adminit. They set up a propaganda commission named the Creel Commission. The commission remarkably converted an otherwise pacifist community into a hysterical war mongering population which suddenly developed a xenophobic determination to destroy everything German — making it supremely fashionable to preach the annihilation of Germans limb from limb.
Many American young males were mobilised into a war they were made to believe was a war to save the world and in fact the naming of the European war as “World War” was one of the greatest achievements of the propagandists of time, including members of the Creel Commission.
Propaganda is premised on the enthusiastic support of what political elites call “progressive intellectuals,” like the John Dewey circle during the Wilsonian times — people who through the great art of writing take pride in informing the public that there is such a thing as “the more intelligent members of the community,” namely themselves.
Propaganda is the art of deceiving populations — driving reluctant people into hysterics by whatever means necessary, many times eliciting from the population jingoistic fanaticism. This could simply be by terrifying the population with anything that can work, be it a concocting of terrorism tales or the flagging of another country as a major threat to the people’s sovereignty and security.
Zimbabweans must brave themselves for a roller coaster dispensation as political parties in the country will take the population through massive doses of earthshaking propaganda in the run up to the March 2013 election.
The propaganda line that sustained the MDC in its various formations for the decade starting 2000 was terrifying the Zimbabwean masses and the rest of the world with the rhetoric that portrayed Zanu-PF as a murderous party so determined to vampirism that it posed a real threat to suck the blood of all its political opponents. This rhetoric was elevated to matters of reality, especially in the Western world.
Indeed, Zanu-PF did engage in some deplorable acts of political violence against its opponents during this time, just as much as the MDC itself believed it could “remove Mugabe violently,” to quote the infamous declaration of Morgan Tsvangirai in the run up to the 2002 presidential election.
Tsvangirai then braggingly declared “What I want to tell Mugabe today is; please go peacefully or we will remove you violently.” Violent political acts from both parties are well documented both at intra and inter party levels.
So intense was the campaign against Zanu-PF’s alleged violence that anyone could concoct a story of their imagination and the pro-MDC media would simply go to print without any form of verification, both in Zimbabwe and in Western countries.
There were numerous stories about “thousands of people killed and tortured,” or “hundreds of women raped by Zanu-PF militias,” and virtually all the stories carried no names of victims, dates of occurrences or any other such specifications. Even this writer was once broadcast as a murderer and rapist by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation and the defamatory story was carried without any effort of verification whatsoever.
Thousands upon thousands of Zimbabweans were granted political asylum in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand purely on the basis of fabricated stories that they were running away from the country because they faced political threats to their lives.
Many times the fabricated stories chronicled unbelievable atrocities allegedly carried out by Zanu-PF. These were largely mere compositions where the writers exercised a great deal of imagination in creating any drama story that could elicit horror and indignation on the part of the reader — in this case the immigration officials of the hosting countries.
The fabrications made good politics for Western countries as they pursued this meaningless obsession of demonising President Mugabe.
Most of the stories ran on the script that family members had been killed, home was burnt down to ashes, mum was raped before being killed and the story writer always claimed the state agents were in hot pursuit when they made the great escape out of Zimbabwe.
Zanu-PF on its part did not take this conspiracy lightly at all. On the political front the party did intensify its aggression against the MDC and there were increased cases of political violence. This did not make the situation any better.
From a propaganda perspective Zanu-PF labelled the MDC a national threat to sovereignty and the MDC was summarily reduced to an outfit of hopeless puppets of Western countries, especially Britain and the US. The puppet tag today sticks solidly on the MDC in the eyes of most Africans across the continent and justifiably so.
Indeed there is no doubt that the MDC is a client party serving the interests of Western countries in Zimbabwe, perhaps in the same vein that Zanu-PF shifted from socialism to embrace IMF policies that saw Zimbabwe reeling under the murderous effects of Esap in the mid-nineties. That the MDC-T is a puppet party controlled by the West is indeed a matter of fact and not opinion.
That said, both Zanu-PF and the MDC formations drive their politics on propaganda techniques that need to be exposed and interrogated. Politicians are convinced that propaganda is a good idea because somehow they are convinced that common interests elude public opinion entirely and can only be understood and managed by a special class of “responsible people” who are privileged to be smart enough to figure out things for all others — the custodians of our collective opinions.
The theory asserts that only a small elite of intellectuals and politicians can comprehend what all of us care about, and that things are so complex that they elude the general public.
In Zanu-PF there is the typical Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals with state power can use the popular revolution emanating from the liberation struggle as the tool to retain political power. This vanguard postures as the sole unit with the power to drive the stupid masses towards a future that they are too dumb and incompetent to envisage for themselves. That patronising tradition is fast becoming notorious.
The MDC formations are driven by the liberal democratic theory where what is important is to assess where power resides in international politics and subsequently submitting and serving the people with real power: the Western political elites and their business colleagues. It is the capitalist conception of democracy.
Now that the MDC formations and Zanu-PF are too close for polarity, the Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC-T can no longer survive on demonising its political opponents in Zanu-PF. In fact Morgan Tsvangirai has been at pains explaining the innocence of both Zanu-PF and its leader President Mugabe, especially to his political handlers in Western countries.
Recently Tsvangirai was hailing Zanu-PF for initiating him and his colleagues into the art of governance, openly admitting that without Zanu-PF him and his colleagues “would have been at each other’s throats” if they had gotten a chance to govern all by themselves.
The MDC-T has been forced to shift to policy as the 2013 election approaches, now that vilifying Zanu-PF has become virtually impossible, unless the MDC-T leadership does not care about appearing completely insane.
This development has forced the Western controlled party to launch a policy document named Juice; an acronym for Jobs, Upliftment, Investment, Capital and Environment. The policy document talks about the MDC-T luring Western capital for investment in Zimbabwe to such an extent that Zimbabweans would be providing cheap labour worthy one million jobs to Western business people between 2013 and 2018. This is the MDC-T’s idea of employment creation.
The selling point of this policy is of course jobs. Upliftment is mere rhetoric to excite the masses; investment is the assurance to Westerners that the MDC-T will pay their handlers back by allowing them a free reign in exploiting Zimbabwe’s resources through their muscle of capital and environment is a sugar coating addition to sound deep in policy; purely for electioneering purposes.
Juice could as well mean Just Understand Illusions Come Election-time if the real context of this policy was to be a factor. There is no good reason to believe that Juice has been designed for anything else, but elections and given the way Restart was quietly abandoned by the MDC-T there is no reason to believe Juice will be any different.
Even Tendai Biti’s Sterp has died a natural death and the MDC-T leadership must be convinced that the public will not remember Juice after the announcing of the 2013 election result, just like nobody seems to remember Restart and Sterp. For all its shortcomings Zanu-PF does implement its policies, however, unfriendly those policies may be perceived to be by Western powers. The land reclamation policy was more practised than it was written in blue prints, and so is the indigenisation policy.
This was the same with the education policy of the early eighties, known better for taking the country to the helm of African literacy than for its blue prints.
Elections must be about people participating in the affairs of their country, not about them ratifying the wishes of the elite. Zimbabweans must base their vote on policies that will allow them to participate in the economy of their country — to be players in the production sector of their economy.
The MDC-T has shown in many ways that the leadership of that party has a dangerous idea of democracy. It seems apparent that the leadership in the MDC-T is convinced that democracy is defined by elections, and that explains the internationalised hullabaloo about free and fair elections.
This concept of democracy relegates the masses to be spectators and not participants in action. People are occasionally allowed to lend their support to one or the other of the specialised class of elites.
The people are expected to chant “We want you to be our leader!” and to cast their vote in an election. Once they have lent their weight to the political elites they are supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, or lack of it. That is what is expected in the kind of democracy the MDC-T believes in, the Western type of democracy.
The moral principle behind this is that the masses are too stupid to be able to understand complex matters, and if allowed to participate in managing their own affairs, they are just going to cause trouble. A champion is always created for the masses to follow and Tsvangirai believes he is such a champion.
The MDC-T concurred with the West when Zimbabwean masses were labelled chaotic and lawless after they occupied white-held farmlands in 2000. Spectator democracy does not allow the bewildered herd (the masses) to rage and trample and destroy things, just like we do not allow three year olds the freedom to run across the streets.
To liberal democrats the masses are all like three-year olds, and they are the full responsibility of the specialised class or their appointed puppets in client states.
But there is a democracy that will get the masses to receive a sound education, be in possession of their land, control the means of production in their own country, and be employed by business owners of their own kind whose profits are in local banks. That is true democracy.
It is participatory democracy and the closest party to that kind of democracy in Zimbabwe is Zanu-PF and that is the fact of the situation regardless of whether one likes Zanu-PF or not.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.
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