Well there is a certain brand of young American males who do so, and they do so from their own perspective of American racial politics. They think that the two things are the same — their own very modern feeling of categorizing a group of people as inferior and attacking them for skin color, as against a group of largely high-minded British types coming up with some ad hoc reasons to justify their continued existence in a hot zone.

As you can see, the two things are not the same. The American males who think this way are brought up in the lap of modernistic luxury, and most likely have some psychological issues, pushing them on a anti-social retardation track. Whereas, the actual Rhodesians were, for all their faults, digging deep and trying to find a way to survive in a hard life situation whilst protecting their homeland.

To make it clear, an American teenager with deep psychological issues and an ax to grind, is not the same as someone who has actually invested emotionally and in other ways, into their homeland, and is coming up with reasons to make their investment seem legitimate or worthwhile.

Specifically, one is an immature child — a brat, according to previous styles of reckoning — and the other is an adult, who may lack intellectual resources, but does not lack in any measurement of courage.

Truly, I think it comes down to social status.

What tends to happen is that those who have higher social status are believed, and those with lower social status are told to go back and rework their basic algebra all over again, because somehow nobody is prepared to believe what they are saying.

Historically, the world was divided in such a way that men were deemed to have a straight line of insight into the truth, whereas women were deemed to have faulty perception every time. The only exception to this was if a woman agreed with a high status man and adopted his viewpoints, in which case she was deemed to be a person of exceptional moral courage and capacity to embrace the truth about things. Failing that, she would be deemed to be someone inherently untrustworthy who needed a good man to straighten her out.

Nowadays, the situation is a little different, although women still face discrimination precisely in this regard of having their perceptions constantly denied or questioned — the more so when they come into opposition with the perceptions of males and those of high standing. But the division of the line between believability and unbelievability is probably most strongly drawn these days as a demarcation of professionalism. If a professional and a woman are in any sort of cognitive conflict then. in effect, the professional will be seated in the role of the traditional male, and the woman will be cast as the indubitably feminine villain.

Such is the way that powerful systems work that perceptions that speak disagreement between professional opinions and female experience will tend to be targeted for erasure. The point of this, as you can see, is that there are entrenched systems of power and they cannot brook intense disagreement, or they would lose their power. So, logically and necessarily, they have to combat alternative viewpoints as “incorrect”, and the most subtle way of doing this is to inform the lower status person to “go back and check your perceptions” — in other words, to sow seeds of doubt.