Nelson Mandela – Page 2

Afrikaners need ‘Devo Max’ too

It is clear that SA is in dire need of an honest debate about what it means to be ’South African’

Scotland wasted an opportunity to become fully independent of the UK, yet the resultant national debate and soul-searching during the referendum had lasting effects on both Scottish and British identity. I was struck by septuagenarian designer Vivienne Westwood’s declaration: “I hate England. I like Scotland because somehow I think they are better than we are. They are more democratic.”

Looking at the kind of ethnic discourse dished up by Jonny Steinberg and Nomalanga Mkhize on what they see as white or Afrikaner identity, it is clear that South Africa is in dire need of an honest debate about what it means to be “South African” (if such a thing exists) and whether we would not relate better at a greater distance from one another. “Devo max” was the term coined during the “Indyref” and Afrikaners definitely require it, at least as far as our schools and universities are concerned.

As I have argued recently in my ebook essay, Raiders of the lost Empire: South Africa’s ‘English’ identity, this society apes everything that Britain and the British do. Even Mandela said that he aspired to be a black Englishman. As Hendrik Potgieter expressed to the Natal governor circa 1840, I can think of no fate worse than becoming English, yet so many people here are absolutely besotted with the British royals and regard South Africa as a Little Britain, smelling of bacon and eggs, especially at the breakfast table. Robin Cook’s speech on multicultural “Chicken tikka masala Britain” would also define how this Little Britain sees itself, although its national dish is probably a Spur flame-grilled hamburger, with that touch of American ambience.

From the English point of view, Afrikaners may be a moribund minority best forgotten about unless they can be slurred with perennial caricatures of apartheid or seeing Oscar Pistorius as an Afrikaner, despite the fact that only his surname is Afrikaans. However, just like “wee Scotland”, we have a right to exist, to speak our language and not to be murdered by the thousands every year.

Until now, our Afrikaans state schools have managed to avoid the depth of the crisis in education, triggered by all the fatal experiments with “outcomes-based education” and other English or Commonwealth fads. Before it gets any worse, control over Afrikaans education at all levels must handed over to us. The notion that an English person could decide what my child should be taught, how and in what language is absolutely preposterous!

As American author Jared Taylor said, there is no such thing as “white identity”. Whites are too browbeaten by constant accusations of racism to have a racial identity. But the Afrikaner nation has a strong and enduring cultural identity, much more so than that of the Scots, in fact.

Great Britain and its leaders were at equally great pains to “embrace” Scotland, lest it flees the union. Locally, Little Britain is so contemptuous of Afrikaners, Afrikaans, boerewors, Steve Hofmeyr, Die Stem and everything that goes with it, that there seems to be a mutual feeling that more separation is not only desirable, but inevitable.

We also want Devo Max, and the first step would be to return our schools and universities to us. We made them, paid for them and still administer them. They do not belong to Little Britain.

A shortened form of this column appeared as a letter in Business Day under the title Afrikaans identity needs autonomy.

Excerpt from ‘Raiders of the lost Empire’ by Dan Roodt

The English proclivity for drink, getting drunk, even the pub culture, has taken root in South Africa.

From Vanuatu ‘our’ flag and penchant for imitation

South Africa, especially these days, is trying to decide whether we should emulate Idi Amin’s Uganda or some cargo cult on the island of Vanuatu. You could call the system here a “cargo-cult democracy” and as long as we spend about a billion dollars or so every five years on an election, in between elections it’s anything goes. Anarchy, or close to it.

However, elections only serve to give the imprimatur of “democracy” to a system in which power changes hands elsewhere: in the ruling party’s headquarters or in dark deals cut with whomever benefits from the system financially.

Speaking of Vanuatu, I first became aware of the existence of this island in the early nineties when I noticed the remarkable resemblance between “our” flag and that of Vanuatu. If there were such a thing as plagiarism in flags, South Africa would be guilty of it. Yet, South Africanness, at least after the decline of Afrikaner influence, is proudly imitatory. The closer one gets in passing oneself off as British, the more “South African” one becomes. Plagiarism at university, at both under- and postgraduate level, is absolutely rife as students “copy and paste” the words and thoughts of others in order to obtain one of our increasingly worthless degrees.

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In other societies a lack of authenticity, or ersatz, showing no originality, or being a copy of something else, a simulacrum, is frowned upon. Not so in South Africa. It is part of “our” colonial heritage. Paradoxically, those revolutionary blacks who fulminate against “colonialism and capitalist exploitation” are the first to adopt the outward trappings of what they imagine a British gentleman to be. They play golf and drive expensive cars. They also drink whisky, of the expensive so-called “single malt” kind, in copious amounts. The English proclivity for drink, getting drunk, even the pub culture, has taken root in South Africa. In fact, in its aspiration to become more and more English, the country has produced the second-biggest beer company in the world, SABMiller. This is a remarkable feat, given that our GDP is only about an eighth of that of Germany, another beer-drinking nation, who was no rival to us in the beer business. As we shall see, beer and being “a nation of one beer” is fundamental to what is called the “new South African identity”.

The English and American taste for drugs has also been adopted. The other day my 18-year old daughter visited the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand and spoke to some first-year students there. (Despite its Afrikaans name, “Wits”, as it is colloquially known, is a decidedly English institution.) According to her, all they could talk about was drugs, what different narcotics they had already tried and what others they still intended to experiment with. With her Afrikaans upbringing and schooling, my daughter takes a keen interest in literature, art and philosophy, and was looking forward to an intellectual exchange with people who may have different perspectives to hers. Yet, alas, all they could talk about was drugs. There is a kind of snobbery around drugs and the English look down upon others who do not use narcotics. I strongly suspect that a lot of the opinions that we encounter in English newspapers or in the media in South Africa, were also concocted while on some form of stupefying substance. The French word for drugs, stupéfiants, expresses it very succinctly, for in the act of drugging oneself one also succumbs to stupor or becomes stupid. South Africa has plumbed such levels of stupidity over the last few years that we are regressing back to primitive, early Stone Age, or even hominid levels. Very soon South African English, which is already considerably creolised and ugly, will consist of screeches and grunts. Like the vuvuzela, a monotonous plastic instrument habitually blown at soccer matches, all communication will eventually descend to a very basic level.

There is something tragic about English consciousness, which is fundamentally unhappy, hence the need to be drugged, inebriated or numbed. Perhaps this has some connection with the global multicultural project, which aspires to the destruction of all identity, including personal identity. Only when we achieve an undifferentiated herd consciousness, an atavistic “we”, are we to become “fully human” or whatever cliché it may be called. In South Africa’s business schools, they even teach courses in “ubuntu” as an ethical principle which translates into “I am a person through others”, another way of expressing the longing for a collective, hive consciousness.

Today in South Africa, it is part of the English creed that we should in no way be “divided”. This is almost a world-wide Anglo-Saxon principle. All progress towards becoming an undifferentiated human mass, a bit like the science-fiction concept of “the Borg” in the American Star Trek series, is applauded. Anyone relinquishing his language and culture in favour of English is seen as having taken a step towards becoming part of the “greater mass” which may even be seen as a global or planetary mass.

Being English in South Africa, and not quite British (yet), is a very painful experience. Like the person who does not quite pass his matric or does not quite make the team, he is forever devoured by “what could have been”. This explains the radicalism, hatred and extremism of many English people who have committed terrorism or espoused communism or Boerehaat (hatred of the Boers) as their motto and been prepared to kill or attack civilians in the name thereof. Why is South Africa so alien to the English mind? one may ask. Of course, there is the ordinary anglophone South African, not part of the academic, media or political elite, and who is probably not seething with Boerehaat and Marxist ideals. But he or she hardly plays any role in defining what it means to be English in South Africa.

At the risk of digressing somewhat, let us look for a moment at what George Orwell had to say about being English. Among Afrikaners, the French, Germans, Spanish and many other nations, reflecting on one’s national identity, style and character is done almost naturally. To Afrikaners, it is even more, a national obsession. The reason for the Afrikaner obsession with identity is not hard to find: it is because we have been forced to share a country with a peculiarly nihilistic, overbearing, colonialist group that is so destructive of identity and culture that we have had to constantly question ourselves.

Why do they hate us so much? Why do they want to prohibit our language, traditions and customs? Is there indeed something wrong with us? The Afrikaner, being given to guilt-ridden, Calvinist introspection and self-doubt, is always trying to locate the problem within himself instead of looking at his hostile, sneering compatriot and his pathological intolerance to any other culture besides his own. In fact, although thousands of novels, essays and theses have been written about what it means to be an Afrikaner, no Afrikaner has ever tried to understand the Englishman. I could have written this essay in Afrikaans, but probably people will only agree with what I have to say and it will not be seen for the unique piece of analysis that it is, an attempt to find out what it means to be English today, in South Africa, but perhaps even globally. I strongly suspect that much of what we experience here, is also felt by people in other non-English countries. The recent essays of Richard Millet (2012) on the decline of French literature in favour of global Anglo-Saxon bestsellers, come to mind.

George Orwell is normally associated with his two dystopian novels, 1984 and Animal Farm. However, he was also one of the few English authors who ventured to reflect on what it means to be English, in his essay “England your England”. Among other things, he has this to say:

“Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this.” (Orwell 1946)

There is a kind of cliché that one may often find in Afrikaans newspapers and uttered by know-it-all Afrikaner academics: that “the Afrikaner feels inferior to the Englishman”. Of course, being an Afrikaner academic today means that you have actually accepted, not only the Anglo-American world-view, but also the ANC and Communist Party’s way of thinking, otherwise you would not have a job! So such opinions do not carry much weight. Here I am merely signalling that such a notion exists.

However, I have come across very few Afrikaners who actually feel that way, or who see themselves as inferior. Most of the time, it is the opposite. As Afrikaners dominate the English in most English sports and games that they actually play, there is rather a complacency in the Afrikaner mind that he is physically and mentally superior to the Englishman. The idea that the English are lazy and tend to concentrate on activities that are both lucrative and require little effort, is also widespread. As a farmer once explained to me, in the English-speaking province of Natal (now officially Kwazulu-Natal) sugar plantations became popular as the cane plant “grows like a weed and does not need any special attention, unlike most other agricultural crops”.

On the other hand, I would say that the liberal or communist Afrikaner has interiorised a sense of inferiority. That is because many of them have actually been to some extent anglicised, living and working in an English world, often associated with politics or the universities, where not subscribing to English stereotypes of Afrikaners would be detrimental to their careers. Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the liberal politician, as well as author André Brink are two such people. Brink has even gone so far as to proclaim that “my people do not deserve to exist and should disappear”, thereby fully embracing Anglo-Saxon ideology. Bram Fischer, the communist leader who lived in Johannesburg, surrounded by mostly internationalist communists, is another case in point.

Regarding Orwell’s observations above, the lack of artistic talent among the English, especially out here in the colonies, is highly evident. Even people without any artistic training or talent, such as William Kentridge, to name but one, are eulogized as great artists by the English media. Wherever there is artistic endeavour in South Africa, there have always been Afrikaners. Even the Nobel prizewinner, Nadine Gordimer, was first introduced to writing and literature by an Afrikaner, Uys Krige.

This is the first cause of anglophone animosity towards Afrikaans and Afrikaners. One of the first things that the new English administration did after 1994, was to destroy all cultural institutions created by Afrikaners, such as the provincial arts councils, after which Afrikaans schools and universities were attacked. Recently, the minister of higher education and leader of the South African Communist Party, Blade Nzimande, announced that “there were no longer any Afrikaans universities”, by which he meant that the anglicisation process had been completed.

In many respects, white English people and blacks share a common rancour towards Afrikaners. “Why do you think you are so special, with your own culture?” they often ask. Having a culture and language of one’s own, a strong identity, is taboo and one should join the Borg. But underlying all of this is also envy and jealousy. There will never be another Voortrekker Monument in South Africa, or the Afrikaans Language Monument at Paarl. Until recently, ninety percent of all monuments in South Africa had been erected by Afrikaners! The efforts expended by Afrikaners in commemorating their history or in maintaining their language are seen as daunting, even intimidating. There is something “unnatural” or “fascistic” in wanting to construct one’s own culture and tradition when you could be out there on the golf course, or drinking in the pub and making jokes.

Recently, the English principal of the University of Pretoria decided to ban the study of European philosophy at that institution, ostensibly as it was suspected of leading to “racism”. Studying Kant, Descartes, Bergson, Nietzsche or Heidegger was not politically correct when one could peruse American feminism, multiculturalism, gender studies, black studies, as well as Anglo-American language philosophy. Not so long ago, a female member of staff with an interest in Nietzsche wrote an article critical of feminism on a website and she was immediately threatened with disciplinary action and eventually hounded out of the university. English “tolerance” has its limits! But the suspicion that in the dark corners of European thought, especially as read by Afrikaners, could lurk ideas challenging the Afro-Saxon and Anglo-Saxon hegemony in South Africa, led to this Soviet-style ban on Continental philosophy.

So the great European philosophers have been reduced to silence in South Africa, in our “becoming English”. But some of our English are even calling for the silence of the white race itself. A few years ago, an English professor of philosophy at Rhodes University, Samantha Vice (2010), caused a stir when she argued that whites or people of European descent should remain completely silent in relation to a black government. Even where that government engaged in corruption, mismanagement, cronyism, nepotism and abuse of power, we had “no moral right to criticise”. That must certainly be the height of English political correctness. Her essay was aptly entitled, “How Do I Live in This Strange Place?” What is even more odd, is that the title was derived from an Afrikaans song from an album by Bernoldus Niemand, but as Vice opines: “While I am not an Afrikaner and so have escaped the taint that identity brings with it, I am a white South African, undeniably a product of the Apartheid system and undeniably still beneﬁting from it.

While Vice wallows in her white guilt, aided by the American concept of “whiteness”, she cannot help but add as an aside that Afrikaner identity is “tainted”. But at least she refers to an Afrikaans song, just like many English people are irritated by the majestic sight of the Voortrekker Monument to the left of the highway as one enters Pretoria from Johannesburg. Some years ago, another would-be British movie critic and man-about-town, Barry Ronge, said that the Voortrekker Monument should be painted pink and turned into a gay disco, which expressed his particular appreciation for Afrikaans culture. He also repeated various anti-Afrikaans slurs such as “rock spider” and “rocks”, which led to complaints from no fewer than 26 Afrikaans organisations to the South African Broadcasting Complaints Commission (1999):

“Barry Ronge: ‘I have always looked at that old stupid monument to the past, called Voortrekkermonument and have decided that the only sensible thing to be done with is to paint it pink and turn it into an enormous gay disco at which they can have drug crazed raves. Now that would be exactly what it deserves. (instemmende gelag) They are not going to do that, BUT they’re going to make it rock. Now how the rocks (rocks =rock spiders, rock heads =neerhalende term vir Afrikaner, Boere) that built it will feel about it (lag van plesier) a rock concert being held at the Voortrekkermonument a du du … but the people that are doing that very thing are with me in the studio, Graham Scott who is the guy who came up with this idea and Claire Johnston who is going to be there Mango Grooving her way through the first ever rock concert at the Voortrekkermonument – amazing stuff, your wicked mind mister.’”

Needless to say, the Commission found Ronge’s comments to fall entirely within the ambit of free speech, whereas the opposite would have been the case if any Afrikaner had had to have insulted an English monument, let alone a black English one.

According to Orwell then, lack of artistic talent and suspicion towards ideology, or at least attempts to systematize one’s understanding of a culture or discipline, are two characteristics of the English. The third one, hypocrisy, or what he politely calls “the power of acting without taking thought”, we also have experience of. Whereas throughout our history, Afrikaners have mostly had to deal with blacks directly on farms or in the state administration, the Englishman has kept himself aloof, residing in all-white suburbs but at the same time fulminating about “racism”. This is a common complaint also levelled at liberal journalists and academics in the United States, that something like 96% of them live in majority-white neighbourhoods, send their children to majority-white schools, and so on. These same people will then intone endless jeremiads about “the lack of integration” and “rising inequality”. Most English people in the South African government, black or white, actually send their children to private schools, use private healthcare, apart from staying in the “formerly white suburbs”. It would be too much to expect of them that they should practise their anti-racism and move to Soweto or Diepsloot, places whose “vibrancy” and “warmth” they praise in articles and books.

Even on a personal level, one must be aware that English people rarely speak their minds and would falsely bring you under the impression that they agree with you. Only later would you find out that you have actually made a tremendous mistake and it was all a ruse. During the twentieth century, Afrikaners have not only suffered a devastating betrayal by their own leaders, but also by the entire Anglo-Saxon Empire. Here and there a figure like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher stands out, but for the most part it was one betrayal after the other, by the local and the overseas English. Many of our forebears had fought on the Allied side during the two world wars and in Korea, but eventually we were simply thrown to the dogs! That includes the patriotic English South Africans and Rhodesians. Ian Smith, the former leader of Rhodesia and an RAF fighter pilot who nearly died several times during World War II, suffered the same fate. It is simply mind-boggling that Anglo-Saxons can betray not only their friends but even their own people for the sake of currying favour with the likes of Robert Mugabe or the devious little East European communist, Joe Slovo, a former leader of the South African Communist Party.

There seems to be a fundamental duplicity at work in English thought and culture that is having devastating effects on the world. Some honest Americans feel the same way about their country and what it is doing to the planet. Paul Craig Roberts (2014)recently said the following about Washington:

“The fraud perpetuated on the world by the United States in the 21st century is extraordinary. Nothing comparable has ever been witnessed in history. Not only are there the frauds of the numerous wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, almost Iran and Washington’s illegal military actions within the borders of Pakistan and Yemen), but also the vast financial frauds perpetuated on the world. Among the costs of Wall Street’s frauds are the European debt crisis, the infringements of national sovereignty of European countries by the IMF bailouts of sovereign debt, and the impoverishment of ‘rescued’ Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, along with Eastern Europe.”

Often have I wondered: Do the Anglo-Saxons have no principles? It is fine to quote Lord Palmerston, “England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only eternal and perpetual interests”, but did our local English and the wider Anglo-Saxon world really serve their interests in betraying South Africa, which will in the long run lead to Chinese domination in South Africa, as well as in the rest of Africa? Perhaps due to their hostility towards systematic thought, they “act without thinking” in a piecemeal fashion.

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Black residents trash anti-Apartheid museum

Black residents have forced the closure of a museum honouring anti-apartheid heroes, accusing the authorities of building “a house for dead people” while they live in squalor.

Once a tourist magnet, The Red Location Museum in New Brighton outside the southern city of Port Elizabeth houses hundreds of “memory boxes” containing the life stories of anti-apartheid activists, including former president Nelson Mandela.

The modernity of the R22m building, which won several international architectural awards, stands in total contrast to the plastic and corrugated iron structures which serve as houses for the neighbouring community.

The museum closed nine months ago in the face of threats by residents to assault visitors and efforts to reopen it have been met with violent protests.

Its website says only that it “is closed due to community protests”, in what is one of the oldest townships of Port Elizabeth.

The building has now been stripped by people helping themselves to electrical wiring, water pipes, power sockets, fencing and wooden fittings for their shacks.

Some security guards hired to patrol the perimeter of the building – which was also used as a research facility by historians – have abandoned their posts in fear for their lives.

“The conditions are getting worse. The fencing has been cut in several places and there is no lighting,” said one guard.

“Even the covers of the drains outside have been pilfered. It is dangerous, you don’t know when you will be attacked,” he said.

“The building used to be very busy and we used to mingle with international tourists here but now it’s a ghost.”

Chris du Preez, the museum’s acting assistant director, says no artefacts or documents were stolen or damaged during the looting.

The museum won the 2006 Lubetkin Prize awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects as the best new building outside the EU.

The building remains closed.

Source: AFP

Mayor held for Mandela fraud

The Daily Dispatch newspaper reported how politically-connected “tenderpreneurs” cashed in on the Nelson Mandela’s chaotic memorial service in December last year.

Factions in the ANC in the Eastern Cape had T-shirts made with public money.

The newspaper said it broke the story a few weeks after Mandela’s funeral.

Buffalo City municipality Mayor Zukiswa Ncitha and two others were arrested on Monday for alleged fraud involving Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, Eastern Cape officials said.

Hawks spokesperson Paul Ramaloko confirmed on Monday that Ncitha, her deputy Temba Tinta and speaker Luleka Simon-Ndzele had been arrested and would appear in the East London Magistrate’s Court on the same day.

RIP Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela Muntz, the main bully in The Simpsons.

By Brian Goldfarb.

Ben Cohen has written a most perceptive remembrance of Nelson Mandela on 5 December, the day he died, in The Algemeiner. Before quoting some of that, I’d like to add my own memories of Mandela.

Early on, Cohen remembers where he was when Mandela walked free from prison. Well, we watched it on television at home, and then listened on the radio. I remember being astounded when the radio commentator expressed surprise, not to say astonishment, when Mandela got out of his car and walked out of the prison gates.

I am old enough to have been a student with a poster remembering the Sharpeville Massacre (those reading this aged less than 30 may need to Google that) on my wall, as well as other anti-apartheid posters thereon. Indeed, the Sharpeville massacre was the final straw in creating my own personal boycott of South African goods (from then – in 1960, two years before I became a university student – until 1991, when Mandela was released from prison), and I can remember when Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to jail for “treason”. Just imagine it, being called a traitor for demanding equal treatment, indeed freedom, for your people: difficult for those under 40, perhaps even for those under 50 (sorry, I’m trying not to be a reverse ageist here, but you have to have been there, in the 60s and 70s to understand this): we saw it unfold and wondered at the stupidity of the Afrikaaner South Africans – not difficult, they did appear to have a problem in coming to terms with the modern world.

I remember thinking, when the apartheid regime (the real one: the one at the tip of the African continent) sentenced him to life imprisonment that maybe, just maybe, they had avoided the obvious risk of creating a martyr. It turned out that that they had, instead, created the only avenue of escape from the corner they were painting themselves into, even it did take 27 painful years to become a reality.

I also remember Steve Biko, effectively beaten to death, who might otherwise have been one of the contenders for the succession to Mandela as President. And I also remember that other far right whites killed another likely (and potentially great) successor to Mandela: Chris Hani, leaving only, sadly, mediocre people to succeed Mandela.

But I also remember that many of Mandela’s comrades were Jews: I remember Joe Slovo, who survived to become Housing Minister in the Rainbow Nation, before succumbing to cancer; I remember Ruth First, his wife, assassinated by BOSS (the South African Bureau of State Security) with a parcel bomb when she had been exiled to Mozambique; I remember Benjamin Pogrund, anti-apartheid fighter who, having made aliyah, now rejects the equation of Israel=apartheid; and I remember Arthur Goldreich, of whom Cohen says:

“[Mandela] recalls that he learned about guerilla warfare not from Fidel Castro, but from Arthur Goldreich, a South African Jew who fought with the Palmach during Israel’s War of Independence.” Further, Mandela “relates the anecdote that the only airline willing to fly his friend, Walter Sisulu, to Europe without a passport was Israel’s own El Al.”

Of course, many of these Jews were Stalinists (such as Joe Slovo and the viciously anti-Israel Ronnie Kasrils). To understand their position (if it’s possible to do that), I would remind readers of the book by Colin Shindler “Israel & The Left“, mentioned in my report on London’s Jewish Book Week, 2012, on this blog.

On the other hand, there are those non-Stalinists Jews, such as Albie Sachs, who lost an arm and an eye to the struggle, and the Jewish lawyers who took Mandela on as an articled clerk, when this just wasn’t done. This enabled Mandela to complete his qualifications and become an accredited lawyer of the South African system. Just as we all know that there are anti-Zionist Jews (would we condemn all Haredi Jews just because of Naturei Kartura? I hope not), similarly, we shouldn’t condemn all anti-apartheid South African Jews because of those who were and are anti-Zionist (and by implication, cast doubts on Mandela’s own philo-semitism and support for Israel).

Furthermore, for anyone who still wants to believe that Mandela was an anti-Zionist, Cohen goes on to say (re Mandela autobiography) that

“the ultimate smoking gun — the equation of Israel’s democracy with apartheid — doesn’t exist.”

There is more. Cohen goes on to note that:

“Mandela once wrote that Jews, in his experience, were far more sensitive about race because of their own history. Now, it is absolutely true that there are parallels between the oppression suffered by South African blacks under racist white rulers, and Jews living under hostile non-Jewish rulers. The notorious Group Areas Act, which restricted black residency rights, brings to mind the enforced separation of Jews into the “Pale of Settlement” by the Russian Empress Catherine in 1791. Many of the other apartheid regulations, like the ban on sexual relationships between whites and blacks, carried echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg Laws of 1935.”

Indeed, whatever their political orientation, Jews are noted for their respect for human rights, both for themselves and their fellow Jews and, just as importantly, for others, having their own flouted so often. Why else create Israel as parliamentary democracy?

All this culminates in Cohen noting that:

“Mandela’s diagnosis was that Africans should be the sovereigns of their own destiny. Similarly, the founders of Zionism wanted nothing less for the Jews.”

That is, Nelson Mandela was not only did not oppose Zionism and the idea of self-determination for Jews (i.e., a state of their own), he also recognised that South African Jews had played a great part in the fight for equality in South Africa, out of a conviction that, as the American Declaration of Independence has it, “All [people] are created equal”.

Source: Blog

NSA, FBI, DIA sued over refusal to disclose role in Mandela’s imprisonment

Mandela's legacy: Killing white children — Mandela’s legacy: Killing innocent white children

Ryan Shapiro reveals he is suing the NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency in an attempt to force them to open their records on one of the country’s greatest secrets: how the U.S. helped apartheid South Africa capture Nelson Mandela in 1962, leading to his 27 years in prison.

The U.S. has never confirmed its involvement, but details have leaked out over the years. Shapiro already has a pending suit against the CIA over its role in Mandela’s capture and to find out why it took until 2008 for the former South African president to be removed from the US terrorist watch list.

The NSA has already rejected one of Shapiro’s requests for its information on Mandela, citing “national defense.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has reminded the Chinese on her visit there that Americans were racist back then when Mandela was imprisoned: “Many decades ago, there were actually laws in America that allowed discrimination against black people like me, who are a minority in the United States. But over time, ordinary citizens decided that those laws were unfair. They called on government officials to change those laws, and they voted to elect new officials who shared their views,” she said.

“And slowly but surely, America changed. We got rid of those unjust laws. And today, just 50 years later, my husband and I are President and First Lady of the United States. And that is really the story of America –- how over the course of our short history, through so many trials and struggles, we have become more equal, more inclusive, and more free.”

Crime and rape in South Africa soared after Mandela was released, a white genocide was set in motion, the US declared the “War on Terror” and launched the invasions of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, making the world a much less safer place.

Source: Democracy Now/The Weekly Standard

Verwoerd’s echo from a dead man talking

by Joseph Secrève

What do Hendrik Verwoerd and Ray Jasper have in common?

At first glance this question may seem a bit peculiar, with Verwoerd being the well-known and much maligned ‘father of apartheid’ and Ray Jasper being the black rap musician who was executed by lethal injection in the state of Texas a week ago.

One could start by saying that both were born in the Netherlands and both were killed in their adopted countries. Verwoerd was assassinated because of his firm belief in ethnically homogeneous nations, and Jasper was put to death because of, well, what appears to be the same belief. Jasper was convicted for slashing the throat of a record producer in 1998, but due to a technicality in Texas law, he maintained throughout his stay that he was not deserving of death but of life imprisonment. Instead, he blamed an all-white judge and jury for being racist at his trial, which according to him helped overturn the possibility of a life sentence into a death sentence.

In Texas, a murder alone carries a life sentence. However, a murder along with another related felony, such as theft of the victim’s property leads to a death sentence. This catch in the legal system is why Jasper had pleaded for life instead of death.

But there’s more: In an exchange of letters to blogger Hamilton Nolan, Jasper revealed a more profound side of himself, one that would not typically be associated with the stereotype of a homicidal rap musician. The content of the letter, albeit slightly incoherent at places, does reveal some poignant insights, and perhaps unwittingly touches on an important topic regarding race relations.

These following excerpts are quoted from Jasper’s letter:

“When I walked into prison at 19 years old, I said to myself ‘Damn, I have never seen so many black dudes in my life’. I mean, it looked like I went to Africa. I couldn’t believe it. The lyrics of 2Pac echoed in my head, ‘The penitentiary is packed/ and its filled with blacks’.

It’s really an epidemic, the number of blacks locked up in this country. That’s why I look, not only at my own situation, but why all of us young blacks are in prison. I’ve come to see, it’s largely due to an identity crisis. We don’t know our history. We don’t know how to really indentify with white people. We are really of a different culture, but by being slaves, we lost ourselves.

You take the identity crisis, mix it with capitalism, where money comes before empathy, and you’ll have a lot of young blacks trying to get money by any means because they’re trying to get out of poverty or stay out of poverty. Now, money is what they try to find an identity in. They feel like if they get rich, legal or illegal, they’ve become somebody. Which in America is partly true because superficially we hail the rich and despise the poor.

A French woman who moved to America asked me one day, ‘Why don’t black kids want to learn?’ Her husband was a high school teacher. She said the white and Asian kids excel in school, but the black and Hispanic kids don’t. I said that all kids want to learn, it’s just a matter of what you’re trying to teach them. Cutting a frog open is not helping a black kid in the ghetto who has to listen to police sirens all night and worry about getting shot. Those kids need life lessons. They need direction. When you have black kids learning more about the Boston Tea Party than the Black Panther Party, I guarantee you won’t keep their attention. But it was the Black Panther Party that got them free lunch.”

Interestingly enough, this dilemma was one of the most important motives behind the Verwoerdian system of racial segregation. Because of the stark differences in culture, Verwoerd foresaw the dangers of having people from a different kith and kin enter an urbanised world that was not a reflection of their lifestyle. With this alienation comes frustration, as age-old customs have to compete with modern laws. The social breakdown and violence in South-Africa’s east coast cities in the early fifties could attest to this. The old customs are not valid anymore and the modern urban laws are too distant and incongruent to properly solidify into their character. The cost of reconciling these contradictory systems could easily lead to personal distress, apathy and hatred.

This might help explain the pathos mentioned by Jasper, and he raises an important issue in this piece. Slavery has been abolished in the West for over 150 years, yet it appears as if certain population groups still haven’t been able to unshackle the leg irons of history. Something is depriving them of their sense of freedom. Racial discrimination is often cited as the culprit, but in reality this discrimination is only a palpable manifestation of a deeper rift. This conflict is best described by historian Oswald Spengler, a phenomenon he named historical pseudomorphosis.

“By the term ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.”

Hence the importance to develop a stable identity that ties in with a people’s history. As Verwoerd once stated, no nation can achieve greater heights for itself by treading on the corpse of a fellow nation. He recognised a fundamental truism that all major cultural achievements arise from within.

Should African Americans be taught the finer details of their history though, similar thoughts as expressed by Jasper would undoubtedly come to the fore. Not many people today realise that the most important black consciousness and civil rights leaders were not in favour of integrating with whites either. Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and others resented the idea of mixing races. Malcolm X’s mentor Elijah Muhammad even stated that he “would take his hat off for any white man who wants to stay white”, emphasising his sense for maintaining one’s own culture, black and white. The fact that Garvey and Muhammad were also fervent admirers of Hitler and the Nazi’s has been kept out of modern-day historical teaching, as well as Malcolm X’s attempt to garner support from the Ku Klux Klan to help resist racial integration.

The status of ethnic integration being hailed as a noble and universal virtue has thus far had a very short shelf life, and doesn’t appear to strike a chord with most people dealing with its full complexities. In fact, it has rather led to situations where one group wants to rule over another, and as the self-esteem of an upwardly mobile minority group improves, so does its will to inflict harm upon the shrinking majority group. The news coverage of Trayvon Martin versus Antonio West serves as a case in point. Not to mention many leading Ivy League scholars who would stop at nothing short of an all-out witch hunt against the white population. Harvard professors Noel Ignatiev, Randall Kennedy and president Obama’s friends Charles Ogletree and Derrick Bell can’t spew enough anti-white hatred, regardless of the fact that they hold positions that would not have been possible without the founders of Puritain America.

Interestingly enough, Jasper also offers a tentative way out of this:

“How many black kids would change their outlook if they knew that they were only considered 3/5’s of a human being according to the U.S Constitution? That black people were considered part animal in this country. They don’t know that. When you learn that, you carry yourself with a different level of dignity for all we’ve overcome.”

Quite ironic that a rap musician on death row calls upon the dignity of people, whereas the nouveau academic elite embrace malevolent principles that would have made Stalin blush.

Just as Verwoerd mentioned, once Mandela became president, the entire West would fall victim to the pernicious ideology of Communism.

Either way, this does not portend well for the future.

‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Ukraine

It can best be described as killing your friends once they become a burden.

An effort is underway to clean up the image of the junta now in control of Ukraine. Although Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) played an instrumental role in the coup, its radical nationalism continues to be an embarrassment for the new regime put in place by the IMF, the EU and the United States.

“Night of the Long Knives” refers to a series of political murders conducted by Hitler and the Nazis after they assumed power. In addition to opponents of the regime, the Nazis assassinated a number of paramilitary brownshirts who earlier specialized in fighting against paramilitary units of political parties opposed to the Nazis and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, union members and Jews.

It is also a popular theme in South Africa, where state security agents regularly bait conservative whites to “rise up” against black crime and the ongoing genocide against white farmers, hoping to draw renewed international sympathy for “mistreated and oppressed blacks”.

However, the South African government did deploy thousands of troops inside the country and added tons of fluoride to the water supply before they finally announced the death of Nelson Mandela last year, fearing indeed that blacks would go on an open killing spree against all whites, not only white farmers.

That would obviously not have supported the narrative that Anglo-Americans have fabricated about South Africa: where kindly, forgiving blacks are oppressed by cruel, destructive whites.

Similary, the Western narrative about “freeing Ukraine” was beginning to suffer from a stark reality infusion.

The corporate media has tried to underplay the violent character of the Ukranian organization, but Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, made this virtually impossible when he allegedly made an appeal to Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov to assist the ultra-nationalist group in its crusade against Russia. In addition to courting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, Right Sector is rabidly pro-American.

Numerous incidents of violence and intimidation by Right Sector have gone unreported in the West. “In the days since the US-backed coup, according to citizens in Ukraine I am in contact with, after the new regime dissolved the National Police, members of the Right Sector took over police functions in Kiev. Groups of young men, mainly members of Right Sector, have been patrolling the streets armed with baseball bats and weapons,” writes F. William Engdahl. “In some documented instances according to these reports from ordinary Ukrainians, they come in groups to homes of people identified as ‘pro-Russian’ and force them out of their homes or take their possessions, as they term it ‘privatization’ actions. The population lives in a state of terror they liken to the Stalin-era terror.”

It appears an effort to “clean up” its image and make it more palatable to the oligrachs moving in on Ukraine is now underway. On Tuesday it was reported that Oleksandr Muzychko, aka Sashko Biliy, Right Sector’s second in command, was shot dead in a cafe in Rivne in western Ukraine.

According to the BBC, Ukraine’s Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Yevdokimov said Muzychko was shot dead after opening fire on police and Sokol special forces during a raid at the cafe. They planned to arrest him and other ultra-nationalists for criminal activity. Ukrainian authorities described Muzychko as a gang leader.

Ukrainian MP Oles Doniy, however, provided a different account. He said Muzychko was abducted while traveling in western Ukraine and executed. His body was later found with hands bound and a fatal bullet wound to the heart. A photo posted on Twitter seems to confirm this second account.

Mandela tribute mistakes Morgan Freeman for dead ‘icon’

American actor Morgan Freeman is known for his portrayal of South African leader Nelson Mandela in the Clint Eastwood drama Invictus.

Perhaps Freeman’s performance in the 2009 was too good as it lead to some confusion for an Indian-based billboard artist.

An owner of a billboard dedicated to Nelson Mandela was red-faced on Thursday after the discovery that a photo of actor Morgan Freeman was used instead of one of the anti-apartheid hero.

The billboard was erected on the side of a road in Coimbatore as part of memorials across India and the world to Mandela, who died on December 5.

Mandela: myths vs. facts

by Christo Landman

The ceremonies and media propaganda around the death of Nelson Mandela, cost millions of rands. Those rands were to a large extent paid by taxpayers of whom the large majority are white. By means of social grants, they also have to financially support 17 million people, the vast majority of whom are black.

The propaganda wave surrounding the life and death of the then President Mandela is a blend of myth and fact. Khehla Shubane of the Centre for Policy Studies verbalized the Mandela mythology on CNN, which hasnow become the official Mandela mythology.

But Shimon Peres, a former Prime Minister of Israel, once said of the Israeli and Palestinian disputes: “Personally, I have very little patience for history. I believe that to imagine is more important than to remember.” Myths are figments of the imagination, but to remember is the recollection of facts.

Imagination is the fertile ground in which myths flourish. Imagine what Mandela was thinking as he looked through the bars of his prison window overlooking Table Mountain. The myth developed that he had had a Damascene experience and converted from a man who planned violence as the only way to achieve his political objectives, to a man who rejects all forms of violence and instead embraces reconciliation, forgiveness, tolerance and accommodating interpersonal and group differences.

Imagination became perception, which grew into mythical proportions to be finally presented as historical fact. It is true that he was a skillful politician and a worthy opponent, who never allowed side issues to influence the core issues on the table. It was a fact that during his five-year tenure as the country’s first black president, he achieved more for peace and harmony in a deeply divided South Africa than Mbeki and Zuma, who succeeded him during the fifteen years thereafter. The success of his policy of accommodating differences between cultural groups during his reign supported the growing myth of the saintly Madiba.

But the historical facts that emerged since his retirement do not support the notion of Mandela’s fundamental sense of righteousness and moral values. During the fifteen years since his retirement he never ever pronounced his displeasure at the way the ANC had converted from a liberation movement to a plundering national mafia. Did he condone what his successors were doing? Did he condone their immoral return to outdated tribal customs in the face of the need for a unified South Africa, where one race group is not superior to another? Or did he merely lack the courage to defend his moral convictions such as Archbishop Tutu so often does?

That failure on his part drew a line through the Mandela myth and has exposed him as a shrewd political strategist and not the moralist he is made out to be. The world conveniently has conveniently forgotten about the last fifteen years of Mandela’s life on earth before catapulting him as a saint into future mythology.

It is therefore fitting to review the actual historical facts of South Africa in order to gain a perspective to evaluate the pre- and post-Mandela era.

It seems that mythmaking is a fact of life in the history of countries and peoples. South Africa is no exception.

Among Afrikaners the myth is accepted as fact that the Dutch came to RSA with the godly purpose to Christianize blacks. In fact, they came to the Cape of Good Hope to open a trade mission between Europe and India.
On the other hand, blacks believe sincerely that they were indigenous to RSA and that their land was stolen by whites. The fact is that the black tribes originated in the central parts of Africa and moved to the south in three great streams. In Southern Africa different language groups occupied different geographical areas. This is still so! The constitution of SA 1996 lists the following black language communities: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwazi, Tshivenga, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhoas and isiZulu. In the 1993/4 financial year the government spent R650 mill on 4 554 tribal leaders, which included 18 kings and queens.

The further fact is that the Dutch occupied land at the Cape which was deemed to be “no-man’s-land”. Here and there nomadic Khoi and San tribes were found but what was absent was a government over an identifiable territory with fixed borders and with its own administration.

Another severe problem is that the original history of the black peoples of Southern Africa is not a written one, but a verbal one — so that mythmaking is obviously at the order of the day. The history of the whites is a written one, of which the facts are verifiable. Some of these facts include the following:

Dutch temporary occupation was a business transaction and when the Free Burger farmers emerged and moved to the interior, the occupation of the Cape in international law obtained a permanent character.
The numbers of the Dutch were strengthened by the French Huguenots and by some Germans and later, after the first and second British occupation of the Cape, by some English and Scots.
White civilization over a period of 2 700 years grew through the following phases: organized agriculture, education, mining, technological innovations, industrialization and an electronic revolution. Differently said: through a pre-modern society to modernism and rationalism to post-modernism!
On the other hand, when the first contacts of the whites with blacks other than the Khoi and San “first peoples” took place in 1675, their agricultural tradition was not organized at all and land ownership was the collective property of the tribal king … as is still the case in many of the tribal communities today.
As a matter of fact, the land ownership at Qunu, where Nelson Mandela is buried, is owned by the Tembu King who is the trustee of land ownership. This is the case in many a Southern African country, such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and others. In RSA there are strong forces at work to abolish private ownership of land.

Ideologically speaking, the divide between white and black is just as strong. British colonialism made a huge impact on Afrikaners and the black peoples. In the case of the Afrikaners British colonialism tried to impose the British way of life on them. Those Afrikaners and black elite groups who adopted the English life-style were in a limited way integrated. Hence, the British influence in RSA actually laid the foundation for a class system; which system is now, after the demise of a policy of ethnic diversity, dominant.

The Afrikaners, on the other hand, advocated the Republican system of government. British liberalism based on the advancement of individual rights, as manifested in Chapter 2 of the Constitution of SA 1996, had a great impact on Afrikaner political thinking. As a matter of fact, a dominant group of Afrikaners now vote for the Democratic Alliance, which Alliance adopts liberal democracy as the only viable alternative to ANC collectivism and the workings of social democracy.

Black political thinking in the leadership of the so-called liberation movements was heavily influenced and supported by the philosophy of Marxism and Soviet Communism whose ideological thinking was closer to the collectivism of the traditional social organization of the various black ethnic groups.

The political development of SA since 1652 developed in various phases:

Since 1652 the Dutch forefathers of the Afrikaners established themselves in the Cape as a permanent settlement.
This was followed by two occupations by the United Kingdom, which led to the advancement of the Voortrekkers to the interior.
It was during their move to the interior that the Vootrekkers encountered the AmaXhosa.
The British introduced segregation of the races to supplement the segregation of a social class system.
The Voortrekkers established themselves in two main Republics: of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
The gold rush to the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal Republic inspired British colonialism to occupy the Transvaal Republic as well as of the Orange Free State.
The British were defeated in the First War of Liberation.
During the second War of Liberation, British colonialism became famous for its concentration camp policy whereby 27 000 Afrikaner women and children (one third of all children in the Boer Republics) died of starvation and diseases.

In 1910 the Union of SA came into being which resulted in the amalgamation of four provinces and a large number of traditional tribal authorities. However, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana, although politically part of British SA and geographically part of Southern Africa, were given the option to remain outside the Union, which they did. In so doing they created three ethnic sovereign states. The other language communities found themselves in subordinate positions as part of the Union. In 1913 their territorial bases were acknowledged by law.

The underdeveloped status of the tribal authorities and the gold rush led to an unprecedented influx of blacks to the four (European-style) provinces. To such an extent that the European-style governments in the provinces introduced extraordinary measures to protect Western standards in policies which became known as “petty apartheid”.

In 1948, when the Afrikaners took over the power of government, they tried to unscramble the egg, made by British colonialism and imperialism. “Petty apartheid” then became only the object of a broader policy of territorially based nation states. In 1960 SA became a Republic outside the British Commonwealth. The so-called TBVC states (Transkei, Botswana, Venda and Ciskei) opted for independence, but lacked recognition by the international community. The role of the Marxist-inspired liberation movements, such as the African National Congress, as a tool of communist expansionism in the cold war, cannot be emphasized enough.

Eventually apartheid and Zionism were declared racist ideologies by the UN. The propaganda onslaught against the policy of separate but equal development became notorious. In the meantime SA was plagued by terrorist acts, such as the Rivonia case, in which outcome Nelson Mandela and others were given life sentences. The fact remains that the then government of SA was never defeated by acts of violence. In his later years the Mandela groups could have been released much earlier, if only they were prepared to renounce violence.

In the end both the ruling National Party of SA and the liberation groups had to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The settlement comprised the following:

34 constitutional principles for state formation, of which principle 12 read that collective self-determination be acknowledged.
An interim Constitution of 1993.
A final Constitution of 1996.

The 1993 Constitution provided for the Afrikaners a Volkstaat Council to investigate forms or models of self-determination. It also included a non-diminution clause for the protection of the Afrikaans language.

The 1996 Constitution included the following clauses to enhance the right of self-determination of (language) communities:

Internal autonomy for organs of civil society [s.31(1)(b)].
Constitutional councils for the protection and promotion of the collective rights of (language, religious, cultural and other) communities (s.185)
Territorial self-determination for blacks on their collectively owned tribal lands (s.211 and 212)
Territorial self-determination for communities other than communities based on customary law (s.235)
A (constitutional) Commission for the Promotion and the Protection of the Rights of Language, Religious, Cultural and other Communities (s.185)

In other words, to a large extent, the ANC is party to a constitution which recognizes many of the principles now post facto discredited as apartheid measures. However, the constitution says one thing, but in practice the ANC-government governs SA as if a negotiated settlement never occurred.

Economically speaking, the development of the so-called homelands is still stunted, due to the non-cooperation of the tribes with the economic system of border industries and industries in the tribal lands on an agency basis. It is also a best-kept secret that white South Africans simply had no rights within the tribal lands, but a lot of propaganda is being made regarding “petty apartheid” measures in the then four provinces.

In conclusion: because of the resistance of the liberation movements to adopting the policies of separate but equal development, the tribal lands are still underdeveloped and their people pre-modern in their outlook. What we see in SA after the failure of so-called apartheid is new colonialism of a special kind: namely the imposition of African collectivism on inter alia the white population with their European heritage. It is an invasion of masses of Africans, and the creation of innumerable so-called informal settlements in conditions of poverty around the cities. It is estimated that about 8 million illegal immigrants from other African countries invaded the liberated South African society. At the same time what we observe is a class of super-rich Blacks with their limos and then 17 million Blacks on social welfare. The real catastrophe facing SA is when the declining economy of the country becomes incapable of paying social grants; a condition which will start a fire that will burn down SA as well as all the myths on which the present de facto government is based.

The Mandela myth would then have failed to liberate the country, as it ignored the hard realities of a developing state with the need for an economy based on sound principles of modernity, competitiveness and hard work.

Dr. Christo Landman is a former South African diplomat and currently active in Afrikaner cultural organisations. His columns in Afrikaans may be read here.

Mandela: muti for white guilt

by Dan Roodt

Ever since Nelson Mandela died, but even before, one was utterly flabbergasted before the intensity of media fervour pouring out en hommage to the Big Man. In Africa, of course, there are all kinds of theories about Big Men, some more politically correct than others. The tribal elder meets the Soviet personality cult, and we get Idi Amin Dada. Or Charles Taylor. Or Robert Mugabe.

If there is one thing I can stand even less than African Big Men, it is British journalists convulsing on the ground in effusive praise of them. Who still remembers the blasts of praise from Fleet Street when Mugabe assumed power in the ex-Rhodesia? For much of the past ten days while South Africa lit the long-awaited Big Candle, visible from outer space without a doubt, we had to endure near-hysterical outpourings exalting the deceased ex-terrorist. One such scribe from the island north of the Continent – I forget which, there were so many this week – wrote: “Mandela could have been president for life but he chose to stay a single term, for the sake of democracy in Africa!”

Democracy in Africa. Oh, yes. If Mandela’s successor at the helm of this decaying country, Thabo Mbeki, were to be believed, democracy was invented in Africa. No less. The point is that there is now such an Afrocentric phantasmagoria, cultivated in Britain and the United States, that anything is now possible, even Mbeki’s “African century”. The notion that Africa will come to dominate the globe economically, politically and militarily, was first articulated by another African Big Man, born Joseph-Desiré Mobutu but whose full regal appellation afterwards became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga.

Novelist V.S. Naipaul wrote somewhat ironically about Mobutu’s dreams of impoverished Europeans beseeching African countries for much-needed aid in 2000. Yet the notion of Nelson Mandela being “the greatest leader of the twentieth century” and voted as the most respected global leader in at least one poll. must inspire some doubt in Naipaul himself. Contemplating the “transformed” inner city of Johannesburg in our postapartheid paradise, Naipaul wrote in The masque of Africa:

It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.

There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink.

I have often thought that Mandela had bewitched a good portion of the Anglo-American ruling class that in turn infected the stupid Europeans who are progressively losing the capacity for independent thought. All this talk of “Madiba magic” might be code for some supernatural, Harry Potter-like influence.

As everone knows, some forms of muti are taken as a cure for an evil spell, while others are used precisely to bewitch the victim. A black man who has designs on a woman who is rejecting him could buy some muti from a sangoma to ensure that she falls in love with him.

In Europe, Nietzsche and others wrote about the “twilight of the idols”. However, in Africa the idols are thriving, with the messianic Mandela being the biggest idol of them all. It seems only a few cantankerous Christians still refuse to bow to him, but not the Clintons, the king of the Netherlands or Barack Obama. Even George W. Bush came as a pilgrim to South Africa this week.

During his speech at Soccer City on the outskirts of black Soweto, Obama cast himself in the role of Mandela’s understudy, a humble disciple to the famous Xhosa.

I suppose in the days of the Roman Empire, people were also nonplussed about the seemingly inexorable rise of a strange new cult, Christianity. In the face of global grief over Mandela’s “exchanging the temporary for the eternal”, as the local Afrikaans saying goes, most mainstream conservatives have joined in eulogizing Mandela. British PM David Cameron, who had wanted to “hang Mandela”, together with other Young Conservatives, reacted to Mandela’s death with:

A great light has gone out in the world. Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time.

The normally truculent George W. Bush who had unleashed a war on other terrorists had only kind words for the man who had co-authorized the Church Street and Amanzimtoti bombs:

President Mandela was one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time. He bore his burdens with dignity and grace, and our world is better off because of his example.

How do we explain such empathy, nay admiration, for a card-carrying member of the South African Communist Party in so-called Western conservative leaders? After all, I cannot recall similar expressions of sorrow when Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party or the East German stalwart, Erich Honecker, expired in 1997 and 1994, respectively.

The answer is that, unlike the venerable European leftists Marchais and Honecker, who had also waged a life-long struggle against fascism and racism – both leaders were among Mandela’s staunchest allies – Comrade Mandela assuages white guilt.

Susan Sontag’s notorious adage, that “the white race is the cancer of human history”, has become almost an official doctrine in the United States and Great Britain, eagerly emulated by the hapless Europeans. Few people have written about this phenomenon, except French “new philosopher” Pascal Bruckner who published two books about it, aptly entitled The tears of the white man: compassion as contempt and The tyranny of guilt: an essay on Western masochism.

Throughout the past week, here in South Africa and elsewhere, whites indulged in moral self-flagellation. A Dutch journalist, resident in South Africa, declared apropos of Mandela as symbol: “We had 40 years of apartheid, but 400 years of colonialism.” I daresay, four hundred years will not be enough to atone for the sins of colonialism and apartheid.

Probably I have referred to this process before, but one of the most repulsive aspects of white, Western guilt, is how South African whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, have been made into literal scapegoats for it. Every time one of us gets murdered, raped or tortured under the mayhem that Mandela’s ANC regime has brought to South Africa, the West’s burden is proportionately leavened.

For all the odes to Mandela’s “wisdom”, sense of politics and so on, most of his public pronouncements consist of commonplaces and homilies befitting a school boy of very young age. His listeners melt away in awe when he says: “Let bygones be bygones.” His theatrical, even cheap and calculated trick of putting on the Springbok rugby jersey in 1995 is praised as a stroke of genius.

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Many Afrikaners have experienced this from Western whites. To them, nothing that we can say, write or compose is even remotely interesting. The handful of modern Afrikaner composers are arguably among the most creative and interesting in the world, yet their music is almost completely unknown. Afrikaans poetry is arguably among the best, even compared to that in much larger languages, yet besides Afrikaners and a few Flemings, no-one has ever taken cognisance of its existence. White guilt excludes the recognition of white talent, especially in the ranks of other “guilty” whites.

Once a young, blonde woman from here recounted to me how she was sent to a European country on a scholarship, together with a black counterpart. Although attractive, intelligent and educated, her European hosts evinced a degree of disinterest in her bordering on rudeness. Despite having been born and bred in Africa, she was white and therefore deemed to be just some displaced European like themselves. The exact opposite behaviour was de rigueur when it came to her fellow black student. She was seen as an object of immense fascination and hidden wisdom, almost like Mandela. Every white European in her presence smiled broadly, addressed her in overly polite terms and posed unending questions about her past and her upbringing. In the same way, the fact that Mandela had herded cattle as a boy according to Xhosa custom arouses far more curiosity than the pedestrian upbringing of some white in Pretoria who learned the cello and read Greek myths and Grimm’s fairytales as a child.

It is as if whites have taken on the behaviour of blacks described by black revolutionary, Frantz Fanon in Black skin, white mask:

The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question…

After his organisation had placed bombs on city sidewalks, in bars and restaurants and killed thousands of blacks in internecine power struggles, including by the infamous necklace method, Mandela was praised for preaching moderation and “reconciliation”. Mandela presided over hordes of sadists wantonly looting, burning and killing their fellows. Such incidence of violence and destruction was, as usual, reinterpreted and recoded by guilt-complexed white journalists and pundits as being pleas for democracy and togetherness. Or free housing, affirmative action and racial quotas in sport, all of which South African blacks deserve in copious amounts, as liberals and leftists clamorously assure us. Of course, riots, violence and sadism continue unabated in South Africa, but because there is now a black government and the perpetrators of such violence are black too, any criticism of such behaviour is expressed in muted tones, if at all.

The Western world expected of South African whites to commit political suicide, which they meekly did. De Klerk and his National Party’s vague dreams of power-sharing came to nought and the former so-called Afrikaner leaders are too embarrassed to admit their abject failure in securing any kind of reasonable future for their constituents.

The corollary of white surrender in South Africa has been the sudden birth of a ready-made black state, a kind of African dream. Whites have been simply pushed aside and most of the state, industrial and mining apparatus taken over by blacks and those communist whites having clearly demonstrated their loyalty to the ANC and SACP through participation in terror and sabotage.

Through the sheer effects of the vast propaganda campaign conducted around Mandela and the apartheid stereotype, many people assume that prior to 1994 South Africa had been as backward as Burkina Faso or Malawi where locals subsist on slightly more than a dollar a day. It is routinely supposed by outsiders that under white rule there were hardly any schools or universities, except ones reserved for whites where they were taught some form of Nazi/racist doctrine. Presumably the roads, multi-storey buildings, concrete bridges and highways, hospitals and more than twenty universities were constructed by Mandela himself or those in his immediate entourage. After all, as the BBC journalists and others in the know assure us, he was the “father of modern South Africa”. A miracle worker, indeed.

Many whites in Europe and North America feel extremely uncomfortable about the fact that Africa is so backward and poor – “underdeveloped” – compared to other continents and regions of the world. European colonialism is usually blamed for this state of affairs, except that it has endured under African rule since the early nineteen-sixties. Also, countries like Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia that have been independent of white rule for centuries, have not fared any better. Both Liberia and Ethiopia are classified among the poorest countries in the world, with Haiti – “the world’s first black republic” as Thabo Mbeki called it – being not only among the world’s poorest, but also the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Eighty percent of Haitians live under the poverty line and fifty-four percent in abject poverty. According to the Red Cross, seven out of Haitians survive on less than US$2 per day.

However, thanks to the “miracle” brought by Mandela and his backers in the ex-Warsaw Pact countries, as well as the UK, the USA, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, everyone may now point to a successful “black state”, the Republic of South Africa. Even the names of towns and cities founded by Afrikaner pioneers are changed to Bantu ones to make them “more African”, completing the illusion of black engineering, scientific, architectural, financial and economic success.

It is no wonder that FW de Klerk is so popular in the West and was cheered in Soweto this week. He had his own people subjugated and their hard-earned assets taken away so that not only South African blacks could feel better about themselves, but in order that the white man shedding tears over his guilt in Western Europe and North America could breathe a sigh of relief.

In a real sense, Mandela and his myth are the muti of the West. But his fame and glory come at a terrible price: the disenfranchisement of the white minority, the hijacking of their public and private assets, as well as their ultimate expulsion from their fatherland as in the Zimbabwean example.

Unless South African whites are able to shake off the stupor in which they find themselves as a result of their decades-long brainwashing into left-extremist illusions by the viciously lying Western media, their ultimate fate will be far more tragic than that of their Zimbabwean counterparts. as many more will be killed than are already dying in the ubiquitous farm murders and suburban house attacks.

The indigenous Afrikaners are now seen as foreigners in the country they had built, together with – ironically – the illegal immigrants from other African countries who are also randomly massacred by South African blacks in so-called “xenophobic attacks”.

All those Africans elsewhere on the continent who cheer Mandela for his “victory over the hated whites” should be aware that Mandela’s followers would kill you too, if ever you set foot here.

While the West and its media perverts will maintain its silence over such atrocities.

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This foreign African was set alight by locals, with a white SA policeman dousing the flames just in time

Mugabe: Mandela was great friend

Nelson Mandela with Joshua Nkomo — The disingenuous Mandela with Joshua Nkomo

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe described Nelson Mandela as a “great friend” and “a man of real principle”.

Mugabe was among many world leaders who attended the memorial service for Mandela at the FNB Stadium, in Johannesburg on Tuesday. On Wednesday he went to the Union Buildings, in Pretoria, to view Mandela’s body lying in state, Timeslive reported.

Mugabe denied that there had been differences between himself and Mandela. “I don’t know about any feud,” Mugabe said on his return to Harare.

“If anything, there was an alliance. We worked very well with him when he came out of prison. We gave him support.

“We established the principle of national reconciliation at independence in 1980. [South Africa] took it over and used it as a basis to create what [it now has, the] rainbow nation.

In the seven years leading to 1987 Mugabe had ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent Zimbabweans through a “special” brigade that reported directly to him. That unit, named the fifth brigade, trained by experts hired from North Korea, murdered thousands of Zimbabweans under the watch and directives of Robert Mugabe.

Robert Mugabe like Mandela – a tribal Xhosa – are minority leaders who prey on the peaceful nature and reluctance of people to live under chaos and violence.

The terrible wounds the Fifth Brigade inflicted on Matabeleland in the early 1980s still show. The countryside is under-populated, there is even less employment in the towns than there is in the rest of Zimbabwe, and people are scared to talk.

But ample evidence of some of the massacres carried out there between 1982 and 1986 exist. Followers of Mugabe’s rival, Joshua Nkomo, were killed in their thousands.

The Fifth Brigade, like Mr Mugabe’s government and administration, was mostly Shona-speaking. Matabeleland is populated mostly by Ndebeles, the descendants of Zulus who came to the area in the 1830s.

Many in Matabeleland describe the campaign of murder as genocide.

Joseph Buchena Nkatazo co-ordinated an investigation carried out some years ago by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

Mr Nkatazo says in the areas where they had been able to investigate, they had found evidence of more than 20,000 deaths. He was sure there must have been many more elsewhere.

Mandela knew about the massacres at the time, but never spoke out against them.

Mugabe only had praise for Mandela on Thursday. “From our point of view, we have lost a great friend, a revolutionary and a man of real principle. That’s why we went to give him a send-off so that we would be satisfied that the love we had for him, the historical alliance that we created in the fight against imperialism and colonialism, will not have been historically lost by our being absent,” Mugabe said.

Mugabe, who turns 90 in February, secured a seventh term in office in July.

The Zimbabwean leader received an applause on Tuesday at the Mandela memorial service, whereas President Jacob Zuma was booed.

Mugabe will not travel to Qunu, in Eastern Cape, for the burial at the weekend.

Mandela mum about systematic murder of whites

by Ilana Mercer

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Why would a consummate narcissist snap a “selfie” of himself at the funeral of Nelson Mandela?

How was it that a random gesticulator—and a very cool, creative guy, if you ask me—officiated as a sign-language interpreter at the Mandela memorial?

What could possibly have driven the handshake between dictator numero uno (the uncrowned king of the killer drones) and dictator No. 2 (Raul Castro)?

These are some of the weighty—evidently inexplicable—questions with which mainstream media are currently preoccupied in their ongoing Mandela monomania.

My homeland South-Africa is a dominant-party state where might makes right. However, due to the same malfunctioning media’s remedial revisionism, a “Rambo Nation” has been marketed to the world as the mythical “Rainbow Nation.”

To the American media, mining Mandela’s legacy has meant repeating the man’s fortune-cookie profundities and warmed-over wisdom.

RT TV, however—“Cross Talk,” in particular—has endeavored to dig deeper into the deceased leader’s legacy. The price I paid this week for smashing RT’s “Cross-Talk” set, so to speak, was this:

Despite twice providing producers with the necessary biographical details, my authorship of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” chronicling “The Heart of Darkness” that is Mandela’s South Africa, was kept under-wraps. Concealed as well was my WND affiliation. (Having no make-up is plenty punishment to any woman, however, the duty to bear Christian witness trumped vanity.) The other panelists you are about to watch—Mandela hagiographers both—had their credentials, affiliations, and yet-to-be-published books advertised.

When truth is smuggled onto television, it is rationed.

Since praag.org has never rationed the truth, what follows is an excerpt from the book that dare not speak its name on Russia Today, much less on American Big Media.

“Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G” is the title of Chapter 4 in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” It analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Mandela and his predecessors have lent to the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. The chapter includes a historic corrective to the glitterati-created myth that is Mandela:

THE CHE GUEVARA OF AFRICA
To some extent, Mandela’s legend has been nourished—even created—by sentimental Westerners. The measure of the man whom Oprah Winfrey and supermodel Naomi Campbell have taken to calling “Madiba”—Mandela’s African honorific; Winfrey and Campbell’s African affectation—has been determined by the soggy sentimentality of our MTV-coated culture. “Madiba’s” TV smile has won out over his political philosophy, founded as it is on energetic income redistribution in the neo-Marxist tradition, on “land reform” in the same tradition, and on ethnic animosity toward the Afrikaner.

Guru and gadfly, sage and showman, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is not the focus of this monograph. Boatloads of biographical stuffing can be found in the odes penned to the man. Concentrating on Mandela, moreover, in a narrative about South Africa today would be like focusing on Jimmy Carter in an account of America of 2010. Going against the trend of hagiography as we are, it must be conceded that, notwithstanding Mandela’s agreement with the “racial socialism” currently contributing to the destruction of South Africa, his present role in his country’s Zimbabwefication is more symbolic—symbolic such as his belated, tokenistic condemnation of Mugabe to an intellectually meaty crowd of “moody models, desperate divas and priapic ex-Presidents,” who convened to celebrate Nelson’s ninetieth. The focus of our attention is, then, not the aging leader but his legacy, the ANC. Or “The Scourge of the ANC,” to quote the title of the polemical essay by Dan Roodt.

The patrician Mandela certainly deserves the sobriquets heaped on him by the distinguished liberal historian Hermann Giliomee: “He had an imposing bearing and a physical presence, together with gravitas and charisma. He also had that rare, intangible quality best described by Seamus Heaney as ‘great transmission of grace.’” Undeniably and uniquely, Mandela combined “the style of a tribal chief and that of an instinctive democratic leader, accompanied by old-world courtesy.” But there’s more to Mandela than meets the proverbial eye.

Cut to the year 1992. The occasion was immortalized on YouTube in 2006. Mandela’s fist is clenched in a black power salute. Flanking him are members of the South African Communist Party, African National Congress leaders, and the ANC’s terrorist arm, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which Mandela led. The sweet sounds of the MK anthem mask the ditty’s murderous words:

Go safely mkhonto
Mkonto we Sizwe
We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them—kill the whites

The catchy chorus is repeated many times and finally sealed with the responsorial, “Amandla!” (“Power”); followed by “Awethu” (“to the People”). Mandela’s genial countenance is at odds with the blood-curdling hymn he is mouthing. The “kill the whites” rallying cry still inspires enthusiasm at funerals and at political gatherings across South Africa, and has been, in practice, a soundtrack for the epic murder campaign currently being waged—however seldom it is acknowledged—against the country’s Boers. This is a side of the revered leader the world seldom sees. Or, rather, has chosen to ignore. Indeed, it appears impossible to persuade the charmed circles of the West that their idol (Mandela) had a bloodthirsty side, that his country (South Africa) is far from a political idyll, and that these facts might conceivably be important in assessing him.

Thanks to the foreign press, an elusive aura has always surrounded Mandela. At the time of his capture in 1962 and trial in 1963 for terrorism, he was described as though in possession of Scarlet-Pimpernel-like qualities—materializing and dematerializing mysteriously for his spectacular cameos. The reality of his arrest and capture were, however, decidedly more prosaic. (At the time, the writer’s father had briefly sheltered the children of two Jewish fugitives involved with the ANC’s operations. The family home was ransacked, and the infant Ilana’s mattress shredded by the South African Police.) About the myth of Mandela as a disciplined freedom fighter, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writes wryly:

[A]s a newly qualified attorney [Mandela] was known as a big spending ladies’ man rather than as a focused political activist. To the horror of his African National Congress (ANC) colleagues, he even fancied becoming a professional boxer, so some of the ANC sighed with relief when he went to jail.

Nor was the ANC very good at terrorism—it certainly had nothing on the ascetic, self-sacrificing Salafis who man al-Qaeda. “Without East European expertise and logistics, not to forget Swedish money, [the ANC] would never have managed to make and transport a single bomb across the South African border,” avers Roodt. There was certainly precious little that would have dampened Joseph Lelyveld’s enthusiasm for “The Struggle.” But when the former (aforementioned) New York Times editor went looking for his exiled ANC heroes all over Africa, he found nothing but monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men whom he desperately tried to rouse with revolutionary rhetoric.

In any event, the sainted Mandela was caught plotting sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the government. “Mandela … freely admitted at his trial, ‘I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation.’” Confirms Giliomee: “Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, embarked on a low-key campaign of sabotage.” For that he was incarcerated for life. In 1967, the U.S. had similarly incarcerated the Black Panther’s Huey Newton for committing murder and other “revolutionary” acts against “racist” America. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover proceeded to hunt down his compatriots who were plotting sabotage and assassination. Were they wrong too? The South African government later offered to release Mandela if he foreswore violence. Mandela—heroically, as The New York Times saw it—refused to do any such thing; so he sat. At the time, the Pentagon had classified the ANC as a terrorist organization. Amnesty International concurred, in a manner; it never recognized Mandela as a prisoner of conscience due to his commitment to violence. In 2002, “ANC member Tokyo Sexwale …, was refused a visa to the United States as a result of his terrorist past.”

Mandela has not always embodied the “great transmission of grace.” The man who causes the Clintons, rocker Bono, Barbra Streisand, Richard Branson, and even Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands to fall about themselves, was rather ungracious to George W. Bush. In 2003, Bush had conferred on Mandela the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. Mandela greedily accepted the honor, but responded rudely by calling America “a power with a president who has no foresight and cannot think properly,” and “is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust … If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.” If the then eighty-five-year-old Mandela was referring to the invasion of Iraq, he must have forgotten in his dotage that he had invaded Lesotho in 1998. Pot. Kettle. Black.

Rebranding Socialism
History is being extremely kind to “Madiba.” Since he came to power in 1994, approximately 300,000 people have been murdered. The “Umkhonto we Sizwe” rallying cry is, indubitably, emblematic of the murderous reality that is the democratic South Africa. For having chosen not to implement the ANC’s radical agenda from the 1950s, Mandela incurred the contempt of oddball socialist scribes like the Canadian Naomi Klein. Were Ms. Klein—the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies—more discerning, she’d have credited Mandela for brilliantly rebranding socialism.

His crafty Third-Way politics aside, Mandela has nevertheless remained as committed as his political predecessors to race-based social planning.
An important element of our policy,” he said at the fiftieth ANC Conference, on December 16, 1997, “is the deracialisation of the economy to ensure that … in its ownership and management, this economy increasingly reflects the racial composition of our society … The situation cannot be sustained in which the future of humanity is surrendered to the so-called free market, with government denied the right to intervene … The evolution of the capitalist system in our country put on the highest pedestal the promotion of the material interests of the white minority.

Wrong, “Madiba.” If anything, capitalism undermined the country’s caste system; and capitalists had consistently defied apartheid’s race-based laws because of their “material interests.” Why, the “biggest industrial upheaval in South Africa’s history,” the miner’s strike of 1922, erupted because “the Chamber of Mines announced plans to extend the use of black labor. By 1920 the gold mines employed over twenty-one thousand whites … and nearly one hundred and eighty thousand blacks.” White miners were vastly more expensive than black miners, and not much more productive.

One of the mining chiefs, Sir Lionel Phillips, stated flatly that the wages paid to European miners put the economic existence of the mines in jeopardy. … Production costs were rising so the mining houses, entirely English owned and with no great sympathy for their increasingly Afrikaner workforce, proposed to abandon existing agreements with the white unions and open up for black workers…jobs previously reserved for whites.

A small war ensued. Bigotry led to bloodshed and martial law was declared. Although a defining event in the annals of South African labor, the General Strike exemplified the way South African capitalists worked against apartheid to maximize self-interest. Mandela clearly looks at business through the wrong end of a telescope.

Problematic too is Mandela’s Orwellian use of the world “deracialisation,” when what he was in fact describing and prescribing is racialization—a coerced state of affairs whereby the economy is forced, by hook or by crook, to reflect the country’s racial composition. Duly, the father of the Rainbow Nation also fathered the Employment Equity Act. It has seen the ANC assume partial ownership over business. Mandela’s comrade-in-arms, the late Joe Slovo, once dilated on the nature of ownership in the New South Africa. In an interview with a liberal newsman, this ANC and Communist Party leader suggested an alternative to nationalization which he dubbed ‘socialization.’” With a wink and a nod Slovo explained how the state would—and has since begun to—assume control of the economy “without ownership”:

The state could pass a law to give control without ownership—it can just do it. It can say the state has the right to take the following decisions in Anglo American [the great mining company]. You can have regulations and legislation like that, without ownership.

All of which is under way in South Africa. Mandela, moreover, has provided the intellectual seed-capital for this catastrophic “racial socialism.” (And who can forget how, in September of 1991, “Mr. Mandela threatened South African business with nationalization of mines and financial institutions unless business [came] up with an alternative option for the redistribution of wealth”?)

If the values that have guided Mandela’s governance can be discounted, then it is indeed possible to credit him with facilitating transition without revolution in South Africa. Unlike Mugabe, Mandela did not appoint himself Leader for Life, and has been the only head of state on the Continent to have ceded power voluntarily after a term in office. If not aping Africa’s ruling rogues is an achievement, then so be it.

Granted, Mandela has also attempted to mediate peace around Africa. But, “not long after he was released from prison,” notes The New Republic’s assistant editor James Kirchick, “Mr. Mandela began cavorting with the likes of Fidel Castro (‘Long live Comrade Fidel Castro!’ he said at a 1991 rally in Havana), Moammar Gaddafi (whom he visited in 1997, greeting the Libyan dictator as ‘my brother leader’), and Yasser Arafat (‘a comrade in arms’).” One has to wonder, though, why Mr. Kirchick feigns surprise at—and feels betrayed by—Mandela’s dalliances. Mandela and the ANC had never concealed that they were as tight as thieves with communists and terrorist regimes—Castro, Gaddafi, Arafat, North Korea and Iran’s cankered Khameneis. Nevertheless, and at the time, public intellectuals such as Mr. Kirchick thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to “living in cloud-cuckoo land.”

In The Afrikaners, Giliomee also commends Mandela for his insight into Afrikaner nationalism. Mandela, Giliomee contends, considers Afrikaner nationalism “a legitimate indigenous movement, which, like African nationalism, had fought British colonialism.” This is unpersuasive. Forensic evidence against this romanticized view is still being recovered from the dying Afrikaner body politic. Judging by the ANC-led charge against the country’s Afrikaner history and heroes—landmarks and learning institutions—Mandela’s keen understanding of the Afrikaner was not transmitted to the political party he created. Of late, local and international establishment press has showered Mr. Mandela with more praise for serving as the mighty Springboks’ mascot.

The Springboks are the South African national rugby team, and the reigning world champions. Not that you’d guess it from the film “Invictus,” Clint Eastwood’s “over-reverent biopic,” but Mandela has never raised his authoritative voice against the ANC’s plans to force this traditionally Afrikaner game to become racially representative. Conversely, the absence of pale faces among the “Bafana Bafana,” South Africa’s equally celebrated national soccer team, has failed to similarly awaken the leader’s central-planning impulses. Has Mandela piped up about the ANC’s unremitting attacks on Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Afrikaner schools and universities? Or about the systematic culling of the white farming community? Has that paragon of virtue, Mandela, called publicly for a stop to these pogroms? Cancelled a birthday bash with “the hollow international jet set”—“ex-presidents, vacuous and egomaniacal politicians, starlets, coke-addled fashion models, intellectually challenged and morally strained musicians”? Called for a day of prayer instead (oops; he’s an ex-communist)? No, no, and no again.

Bit by barbaric bit, South Africa is being dismantled by official racial socialism, obscene levels of crime—organized and disorganized—AIDS, corruption, and an accreting kleptocracy. In response, people are “packing for Perth,” or as Mandela would say, the “traitors” pack for Perth. The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) was suitably dismayed to discover that close to one million whites had already left the country; the white population shrank from 5,215,000 in 1995 to 4,374,000 in 2005 (nearly one-fifth of this demographic).

Chief among the reasons cited for the exodus are violent crime and affirmative action. Alas, as the flight from crime gathered steam, the government stopped collecting the necessary emigration statistics. (Correlation is not causation, but …) The same strategy was initially adopted to combat out-of-control crime: suppress the statistics. The exact numbers are, therefore, unknown. What is known is that most émigrés are skilled white men. Also on record is Mandela’s message to them: He has accused whites of betraying him and of being “traitors” and “cowards.” Had “Madiba” wrestled with these defining issues, perhaps he’d be deserving of the monstrous statues raised in his honor. These too are in the socialist realist aesthetic tradition.

SALUTING THE ALPHA MALE
Back to the original question: Why have the leaders of the most powerful country on the continent (Mandela and Mbeki) succored the leader of the most corrupt (Mugabe)? The luminaries of Western café society were not the only ones to have given Mugabe a pass. So did blacks. “When Mugabe slaughtered 20,000 black people in southern Zimbabwe in 1983,” observes columnist Andrew Kenny, “nobody outside Zimbabwe, including the ANC, paid it the slightest attention. Nor did they care when, after 2000, he drove thousands of black farm workers out of their livelihoods and committed countless atrocities against his black population. But when he killed a dozen white farmers and pushed others off their farms, it caused tremendous excitement.”

When he socked it to Whitey, Mugabe cemented his status as hero to black activists and their white sycophants in South Africa, the US and England. “Whenever there is a South African radio phone-in programme [sic] on Zimbabwe, white South Africans and black Zimbabweans denounce Mugabe, and black South Africans applaud him. Therefore, one theory goes, Mbeki could not afford to criticise [sic] Mugabe,” who is revered, never reviled, by South African blacks.

Left-liberal journalist John Pilger and classical liberal columnist Andrew Kenny concur: bar Zimbabweans, blacks across Africa and beyond have a soft spot for Mugabe. While issuing the obligatory denunciations of the despot, Pilger makes clear that Mugabe is merely a cog in the real “silent war on Africa,” waged as it is by bourgeois, neo-colonial businessmen and their brokers in western governments. From his comfy perch in England, this Hugo Chávez supporter preaches against colonialism and capitalism. Writing in the Mail & Guardian Online, Pilger untangled the mystery of Mbeki and Mugabe’s cozy relationship: “When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki’s second term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe’s dictator a standing ovation.” This is a “symbolic expression of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just comeuppance.”

South Africa’s strongmen are saluting their Alpha Male Mugabe by implementing a slow-motion version of his program. One only need look at the present in Zimbabwe “if you want to see the future of South Africa,” ventures Kenny. When Mugabe took power in 1980, there were about 300,000 whites in Zimbabwe. Pursuant to the purges conducted by the leader and his people, fewer than 20,000 whites remain. Of these, only 200 are farmers, five percent of the total eight years ago.” Although most farmland in South Africa is still owned by whites, the government intends to change the landowner’s landscape by 2014. “Having so far acquired land on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, officials have signaled that large-scale expropriations are on the cards.”

In South Africa, the main instrument of transformation is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). This requires whites to hand over big chunks of the ownership of companies to blacks and to surrender top jobs to them. Almost all the blacks so enriched belong to a small elite connected to the ANC. BEE is already happening to mines, banks and factories. In other words, a peaceful Mugabe-like program is already in progress in South Africa. Except that it’s not so peaceful. South Africans are dying in droves, a reality the affable Mandela, the imperious Mbeki, and their successor Zuma have accepted without piety and pity.

Excerpted from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” (pages 140-151, 2011). End-notes have been removed for fluidity.

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Backlash from Newt Gingrich’s supporters over his praise of Mandela

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday he was “very surprised” at people who were critical of his decision to praise Nelson Mandela this week, standing by his admiration for Mandela’s “very long, deep commitment to freedom.”

On Thursday, upon hearing of the former South African president’s death, Gingrich put up a post on Facebook, expressing his condolences.

“President Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime,” he wrote. “When he visited the Congress I was deeply impressed with the charisma and the calmness with which he could dominate a room. It was as if the rest of us grew smaller and he grew stronger and more dominant the longer the meeting continued.”

Gingrich’s statement, however, was met with backlash from many of his followers.

“Newt, I was rooting for you to win the primaries and become the next president; please tell me your joking!! Mandela was a commie murderer!!” read one comment that was popular with other users.

“You’re forgetting Mandela’s extreme racism! There are YouTubes of Mandela singing songs about murdering the white man. I spit on his grave….,” read another.

When asked about the criticism in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Gingrich replied, “I was very surprised by it. [My wife] Callista posted my statement on her Facebook page and was amazed at some of the intensity — some of whom came back three, four and five times repeating how angry they were.”

In response, on Saturday, Gingrich put out a new statement and video to his supporters, challenging critics to put themselves in Mandela’s shoes.

“I was surprised by the hostility and vehemence of some of the people who reacted to me saying a kind word about a unique historic figure,” he said. “So let me say to those conservatives who don’t want to honor Nelson Mandela, what would you have done?”

Responding to conservatives who dismiss Mandela as a communist, Gingrich added, “Actually Mandela was raised in a Methodist school, was a devout Christian, turned to communism in desperation only after South Africa was taken over by an extraordinarily racist government determined to eliminate all rights for blacks.”

As Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic pointed out, Gingrich’s support for Mandela is not new or an attempt to rewrite history.

“Newt Gingrich was among a cadre of conservatives who opposed the mainstream conservative stance on Apartheid and ultimately helped override Reagan’s unconscionable veto of sanctions,” he wrote, adding, “When Gingrich compliments Mandela on his presidency he doesn’t do so within the context of alleged African pathologies, but within the context of countries throughout the world. It’s a textbook lessons in ‘How not to be racist,’ which is to say it is a textbook lesson in how to talk about Nelson Mandela as though he were a human being.” – excerpted from Huffington Post