After the Presidential Election Results were announced, 35 houses in a village near Shamva about 80 km north of Harare were burned and smashed.

ZANU-PF Youths and so called "War Veterans" attacked a fourteen month old baby beating her unconscious on her mother's back because of the mother voting for MDC.

The older victims have said that Zimbabwe today is similar to the Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970's when Mugabe's Forces fought against Ian Smith's Forces. All of this in which MDC either has to compete in the second round and risk more violence or not contest the second round and give Mugabe another term in office. Human Rights Watch has declared that the environment is not conducive for a second round.

Many people [in the 1970's] condemned the Ian Smith Regime for its racial policies against the indiegenous population. There were people who condemned the Apartheid Regime in South Africa. We will not deny that Ian Smith in Rhodesia and the Apartheid Regime in South Africa were terrible, but inhumanity is a universal langauge. It is hoped that this receives a lot of publicity. I finish with a quote from Robert Mugabe shortly after Zimbabwe became Independent in 1980.

"An evil remains an evil whether practised by white against black or black
against white".
- Robert Mugabe, 1980

REFERENCE:

http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/may4b_2008.html

Washington, D.C. - Executive Director Shane Cory has stepped down this week from his staff position with the Libertarian Party.

"I have come to appreciate his talent and professional performance," says Libertarian Party Chairman William Redpath, expressing his thanks for Cory's outstanding service to the LP. "Also, as a personal friend. I wish him well and future success."

"Shane was very productive and an excellent financial manager," says Libertarian National Committee member Vice Admiral Michael Colley, USN [Ret.]. "He got the Party back on the right page financially and did very well representing the Party in the nation's capital. He did well for us, and it's unfortunately been his personal decision to do something else with his energy."

"It was a pleasure working with Shane during his time with the Libertarian Party," says National Media Coordinator Andrew Davis. "He was an asset to the libertarian movement as a whole, and we know he will continue fighting for freedom in this nation with whatever he does next."

We Can Politely Disagree:

Sensible Answers to Tough Questions, Part 1

Having urged civil disagreement between candidates, I now enumerate a
few points where Mary Ruwart and I take different stands on issues.
The following are issues that have significant national interest: The
National debt. National defense. Climate Change. Pollution. Our
answers differ a great deal. Which do you prefer? That choice is up
to you.

Dr. Ruwart describes herself as being from the libertarian wing of
the Libertarian Party. I view myself as being from the centrist wing
of the Libertarian Party: I'm not Republican Lite, and I'm not an
anarchist.

#1 What is the Libertarian response to handling the National Debt?

*Ruwart* (pp. 91-92, Short Answers to the Tough Questions by Mary J.
Ruwart): The national debt represents loans to government secured by
its willingness to tax (steal from) its citizens. Thus, some
Libertarians view buying government bonds as encouraging a thief and

have no qualms about repudiating the debt. Others believe that
government property (including over 40% of the U.S. landmass) should
be liquidated to repay the debt, wholly or in part.

*Phillies*: Three choices for solving the national debt are paying
it, selling assets, and repudiating it. I say that we should
eliminate the National debt by paying it.

Can we? It's exactly like paying off a house mortgage. If you want to
pay off a mortgage over 30 years, your monthly payment on the
principal starts near a tenth of a percent of initial debt. We have
nine trillion

dollars of national debt. A budget surplus around $100 billion a year
and constant future payments makes our funded national debt go away by
2040. What about alternative solutions?

Sell Federal lands? That won't work. Why? America has around a
billion acres of Federal land. Parts of that land, such as the Grand
Canyon, simply will not be sold. To pay off the national debt by
selling the

rest, we'd need to clear around $10,000 an acre. In contrast, in
eastern Kansas and Western Missouri, real estate ads show farmland
for one or two thousand dollars per acre. Selling all our Federal
lands might raise, being optimistic about central Alaska, perhaps a
trillion dollars, ignoring what happens to real estate prices if 40%
of our land area hits the market. A trillion dollars is barely a
tenth of the funded

National debt.

Repudiate the national Debt? Ask yourself: What happens next? Huge
numbers of Americans bought T-Bills for their retirement. Their
retirement savings are wiped out. Foreign governments hold dollar

reserves in Treasury bonds. The value of the dollar vanishes. Banks
hold financial reserves in Treasury bonds. Those banks are insolvent;
their doors close. The economy collapses. Furthermore, no one --

neither foreign governments nor our own citizens would be willing to
lend the U.S. money again since by this point we would have
established that we renege on our obligations.

My good friend Mike Badnarik always asks: 'Is it Constitutional?' No,
repudiation is not constitutional. The 14th Amendment says so. And the
opposition parties chant 'Repudiation is Theft'.

#2: Libertarian National Defense

*Ruwart*: Free trade is the best national defense we could ever have.
No country bombs their trading partners. (page 77)

*Phillies*: A real defense requires real defenses. Trade is no
defense. Countries that trade with each other go to war regularly. A
few examples:

Consider the Latin American countries attacked and occupied,
sometimes repeatedly, by their major trade partner, the United
States. World War I was fought between countries that had traded
substantially with each other. In 1937, Japan invaded major trade
partner China. In 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, and 1945, when
Russia invaded Manjukuo, each country attacked a major trading
partner. In 1943, Italy declared war on Germany, which had been not
only its largest trade partner but its primary military ally.

Question: Lately, I've been reading in the newspapers and seeing reports on television saying that men in relationships are about as likely to suffer from domestic violence as women are. How can this be?

Answer: A large and growing number of university research reports is indicating that men are about as likely as women to suffer from relationship violence. One study by the renowned University of Calgary researcher Eugen Lupri, reported that while 17.8% of husbands had admitted to abusing their female partners, 23.3% of the wives admitted to abusing their male partners1. While similar studies show slightly different results, there is a consistent trend of about one in five women and one in five men suffering from domestic violence.

Question: If this is true, why don't I hear about any men in hospital recovering from domestic violence?

Answer: Although men and women are about as likely to use violence in the home, assaults by men are seven times more likely than women to cause injuries requiring medical treatment2. Since men are generally stronger than women, it is unfortunately easy to understand why abuse by men towards women is so much more damaging. It is also this difference in strength which makes abused men virtually invisible, since only a small number of male abuse survivors require medical treatment.

Question: How do we know that these statistics of women abusing husbands, aren't just cases of women defending themselves against abusive men?

Answer: More research is urgently needed in the area of self-defense as motivations for husband abuse and wife abuse. However, one study on the related subject of courtship violence reported that 35.6% of women and 18.1% of men were abusive towards their partner for reasons of self-defense3. While it would be easy to dismiss one-third of abused husbands and one-fifth of abused wives as being "less legitimate," because of the fact that they initiated the violence, a better solution would be to treat all survivors of violence as being equally worthy of society's assistance, whether or not they have themselves been abusive.

Question: Okay, I accept that husband abuse is an important problem. Even though less serious physical damage is done to men than women, the emotional effects of being abused are probably quite serious for any survivor of abuse. Are there other ways that spouses can abuse each other besides just physically?

Answer: Although physical abuse is considered the most obvious form of abuse, emotional abuse by way of insults, intimidation, and other methods, has the potential to be even more devastating than physical abuse, because it is difficult to prove and therefore difficult to stop. More research needs to be conducted in this area.

Question: How are children affected by husband abuse?

Answer: Many studies have shown that children who witness wife abuse have become abusive spouses. In addition, a 1984 study found that 29% of abused wives and 35% of abusive husbands witnessed their mother abuse their father during childhood4. More research needs to be done on the relationship between witnessing husband abuse during childhood, and female violence in adulthood.

Sources:

1. Eugen Lupri, Why Does Family Violence Occur, in Everyday Life, Lorne Tepperman and James Curtis, editors. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992

2. Jan E. Stets and Murray A. Straus (1980). Gender Differences in Reporting Marital Violence and its Medical and Psychological Consequences, in Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families, Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles, editors, 151-166. New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Publishers

3. J. M. Makepeace (1986). Gender Differences in Courtship Violence Victimization. Family Relations, 35, 383-388.

4. Lenore E. Walker (1984). The Battered Woman Syndrome. New York: Springer.

For more information, contact the author:

Will Steeves (goid@ican.net)
2300 Yonge Street
P.O. Box 67058
Toronto, Ontario
M4P 1E0 Canada
(c) Will Steeves, 1993