History
Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson have directed a fantastic, graphic and very moving documentary, Mugabe and the White African, on political violence in Zimbabwe. Michael Burleigh’s new book, Moral Combat: A History of World War II, has impressed George Walden, who has today written in The Observer:
“His conclusion is sane and simple: reducing individuals to culpable groups, and seeing the solutions to the problems of mankind in their extermination, is the ultimate crime, whether perpetrated by Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler. End of discussion, I should have thought, though for diehard romantics, notably on the left, it never is.”
Michael Campbell and his family are the individuals depicted in Bailey and Thompson’s film, which powerfully makes clear that these individuals have been reduced to a culpable group, by virtue of being white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But this is not the end of the discussion as far as Blessing-Miles Tendi is concerned.
He argues, amongst other things that, “the documentary shows us that Mugabe implemented a racist land reform programme in 2000, but we are not told why, and how he gradually became racist.” This is an argument that seeks to defend the indefensible, because the mob beatings experienced by Campbell and his family are entirely without defence, irrespective of historical and political context. As such, Tendi provides a striking contemporary example of the “diehard romantic” trait bemoaned by Walden. We should never stop trying to learn the lessons that Burleigh aims to teach us.
When visiting Dublin last weekend I was told that it was in the room that is now the Eamon De Valera suite in the Shelbourne Hotel, overlooking St. Stephen’s Green, that De Valera signed the constitution of the Irish republic. Contention surrounds De Valera’s role in the journey towards this constitution. Why did he stand aside for Michael Collins in negotiations with the Westminster government in 1921 only to tip Ireland into civil war after Collins returned with the most generous package the Irish could have hoped for? Why did he later – after Collins was one of thousands of casualties of this civil war – move towards the republic via a strategy that amounted to the gradualism earlier advocated by Collins? He may have been one of only nine people in the world capable of understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity during the scientist’s lifetime, so he was no dummy, but his political journey has always struck me as perplexing. Michael Fitzgerald has argued that “his political achievement was marked by its greater dedication to ideology than to people, which is certainly in keeping with HFA/ ASP”. So, perhaps, undiagnosed autism is the key to understanding the enigma that is De Valera, which might seem to stretch credulity, but David Owen sees mental illness amongst leaders as being more important in explaining political outcomes than is usually recognised.
