OT: Rhodesian War Resources

[HorseSoldier]

I think they could have made it a tougher proposition for the opposition, but I'm not sure they could have really implemented sufficient reforms to really check the pie in the sky utopianism the communists were selling. A lot of the problem, politically, seems to have been that a big chunk of the black population resented even the government initiatives that directly benefitted them because they often meant doing what whites told them to do in defiance of traditional cultural practices. Or at least this was a cultural trope that ZANU was able to exploit.

As an example, veterinary programs that improved the health (and quality) of livestock owned by villagers (and as an off shoot reduce disease and infant mortality among humans as well, improved nutrition for the populace, etc) were unpopular because of Not-Invented-Here sort of issues. ZANU had a very easy time co-opting members of the populace to destroy or sabotage the infrastructure associated with them, even though this directly harmed the saboteurs and/or their relations. I think this even occurred in cases where the government had invested the time to win over the traditional local/tribal leadership on the programs because as noted, there was a large population of young, unemployed and uneducated black males who found communist propaganda more appealing than what the status quo was able to offer them (both in terms of their relationship with the white government and their ability to garner status and success within the framework of their traditional culture).

One thing that might have made a very big impact once the war started would have been large scale expansion of the Rhodesian African Rifles earlier in the war. As the manpower crunch hit late in the war my understanding is that a lot of people were looking at the idea of the Rhodesian military being primarily made up of RAR units with black soldiers and white officers (and a mix of black and white NCOs) since the heavy use of the white reservists in the Rhodesia Regiment was slaughtering the economy. This would have provided another outlet for disadvantaged young males in the tribal lands to make a living and gain status, but I think there were perhaps legitimate concerns about political reliability as well as less legitimate ideas limiting this until things got desperate enough on the military front to force it.

[Legbreaker]

It all comes back to effective education. The uneducated are idiots, willing to cut their own throats if somebody they think knows more than them tells them it's a good thing.
The more educated a society is, the less likely it is to rip itself apart.

[HorseSoldier]

I'd think there's kind of a tripod for social stability involving education, economic prosperity, and personal identification/investment in the status quo. You can probably pull one leg right off the tripod and have things still work out, but start pulling two or all the legs off and it's going to end in trouble.

In the US and western Europe in the 60s and 70s you had a lot of people who did not feel any personal affiliation to the status quo, but that by itself was not sufficient to generate revolutionary sentiments on a widespread enough basis to lead to serious problems. Conversely, in post-WW1 Germany you had economic implosion and people who felt alienated or hostile to the government imposed on them the winners of the war (and/or their government that had lost them the war) -- about the only thing left was a well educated population, who then elected Hitler.