That’s ok, we can be like Hale and Bopp. Or Shoemaker and Levy.
We’ll call it the Brazillian Monkey Law.
Fair point Tuckerfan, and I’m no USSR expert, but my understanding is that the USSR was not a western styled democracy.
Yeah, but Clinton got a blow job.
The crap with the farms has been a cock up since it’s conception, and implementation. The situation is really fucked up, and still it’s the white farmer’s fault. It will never be the government and new farmer’s fault.
TFTFY. 
Maybe I’m completely naive here, but what is Mugabe’s motive? Does he want his entire country to starve? Or is he truly a racist who thinks once the White Menace is wiped clean his country will become a world power? Surely he’s not that blind? Is he on a level with other dictators, who can drink French wine and nibble Iranian caviar, and not hear the cries of the starving peasants?
And where is the UN in all this?
Just like in Burma! Oh, hang on…
IOW: what colour is the sky in your world?
True, but if I’m remembering my sixth grade [del]propaganda[/del] current events classes correctly, the USSR pretended to have the trappings of a Western-style democracy, sort of like what Saddam did when he had that “election” where he took 100% of the vote.
I think he’s just pandering to the anti-white/anti-European sentiment prevalent in the native population.
I agree. It’s a time-honored tradition for dictators and other jerks to abuse, persecute, and opress minority groups. i.e. to pander to peoples’ racism and class envy. Really it’s the same idea that Mike Nifong had.
Probably Mugabe didn’t anticipate the kind of problems that would be caused by seizing the farms. But at this point, it’s difficult to change course.
I’ve always wondered why things went so differently in Zimbabwe and SA, post-Apartheid. They started in more or less the same place . . .
For Mugabe, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t:
If he expels the white farmers, his people will stave.
At this stage of the game, if he does not expel the white farmers, the people will revolt.
Better to have them starve than revolt, I guess. :rolleyes:
There is a huge difference between owning a farm and running a farm but not much between seizing a farm and buying the farm.
I would have thought that it’s pretty easy to run a commercial farm, but apparently not.
Are you whooshing us? I’m not aware of the issues facing a farmer in Zimbabwe, but those of which come to mind in the US include:
Machinery capital investment and repairs, outbuilding maintenance, environmental regulations re pesticides, market forces on finished product, crop rotation, irrigation, and put the whole effort at the mercy of weather and pests.
Turn off the reruns of Green Acres, because it ain’t that simple.
What Mugabe has done is effectively fire the guys running the assembly line, and turned the factory over to the fellow who installed hubcaps. Hrm. I wonder why there are no cars coming out the door.
Perhaps that’s the key to understanding the mess-beforehand, the indigenous Zimbabweans were at the bottom of the economic ladder, and the evil white farmers made profits. Now everyone is equally fucked. And hungry.
Yes, I think you are right. However, Mugabe may not have thought it through that carefully. He may have focused on the claim that the whites had all the good land and figured that good land = productive.
Heck, just knowing how to drive a tractor is pretty difficult. Add to that actually plowing a field, when the field needs to be plowed and when the conditions are right for that and a very common task in farming is actually quite complex.
The United States has an entire university system just for educating farmers. Modern farming is an extremely complex discipline and you have to be everything from a heavy equipment mechanic to a meteorologist to a logistics genius to make it work.
Mugabe seems to think you can just plop a bunch of uneducated people who have never grown crops before on a bunch of farmland and they will be able to grow crops.
It’s a little more complicated than just throwing some seeds in the ground and waiting for them to grow.
Sorry, but as far as I am concerned, the entirely of Africa between the Sahara and South Africa is hopeless. And, to a large extent, they have brought it on themselves. 
Invading won’t do any good, except to temporarily get everyone to join together to get US out. After an invasion, the nation will just slide into more anarchy and tribalism, 'cept now they’ll blame US.
Sorry, it’s just more RO.
Corruption + a Head Of State who is sadly uneducated + Xenophobia = Total National Train Wreck.
Which could apply to the US, too…now that I think of it.