Monday, June 06, 2005
"EARN AN HONEST LIVING"
Zimbabwe is under siege:
President Robert Mugabe’s onslaught against Zimbabwe’s cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.
Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike ...
Bulldozers spent last week razing [a 70-acre site filled with 24 factories and workshops], destroying all but nine businesses that employed about 1,000 people in a country suffering mass unemployment and economic crisis.
Mugabe’s destruction echoes Mao’s Great Leap Forward:
The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged “urbanites” to go “back to the rural home, to reconnect with one’s roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme”.
UPDATE. Here’s one US academic who thinks the Great Leap Forward was “an extraordinarily creative intervention in Chinese economic development.”
UPDATE II. Speaking of US academics, things aren’t looking too good for Big Chief Lying Weasel.