by Dan Roodt
When Margaret Thatcher died, British leftists and her Labour Party enemies threw “death parties” in a distasteful display of Schadenfreude. Whether Mandela will die today or live to be a hundred is irrelevant to my argument, as the idea of his death has already provoked a number of reactions, including a tweet from BNP leader Nick Griffin:
“Saint #nelsonmandela on last legs it seems. Make sure to avoid BBC when the murdering old terrorist croaks. It’ll be nauseating.”
Griffin’s tweet caused outrage in British newspapers and on Twitter itself. It is not entirely in good taste, but by the standards set by Thatcher’s detractors with their “death parties” it seems to be in keeping with the Zeitgeist.
For a moment I wondered whether we, the victims of Mandela’s movement, should start organising death parties, in case he does “exchange the temporal for the eternal” as the Afrikaans saying goes. I suppose we could all come dressed in camo with plastic AK-47s.
Americans use the term “disconnect” when they mean “disparity”. It’s not really part of my vocabulary but it sounds right when I say there is a disconnect between the global image of “Saint Nelson Mandela” and the man. Here we have someone who wandered onto the world stage by mistake, almost like an extra, and got applauded for being the hero.
Worse, Mandela is one of the last dinosaurs of a bygone, socialist-revolutionary age. In the early 1960s when he engaged in a botched attempt at revolution, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse Tung and their African imitators were still seen as heroes. In May 1968, the rioting French students in Paris had heard of Mao but not Mandela, yet they could just as well have put his face on a few posters. In the 1980s when I lived in Paris the French Communist Party had a monopoly on the Free Mandela slogan in France, as if they had bought the franchise from the bunch of death-party-celebrating Labour and Anglican fanatics in London.
The Church of England must be the first church in history that had engaged in money laundering to further urban terrorism in South Africa. The radical cleric, Canon Collins, oversaw the whole operation from a back office at St. Paul’s Cathedral. If only the B.I.S. in Basle had been more proactive in curtailing money laundering, they could have spared the lives of many civilians who died in ANC terrorist incidents in South Africa.
Unlike Mao, who wrote some nice poetry and became famous for his Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims, I strongly suspect that Mandela never wrote anything. He was surrounded by a bunch of white or Indian communist advisers and handlers who wrote his speeches and who more or less told him what to do. His speech from the dock at the Rivonia trial was “edited” by author Nadine Gordimer and journalist Anthony Sampson. Gordimer also “edited” his voluminous autobiography, Long walk to freedom.
Nowadays the school history books in South Africa contain naked propaganda, just like in any erstwhile East-European totalitarian state. Our children studying those books for exams are led to believe that Mandela was imprisoned for his “opposition to apartheid”, whatever that might mean.
In reality, he had already engaged in a campaign of sabotage and terror, but was found out in time by the South African police. In a post 9/11 world, and if Mandela had planned anything against the USA, he would simply have been eliminated by American special forces like Osama Bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton cackling some Caesarian paraphrase.
Like all terrorists, Mandela had embraced the dubious moral principle of “the end justifies the means”. Even after his first failed attempt for which he had been jailed for life in SA after a fair trial, prosecuted not by an Afrikaner but by a South African jew, Percy Yutar, Mandela must have ordered or acquiesced in the terror campaign masterminded by the devious Joe Slovo from London.
If ever Saint Mandela sailed on a cloud to heaven as his global leftist and liberal admirers foresee, he could announce at the pearly gates: “My organisation never had an army worth mentioning, but we did place bombs in restaurants.” The infamous Wimpy bombing campaign of the 1980s killed and maimed a large number of civilians all over the country. But the ANC’s biggest “success” if one could call it that, was the so-called Church Street Bomb in Pretoria that exploded on 20 May 1983, killing 19 civilians and injuring more than 200,
The ANC’s terror campaign in the 1980s was no different to that waged by other extremist organisations all over the world. If Mandela had given the go-ahead for the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April this year, would his reputation as “a man of peace” have been affected at all?
I daresay the world would have looked upon him somewhat differently if that had been the case. Why then is Mandela revered for having been a member of an extremist, crypto-communist “liberation movement” that bombed innocent people in the street, in Wimpy fast-food restaurants and that placed limpet mines on farm roads, killing not only white farmers but also their black workers?
Even if Mandela’s bloodthirsty teleology could have been justified by the end goal of “democracy” (belatedly replacing a communist class revolution in the early 1990s), it would still have been a vicious way of pursuing power. However, South Africa today is hardly a democracy. At best it is a violent, corrupt and crime-ridden oligarchy run by Mandela’s ex-terrorists.
Mandela’s legacy of terror against rural people, perhaps inspired by some Maoist creed, lives on today in the form of farm murders whereby our farmers are regularly attacked, tortured and killed in the cruelest ways imaginable. A local TV documentary on farm murders was appositely entitled “A bloody harvest”.
The mainstream media world-wide, particularly the BBC, may have cynically elevated Mandela to the holy status he has today, but the bloody harvest we are living through is as much his as the rest of the ANC with its shadowy characters who have successfully converted from perpetrators of random violence to looters of the public purse.
It is an intriguing question whether, for liberal journalists in the MSM, terror in the name of Islamic jihad may not be acceptable but in furthering black power it is. One type of terrorist bows to Mecca but the other thrusts his fist into the air shouting “amandla!” (power!”; therein lies all the difference, it seems.
Mandela and his cohort of self-styled revolutionaries have destabilised South Africa and we may be doomed to experience nihilistic violence forever in the form of bands of criminals or ethnic killers attacking us at random.
South Africa has a so-called model constitution. I do not care much for the constitution, for the ANC never respected the Geneva convention when it visited terror upon us. It seems as if their nameless war continues to this day, still without respecting the rules of civilised warfare. Of what use is the constitution if there is no real peace, no real safety?
Lately I have spent some time in Wimpy bars here in Johannesburg where they offer free wifi. They have been revamped, but still contain that 1960s American “diner” look that makes you think of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.
Inside the Wimpy they have a large letter W in a corner sometimes, an upside down M. As in Mandela. It is comforting that the ubiquitous South African Wimpy bar will outlive Mandela, the smiling old terrorist. Only when his entire generation of crazed extremists will have died out, may we make some political progress in South Africa.
No-one can feel secure in this country. There is menace everywhere. But somehow when Mandela dies I will feel a little bit safer typing an email in the Wimpy.
