"The key to understanding Smith," Johnson wrote, "was that, like other white Rhodesians, he clung to an almost Victorian view of the world both in moral values and in the easy assumptions of British primacy that characterised the empire." Bill Schwarz took a similar line, writing that Smith and his supporters reacted to the British Empire's demise by imagining white Rhodesians to be "the final survivors of a lost civilisation", charged with "tak on the mantle of historic Britain" in the imperial power's absence. "He spoke endlessly about how Rhodesians had been more British than the British," Boynton reflected, "and how this small community of decent, fair-minded whites had been betrayed by, well, just about everybody he could think of ... It was easy to mock Ian Smith, but he was right—both about the betrayals and about the quality of most African politicians". Smith's "not in 1,000 years" quote dominated his obituaries, a development that Peter Godwin, despite his critical stance regarding Smith and his policies, considered "unfair and inaccurate": "Over the years it has become shorn of all context and compressed into a free-floating clip that has now become his epitaph ... But there is more than enough for which to quite legitimately criticise Smith, without resorting to fabrication."