Reply #57: If you hear about a knifing of an immigrant the day after Hague or Major [View All]

are out there complaining about imigration and talking about Europe in thinly-veiled nationalist terms, it clicks in your head. It has happened. However, immigrants get knifed all the time.

In my opinion it's all part of the same complicated political nexus, and it IS, to me, a form of intimidation in the UK. However, nobody would ever tell Hague or Major to shut up with their racism. Yet everyone is very quick to hold up evidence of stuff that's pretty similar, all things considered, in Africa as a sign of illegitimacy.

Curious to know what you think about, say, the violence in Nigeria during the last election. It's hard to find concrete evidence of more than 20 deaths in Zimbabwe related to the elections (I couldn't open you link, so I couldn't see what it said, but most of the stories I've read have hard time coming up with super-concrete facts). Now, compare that to the 1000s (you can google to get the number) of people in Niegeria they caught on camera, and have of which really good documentaion, being intimadated, beaten, and killed. Why doesn't the US question the legitimacy of that government? Because we got the outcome we wanted. We treat Nigeria like it's just crazy tribalism, but the government is still fine with us.

Why does the violence in Zimbabwe totally deligitimize Mugabe in the eyes of the press?

Why?

Because it's isn't about the violence. It's about the neoliberalism. If we get the outcome we like, we don't complain about the violence. If we don't get the outcome we like, all we can talk about is the violence, and the poor white farmers, and the famine, and we use all the racist stereotypes we can think of, and we say these people aren't able to govern themselves, much less, able to farm a plot of land.

It's really really disturbing.

It's all about the money.