Caveat on Nelson Mandela

A Martian visiting earth this week, coasting TV channels and perusing papers, would have to conclude that among the items that most interest this planet’s news bureaus is the plight of former political prisoners, especially black ones.

Well, many Cubans (many of them black) suffered longer and more horrible incarceration in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (relatively) comfortable prisons, which were open to inspection by the Red Cross. Castro has never allowed a Red Cross delegation anywhere near his real prisons. Now let’s see if you recognize some of the Cuban ex-prisoners and torture-victims:

Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle, (29 years) Antonio López Muñoz, (28 years) in Dasio Hernández Peña (28 years) Dr. Alberto Fibla (28 years) Pastor Macurán (28 years) Roberto Martin Perez (28 years) Roberto Perdomo (28 years) Teodoro González (28 years.) Jose L.Pujals (27 years) Miguel A. Alvarez Cardentey (27 years.) Eusebio Penalver (28 years.)

No? None of these names ring a bell? And yet their suffering took place only 90 miles from U.S. shores in a locale absolutely lousy with international press bureaus and their intrepid “investigative reporters.” From CNN to NBC, from Reuters to the AP, from ABC to NPR to CBS, Castro welcomes all of these to “embed” and “report” from his fiefdom.

This fiefdom, by the way, is responsible for the jailing and torture of the most political prisoners (many black) per-capita of any regime in the modern history of the Western hemisphere, more in fact than Stalin’s at the height of the Great Terror. But the Martian would only learn that it provides free and fabulous healthcare and is subject to a “cruel” and “archaic” embargo by a superpower.

Here are a few items the Martian would probably never learn regarding Nelson Mandela or the Stalinist regime he adored:

South Africa's apartheid regime was no model of liberty. But even its most violent enemies enjoyed a bona fide day in court under a judge who was not beholden to a dictator for his job (or his life.) When Nelson Mandela was convicted of "193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963, including the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives, including 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate," his trial had observers from around the free world. "The trial has been properly conducted," wrote Anthony Sampson, correspondent for the liberal London Observer. "The judge, Mr Justice Quartus de Wet, has been scrupulously fair." Sampson admitted this though his own sympathies veered strongly towards Mandela. (Indeed, Sampson went on to write Nelson Mandela's authorized biography.)

In sharp contrast, when Ruby Hart Phillips, the Havana correspondent for the flamingly Castrophile New York Times, attended a mass-trial of accused Castro-regime enemies, she gaped in horror. "The defense attorney made absolutely no defense, instead he apologized to the court for defending the prisoners," she wrote in February 1959. "The whole procedure was sickening." The defendants were all murdered by firing squad the following dawn.

In 1961 a Castro regime prosecutor named Idelfonso Canales explained Cuba's new system to a stupefied "defendant," named Rivero Caro who was himself a practicing lawyer in pre-Castro Cuba. "Forget your lawyer mentality," laughed Canales. "What you say doesn't matter. What proof you provide doesn't matter, even what the prosecuting attorney says doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what the G-2 (military police) says!"

According to Anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime, (all after trials similar to the one described above by Anthony Sampson.) Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million. Here's what Mandela's "jail cell" looked like towards the end of his sentence.

"N*gger!" taunted my jailers between tortures. “recalled Castro’s prisoner Eusebio Penalver to this writer. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!" they laughed at me. “For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But they never succeeded in branding me as common criminal, so I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide,” continued the late Mr Penalver.

According to the Human Rights group, Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps (many after trails like the one described by R.H Phillips above, others with none whatsoever.) At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses (in torture chambers and forced-labor camps designed by Stalin's disciples, not like Mandela's as seen above.) This was out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.

So who did the world embargo for "injustice?" and "human-rights abuses?" (Apartheid South Africa, of course) And who currently sits on the UN’s Human Rights Council? (Stalinist Cuba.)

In brief, none of the craziness Alice found after tumbling down that rabbit hole comes close to the craziness Cuba-watchers read and see almost daily.

MANDELA MANIA

ACCURACY IN MEDIA REPORT

http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1990/07a.html

EXCERPTS

The visit of Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie, to the United States gave rise to what might be described as Mandela mania on the part of our news media. Mandela is a confessed terrorist who has refused to renounce the use of terror.

He is deputy president and de facto head of the African National Congress (ANC), which is listed as a terrorist organization in the State Department publication Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1989 (released April 1990) and in the Defense Department’s Terrorist Group Profiles, along with such organizations as the PLO, Shining Light (Peru) and the FMLN (El Salvador). Like Yasir Arafat and those affiliated with the other terrorist groups listed in these publications, the Mandelas could legally be denied visas to enter the United States.

Terrorist Group Profiles includes a two-page introduction dated November 1988 by then Vice President George Bush in which he says, “In seeking to destroy freedom and democracy, terrorists deliberately target noncombatants for their own cynical purposes. They kill and maim defenseless men, women and children. They murder judges, newspaper reporters, elected officials, government administrators, labor leaders, policemen, priests and others who defend the values of civilized society.” That is not a bad description of the “armed struggle” of the ANC, which has been directed primarily against black South Africans and which Nelson Mandela refuses to abandon.

Our big media, which supposedly are eager to expose closeted skeletons, scandals and the inconsistencies of our leaders, were strangely indifferent to the inconsistency of Mandela’s warm reception and the denial of visas to Yasir Arafat, whom he has described as “a comrade in arms.”

Nelson Mandela was the only guest on an extra- ordinary two-hour televised “Town Meeting” program on ABC hosted by Ted Koppel on June 21. Neither Koppel nor any of the handpicked, pre-screened interlocutors in the audience mentioned the terrorism practiced by Mandela’s organization against both blacks and whites in South Africa or about the domination of the ANC by the South African Communist Party. Responding to a question posed by Kenneth Adelman, a former high official in the Reagan Administration, Mandela defended his praise of three other sponsors of terrorism, Yasir Arafat, Muammar Gadhaft and Fidel Castro. The reverential treatment accorded Mandela was typified by Ted Koppel’s reaction to this embarrassing revelation of the man’s ideological leanings. Koppel gently suggested this was “impolitic” because it would cost Mandela the support of some Jews and Cubans.

THE ANC’S WAR ON BLACKS

Cindy Lee Leontsinis, editor of a South African publication called People Against Terrorism, says the ANC has used terror against moderate black mayors and councilmen because it wants to represent itself as the sole negotiator for South Africa’s blacks. They take the position that the moderates must be done away with. “How they do it,” she says, “is by targeting their homes, targeting their businesses and killing their children.” A black mayor, B. Ndlazi, whose house and car were firebombed, nearly killing his children, says, “They wanted to intimidate me into resigning from Council so as they should take over the People’s Courts and threaten the people.” (These statements are shown on a new 12-minute video prepared by AIM titled Winnie Mandela’s Secret.)

Tamsanqa Linda, a black South African whose home and small business were burned by ANC goons, flew to the U.S. in advance of the Mandelas to tell people about the ANC’s war on blacks. Linda, a former mayor of a large black township and currently president of an association of 74 township councils, gave a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on June 22. He said that he was putting his life in danger, but he felt it was necessary to speak up for the people of South Africa “who cannot talk.” He was referring to the millions of black South Africans who don’t like the ANC and its radical policies but who can’t get our media to report their stories.

Linda, the son of a factory worker, said he came under attack by the ANC because he had built up a successful small business. He said the ANC does not like blacks who have worked hard and prospered within the system, because they expose the falsity of Marxist theories. He said the ANC is a front for the South African Communist Party, which wants to impose on South Africa a system that will impoverish the country. South African blacks don’t want to end up like Angola, Mozambique and other black-ruled African states whose socialist economies are “in tatters,” Linda said.

Unlike Mandela, who has said he prefers communism to apartheid, Linda said if he had to choose, he would take apartheid. But he doesn’t think that choice is necessary. He was appalled to find how little most Americans know about conditions in South Africa. He said they don’t realize how far the government has gone in removing racial barriers.

Linda’s press conference was aired several times on C- SPAN. The TV networks and the big print media, including both the AP and UPI, were not interested in reporting his message. Crossfire and Nightline would not give him a hearing. But numerous radio talk shows throughout the country did. Thanks to them and to C- SPAN many Americans learned that Nelson Mandela does not speak for all South African blacks. ABC News belatedly got around to reporting this on June 27. Its “World News Tonight” aired a good story from South Africa reporting that many blacks there reject Nelson Mandela and the ANC, just as Linda had said.

WONDERFUL WINNIE MANDELA

One of the most horrible but effective terrorist tools the radical blacks have used to eliminate and intimidate those who might stand up against them is “neck lacing.”

This consists of binding the hands and feet of the victim, draping a gasoline-filled tire around his or her neck and setting it afire, subjecting the victim to a slow, excruciatingly painful death. This is done by mobs, who add to the suffering by beating and stoning the writhing victims. (Winnie Mandela’s Secret describes and shows actual scenes of this barbarism.)

It is unthinkable that anyone who has condoned, much less encouraged, such atrocities would be welcomed in this country, honored by high officials, cheered at mass gatherings, and escape any critical comment by our ever-vigilant media. It is equally unthinkable that a person who had been implicated in the abduction, torture and murder of a 14-year-old black renowned as an anti-apartheid activist would be honored by the American people, its media and especially by American blacks. But this is exactly what happened when Winnie Mandela came here with her husband.

In April 1986, Winnie Mandela publicly endorsed “neck lacing,” telling a Soweto mob, “With our necklaces we will liberate this country.”

Mrs. Mandela was also implicated in January 1989 in the abduction of three young black men and a boy from a Methodist Church shelter. Mrs. Mandela’s bodyguards, known as the “Mandela United Football Club,” snatched them and took them to Mrs. Mandela’s home where they were beaten, whipped and subjected to other forms of torture. The object was to get them to say that the Methodist minister, who is white, had abused them sexually. Two of them did so but later recanted. A third escaped. The boy, 14-year-old Mokhetsi “Stempie” Seipei, did not give in and was beaten into unconsciousness. On January 7, 1989, his battered body was found in a field with his throat slit. Stempie was famous as an anti-apartheid activist, having been arrested for his activities when he was only 10.

The police went to Mrs. Mandela’s home in Soweto, where they confiscated weapons, noted blood-splattered walls in outbuildings, and seized large quantities of bedding, carpeting and a van for forensic examination. Mrs. Mandela claimed that she was not home when the torture took place, but even Tom Sebina, the ANC spokesman in Lusaka, Zambia, doubted that claim. The survivors said Mrs. Mandela was present and had participated in the torture, and they testified to that effect when the leader of the bodyguards was tried for murder in May 1990.

The judge said in his summation that the evidence showed that Mrs. Mandela had been present and had taken part in the beatings. He said the evidence had “the ring of truth,” implicitly suggesting that Winnie Mandela was an accomplice in the crimes, even though she had not been charged. This was reported in a lengthy story, largely devoted to the murder case. by the New York paper, Newsday, on June 20, the day the Mandelas arrived in New York City.

Africa developed the way just as in europe developed. Tribes fought with themselves and others then developed and expanded into indigenous African nationalites.

The area comprizing the tip of Africa known as South Africa up to three hundred years ago had lightly populated scattered sundry distinctive tribes which developed into what one could call nations.Which sparsely settled that area of far southern africa . The Zulus, Bantus,and others. But beyond not beyond furthur south where the europeans seetled.

Begining in the 14th century, as in the development of the western hemisphere other groups notably tribes from europe moved into areas which were unsettled and undeveloped cheifly along the rather expansive area on the southern tip of Africa.

Portuguese,Dutch,German,and of course English resettlements occured. In South Africa’s case Cape Town was created as a fishing station manned by the Portuguese,who subsequently interbred with local black tribes and were later to be known as “coloureds”.

Furhur north, Dutch,Swiss,Flemmmish, and Germans belonging to a Christian protestant sect known as Calvanists much like and about at the same time as the pilgrims but in greater numbers settled into what became “The Orange Free State”. And a mixture of Dutch/German and English became their offical language known as Africans.

While this by no means is the complete history of the place and does not include the Boorer War (boor= Dutch for farmer) or the aquisition of former German territories of Tanganyika and Kameroon which went to the UK after WWI or Southwest Africa, today known as Namibia which went to the administration of South Africa. My point in referencing these names is this.

IF you go to any current dictionary and research these names and titles you will not find any reference to them.If you do they will be “revisionist” or scrubbed clean of any so called “white” sympathatico.

South Africa did not “institutionalize” its “Jim Crowe” laws called appartheid until well after WWII. Prior to that time black nations within its borders were given the same rights as we give our “Indians”. In fact during that time much effort was made by the central goverment to develop what the South African’s called homelamds and the country led all of Africa in the number of “black millionaires”.
What you are not going to hear about is how worse off those smaller “homelands” are doing now.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.