Nice to see people standing up to Leviathan:

• Protesters take on Mugabe’s thugs (Times Online)

For those of you who came in late, Mugabe is driving Zimbabwe headfirst into the ground. He’s managed to keep the population in line with Orwellian police work, but has yet to realize that he can’t change the principles of economics with jackboots and truncheons. The above article sums it up nicely:

Inflation is estimated by bankers to be about 13,000% and a military-imposed campaign of price controls has left nothing on the shelves. As the economic crisis grows, police brutality, long a feature of the Mugabe regime, has worsened.

In a typical incident nine days ago, police descended on Nyaradzo funeral home in Harare and prevented a service taking place for 24-year-old Memory Jenaguri. Her home had been destroyed in Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Filth), a government demolition campaign that began in 2005, and she had been living in the open for the past two years until dying of hunger. The police arrested all 60 mourners.

According to the article, however, people are getting upset en masse with Zimbabwe’s nonfunctional economy and abusive State. For example, when a Harare police officer tried to nightstick his way into a cheap taxi ride:

Someone from the crowd stepped forward and told the officer that what he was doing constituted “a human rights abuse” and he should stop.

Masamwi laughed and hit him too. The man again told him that what he was doing was wrong as there were hundreds of people waiting. This time the crowd joined in, turning on the policeman and beating him.

The officer called in riot police. They dispersed the crowd violently and arrested the taxi driver, who is still in jail two weeks later.

A few days after the incident, however, Masamwi received a legal summons. Then last week about 500 people gathered outside his police station to demonstrate. This protest was also broken up by riot police and 11 people were arrested, but the demonstrators returned the next day.

(Please note the writing’s strong, if workmanlike, structure and its forceful composition. This is how one ought to write!)

Bravo to the anonymous “man” and “crowd”.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything–you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
– Robert A. Heinlein