TERRORIST WATCH!
Mandela & the
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Here are
two photos showing the
This is a story about Nelson
Mandela, the world-famous "freedom fighter" and "democrat."
You'll have to pardon those slightly sardonic quotes, because I'm afraid this
is that kind of story: a bit iconoclastic, and likely
to provoke howls of outrage from Western liberals who see Mandela as a benign
black moderate who led an army of hymn-singing Uncle Toms to the promised land.
The technical term for those liberals is "useful
idiot," but even I must concede that their intervention was actually quite
intelligent, back in the 1950s, when this all started. In those days, good men
were weak, and their apartheid adversaries invincible
on all but one score: propaganda. The war of perceptions thus became the most
critical of all battlefields, with the African National Congress constantly
seeking to exaggerate apartheid's evils while portraying itself as
"good" in a way that was universally appealing.
In the early sixties, Special Branch detectives came upon a
piece of evidence that made this a bit tricky in Mandela's case - a handwritten
essay titled, "How To Be A Good Communist," in which the leader of
the ANC's newly-formed military wing opined that South Africa would become
"a land of milk and honey" under Communist rule. We were told that Mandela
was innocently toying with Marxist ideas, trying to understand their appeal,
but this made little sense. Almost all his co-conspirators were Communists,
wedded to a Sovietist doctrine that envisaged a
two-phase ending to the SA struggle - a "national democratic revolution,"
followed by second revolution in which the Marxist-Leninist vanguard took
power.
If Mandela wasn't in on this plot, it would have been
exceptionally stupid of him to participate in it, and Mandela was not stupid.
On the other hand, he had to be very careful what he said on this score. The
ANC needed the support of Western liberals, and by l964, those folks had come
to realize that Communist revolutions inevitably led to the outcome satirized
in George Orwell's Animal Farm - a dictatorship of pigs who hogged the
best things for themselves, impoverished the proletariat and murdered or
imprisoned dissenters by the million.
In such a climate, one didn't want to focus attention on
that hand-written "milk and honey" essay. On the contrary: one wanted
the world to see Mandela as a democrat, willing to die for values that
Westerners held sacred. Toward this end, Mandela and his lawyers (with a bit of
help from British journalist Anthony Sampson) crafted a masterful speech for
Mandela to deliver from the dock during the Rivonia
trial.
"The ideological creed of the ANC is, and always has
been, the creed of African nationalism," he said. "It is true that
there has been close cooperation between the ANC and the Communist Party. But
cooperation in this case is merely proof of a common goal - the removal of
white supremacy."
Mandela went to describe himself as a democrat in the
classic Western sense, and a fervent admirer of the British and American
systems of governance. "Africans just want a share in the whole of
These words rang out around the world, and still echo
today. Type Mandela's name into Google, and you come upon millions of essays,
articles and book-length hagiographies depicting Madiba
in exactly the way he presented himself in that speech: a black liberal, driven
to take up arms by a white supremacist state that seemed utterly impermeable to
calls for dialogue.
The Rivonia statement has become
the foundational text of a semi-religious movement that seeks to canonize
Mandela as the 20th century's greatest proponent of freedom and
democracy. Or perhaps I should say, "bourgeois
democracy," in order to distinguish between democracy of the sort
practiced in
Or did he?
It takes a brave man to address that question, and lo, one
such has emerged. Professor Stephen Ellis heads the African Studies Centre at
the
Now Ellis has published a study that sheds startling new
light on Mandela's early political career and the circumstances under which he
launched his armed struggle against apartheid. The study contains at least one
revelation that can only be described as a bombshell -- Mandela was, at least
for a time, secretly a member of
The strange thing about Ellis's bombshell is that South
Africans appear to be deaf to its detonation. I know this because I started
hyping it to fellow journalists the instant it appeared in print. To a man (or
woman) they all shrugged and said, "So what? It's not really a
story." This tells us something interesting about South Africans: we are
at once riven with ideological obsessions and
hopelessly ideologically naïve.
The blame for this rests largely on our charming and
literate Communists, who go to great pains in their memoirs to disguise the
true nature of their beliefs. They tell us that they stood for fairness,
justice, and racial equality, and against all forms of exploitation and
oppression. They'd also like us to believe that their party was outlawed in
l950 because they treated blacks as friends and wanted them to enjoy the
franchise. Well, yes. I suppose this was a factor, but the overriding
consideration that led to the SACP's banning was
something else entirely.
At the Yalta Conference of l945, Soviet dictator Josef
Stalin assured the Western powers that all the countries his forces occupied at
the end of World War 2 would be allowed to determine their own destinies via
free elections. With his international image in mind, Stalin instructed
commissars in the occupied territories to observe the outward forms of
"bourgeois democracy." Towards this end, liberals and social
democrats were lured into broad fronts in which all key decisions were secretly
made by tiny Communist minorities, with the backing of the Soviet's secret
police apparatus.
These Communist conspirators then staged spurious elections
that brought Soviet puppet regimes to power throughout
The problem with Communist parties, including the South
African one, is that they blindly supported this Soviet outrage, and seemed
intent on pulling similar moves everywhere. If Joe Slovo
and Rusty Bernstein were still alive, they'd stoutly deny such charges, but
they'd be lying. We know this because Rusty's wife Hilda lived long enough to
acquire a shrewd understanding of herself and the
Communist movement of which she was a life-long part. "Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists," she said in a 2004 interview.
"Anything the Soviets did was right. They were very, very pro-Soviet."
It is important to note that Mrs. Bernstein was by no means
suggesting that her husband or Joe were evil men. On the contrary: they were
religious zealots who genuinely believed that the Soviets had discovered the
cure for all human misery.
"I've often thought about this," she said.
"They wanted something bigger than themselves, something to believe in.
People are always seeking for the meaning of life and if you're not religious,
what is it? To us, working together in a movement that had rules and attitudes
and comradeship gave important meaning to our lives."
In short, being a Communist was much like being a
Christian. One studied the sacred texts of Marx and Engels, engaged in polemics
as a form of prayer and ruthlessly suppressed all doubts, including one's own.
Mrs. Bernstein says she was adept at this until l956, when Kruschev
revealed the appalling extent of his predecessor Stalin's atrocities (he
murdered around 16 million people, either by having them shot for thought
crimes or starving them to death with mad policies). Her husband dismissed
these reports as "lies and capitalist propaganda," but Hilda's bones
told her it was all true.
"We had a fight," she said, "a battle that
went on into the small hours of the morning. I wanted to leave, but we had
three dependent children, and there wasn't any possible way in which we could
have separated economically and so on. So we stayed together, and I
accommodated myself by refusing to talk about it any more."
And so it came to pass that Hilda Bernstein, the secret
doubter, had a ringside seat for the epochal events of the late fifties and
early sixties, a time when her husband Rusty was one of South Africa's most
senior Communists, and one of Mandela's closest allies moreover.
It was in this capacity that she learned of Madiba's secret membership in the Communist sect.
"Mandela denies that he was ever a member of the party," she said,
"but I can tell you that he was a member of the party for a period."
When this interview appeared on the website of the O'Malley
archive, it caused a brief frisson among old Cold Warriors, especially when
former SACP central committee member Brian Bunting verified Hilda's account.
The interview also caught the eye of the aforementioned Professor Ellis, a
lifelong student of the byzantine inner workings of SACP. He notes that the
SACP of the early sixties was of necessity a pathologically secretive
organization, a network of cells with little or no knowledge of each other and
no official membership records.
"SACP members were formally required to keep their
membership secret," says Ellis. "In principle, only the members of
each four or five-person cell knew each other. One person reported to the next
higher level, and so on. But there was also a special category of ultra-secret
members who were not required to join a cell and whom even very senior party
members might not know about." With this in mind, Ellis proceeded very
cautiously before publishing anything about Mandela's apparent role in the
Communist conspiracy.
One item in his files was an old police report claiming
that two arrested Communists had identified Mandela as an SACP member. A
similar admission appeared in the minutes of a 1982 SACP meeting. The final
breakthrough came when Russian researcher Irina Filitova
interviewed veteran conspirator Joe Matthews, who confirmed that Mandela served
on the party's innermost central committee alongside him. "In the light of
this evidence," Ellis concludes, "it seems most likely that Nelson
Mandela joined the party in the late l950s or in 1960, and that he was co-opted
onto the Central Committee in the latter year, the same year as Joe
Matthews."
Even as I write this I sense that I am losing the average
South African. I can almost see you shrugging and saying, "So? This still
isn't a story." But it is a story, and here's why: if Ellis's evidence is
correct, the fatal decision to launch a war against apartheid had nothing to do
with the ANC. It was a decision taken unilaterally by the Communist Party, and
then imposed on ANC president Albert Luthuli by a prominent African nationalist
who was secretly a member of the Communist underground. His name: Nelson
Mandela.
It seems fair to say that black South Africans have
entertained thoughts of armed revolt since the day Jan van Riebeeck
landed in
The difference between those organizations and the
Communist Party is that peaceful change via the ballot box was never really on
the Communist agenda, because that sort of change invariably left the
capitalist edifice standing. "Classes do not commit suicide," said
Joe Slovo, a dutiful acolyte of Vladimir Lenin.
Enemies of the working class had to be undermined, subverted, and conclusively
defeated before the socialist millennium could begin.
There was a time when this socialist millennium did not
seem particularly attractive to
In the early fifties, however, the SACP realized that
cooperating with the nationalists was likely to hasten the fall of the Boers,
thus creating conditions conducive to a more rapid advance towards true
socialism. At more or less the same time, nationalists like Mandela realized
that the Communists could bring several desirables to the party. Around half of
them were white. They had cars, houses, telephones, organizational skills and
access to funding. Soon, Communists were supporting the ANC's legal campaigns
and recruiting ANC members into their own underground party.
As Ellis observes, this strategy did not enjoy the approval
of the high priests of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science, who were located
in
Out of this emerged the SACP's
new revolutionary doctrine, which has always reminded me of the hoary old fable
in which a scorpion convinces a frog to carry it across a river. The frog (or
bourgeois nationalist) does all the work, staging a "democratic national
revolution" that topples the imperial or colonial power. The scorpion
(representing the Communist cause) goes along for the ride, only to sting the
frog to death just as it reaches the far bank. The punchline
of the original remains entirely apposite: scorpions do such things because
that is their nature.
Something else happened in l960, something very important.
The catalyst was the PAC, a movement of hardline
African nationalists who'd broken away from the ANC the previous year on the
grounds that it was "dominated by white Communists" whose ultimate
loyalties were open to question (see above). In April, l960, the PAC staged a
nationwide protest against the hated pass laws. In Sharpeville, police opened
fire on a crowd of PAC supporters, killing an estimated 69. The resulting
outburst of rage shook the apartheid government to its core, and led to the
outright banning of both the PAC and ANC.
From afar, it seemed that the mood in
According to Ellis, the Chinese had previously been
sceptical of such plans, but now, the SACP delegates were considered so
important that Chairman Mao himself took time to meet them. They were accorded
a similar honour in
The precise outcome of these discussions remains uncertain,
but Ellis presumes that Matthews and Harmel came away
with pledges of support, because the SACP now moved swiftly forward, adopting a
policy of armed struggle at a conference in Johannesburg "towards the end
of 1960."
It now became necessary for the SACP to convince the ANC to
join its initiative. White Communists couldn't act in this regard, because they
weren't allowed to join the racially exclusive ANC or take part in its
deliberations. The task thus fell to black ANC leaders who wore two hats - which
is to say, were members of both the ANC and the SACP.
In some cases, this joint ANC-SACP affiliation was open and well-known, at
least to those in the underground. In others, it was secret. The most important
of these secret members was the charismatic Nelson Mandela.
On the day the SACP took its fateful decision, Mandela was
a defendant in the Treason Trial, a marathon affair that had been dragging on
since l956. The rest of
In theory, the gap between the white judges and the mostly
black accused was unbridgeable, but these men had been staring at one another
across the courtroom for years, sparring, joking, taking each other's measure
and acquiring a measure of mutual respect.
All the accused were out on bail, but when they were
re-detained during the post-Sharpeville State of Emergency, Judge Bekker's wife came to their aid, running errands on their
behalf and carrying messages to their families. Judge Kennedy was so impressed
by the pro-ANC testimony of Professor ZK Matthews that he came down from the
bench and shook Matthews' hand, saying, "I hope we meet again under better
circumstances." Judge Rumpff was a grumpy old
Afrikaner and a reputed Broederbonder, but even he
seemed to be softening.
On March 23, l961, Rumpff took
the unprecedented step of interrupting the defence's closing argument, saying,
in effect, we don't really need to hear this. Some of the accused took this to
mean that the judges had decided to disregard the evidence and hang them - the
predictable totalitarian outcome. They were wrong. A week later, Rumpff asked the accused to rise, and pronounced every one
of them innocent.
This was a dumbfounding outcome, given the enormous
resources the apartheid state had devoted to the treason case. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was in the habit of telling the world that
most blacks supported the principle of separate development, and that only a
handful of misguided troublemakers opposed it. Rumpff's
judgement annihilated that argument. In rejecting the state's case, he had in
effect ruled that the ANC's cause was just, its grievances legitimate, and its
strategy of non-violent defiance acceptable in the eyes of reasonable men.
This outcome hugely strengthened the hand of ANC president
Albert Luthuli, a devout Christian who continued to believe that peaceful
change was possible in
South Africa also had a relatively free press, a vigorous
democracy (albeit for whites only) and, as Mandela acknowledges in Long Walk
To Freedom, a police force that still conformed to British norms, with due
process respected and torture at this stage unheard-of. Some observers saw Rumpff's verdict as a watershed of sorts, a development
that could easily have led to further liberalization.
Nelson Mandela was totally disinterested. In Long Walk To Freedom, he writes that he went underground within
hours of Rumpff's verdict. Officially, his mission
was to organize popular support for a national convention, but Ellis thinks this
unlikely. "A close analysis of the campaign for a national convention
concludes that this initiative was primarily intended to provide proponents of
armed struggle with a paper trail that would justify their forthcoming change
of policy," he writes.
In other words, the SACP was angling to regain the moral
high ground. It knew that the verdict had come as a surprise to international
observers, who were left wondering if Verwoerd's regime was indeed as evil as
it was held to be. But the SACP also knew that Verwoerd could be relied on to
reject any call for a national convention, thus restoring his reputation as an
intransigent racist. As Ellis notes, this would allow the party to present the
coming declaration of war "in the best possible light for public and
international consumption."
The second leg of Mandela's underground mission was of
course to convince ANC president Albert Luthuli to follow the lead the
Communists had taken. Luthuli was not a pacifist per se, but he believed
that non-violent options remained viable. Like many others in the ANC and even
the SACP, he also believed it would be folly of the highest order to take up
arms at a point when the ANC was still struggling to organize effective
protests.
Luthuli and Mandela had it out in June l961, at a
tumultuous meeting of the ANC's national executive in Tongaat,
This is Mandela's version - or more accurately, one of his
versions. In Long Walk, he acknowledges that the outcome of his clash
with Luthuli was actually very messy. "The policy of the ANC would still
be that of non-violence," he writes, and the new military organization was
required to be "entirely separate from the ANC." Luthuli himself
remained committed to non-violence until his death six years later.
Arenstein was subsequently purged from the party. Mandela returned
to
The first MK bombs went off on December 16, 1961. The rest
is history.
- article by Rian, August 16, 2011
Poster distributed by the Federation of Conservative Students (the official Conservative Party student organisation) in Britain during the early 1980's, clearly illustrating that people overseas were more aware of the evil nature of Mandela and his fellow ANC terrorists than most people in South Africa were.
South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" - ostensibly set up to cleanse that nation's psyche of its tortured past - is finding that the Marxist revolution fought there between 1948 and 1994 witnessed a departure from the normal rules of war by both the communist African National Congress and the Christian, pro-West NP government.
The TRC's official goal is to investigate crimes
committed by both the Marxist ANC and the right-wing government during the
“apartheid era”. Crimes committed by other groups, including the Inkatha Freedom Party, are also being
investigated. If those charged with crimes promise to tell all they know to the
commission, they can be granted amnesty. Under ongoing hearings before the
“Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, the sordid and often macabre blood sport
that characterized this war has been leaking out in dribs and drabs to a global
audience. Most of those appearing before the TRC can apply for amnesty and
escape prosecution if they admit their guilt. Many have chosen this route and
testified against either the Afrikaner leadership or the ANC. Others, like Winnie Mandela (ex-wife of Nelson Mandela) and former South
African President P.W. Botha, have maintained their innocence to the very end.
The ANC at first denounced a parliamentary bill granting amnesty for those who
request it from the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”. The feeling among
the ANC was that it would provide a blanket amnesty for the torture and
killings conducted by the right. However, as more and more of the ANC's
misdeeds are exposed, some have concluded that the Marxist organization is also
in need of blanket amnesty.
The misdeeds of the Soviet-sponsored ANC have been well chronicled. It operated
under and parallel to the South African
Communist Party, established in the early 1920s as the first Communist
Party outside the
The crimes committed by the ANC in the name of liberation are legion. First,
there was the practice of "necklacing," in
which a petrol-filled tyre is placed around the neck of a victim and set ablaze
- an action carried out by Winnie Mandela and her
minions. Another horror was the "Church Street Massacre," in which
Nelson Mandela approved of a bomb set to explode at rush hour to maximize
casualties of Afrikaner women, children and babies. The same Mandela who told
the Black youth of
Through the work of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, the gulags of
northern
against the White-led government. Mandela did, however, admit that torture
occurred at ANC prisons and camps, but the report now documents that this
abuse was widespread and far-reaching. Torture and murder occurred not only in
This report was a major embarrassment to the ANC, which had been lionized in
the West for its war to end apartheid and install a supposedly democratic
government in
The report reads in part:: "The worst conditions
were at the Quatro camp in
Ironically, the ANC accused the White-led South African police of conducting
torture of Black cadres in a similar manner. The report continues: "We
were left with an overall impression that for the better part of the '80s,
there existed a situation of extraordinary abuse of
power and lack of accountability at the prisons. Order in the exile camps began
to break down after the 1976 Black student uprising in
guerrilla training centres. Many of the new recruits were poorly educated,
impatient to fight, given to drinking and drugs. Some were secret agents sent
by the South African police. Thus the ANC gave its security department, called
"Mbokodo" [the Xhosa word for
"grinding stone"] unchecked power to investigate, judge and punish
recruits."
The panel that compiled the report also learned the names of accused torturers,
some of whom still hold posts in the ANC's security apparatus. The actual names
were withheld from the published report, but are known to the ANC hierarchy.
Two ANC leaders were directly named, however: Joe Modise,
the former head of the ANC's military wing, and Jacob Zuma,
the former ANC secretary general. Neither was accused of torture, however, Modise was cited as being part of a tribunal that in 1981
improperly arrested Dumisani Khosa,
a producer for the ANC's underground radio station. Khosa
was arrested for "complaining about nepotism and sexual harassment"
within the ANC. The report states that Khosa was
"beaten until he urinated blood, then shipped to
the Quatro camp in
- WorldNetDaily report, 2000
The evidence in the Rivonia trial was shocking.
The prosecutor, Dr. Percy Yutar, wrote the following
in the prologue of the book Rivonia, The Mask Off by
Laurutz Strydom. He said
the aim of Rivonia was to create utter chaos in the
- Reality SA,
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first Black president, who is
widely admired across the political spectrum more for his performance in office
than for his beliefs, is now retired and thus free to express his long standing
Marxist and often bizarre beliefs freely. He continually attacks
There were good reasons for such fears, not the least being the decades old
cohabitation of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) with, and its
penetration by, the Communist Party of South Africa (SACP), one of the world's
most committed Stalinist parties. There were also the ANC's close links with
the militantly leftist (and SACP dominated) trade union federation, COSATU.
Importantly, despite the rhetoric about Black economic oppression under
apartheid, the fact remains that a Black middle and indeed upper class had
developed in
Mandela implemented an aggressive affirmative action policy once he took
office - which slowed down the economy. His government established a criminal
law code on the European model - abolition of the death penalty, excessive
rights for accused criminals, etc., with destructive results.
The high crime rates, and a decline in educational standards, led to a
massive emigration of White professionals to the
When it comes to African opinions at the UN,
President Mbeki has a problem with his own ANC party, specifically with
Nelson Mandela's former wife, Winnie. Mrs. Mandela is
the loose cannon of the ANC. A convicted torturer and felon and thoroughly
corrupt, she remains a very popular figure with Black South African youths and
was repeatedly elected to the ANC leadership. The disturbing thing here is not
so much Winnie's criminality, awful as it is, as the
general decline of
- Michael Radu, Front Page Magazine,
The Rivonia high treason trial, in
which Mandela was one of the accused, is in the news again. According to
reports Dr Percy Yutar, who was the prosecutor in the
case, is going to sell his documents and books in a public auction. Foreign
universities are allegedly very interested. The first reaction is alarm that
these very valuable and unique Africana could become lost to South Africans.
However, after a little reflection one has to admit that the documents will
probably be safer in the library of some foreign university than in
- Report sent by the "Boernews" news service.
1) Concerning Mandela's jail sentence. The crimes he
committed were shamelessly criminal, and included no heroic acts. In fact, it
is still a mystery why Percy Yutar (the then state
attorney) did not file for murder, but manslaughter instead. Based on the facts
it is commonly agreed by legal scholars that Mandela would have been hanged if Yutar filed for murder. You can easily get access to the
case and you will find facts that the media, for whatever reason, prefer to
ignore. 2) They often show Mandela's cell on
- Report sent by South African historical expert living in the
The ANC is part of an alliance with the SA Communist Party and the Black super-union COSATU, of which the Communists are the numerical minority, but the most influential and dominant partner. Most key positions in the ANC are occupied by SACP and ex-SACP members. Before 1990 the ANC/Communist alliance was a terrorist organisation, which waged a relatively unsuccessful, but nasty and cowardly "war", mostly against civilians and against what was supposed to be "their" people, the Blacks, through the barbaric "necklacing" (torching a helpless victim with a burning tyre around his neck to death), bombs and assassinations. From 1990 to 1994 the last White president of SA, F.W. de Klerk, railroaded the traditional power structure of the country into accepting a staged "democratic election" in 1994, which was manipulated to bring the ANC/Communist alliance to power. By lying and cheating he kept many Whites in the dark about his real intentions. Since 1994 the ANC/Communist regime is dutifully busy destroying everything good and strong in the country in the name of "affirmative action" and "Black empowerment", while step by step suppressing the freedom of the people and nations under its heel. "Nelson R. Mandela", a Xhosa from the Transkei, got involved as a young lawyer with a bunch of White would-be terrorists with large caches of explosives and weapons in Johannesburg, who were found out and tried in a court of law (the old SA courts were still independent). Left to face the music by the White instigators, who had mostly run away overseas, Mandela got a life sentence for his involvement in terrorism, being part of the planning of attacks on installations and non-military targets and the beginning of the terrorist war mentioned above. He sat in prison for 27 years, treated as a political prisoner, regularly visited by all sorts of monitors and others, in clean, efficient prisons of the old SA (not like the new SA's hell-holes). In the early nineties de Klerk let him out to become the "nice" figurehead of the "new SA". This is just a nutshell. Quite tragic really what is happening in SA. But in the end the Whites have only themselves to blame for the gutless way they allowed the treacherous handover to happen - and the even more disgusting way many of them are now helping keep the regime in power by fawning and toadying up to the new rulers.
- Report sent by "Southern Cross Africa".