U.S. policy toward Rhodesia, which includes economic sanctions, the shifting of our chrome purchases from Rhodesia to the U.S.S.R., and President Carter’s snubbing of Prime Minister Ian Smith, is supposedly justified because Rhodesia does not have an electoral system based on “one man, one vote.”
Why do we demand “one man, one vote” as the sine qua non for doing business with Rhodesia, or sipping tea with its head of state, when we impose no such prerequisite on other economic or diplomatic contacts? Even now, Carter is making plans to issue a cordial invitation to Brezhnev to visit the White House to put the finishing touches on the SALT II treaty.
No one suggests that the lack of one man, one vote in the Soviet Union will be any impediment to the warmth of Carter’s hospitality. Yet current U.S. policy requires us to buy higher-priced, lower-quality chrome from the Soviet Union, where there are no free elections, and to boycott lower-priced, higher-quality chroma from Rhodesia, where there are free elections and rapid progress toward a democratic government.
We don’t demand one man, one vote in other countries we trade with. We don’t ever ask for it in countries to which we loan America’s money! The State Department encourages trade and trade-plus-credits with the Soviet Union, Eastern European satellites, and Red China, none of whom have the slightest inclination of granting free elections.
Only five out of 43 African countries have any semblance of individual freedom or free elections. In Idi Amin’s Uganda, there is only one vote in the entire country, yet we continue to support him with our coffee purchases. Why does the Carter Administration insist on one man, one vote only in countries resisting Communism?
Even in our own country, it took generations to extend the right to vote to women, blacks, Indians, and non-propertied whites, Literacy tests were legal here until 1970, and the elimination of literacy tests was accompanied by the near-elimination of illiteracy. How can we demand that Rhodesia achieve in a couple of years what took us a couple of centuries?
One man, one vote became the national rule in the United States only with the 1962 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr. Although this rule governs state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives, of course it does not apply to the U.S. Senate, A Senator from California represents 66 times as many people as a Senator from Alaska.
Our nation was born because our Founding Fathers combined the vision of freedom with political reality. The Great Compromise between the large and small states produced the two Houses of Congress, with one House based on the vote of the people and the other on giving the minority faction (the small states) the incentive to cast their lot with the new Republic.
The political reality in Rhodesia was spelled out by Ian Smith on Meet the Press. If the whites are not given sufficient political incentive, they will flee the country. With them will go most of the technological, professional, academic, and managerial skills without which Rhodesia will Jose whatever political freedom and economic prosperity °° it now has or could hope to achieve. This is why Rhodesian blacks, except for the Communist-backed guerrillas, are willing to cooperate with Tan Smith on a workable plan for Rhodesia’s future.
Rhodesia has abolished all statutory racial discrimination. Blacks have better education, better housing, and better medical care than anywhere in Africa except in South Africa. Sixty percent of the army and police force is already black — a tremendous gesture of good faith on the part of the minority whites. The Carter policy toward Rhodesia is not only consummate hypocrisy. It will result in shoving another African nation into the waiting arms of the Soviet Union.
