By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

MY August 12 2016 instalment on postmodern myths and the devaluation of history coincided with The Sunday Mail’s interview of General Constanino Chiwenga (August 14 2016) in which the general also deplored the deliberate devaluation and distortion of history by the younger generation which includes persons masquerading as former liberation soldiers.
In its latest re-packaging, the current attack on the legacy of liberation soldiers includes the following allegations:
l That liberation soldiers demand too much from the public and the Government and that they have cost the economy dearly;
l That it was the demand of liberation soldiers for recognition and gratuities which triggered the current on-going economic crisis;
l That liberation soldiers have been relegated to the dustbin of history; therefore, they no longer have any relevant contributions to make toward the future Zimbabwe; and
l That their record is one of brutality and the systemic violation of human rights.
Based on these assumptions, the MDC formations and turn-coats within the ruling ZANU PF came up with counter demands against liberation soldiers, including the following:
l That as an organised group, their activities and ideas should be limited to the welfare of their members.
l Individual soldiers, police officers and war veterans were not supposed to be involved in the Constitution-making process and one of them was publicly expelled by COPAC, with great cheers from the MDC formations their media and NGO allies.
l Individual soldiers, police officers or war veterans were not supposed to be appointed to boards of parastatals or companies because such boards would lose their ‘independence’ as a result.
l Individual soldiers, police officers and war veterans could not be accepted as academics, lecturers, scientists, engineers and doctors, otherwise the institutions so associated with their professional contributions would be condemned as ‘militarised’.
Contrary to these allegations and demands, African liberation soldiers are nation-builders who made democracy possible for their own people and contributed to the creation of their nation-states as well as to the improvement of human rights on a global scale.
The gross vilification of liberation war soldiers orchestrated by turn-coats in ZANU PF with help from the MDC formations can be sustained only if our recent national history is distorted or erased.
First, the US Federal Government’s grudging support and co-option of the US Civil Rights Movement in North America was forced on the North Americans by liberated African nations.
The presence of African diplomats, their spouses and children in New York, in Washington DC and all over the country beginning in 1957 helped to expose North American apartheid when the red necks who were used to lynching US-born Africans began to lynch African envoys and spouses and dependants of African envoys seconded to the UN.
African liberation is therefore associated with democratisation of international politics and international institutions.
The racist attacks perpetrated on African envoys in the 1960s exposed the US Federal Government’s foreign policy and propaganda in two costly ways: They were denounced in pan-African and Organisation of African Unity (OAU) conferences as proof that North American whites were no better than South African, Rhodesian or Portuguese settlers in Southern Africa.
The scandalous attacks were also denounced in Afro-Asian and Non-Aligned Movement conferences.
And they could be exploited to the maximum by the Eastern bloc countries as part of the Cold War.
And they could cost a lot in real trade relations.
So, the US Government was forced to clamp down on its racist local and state governments in order to save face and trade abroad.
Second, the last fascist government in Europe was overthrown because of the determination by the Africans of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau to fight to liberate themselves from Portuguese colonial fascism.
The Portuguese revolution of 1974 was a direct product of the internationalist solidarity between Africans and Cubans who forced young officers in the Portuguese military in Europe to overthrow their fascist government.
That fascist government was defended and partly financed by the US administration of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
That fascist regime was supported by the same Social Democrats of Germany (SPD) who also sponsored the strategic study which led to the transformation of the ZCTU leadership of Zimbabwe through the establishment of the NCA which gave birth to the MDC formations and betrayed the working people of this country.
The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung is an arm of the SPD and it led the strategic research which became the EU blue print for illegal regime change in Zimbabwe.
Yet the SPD is not known for defending ‘democracy’ in Europe.
How could it invent democracy in Zimbabwe?
The SPD (Germany) relationship with the MDC formations is the equivalent of the Jesse Helms and NED (USA) relationship with the same MDC formations, which I raised when I debated the late MDC spokesperson Learnmore Jongwe on the issue of illegal sanctions on ZTV on November 21 2001.
Jesse Helms was the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee whose career spanned the UDI and apartheid years.
Helms lived to receive the illegal sanctions request from the MDC formations in 2000.
Jesse Helms was a notorious supporter of white racism in North America and the arch-enemy of the Civil Rights Movement who also supported UDI and apartheid.
It is therefore significant that, in the name of democracy, the MDC formations turned to Jesse Helms, to the SPD and to the US National Endowment for Democracy and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung who were renowned enemies of democracy in their own countries.
Third, when the US finally abandoned its policy of ‘Constructive Engagement’ with apartheid in 1986 and repealed the Byrd Amendment of 1971 in 1978, it was not because of any inclination to defend human rights and democracy; rather these actions were calculated responses to a geopolitical situation on the ground in Southern Africa which the African liberation movements and their internationalist allies had created through armed struggle.
The defeat of the combined CIA-South African invasion of Angola in 1976, the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, the increasing numbers of Cuban International Forces helping the PLAN forces of Namibia and defending the new MPLA Government of Angola – all helped to create a situation where the US Government needed at least to make diplomatic and public relations efforts at distancing its foreign policy from apartheid and UDI.
In the words of former US Ambassador Elliot P. Skinner, who was also the Franz Boaz Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1979:
“Our (Western) tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the US has inherited the role of ‘metropole’ (or mother country) of all the whites in Southern Africa. This is not a role we welcomed, but it is one we cannot avoid…we are the ones who have led the discussions about the future of these countries (Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa).”
This ‘mother country’ role on behalf of just European settlers only is what makes the illegal and racist sanctions against Zimbabwe a uniquely Anglo-Saxon problem which has exposed the MDC formations who agreed to be used. Professor Gerald Horne in his study From the Barrel of A Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980, calls this white ‘mother country’ role a ‘synthetic pan-European solidarity’ which former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson called the ‘kith-and-kin’ bond.
It is the US which, through its Cold War posture, provided the over-arching synthetic ideology which made it possible to protect all white settlers from Kisangani to Cape Town under the banner of anti-communism and anti-socialism.
That banner had to be quickly re-labelled as the ‘human rights and democracy’ banner when the former Soviet Union dissolved.
It is interesting to note how the US treats its serving and retired war veterans.
For instance, readers of this column may remember that one of the critical objections to Bill Clinton’s candidacy for the US presidency in 1996 was that he had never served in the armed services of the US.