Much to the dismay and humiliation of the ruling classes of Britain and the US, Robert Mugabe was inaugurated for a sixth term as President of Zimbabwe on 29 June, winning the runoff election in a landslide victory after his opponent, the IMF-favoured Morgan Tsvangirai, saw the writing on the wall and pulled out of the contest.

We congratulate Comrade Mugabe, Zanu-PF and the people of Zimbabwe on their hard-won victory in the face of what Abayomi Azikiwe quite rightly referred to as “a well-orchestrated destabilisation campaign” composed of “economic sanctions as well as an intense international media blitz which seeks to create public opinion against [Zanu]”. (Pan-African News Wire, 3 July 2008)

Media lies

Duping the masses is, of course, an essential component of the ruling class’s programme to maintain its power at home and to pursue its vile neo-colonial agenda abroad.

Public relations experts and government spin doctors – modern-day Goebbels figures that they are – have paved the way for every war in recent memory, with their finely-tuned emotional rhetoric, phoney evidence and far-reaching media.

Remember Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction? Slobodan Milosevic and his supposed ethnic cleansing of Kosovan Albanians? Older readers might remember the putative ‘terrorist threat’ posed by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, or the ‘Soviet-Cuban militarisation’ of Grenada.

Time and time again, the imperialist press has been able to build a climate of fear and hatred that has served to pacify a working class that might otherwise have found common cause with the superexploited masses of the third world.

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Strategy behind the slander

The intensification of the anti-Zanu smear campaign is a major component of the British and US strategy to oust the anti-imperialist, pan-Africanist Zanu-PF government and replace it with an administration more amenable to market liberalisation, privatisation, cash crop production and the return of the land to white commercial farmers.

The purpose of this imperialist campaign is not lost on its intended victims. President Mugabe, addressing more than 15,000 people at a pre-election rally in the Gaza Stadium, Chipinge, said: “Britain and her allies are telling a lot of lies about Zimbabwe, saying a lot of people are dying. These are all lies because they want to build a situation to justify their intervention in Zimbabwe.”

Now that the election is over and has ended with defeat for the forces of imperialism, Britain and the US have started mobilising in a big way for military intervention. This is dressed up in the most innocuous terms of course – an international ‘peacekeeping’ force to ensure ‘democracy’ – but what Britain and the US plan is nonetheless a military intervention.

There are plenty of examples of UN-led ‘peacekeeping’ forces that have done the dirty work of imperialism: Korea, Congo, Haiti, Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name but a few.