Nelson Mandela’s legacy

...On his release, Mandela emerged as the one man who could bridge the racial gap in his country, sit down with the despised leaders of the white regime they sought to topple and come up with a deal that would turn the reins of power over to South Africa’s black majority while protecting many of the rights of the white minority and create the continents first real attempt at a successful multi-racial society. He made that deal and sold it to his people. To make the deal, he sat down with then-President F.W. de Klerk even before his release from prison and convinced him that the two of them had to work together to save the country they both loved. As a result, the civil war that might have been was avoided and while the tribal and racial tensions that have torn apart other African nations may lurk under the surface in South Africa, thanks to Nelson Mandela that’s where they remain...

CAVEAT ON NELSON MANDELA

Townhall.com ^ | December 7, 2013 | Humberto Fontova

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 some choice Mandela-isms:

“Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.”

“The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind!”

“There’s one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!”

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!”

A reminder:

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.

SOUTH AFRICA IN THE SHADOWS

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 6, 2013 @ 12:48 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/south-africa-in-the-shadows/print/

“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote. Few men have had as much history trapped in them as Nelson Mandela.

To those outside South Africa, the country has been reduced to Nelson Mandela just as it was once reduced to apartheid. Mandela was the ending to a story that everyone thought they knew. With his death, the story comes perilously close to losing its meaning.

The history trapped in Mandela escapes with his death forcing both those inside South Africa and those outside it to come to terms with all the complex realities of history packed away into one man’s life.

Like Gandhi, Mandela became an iconic figure who appeared to encompass the moral of his own story. The fictional Nelson Mandela has appeared in dozens of movies. He has been played by everyone from Danny Glover to Sidney Poitier to Morgan Freeman. And each of those movies has made the real man and the real South Africa that he leaves behind in death seem that much more unreal.

Western liberals like simplistic stories and Mandela was their happy ending. His very existence freed them from the need to learn anything more about what happened after apartheid. By knowing him, they knew, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. Mandela freed them from knowing history.

Everyone knows the history of South Africa and no one knows it. The dynamics of a troubled past that were reduced to a happy ending built around one man are still playing out in South Africa. Even as the mourning for Mandela goes on, one child is raped every three minutes in South Africa and three children are murdered every day.

If there is anything that the world ought to mourn, not only today, but every day, it is a horrifying reality in which a South African woman is more likely to be raped than to learn to read, a quarter of the men admit to having raped and men with AIDS believe that they can find a cure by raping a baby.

Troubling facts like these defy the easy inspiration of the happy ending. They remind us that history does not stop the way that a film script does. There is no moment when the crowd cheers, the camera pans up and the audience is free to leave the theater and look no further because the story has ended.

South Africa’s story did not end with apartheid. It does not end with Mandela’s death. South Africa remains in twilight. The credits do not roll. The happy ending has not come.

The Mandela era gave way to the Mbeki era and the Zuma era. Mbeki had been trained in the USSR and Zuma, like Mandela, had been a member of the Communist Party. Their rule was characterized not only by corruption and violence, but by the denial that the corruption and violence existed. Mbeki claimed that HIV was not linked to AIDS and that those pointing out the escalating crime rate were white racists. Zuma has said that the child rapes are “inexplicable”; but had been put on trial for raping an HIV-positive AIDS activist while claiming an equally magical way of preventing the disease.

Just as Mbeki’s successor was worse than him so too Zuma’s successor is likely to be worse than his predecessor. The difference between South Africa and Zimbabwe is only one of degree. And to prove that very point, Zuma has praised Zimbabwe’s Mugabe calling him a fellow freedom fighter.
In his address to the nation, Zuma said that, “What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves. And in him we saw so much of ourselves.”

There is certainly some truth to that. But it is not a truth about Nelson Mandela. It is a truth about people who are caught up in chaos and searching for something to believe in. Zuma said that South Africans, “mourn the loss of the one person who, more than any other, came to embody their sense of a common nationhood.” But the unpleasant truth is that there is no more South African nationhood.
The more liberals wanted South Africa to escape from its own history, the more it became trapped in real problems with no easy solutions.

South Africa is just as divided by race as it was when Mandela was in prison. It is broken up into countless tiny factions protected by real and metaphorical violence. There is no trusted institution in the country that unites it. There is no trust by South Africans in each other.

When a farmer’s family is brutally murdered by his own workers and men rape the children of their neighbors in the hopes of curing themselves of AIDS—there can be no such thing as trust. The story told in so many of the movies where Mandela played by Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman teaches blacks and whites to set aside their hatred has not worked out nearly as well in real life.

In the new apartheid, the black government represses a white minority and abuses its power over the black majority in ways that Western liberals would never tolerate if it were being practiced by men with Dutch last names. Every government crime is covered up by more incitement against the white minority with each generation of activists struggling to outdo the previous generation in its anti-white racism.

There has been no moment of transcendence that endured. No cure for the things tearing the nation apart. There is no new spirit in South Africa. There is a new apartheid defined not by law, but by hate. Freedom and democracy are equally vaporous under the rule of a political movement obsessed with the vicious pragmatism of power now being exercised by Mandela’s African National Congress successors.
“People pay for what they do and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become,” Baldwin wrote. “And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead.” There is no place where that is quite as true as in post-apartheid South Africa where the violence unleashed still haunts the townships.
In working nations, the death of a Mandela would create a symbol. In South Africa, it removes one of the few fragile symbols whose meaning is as disputed as everything else about the post-apartheid era.

For Western liberals, Mandela’s death provides them with permission to stop caring about South Africa. Having reduced South Africa to Mandela, his death permanently removes its existence from their minds. They may show up to the theater if Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx decide to play Nelson Mandela. Otherwise they will comfortably banish the entire country to the dusty attic of forgotten history.
Meanwhile one child is raped every three minutes and three children are murdered every day.

Posted on 12/07/2013 12:21:51 PM PST by Dqban22

Made an on-line donation to Newt Gingrich's primary campaign last year after Jim Robinson encouraged conservatives to support him. Ever since I have been receiving e-mails from Newt/Calista nearly every day - many of them pithcing their books or refering to investor advisors. Anyway, received this e-mail from Newt Gingrich yesterday.

What Would You Have Done? Nelson Mandela and American Conservatives

Yesterday I issued a heartfelt and personal statement about the passing of President Nelson Mandela. I said that his family and his country would be in my prayers and Callista’s prayers.

Newt Remembers President Nelson Mandela
video run time = 00:02:41 minutes

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.

So let me say to those conservatives who don't want to honor Nelson Mandela, what would you have done?

Mandela was faced with a vicious apartheid regime that eliminated all rights for blacks and gave them no hope for the future. This was a regime which used secret police, prisons and military force to crush all efforts at seeking freedom by blacks.

What would you have done faced with that crushing government?

What would you do here in America if you had that kind of oppression?

Some of the people who are most opposed to oppression from Washington attack Mandela when he was opposed to oppression in his own country.

After years of preaching non-violence, using the political system, making his case as a defendant in court, Mandela resorted to violence against a government that was ruthless and violent in its suppression of free speech.

As Americans we celebrate the farmers at Lexington and Concord who used force to oppose British tyranny. We praise George Washington for spending eight years in the field fighting the British Army’s dictatorial assault on our freedom.

Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death."

Thomas Jefferson wrote and the Continental Congress adopted that "all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Doesn't this apply to Nelson Mandela and his people?

Some conservatives say, ah, but he was a communist.

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.

I would ask of his critics: where were the some of these conservatives as allies against tyranny? Where were the masses of conservatives opposing Apartheid? In a desperate struggle against an overpowering government, you accept the allies you have just as Washington was grateful for a French monarchy helping him defeat the British.

Finally, if you had been imprisoned for 27 years, 18 of them in a cell eight foot by seven foot, how do you think you would have emerged? Would you have been angry? Would you have been bitter?

Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison as an astonishingly wise, patient, and compassionate person.

He called for reconciliation among the races. He invited his prison guard to sit in the front row at his inauguration as President. In effect he said to the entire country, "If I can forgive the man who imprisoned me, surely you can forgive your neighbors."

Far from behaving like a communist, President Mandela reassured businesses that they could invest in South Africa and grow in South Africa. He had learned that jobs come from job creators.

I was very privileged to be able to meet with President Mandela and present the Congressional Medal of Freedom. As much as any person in our lifetime he had earned our respect and our recognition.

Before you criticize him, ask yourself, what would you have done in his circumstances?

Here is my statement from yesterday on President Nelson Mandela:

"President Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime. He emerged from 27 long years in prison with a wisdom, a compassion, and a commitment to help other people that was astonishing. His life was a triumph of the human spirit. 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. His thoughtful disciplined but friendly and warm personality made him a leader who could define the right policies and the right behaviors. Nelson Mandela was truly the father of an integrated, democratic South Africa. He will be an inspiration for generations to come and an historic leader worth studying for as long as people want to learn about greatness in serving others. Callista and I extend our condolences and our prayers to the Mandela family and to the people of South Africa."

Your Friend,
Newt

South Africa: “One Child Raped Every Three Minutes, Three Children Murdered Each Day.”

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 7, 2013 am In The Point

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/south-africa-one-child-raped-every-three-minutes-three-children-murdered-each-day/print/

Liberals took credit for defeating Apartheid, took their bows and moved on ignoring the mess they left behind. Here’s a letter from South Africa. The real South Africa, not the one where Morgan Freeman plays Mandela and everyone lives happily ever after.

South Africa is in a serious moral crisis. We are a violent society disintegrating by the day. Ghastly murders are committed daily.

We have become delusional. Forgetting that life is absolutely intrinsic and inviolable. Our country is awash with demonic monsters in human garb, savages fit only for the wild, and satanic beasts ill-equipped for civil society.

Is this the democracy we fought so hard for? One child raped every three minutes, three children murdered each day. We are sliding towards the edge of the abyss and our people are crying out for sanity to prevail.

Maybe all the Anti-Apartheid campaigners have some suggestions? Surely a boycott might help. I bet it would make the child rapists who are raping a child every 3 minutes rethink their ways?

No? They’re understandably busy. The world is full of problems. Rain forests are being chopped down, whales are choking on packets of crackers and somebody just droned a terrorist.

There’s plenty of things to be outraged about. And if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. And if you’re not paying attention, you can always be outraged

VICTIMS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN GENOCIDE

http://sarahmaidofalbion.blogspot.com/

As August 6, 2013

3,338

Number of white farmers murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994.

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.