Posted on 12/09/2013 9:19:00 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Without a doubt, Nelson Mandela was one of the towering figures of our times, a man who became a legend and cultural icon while still alive. Now that he is dead, his detractors are demonizing him while his followers are canonizing him.
Senator Ted Cruz was quick to find this out after he issued a statement that Mandela would “live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty,” noting that, “Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free.” In response, some of Cruz’s followers wrote that Mandela was a “terrorist,” a “communist,” a “murderer,” and more.
Who then was the real Nelson Mandela?
According to President Obama, “We have lost one of the most influential, courageous, and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this Earth.”
In the words of Bono, “Stubborn til the end for all the right reasons, it felt like he very nearly outstared his maker. Today, finally, he blinked. And some of us cry, knowing our eyes were opened to so much because of him.”
According to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Mandela was “a hero of our time,” stating that, “A great light has gone out in the world.”
But World Net Daily’s Joseph Farah urged us not to mourn for Mandela, writing that “He was a committed member of the South African Communist Party. He was a leader of the revolutionary African National Congress, which he helped to radicalize into an organization sworn to armed, violent attacks.” And while he overthrew the evil system of apartheid, “Mandela’s revolution brought about . . . one in which anti-white racism is so strong today that a prominent genocide watchdog group has labeled the current situation a ‘precursor’ to the deliberate, systematic elimination of the race.”
In short, Farah argues, we have been sold a myth about Mandela (think “Invictus”), in support of which he quotes Sonia Hruska, “an early supporter of Mandela” who “worked in his administration.” She states that, “After about six years, I realized something serious is wrong; the communist elements are taking over, it’s not what we were promised.”
Farah adds that, “Hruska describes routine, violent, racist atrocities of almost unimaginable proportions: Kidnap murders, home invasions, gang rapes.”
CultureWatch blogger Bill Muehlenberg also has strong reservations about Mandela, citing South African missionary Dr. Peter Hammond who notes that “Mandela was the head of the military wing of the African National Committee (ANC),” which Hammond referred to as “the abortion, necklacing and corruption party.” According to Hammond, “1,000 Africans were killed by necklacing in the country through the ANC, an act where terrorists would ‘put an automobile tire over someone, pour petrol over them [and] set them alight.’
“Hammond also described numerous other acts of violence that he alleges were committed by the ANC under the order or oversight of Mandela. ‘Missionaries and their kids [were] murdered, bayonetted on the fields—whole families killed by landmines planted in the roads,’ he said.”
And it is without dispute that Mandela signed off on acts of terror against the apartheid government, to the point that even the New York Times tempered its praises for Mandela.
Yet it is hardly a violent terrorist who states, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
And on a Facebook post, Messianic Jewish scholar Stuart Dauermann wrote, “I read his biography ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ and was particularly struck by his extraordinary self-control. When he was negotiating with the leaders of the Apartheid government which had so demeaned and oppressed him and all South African blacks, he writes that he utterly despised these people. Yet he learned their language, Afrikaans, and spoke to them respectfully because he judged it was more important for him to win freedom for all South Africans than it was for him to tell these men what he thought of them. All of this after 27 years of demeaning and cruel imprisonment on Robin Island where the white prisoners wore long trousers, but the blacks were required to wear shorts, as if they were children.”
Others would point out that despite his acts of terror, Mandela was never tortured in prison and did not renounce violence against the government while a prisoner, yet there’s no denying the evil he opposed and there’s no denying the courageous stands he took.
When facing the death penalty in 1964, he famously said, “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realised. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
In short:
1) He was a man who resorted to acts of violence and terror to overthrow injustice;
2) He was a man who stepped into the role of national and international statesman with dignity; and
3) He was a man who was more communist than conservative and whose legacy in South Africa remains mixed.
While the assessment of Muehlenberg is meant to be simple rather than profound, it appears to be accurate: “Mandela was a great man in some respects, but he was also an evil man in some respects.”
Do you concur?
We cannot judge. Perhaps he confessed and had a deathbed conversion experience.
He supposedly prevented mass murder of white people when he and the ANC took over. That might have been true for a while, but he failed to institutionalize it so now white farmers are being murdered, just like Zimbabwe.
LOL
Depends on a persons point of view. If one is a truth believer he is not very good, if truth matters little he is very good.
Everyone is celebrating Mr. Mandela because he insisted on racial majority rule, even when the racial minority attempted to separate themselves physically into their own country, where they would be the majority.
But he insisted that his race had the right to claim that territory, populate it with people who looked like themselves, and then rule the racial minority by force.
The entire civil rights movement of the last 150 years in the United States has insisted just the opposite: that a racial minority has the right to have not just equal rights, but more rights to promote their status (affirmative action), and political power disproportionate to their numbers.
So Mr. Mandela was a stone Racist. His only interest was Black African hegemony not just where they were, but wherever they might go.
Even today they insist that no border or nation prevent their emigration into that country.
But of course they insist that “their” borders, and the entire continent of Africa, remain racially monotone, and politically tribal.
Africans Uber Alles, you might say. Black Supremacists.
That’s what Mandela was, and what the “new” South Africa is.
When one considers the crime and corruption rampant in South Africa since he and his ANC party came to power there,
I would have to honestly say that Nelson Mandela “took South Africa in the direction of Detroit”.
No doubt he was a Marxist-Leninist (Communist), just a peaceful one which many see as redeeming.
When he was released from prison everything was going his way, so it was easy at that point to back off from any violence that he and his associates like his ex-wife Winnie were involved in.
He’s in God’s hands now not ours. I’ll just have to let my feelings go and move on.
His service tomorrow will reveal who his friends were and those who loved him the most. Lets get some quotes from them for illumination.
It's a matter of tactics and strategy. Immediate mass murder would have been a fun tactic (per Alinsky, use tactics your people enjoy) but a failed strategy as it would invite foreigners to intervene.
So, Mandela put on a winning face, and went for the slow route. Put blacks in all positions of power, and then ignore any atrocities that might happen to whites. Sort of like how Eric Holder ignores any crime sprees against whites in this country.
Having the lowest and meanest of your followers do your dirty work leaves clean hands for Mandela, and for Holder/Obama.
RE: No doubt he was a Marxist-Leninist (Communist), just a peaceful one which many see as redeeming.
When he was released from prison everything was going his way, so it was easy at that point to back off from any violence that he and his associates like his ex-wife Winnie were involved in.
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Lost in all these is the role Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II played in DEFEATING communism in the early 1990’s.
Before Mandela was released, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and most of the Eastern bloc countries of Europe repudiated communism. Even China moved towards capitalism. Mandela at least slowly realized that Communism wasn’t in South Africa’s future ( plus, his Soviet benefactors were no more ).
At least Mandela has the good sense not to impose communism on South Africa.
Many liberals castigated Reagan and Thatcher for not focusing on apartheid in South Africa when they were in power. Many do not realize that they had a BIGGER PICTURE in mind... they did not want a South Africa ran by someone who would be controlled by the communists in the Soviet Union.
The fall of communism paved the way for Mandela’s release, the end of apartheid, and a South Africa that (thank God) DID NOT TURN MARXIST.
The Soviet Union was no longer in a position to help him promote Communism in SA by the time he got out of prison.
Good point.
Apt summary of the piece.
That barry liked him is all I need to know. “Yup. I hate him.”
That’s a good description of all this Mandela business. Whites who were in the know cleared out of SA as fast as they could, leaving behind the people who believed Mandela’s lies about being safe.
I know people in the “cleared out” category, and they are sad for the homeland and friends murdered in the pogrom.
Sinner. Like all of us.
I fail to see much difference between the two men, yet somehow, one is (rightly) remembered as a terrorist while the other has been elevated to sainthood, including by some on the so-called right.
South Africa is Marxist in everything but name. The ruling ANC's "Black Empowermen Program" is all about taking money and resources from prosperous and successful whites and handing them over to indigent blacks.
I wonder if he had used terrorism to overthrow a communist government if he would have been as well thought of? I’ll answer my own question. NO.
Wouldn’t have been able to. He would have died in prison or been shot after he was convicted of the acts of terror which he admitted to.
But because he was a Commie, then that’s just fine.
“Siiner or Saint” denotes a religious connotation to the dead Communist mandela.
Communism is it’s own religion, therefore, he was evil embraced through his lies.
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