From South Africa, Australia, and Canada Through the U.S. Far Right: Making a Transnational Pro-Rhodesia Network, 1965–1967

This article reveals how a decentralised transnational network of southern African, Australian, and Canadian right-wingers helped the U.S. far right defend the colonial regime of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the mid-1960s. Both Tom Anderson, a Southern leader of the John Birch Society, and Lee J. Adamson, a local activist in the Pacific Northwest, interpreted the United Nations boycott of, and the general anti-colonial opposition to, Rhodesia’s secession from Britain as threats to an important anti-communist government on the African continent. Ivor Benson, Sydney E.D. Brown of the South African Observer, Eric Butler with Australia’s League of Rights, and Ron Gostick of Canadian Intelligence Publications all bolstered Anderson and Adamson’s efforts to encourage American support for the Rhodesian regime, whose Ministry of External Affairs played a direct role in this global network by facilitating connections among pro-Rhodesian activists and providing useful propaganda. Nurtured by this transnational network, the resulting pro-Rhodesian defence of the resulting global far right on the basis of anti-communism spread from international allies and the regime, through these activists, across the U.S. grassroots as American civilians petitioned their congressional leaders to support the colonial regime.