MARINA DEL REY, CA--More than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation, said Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.
Tracinski explained that "the man-made tragedy in Zimbabwe is a distilled example of the larger trend that is destroying the world: the West's loss of moral confidence."
"That loss of confidence," Tracinski noted, "is codified in the post-colonialist doctrines of the academic left, which claim that every evil in the world is caused by the West asserting the superiority of its ideals--like individual rights and the rule of law--over the primitive way of life of 'indigenous peoples.'"
The leftist intellectuals condemn the West's prior colonization of Zimbabwe and the white farmers who remain there. But the famine is actually caused by dictator Robert Mugabe's seizure of farms, which now go unplanted because they are occupied by Mugabe's armed gangs. "Make war on the farmers," Tracinski concluded, "and what can you expect but famine?"
Contrary to the post-colonialist doctrines of the academic left, Tracinski argued that Western values are not the cause of poverty and famine in Zimbabwe and Africa--they are the solution.