white man, black war, and true colours

I received this note last night from a man who wrote a polemic about the Rhodesian war that rather moved me.

I was a child when that war really got underway. It had been going for sixteen years already when I first hit my teens. And I remained a child until several years after it was over -- deeply politically ignorant. (The Victorian legacy of the status of the 'woman-child' seemed to have been much under sway up to and during the height of the war, in the mid-70s -- I becoming the unwitting victim of it.)

One of the reasons I liked Bruce Moore-King's writing in White Man, Black War was that he had the courage to speak of things that few people dare to. Perhaps most also lack the insight, analytical skills or complexity of experience necessary to elucidate what it is like to be born in a cult.

My own calculations suggest to me that for the most part the time-locked Rhodesian culture that I was a part of was about 30 years behind the rest of the world in its attitudes and modes of thinking. I realise that cultural ideas and progress procede unevenly, and that there were resonances in my culture of the British Romanticism of the 1780s and a culture of war that seemed to linger from the 1940s, promoting a comfortable British triumphalism over the defeated axis powers. However, in terms of the peaks of our culture, not the depths or even the regressive aspects, I would have put us 30 years behind the times. Moore-King, in his note to me, however, clocks us back to 70 years behind, in cultural attitudes, compared to where we should have been. He may be right.

I didn't participate, as he did, in the war, or even in engaging in attitudes about the war. When it was all over, in 1979-1980, I was just turning thirteen. The innocence of my condition might be viewed in terms of the fact that I did not consider Mugabe's regime to be meaningful or a threat to me, when it came to power in 1980. Niether did I consider the integration of blacks into my school to be a threat or anything capable of causing hardship. It ought to be noted that I'm not aware of any of my peers having a problem with it, either. It was very easy for me, then, to become a part of the new Zimbabwe regime -- mostly because in any meaningful way I had not been a part of the old Rhodesia regime. I had been born too late, and given too little that would make me partisan for such a transition to bite.

What now seems clear to me, however, is that I paid for my easy transition (brought, no doubt, at the price of ignorance) by becoming the victim of those, left and right, who demanded that my adjustment to the new world order had to come at a price. I should not be permitted to get off the hook that easily, they insisted.

Bullying, of course, has its advantage in making down and out people feel better about themselves. Moore-King confirms my thesis that gender attitudes were pretty backwards where I came from (a reality that I was largely protected from up to the point that I was no longer permitted so much to be a child -- right when the war had been resoundingly lost.) What gets me is that gender attitudes are backwards here, in Australia 2008, as well.

Let me get right to the point. Most people do not seem to realise that patriarchy (and its ideals of dominating women) is fueled by a herd mentality. My father's poor treatment of me when I came of age gave other men permission to treat me badly too. It was like they got a whiff of a certain logic of witch-hunting and denunciation in the air, and couldn't help themselves. They had to follow suit, conceding that his opinion of me was the correct one. Who knows, for all the colonial outpost stoicism training I'd had, I simply must have been 'hysterical' I guess.

I wasn't. Let me repeat and rephrase. The patriarchal abuse of women, the bloodlust promoted by patriarchal ideology makes men hysterical. Something becomes wrong with them when they embrace another man's oppression of a woman as the right option. When they refuse to see the truth of the situation, about who is oppressing who, they regress back 70 years, prior to where they ought to be.

The infectious nature of the will to regress is something I have vividly observed. Those who condemn the excesses of the Rhodesian regime so morally, and yet regress so quickly to a level of culture that it had promoted, betray their true colours.