RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week’s controversy over President Donald Trump’s call for his State Department to examine South Africa’s coming land reform policy — in which white farmers purportedly are to have their farmlands seized — recalled a similar tragic situation in neighboring Zimbabwe in the early 2000s.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson apparently started the ball rolling when he reported on South Africa’s plan to begin expropriating white farmers’ land. Carlson drew comparisons with a similar program in Zimbabwe 20 years ago that led to economic collapse and hunger there. The president apparently took his cue from Carlson; the talk show host called on the U.S. to take a human rights stand on the basis of how things turned out then in Zimbabwe for both blacks and whites. All of this has been portrayed elsewhere as “dog-whistling” to alt-right nationalists and white supremacists.

Even if the South Africa plan coincidentally excites some racists, Carlson is correct about naming Zimbabwe as the poster child for what can happen down this road. Zimbabwe was that bad — and the United States should put South Africa on notice that it and the whole world is watching if it chooses to follow Zimbabwe down this path.

I know a little about this. Some 17 years ago, while working as a reporter covering federal court systems for the Dallas Morning News, I’d had an interesting connection to the Zimbabwe situation referenced by Carlson. Back then, I heard through my source grapevine that a white family from Africa had arrived in Dallas and was pursuing a U.S. asylum claim. They, because they were white, claimed they had suffered racial persecution at the hands of a black-majority government.

This was classic man-bites-dog stuff, ironic beyond threshold as a news story to a broad general audience far wider than a few white supremacists. Naturally, I jumped all over it. Soon, I was interviewing Dave and Amber Penny and followed them in and out of the immigration courtroom.

A little background: Rebels supporting Mugabe and armed by the Soviet Union achieved independence in 1980 for the country once known as Rhodesia, about the size of Montana. Long before apartheid was dismantled in neighboring South Africa, Zimbabwe was seen as a model of how whites and blacks could live together after blacks replaced white minority rule, despite resentment that whites got to keep the nation’s land wealth. White farmers, who made up about 1 percent of the country’s population of 12 million but formed the backbone of its economy, were urged to stay as a minority class protected by law. The arrangement had been supported by the United States for decades, with appropriately little regard for whatever white supremacists in the U.S. might have had to say about it. CONTINUE AT SITE