to have SA not want to be associated with you.
Maybe it was less about the intensity of the racism and more about the incompetence of it's implementation.
Here's a fairly decent short summary of the history of Rhodesia
Well There's Your Problem had a pretty good episode about Rhodesia.
Wish I didn't click that since my recommendations are going to be radioactive with :anti-cracker-aktion: shit.
I right click > open in new private window when opening almost every youtube video. I also use the shit out of the "dont recommend channel" button
Zimbabwe is a pretty cool name, and their flag is also very nice looking.
I remember reading about how when the Rhodesia goverment found out about the city of Great Zimbabwe, they decided that it was built by white people since there was no way the natives could have build such great city.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson recognised that the builders were indigenous Africans, but she characterised the site as the "product of an infantile mind" built by a subjugated society. The official line in Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s was that the structures were built by non-blacks. Archaeologists who disputed the official statement were censored by the government.
"I was the archaeologist stationed at Great Zimbabwe. I was told by the then-director of the Museums and Monuments organisation to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the [Great] Zimbabwe state. I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurising them to withhold the correct information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks, radio programmes, newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said it was okay to say the yellow people had built it, but I wasn't allowed to mention radio carbon dates ... It was the first time since Germany in the thirties that archaeology has been so directly censored."
To black nationalist groups, Great Zimbabwe became an important symbol of achievement by Africans: reclaiming its history was a major aim for those seeking majority rule. In 1980 the new internationally recognised independent country was renamed for the site.
We had an archaeologist visit our school and show us a few artifacts from Great Zimbabwe. It was pretty cool.
I think Zimbabwe's flag features a statuette of a bird found at the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and a socialist red star. Despite their problems the country seems pretty cool to visit and it has a rich history like most of Africa.
I might visit one day as I live in a neighbouring country and have friends from Zimbabwe. A bit broke now though.
Also it means "fortress", which you kinda have to be if you decolonize in the way that they did, going straight to ML party rule.
It was a white supremacist settler state in southeast Africa which was overthrown by a communist revolution*. Its own variation on an apartheid system was marginally less open about its racism than South Africa's, but was crafted to achieve the same result (similar to Jim Crow laws in the US) while trying to avoid the international condemnation that South Africa was receiving by maintaining plausible deniability (obviously the only people taken in were credulous fools and white supremacists who wanted in on the plausible deniability themselves).
It became a symbol for western fascists during its civil war when it heavily recruited european mercenaries and became a rallying point for white supremacist militants, and after its apartheid government was ousted and the revolutionary state took power (and renamed itself Zimbabwe) it became a reactionary symbol in a similar fashion to the lost-cause narrative that sprang up around the Confederacy post-reconstruction and gets used by white supremacists in the same way as Confederate symbolism except with added anti-communist elements and with the same plausible deniability that Rhodesia itself tried to maintain. Because its symbols (which include the camo pattern used by the mercenaries who fought for it in the civil war) are comparatively more obscure than Confederate ones their use tends to pass without notice among liberals.
* There were multiple distinct communist factions in the civil war, primarily the USSR-backed one and the PRC-backed one, and the latter more or less massacred the leaders of the other one and absorbed its rank and file in the middle of the civil war. Their actions after were similarly opportunist, even though they still deserved critical support for overthrowing a brutal apartheid system.
overthrown by a communist revolution
I wouldn't say it was a communist revolution. The West, China and the Soviets pressured South Africa and Rhodesia to give more rights to natives. First they tried to set up a puppet government with a weak native figure they could control, they renamed the country Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and removed much of the apartheid system from schools, military and public office.
Despite all this, no one believed their attempt to appeal to the West, and in 1980 the UK re-annexed the region only to give it its formal independence under a national unity government with Mugabe and Nkomo in power. While some of the white population of Zimbabwe fled to SA and UK.
Much of Mugabe's authoritarianism comes from terrorist attacks done by angry ex-mercenaries who wanted to kill him and re-establish their white supremacist state again. But yes, Mugabe was homophobic and a corrupt politician.
I think it was also because they were very bad at running it, or at least worse than South Africa
my ignorant understanding was they were apartheid weiners. Dylan roof idolised them or something
