Will Tanner Profile picture
Nov 18, 2024 14 tweets 9 min read Read on X
This is what Zimbabweification means for landowners, and really anyone who is normal and has assets

As leftism is built on envy and grievance, like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the jackals are coming for wealth in the name of equity, as has happened before in England

🧵👇 Image
Mugabe is far from the only communist to do this, of course. All such regimes, from the Bolsheviks to Mao, confiscated land in the name of leveling society

But Mugabe is particularly apt, as his land confiscation wasn't so much for economic reasons as for spite and envy

To some extent, that was true of all communist regimes. But some of the Soviets at least appeared to think farm collectivization would lead to some prosperity for at least some of the USSR. Similarly, Mao's collectivization and bird killing had a drop of (quite poor) economic reasoning behind it. It was all ridiculous and foolish, of course, but not motivated purely by spite

Mugabe's land expropriation was. No one thought that taking land out of the hands of intelligent farmers and putting it in the hands of various regime cronies and ex-guerrillas would lead to more prosperity. They just hated that the whites owned it, and so they wanted to steal it while citing racial "equity" as their reasoningImage
This is essentially what's happening in Britain now

Much as they claim that growing crops or raising animals on land is "hoarding" it and taxing families out of existence so that solar farms and migrant shelters can be built on fields that have been farmed for a millennium, that's not actually what they care about, nor what they really think

Only the dumbest could think poisoning the land with solar panels...in a county known for being cloudy, would be anything approaching a prosperity-inducing idea. It has even less sense behind it than Pol Pot killing people with glasses or Mao killing sparrows. Similarly, the migrants who need shelters built for them are an obvious drain on society rather than being anything prosperity-inducing

So, it's near impossible for anyone with a brain to seriously think that stealing, through brutal taxation, land from farmers would lead to prosperity or "new life"Image
If it's not about prosperity, then what is it about?

The "prices and rents" line in the above article is telling: they hate that the land of England is tied to its history

They hate that families like the Percys have owned 100k acres for centuries, that farmers who love England have tilled the same soil, whether because they own or rent it, for similar periods of time, that being part of the beautiful countryside is something that ties people to the country's history and traditions

Hence why they claim to want "prices and rents" to fall. It's not really about decreasing costs; if that's what they'd care about, then they'd reduce inflation and the resultant financialization of farmland that has resulted from it. But they're also the easy-money crowd, so it's not that. Rather, the gloating about seeing prices fall is gloating about the massive sales of land they know will happen. They know prices will fall like a rock when huge chunks of farmland hit the market due to families being unable to hold onto the same land their forefathers tilled, and they couldn't be happierImage
Key to their goal is severing the link between land and tradition

As things currently stand, the landed families and their longtime tenants are much more conservative and care about England herself rather than the cosmopolitan, globalist world of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer

Breaking that link is key to the liberal "end of history," or having a rainbow flag-festooned boot stomping on the face of normal people, forever. Without people tied to the nation's history, people, and culture, who will stand up to the BLM boot? No oneImage
But it's also just spite

They hate that certain families own much of the land and have managed to hold onto it despite taxes and regulatory hostility

They hate that people like @JeremyClarkson own land and want to be able to do on it what they please, rather than what a council decides

They hate liberty, they hate freedom, and they hate that such feelings tend to come from country living

And that brings us back to Mugabe. They hate that people like the Duke of Rutland (a UKIP patron) enjoy chasing the fox on horseback or shooting grouse, not so much for any reason other than that they exist. They hate that farmers enjoy the crisp country air, the sight of sheep and cows grazing, the joy that comes from riding a horse into a covert or alongside a hedgerow. And, of course, they hate the feeling of private property and ownership; such is a feeling of independence, of resistance to liberalism and its leveling impulse, and so on

And, like Mugabe, they're justifying their confiscation of private property (though through taxation rather than men with guns) in the name of racial equity.

It's just envy, it's just hate of normal white people. It's just MugabeismImage
This isn't the first time that this has happened to England

The envy Starmer represents existed essentially from the Parliament Bill to Thatcher, particularly under Attlee and Wilson

Here's the background on that:
The Attlee years particularly stand out as a time when envy won out and countryside life and prosperity were destroyed in the name of envy

The best example of this is what happened to the Fitzwilliam family and Wentworth Woodhouse
The Fitzwilliams grew, under the low-tax Victorian and Edwardian years, fantastically wealthy off their coal mines. Unlike other landowners, such as the Marquesses of But, they didn't rent coal land out but instead ran the mines themselves

As mine owners and operators, they contrasted with the plutocratic, new-man mine owners in that they placed a heavy priority on miner safety, and seemed to care a great deal about miner well-being. They always had the best, most effective safety improvements in their mines, provided employment for mine workers during depression years when the mines were slowed or shut down, and generally treated the miners as people rather than industrial cattleImage
Image
Proof that their behavior wasn't just an act is that the local miners liked them and stood by them, even during the nationalization period

That period came under Attlee, the post-WW2 PM. He nationalized railroads, mines, and mills in the name of...envy of the wealthy, explained away as caring about worker wages and safety. Amongst those mines confiscated were those of the Fitzwilliams, showing the lie of Attlee's reasoning: the Fitzwilliam miners were well-paid and safeImage
But, nationalize them Attlee did. The spite and envy were put in clear relief by Manny Shinwell, the Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power

He ordered strip mining on the Fitzwilliam family's Wentworth Woodhouse estate, despite the low value of the coal on it. The miners protested and threatened striking over his decision, as they were loyal to the Fitzwilliam family, but Shinwell crushed that and the strip mining began. It ravaged the cultivated, Capability Brown garden landscape. It also continued right up to the door of Wentworth, and damaged the foundation of the house severely, making it unliveable

In the name of spite, he destroyed a family's home and gardens despite that family's kind treatment of their employeesImage
There was no reason for that other than envy. The miners had been well-treated, the coal was valueless, and the family paid its (unjustly high) taxes

But envy lies at the root of socialist Labour's popularity, just as it lies at the root of communism like Zimbabweification

So, with the Wentworth story playing out across the countryside and sky-high estate taxes destroying landed estates and old families, envy as a political force plagued England and culminated in Harold Wilson's 90% death taxes, currency devaluation, and economic stagnation

Of course, those who were destroyed for no reason other than envy were mocked for it by the mediaImage
That's back

Economic Envy is behind Starmer's decision to start confiscating land through taxation, and this time the country isn't still wealthy from Victoria but rather impoverished and already overtaxed, so the effects will be even worse
As always, the policy of envy is justified by saying the policy will just make the rich "pay their fair share"

But are land-rich, cash-poor yeomen farmers "the rich"? Should the actually rich, those relatively few peers who survived the death taxes of Churchill, Attlee and Wilson, be destroyed because of envy? Is that just?

No. But it is what liberalism wants. "Equality," by which they mean state-enforced egalitarianism, requires it

So now the last remnants of the old world are being taxed out of existence, their land to be confiscated by the state in a process little different than what Mugabe did to Rhodesia. It's just envy, as the "meme" below showsImage

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More from @Will_Tanner_1

Apr 8
The reason this happened is that the Indochina was the original Rhodesia: a colonial conflict in which the Americans and communists worked hand in hand to destroy colonial, Christian society and spread communism

That lens is the only one that makes the war make sense

🧵👇 Image
First, we dragged the French along and let them waste their strength, political capital, and blood while providing just enough aid to keep them from losing but not enough to win

Then, when Dien Bien Phu came, we yanked it all away so that they lost in a humiliating defeat and their colonial project, and related war effort in Algeria, took an irrecoverable black eye

The French Empire was finished, and the communist bayonet, aided by our lack of commitment and domestic French leftist agitation, killed itImage
With that French defeat came the partition, and with it the crowding of the capitalists and Catholics into South Vietnam, with Diem as their leader

We backed Diem in a way that only made him unpopular, and once Diem leaned into pro-Catholic policies, something that would have separated the South from the North and given it a continued reason for resistance, the CIA murdered him and replaced him with a succession of awful and ever more incompetent puppets

Lee Kuan Yew notes in From Third World to First that this was a terrible ideaImage
Read 8 tweets
Apr 6
🧵👇

The central reason the American Revolution proved successful in creating a free and prosperous nation is that the Founders, many of them Virginia and New York gentry, embraced rather than rejected hierarchy

This separated, in practice, our Revolution from the horrors of the egalitarian French Revolution, and is what led to America’s subsequent success as France floundered, though both used similar language about rights and liberty

Continued below 👇Image
This often gets forgotten because 1) they rejected creating a British-style peerage after the war (though they did create the Society of the Cincinnati), and 2) the war is now framed not as a dispute over local sovereignty but rather as a rejection of British culture

That’s an incorrect interpretation of what happenedImage
The central fact is that American culture remained resolutely English in the decades after the war, however much some radicals hated England

This is obvious even in superficial respects.

The White House is a Palladian country house. 4/5 of our first presidents were country gentlemen who ran plantations as their cousins across the ocean ran estates. They are with silver, constructed country manors, hunted the fox on horseback, drank port by the gallon, and otherwise followed the culture traditions of their English ancestors

Similarly, the Scots-Irish, though significantly more hostile to Britain, retained the traditions of their Borderer ancestors, particularly surrounding local leadership by the major men of qualityImage
Read 13 tweets
Mar 30
A very short🧵👇

This is just false

Every study of the economic contributions of immigrants has shown that only some East Asians - namely the Japanese - and those of European descent in any way contribute to the public coffers on a net basis. The other groups drain them in a huge wayImage
This same general thing bears out in America: the net fiscal impact of those "undocumented folk" is severely negative... Image
Read 5 tweets
Mar 21
A rat done bit my sister Nell // with whitey on the moon

If anything symbolizes the noxious race communism strangling our civilization, it's this song, Whitey on the Moon, a paean to the stultifying Stone Age spirit of the global favela

A short 🧵👇

(video by @kunley_drukpa)
The long and short of it is that we face a time for choosing.

Will we embrace what is represented now by SpaceX and Apollo — greatness, aesthetic beauty, and feats of technological brilliance and daring beyond anything seen before?

Or will we embrace the global favela — the spirit, smell, and aesthetic of the steaming, putrid air of a decaying village in Dahomey?Image
There are a great many people that identify with Whitey on the Moon

They claim to want no leaps forward until everyone is pampered by the nanny state, living in luxury because someone else paid their doctor's bill, as the song's sullen artist indicates

But what they really want is a dragging of all of us into a global favela. They hate any form of achievement, because it reminds them there is nothing they could ever achieve

They, like the glowering savage in the picture below, want to crush anything excellent, beautiful, or marvelous merely because it is so; it reminds them that their ancestors never invented the wheel, and barely escaped the Stone AgeImage
Read 4 tweets
Mar 12
What separated Rhodesia from the rest of the West?

One key matter: it focused on excellence in an age when all others transitioned to ruthless egalitarianism

As Ian Smith put it in the clip below, “We simply have a standard”

That standard is what made the West great

🧵👇
This is, I think, really the key differentiating factor and is what makes it so interesting to me

In an era when America was in the throes of Civil Rights egalitarianism, tearing down everything to make communist-connected rebels happy, and England was at war with its heritage, taxing those who embodied that heritage out of existence while confiscating their houses, Rhodesia chose the other pathImage
That other path was the one that really matters: it was simply having standards

Their elections are the best example of this. Those weren't racial, but rather required those who were to vote in national elections first prove to the country that they could be stewards, shown through their being stewards in their own lives

Hence the property qualification: requiring the equivalent of $60k in 2024 USD in Rhodesian property, they largely succeeded in screening out those who were irresponsible.Image
Read 15 tweets
Mar 10
Below, Elon argues DOGE is fighting the bureaucracy, and thus might restore Democracy in America

He's right to call bureaucracy the enemy of the people, but wrong to say it's the enemy of democracy

The two go hand in hand, as the West's 20th century decline shows

🧵👇
First, what Elon told Rogan was partially correct, but mostly incorrect

He said, “The reality is that our elected officials have very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy—it's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.”

In some ways, that is obviously correct. DOGE is indeed at war with the bureaucracy, as shown by the firings, the court cases, the budget freezes, and so on

Elon, and thus DOGE, recognize that the federal bureaucracy is not only overly expensive, but has been spending and regulating in a way that makes it hard to do anything in America, particularly anything worth doing. Business is burdened by taxes and constrained by onerous regulations. Hiring is difficult, and firing an incompetent employee of a "protected" race is nearly impossible. Innovation is stifled by aging bureaucrats. The Deep State has been weaponized against conservatives, and most bureaucrats go along with it because they just want their pensions.

So, DOGE is indeed at war with the bureaucracy, is winning some battles, and the bureaucracy is clearly the enemy of the American peopleImage
But he is wrong in saying that the bureaucracy is the enemy of democracy, by which he means modern mass democracy, or a near-universal adult franchise, which hereafter I'll just call democracy

That is wildly off, and proof of that comes from America and Britain throughout the 20th centuryImage
Read 10 tweets

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