Death of a tyrant

ROBERT Mugabe’s ruthless subjugation of the Zimbabwean people during a reign of terror lasting nearly four decades was an object lesson in how Marxism always descends into tyranny.

In 1980, after what was then Rhodesia finally surrendered to majority rule, ‘Comrade Bob’ was hailed as a hero of the liberation. Having commanded his merciless Zanu guerrilla army through the Bush War, he pledged a new spirit of amity and reconciliation, to the sycophantic delight of the British Left.

The mask soon slipped. Over the next few years his goons slaughtered some 20,000 political opponents, expropriated private business and dispossessed white farmers in a brutal land grab.

The economy and currency collapsed in a morass of debt and hyperinflation. But while his people were impoverished, Mugabe and his kleptocratic elite lived like kings on their subjects’ stolen money. And all in the name of Socialism. Yet instead of regarding Mugabe – and similarly Venezuela’s sinister president Maduro – as cautionary tales, Mr Corbyn seeks to deploy many of their tactics here.

Plans for avaricious land taxes, compulsory purchase of private property and coercive redistribution of wealth are straight out of the Marxist playbook. And of course, wherever they have been tried they have always led to penury.

Margaret Thatcher once said: ‘ The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ The tragic beggaring of Zimbabwe proves how right she was.