Parenting & Family Quote by Ian Smith

It lands like a confession and a dare: the respectable statesman momentarily steps into the shoes of a desperate parent and admits he would break the law. Ian Smith, a politician defined by rigid order and minority rule in Rhodesia, borrows the oldest moral loophole in the book: necessity. The line is built to short-circuit ideological debate. You can argue policy; it is harder to argue with a hungry child.

The specific intent is to claim a kind of common humanity while quietly relocating blame. Smith isn’t endorsing theft as principle; he’s framing lawbreaking as an understandable response to deprivation, a pressure valve that makes the poor’s actions legible and, by extension, containable. That matters coming from a leader associated with harsh security politics: empathy here doubles as a tool of control, implying that if society wants “order,” it must manage scarcity - or punish what scarcity produces.

The subtext is also self-exculpating. By keeping the example hypothetical (“I should think”), Smith avoids responsibility for any actual hunger under his governance while still harvesting the moral authority of compassion. It’s a politician’s version of intimacy: personalizing the crisis without conceding systemic culpability.

Contextually, the statement resonates in a Rhodesian landscape marked by racialized inequality and international isolation, where questions of legitimacy weren’t abstract. Invoking parental desperation lets Smith shift the frame from power and rights to bread-and-butter survival - a rhetorical move that narrows the audience’s moral horizon to the immediate, the domestic, the “reasonable,” and away from the political order producing the hunger in the first place.