A classic. I would also like to note that the US never had a Hellenistic period, and China never had a Victorian era. Explains a lot when you think about it. No, wait, not “think about it.” What’s the other thing? Oh yeah, “hit yourself on the head repeatedly with the works of H. Rider Haggard.”

Never heard of that one. Pretty thin argument, eh? (arf, arf…)

Renders satire redundant, doesn’t he?

Mugabe’s ZANU-PF was not Soviet supported, but by the Chinese. “Seven years of turbulence” for an armed liberation struggle that began officially in 1967 and ended in 1979? In fact, violent resistance to white colonial rule in Rhodesia had existed since the first white settlers arrived in 1890.

Ian Smith’s political actions were so inimical to the interests of his own electors, his own race and his own class, not to mention to the country as a whole and to the region, that to call him a statesman is laughable. Just because the present Mugabe regime is an evil tyranny does not bless post-hoc goodness on Ian Smith’s illegal, immoral and murderous government.

And, not all African colonies were fully supportive of the Allied side in WW II. Indeed, the very first action of the Rhodesian Government in September 1939 on hearing that Britain had declared war on Germany was to send troops to the border with South Africa! The Rhodesians feared that the South Africans would join the war on the Nazi side and invade them.

One is reminded of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s opposing sanctions on South Africa on the grounds that the country had been allies of the USA in WW II, at a time when South Africa was governed by a party (the National Party) whose leaders had spent that war in internment camps, so strong were their pro-Nazi sentiments.

And Lefever quotes, of all people, Kempton Makamure, someone who denounced the Mugabe Government all through the 1980s for not being sufficiently Stalinist, for not rounding up and deporting white farmers (“kulaks” he called them), along with their black brethren and the black comprador bourgeouisie.

Lefever’s screed has all the characteristics: random order of paragraphs; sharp transitions like “Back to Hobbs.”; elided subjects; observations from the 1960s serving as evidence for the present; the inability to look up even the simplest dates on Wikipedia, for crying out loud; self-contradictions*.

I enjoy knowing now about the democratic and prosperous European states from 1476, that the Second Chimurenga consisted of “seven years of turbulence,” or that there’s “something new out of Africa” in an essay that brings us up to 2002. I especially like learning the fact that Africans haven’t experienced the Reformation. No Protestant missionaries ever got themselves to the Dark Continent, did they? (And plus Africans didn’t have a delightful century-and-a-half of sectarian violence.)

Note to Lefever: Africans experienced the industrial revolution as, say, enslaved sugar producers, as commodities exchanged for the cheap cloth, as rubber gatherers who lost their hands, and as palm oil traders who lost their business to British gunboats.

You’d think a publication(?!) with the word “standard” in its name might actually have some, no?

*People are wrong to see Africa as a perpetual Hobb[e]sian state. So let me tell you about how it’s always been Hobb[e]sian when Europeans weren’t dictating the terms.

I do have a pretty vivid memory of the fourth one being “human rights,” though; and I think I’d be less likely to remember a cartoon about Watt as about Lefever than vice versa, because Watt loomed pretty large on the landscape in the ‘80s* and basically I’ve only heard of Lefever twice, when I read that cartoon and when I read this post. My mom told me about a philological principle (lectio difficilior lectio potior, apparently) that the less likely reeading is probably the original one. This would make it more likely that it is Lefever; though it wouldn’t account for why you think it’s Watt, since you never heard of the guy.

So, hum. I give Lefever a p of 0.6 on my current evidence. If I’m wrong, which I could well be, there must have been some other cartoon about Lefever in there.

*The Beach Boys! The plaster foot with the hole in it! “A black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple!” There was definitely a Bloom County cartoon about that one.

http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1981/02/ratner.html

A cold-war academic. I think there are more Africa connections.