The British civil servants, or mandarins, sitting around the table at Lancaster House all knew Canaan Banana was a depraved little bastard. They knew, but when the Marxist oddball Robert Mugabe proposed him as Zimbabwe’s leader, they supported it.
They supported it because they wanted to spite the white Rhodesians they were jealous of, who incensed them with their superior instinct, who were tougher and more fun. To paraphrase Mark Steyn’s point on the issue, the British fancied the presentation of a ‘Banana Republic’ to rub their noses in.
Banana accepted the support, then started drugging and raping his male security detail. A former guard recalled waking up delirious with no trousers on and Banana standing above him solemnly remarking, ”Whilst you were out…you were burgled”.
An alliance of cynicism not dissimilar to the Lancaster House group that the British formed again in October 2020, but this time it consisted of the liberal English-speaking world’s media. In just the previous decade, many reporters in that profile had devoured the controversial Panama Papers leaks, then the Paradise Papers leaks and before those, it was Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks which were bravely exposed by Glenn Greenwald for The Guardian before the others.
Gupta server
In South Africa, some journalists got to call themselves “acclaimed” when they won prizes for covering the leaked Gupta server in 2017 and 2018. So, when the contents of a laptop belonging to the son of the Democrat candidate Joe Biden emerged weeks prior to November 2020’s Presidential election, the expectation was that journalists in that profile would apply their minds to what appeared to be credible traces of corruption on the part of the former Vice-President and his family.
That didn’t happen. In America, Biden’s campaign scrambled to get 51 crooked former intelligence personnel to compose a bogus letter: “Whilst we cannot be sure this is Russian disinformation” they declared, “it also…could be”. Obama statecraft alumna Jen Psaki, who would go on to being the second-worst White House press secretary in history, hyped the same “Russian disinformation” hoax, and Twitter, then under the grip of intelligence spooks and law enforcement, banned users from sharing the New York Post’s scoops.
In the United Kingdom, liberal newspapers and websites described the story as “irrelevant”. In South Africa, local transgender activist Max du Preez and local diversity, inclusion, and equity expert Adriaan Basson coupled to lead resistance against anyone daring to suggest that the laptop partially evidenced claims that the Democrats were the party of US state capture.
Usher in President Biden
In their failure to act, this alliance revealed what they wanted: to usher in a President Biden. They had been thrilled when Nancy Pelosi had winced down onto one knee in yet another scam: to “honour” George Floyd – wearing Kente cloth of all things. Twenty-twenty was a year in which the groups these people idolise – $cientists and academic$ – had been permitted to venture out of their lanes into the bizarre. Not four months previously, another liberal alliance, this time consisting of health professionals, announced that while lockdowns were brilliant, racism was a ‘public health emergency’ – so protestors should be exempted from its arcane rules. Everything appeared poised to deliver Biden a first term in office, and Western journalists weren’t going to interrupt that.
(Except Glenn Greenwald. Having examined some of the laptop’s contents, he wrote on the subject for the media website he founded – The Intercept. Betsy Reed, then editor, spiked the column, prompting Greenwald to resign in disgust. Reed would later smear Greenwald as “having lost his moral compass”. In the pattern typical of liberal establishment upward failure, she would later be appointed editor of the US edition of The Guardian).
In the four years that Joe Biden’s handlers occupied the office, Western civilisation imploded, with war, censorship, inflation, institutions, and corporations captured by identity and climate obsession, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings.
New Zealand or Canada
The types of authority exercised by Justin Ardern in Canada or New Zealand, and Jacinda Trudeau in New Zealand or Canada, or some EU bureaucrat demanding all farmers or “vaccine sceptics” be rounded up and set on fire, did not tolerate democratic responses. But the worst consequences of those four years are most vividly felt in the present state of the liberal media, who failed to rock up when called back in 2020.
Their environment today is grim: they have accomplished the impossible by appearing even more untrustworthy and even more judgmental. Not a week passes without news of tanking ratings, industrial retrenchments, or theatrics being employed in begging for cash.
And then on Monday, the ultimate betrayal. With Joe Biden issuing his son a curiously extended blanket pardon (dating back to 2014), the “democracy dies in darkness” quarter who rushed to his defence in 2020 are humiliated.
Did these people know they were protecting a man with a history of explicitly racist remarks? Did they know about Nancy Pelosi’s ballooning wealth thanks to her stock picks, or that Biden’s handlers had plans to re-erect the lobbyist force in Washington by renaming them “consultants”? Did they know that pandering and imagining enemies unleashes chaotic, uncontrollable forces? Did they know about Joe Biden in China, or Hunter Biden in Ukraine?
Absolutely. They knew. They knew, but just like the Lancaster House British, they gambled on sentiment, consciously chose division, became vindictive and self-righteous, then surrendered their critical thinking.
[Photo: bananaclan99/flickr]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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