The sickeningly sweet sycophancy has already started and will most assuredly continue at least until the old Marxist is buried — one hopes very soon. TV News will become even more unwatchable.
In the face of the avalanche of BS that will be said of Mandela, there will be a temptation among many on the Right to start to think well of him.
Anyone that does should keep a few things in mind…
-This Tweet from the Scottish Communists is very fitting [tip of the fedora to Stacy McCain]:
Nelson Mandela has died. A hero against all the odds. True friend of ordinary ppl & progressive politics, we miss u pic.twitter.com/7pOZbH227Y
— Communist Party (@communist_party) December 5, 2013
Of course, considering that the old saying is so very true, ‘The only good Commie is a dead Commie’, I guess Mandela is now, finally, worthy of being called ‘good’.
-From his file at Discover The Networks:
…The leading South African socialist parties merged with the Communist Party in 1920s, and in 1923 the South African Native National Congress changed its name to the African National Congress to reflect its growing internationalist, Communist outlook.
In its early phase, the group focused on non-violent resistance; Mandela, his future law partner Oliver Tambo, and several other young African students in and around Witwatersrand established the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL). Mandela was one of the drafters of the group’s manifesto. The ANCYL criticized the more genteel ANC and promised to politicize and radicalize the movement. It succeeded.
And…
Sharpeville also marked a definite turning point for Mandela and other members of the ANC, who now opted for the use of force to accomplish their political agenda. An offshoot militant wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (UWS), the “Spear of the Nation,” was created by Mandela and others to bring the apartheid government down by use of sabotage. Mandela went underground and eventually left the country without permission, training in terrorist camps in Algeria and addressing the Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa in January 1962. His speech was a masterpiece of one-sided distortions, as he condemned the South African government for atrocities like Sharpeville or Bulhoek (a 1921 incident in which government officers, attempting to enforce an eviction warrant on squatters, were attacked by a mob of religious fanatics and returned fire, killing 163; Mandela refers to them as ‘unarmed’, an adjective not supported by accounts at the time), invariably oversimplifying the complex background of each incident. He spoke approvingly of bombings in Fort Hare, Durban, and Johannesburg, and claimed that he was sending ANC members for guerrilla training.
Mandela returned to South Africa in 1962 and while in custody, was arrested and tried in the Rivonia trials. Rivonia was the headquarters of a group of saboteurs accused of blowing up not only government buildings but also the homes of government officials. Mandela did not deny that he was a member of the UWS and that it was engaged in sabotage, but claimed that the UWS did not engage in bombings of private homes. He also denied the possibility of finding real justice in a “White Man’s Court”.
Sometimes lost in the reports of the trial was a document that South African police found when they raided the UWS headquarters, the plans for Operation Maribuye, which detailed the targets that the UWS intended to hit and listed the strategic and tactical considerations that the group should consider. It is, in effect, a plan for war, and contrary to the rhetoric of the ANC and Mandela, both at the trial and in subsequent years, the UWS saboteurs had already claimed lives as well as buildings for their victims.
Mandela was convicted and sentenced to life in prison….
During his imprisonment, the ANC unleashed a reign of terror and torture that has been well-documented. In 1997, during the TRC hearings, the ANC leadership admitted to at least 550 actions carried out by its UWS wing, with another 100 incidents that “may or may not” have been carried out by members acting on their own. The terrorist attacks included the infamous “necklacings,” in which attackers put a gasoline-soaked tire around the victim’s neck and then set it afire (a tactic often ascribed to Mandela’s wife, Winnie, and her followers), bombings of government and military installations, and the establishment of secret “re-education” camps in northern Angola, Tanzania, and Uganda where the ANC would torture those reluctant to go along with its program of violence. In addition to warring with the apartheid government, the ANC often battled other black groups, particularly the Zulu-led Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The government, for its part, employed equally violent means of quelling black resistance. The death totals for the period from 1985-1994 reached 23,000, according to the TRC.
After Mandela was freed and apartheid ended…
In 1994, South Africa held its first multi-party, multi-racial elections. The ANC took 68 percent of the available seats and has retained power ever since. The elections were marked by serious scandal, which was largely underreported or ignored by the press. The ANC intimidated people entering and leaving the voting booths; IFP candidates were left off ballots; children of ANC party members were allowed to vote; and some polls never even opened. Nonetheless, the international observers declared the elections “free and fair.” Mandela was inaugurated president in that same year. Since then, the largely unsuccessful administrations of Mandela and his hand-picked successor, Thabo Mbeki, have plunged what was once an orderly and somewhat prosperous country into an abyss of crime and poverty.
Mandela’s ANC and its economic policies have been largely subservient to the Communist controlled South African trade unions (COSATU); the South African union workers have low productivity rates and, compared to China and other parts of Asia, vastly higher wages….
How about some icing on the red cake…
In recent years, Mandela – a longtime friend of Arafat, Castro and Qaddafi, has been sharply critical of U.S. support for Israel, no doubt animated by the fact that South Africa was, during apartheid, one of Israel’s strongest supporters, and that support was reciprocated. He has criticized the U.S. and Great Britain for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and has accused President Bush of lacking vision in dealing with the Middle East. [BOB: He wouldn't be a true Communist if he didn't hate him some Jews.]
Mandela never rejected Communism and Terrorism.
-Finally, out of his own putrid mouth…from a speech in 2003 [tip of the fedora to Joseph Klein]:
If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. [APPLAUSE] They don’t care for human beings. Fifty-seven years ago, when Japan was retreating on all fronts, they decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; killed a lot of innocent people, who are still suffering the effects of those bombs.
Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese, they were aimed against the Soviet Union to say, ‘look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you’. Because they are so arrogant, they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that.
Who are they, now, to pretend that they are the policemen of the world?….
-Requiem in tormentum.
UPDATE at 2335…
Stacy McCain has published an excellent post on the willful blindness of many of those [especially those too young to remember what the world was like before the Soviet Union fell] who are praising Mandela. And he was kind enough to link your Humble Dispatcher.
A highlight:
…Revolutionary groups with no worse reputation than the ANC, and leaders with no worse reputation than Mandela, had in other nations posed as “agrarian reformers” and critics of abusive governments, until such time as they succeeded in toppling those governments, at which point they cast aside the “reformer” mask, unfurled the banner of Marxism, and aligned their “popular” regimes with the Soviet bloc. Such was the story in Cuba and Nicaragua, and the U.S. could not ignore Soviet aspirations in Africa.
It would have been criminal negligence against the American People if they had.
