The world mourns the loss of Nelson Mandela, the South African social revolutionary and later national leader who devoted his life to fighting apartheid, a system of racial division that vested power only in whites. Posted on 12/06/2013 3:13:01 PM PST by LD Jackson
The world mourns the loss of Nelson Mandela, the South African social revolutionary and later national leader who devoted his life to fighting apartheid, a system of racial division that vested power only in whites.
For much of his life Mandela was vilified as seditious, treasonous, a terrorist and a social malcontent. He reveled in peaceful civil disobedience to advance his cause but for a time suborned sabotage in his struggle against the entrenched white government. During the period of apartheid, black Africans were barred from voting, holding national political office, traveling freely about the country or organizing. The existence of the black majority in South Africa, their birthplace and birthright, was characterized by poverty, humiliation and subjugation.
Eventually he was sentenced to prison, serving twenty-seven years before his release in 1990.
The emergence of freedom, equality and justice throughout the world have historically been troubled affairs. The powerful elite yields only grudgingly, often marked by vitriol, upheaval and violence. Mohandas Mahatma ("Venerable") Gandhi resisted British exploitation for over twenty years, enduring prison in the process, before a post-colonial free India finally emerged. He was eventually assassinated for his efforts. Martin Luther King, Jr. endured physical attacks and jail before the Civil Rights Act was passed by congress in 1964. He, too, ultimately paid for his activism with his life.
Our founding fathers defied English rule by all means, too. The Boston Tea Party was an act of disobedience and sabotage aimed at the exploitation and denigration of "colonists" by the British. 
The Shot Heard 'Round the World, fired at Concord in 1775 and famously heralded by Paul Revere, was an act of defiant violence against the oppression and injustice of foreign domination. Had we lost the Revolutionary War (its outcome was in doubt), George Washington would have hanged for his acts of sedition and terror; he led a bloody revolution against a sovereign government, that of Great Britain. But instead the result was the declaration a year after Concord that ratified every man's God-given right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," a concept that swept the world and led directly to the western democracies we see today.
I recently returned from a visit to South Africa and its immediate neighbor, Zimbabwe. The later country is ruled by a murderous tyrant, Robert Mugabe. Following independence from white colonial rule, Zimbabwe—the former Rhodesia—instituted a system of retribution against whites that included seizing their lands and businesses, one injustice replaced by another. Elections are a sham under this thinly disguised dictator. Political opponents are routinely murdered. The result has been fear and economic chaos, harming the indigenous black Africans there disproportionately. Unemployment in Zimbabwe is over eighty percent, much higher than previously, and their national currency completely crashed, replaced by the dollar and South African rand.
Upon his release from prison, Mandela went on to become president of South Africa. Until his recent death he continued as a political, social and spiritual force. He has become a winner of the Nobel Prize, a global icon for justice and progress. Under his leadership apartheid was dismantled and replace by an effective system of social democracy where whites and blacks have equal rights under the law. Unlike Zimbabwe, there has been no structural retribution against whites. South Africa has its problems as a developing third-world African economy. But the changes resulting from the leadership of Mandela today include a growing economy and stable currency, while unemployment, still high by American standards, is less than a third of neighboring Zimbabwe's. Their progress is expected to continue into the future.
Mandela has had his admirers and detractors. Like many historic leaders he had personal flaws. But he stands as an example—in the company of Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln—as one who was willing to stand for what is right irrespective of the personal consequences. His life embodied many of the principles of our founding fathers who fought for an America Revolution.
As America moves forward in the twenty-first century we would do well to heed the example of Nelson Mandela. Our democracy is under assault internally by those who would undermine our heritage of freedom and opportunity in the pursuit of socialist egalitarianism. Is the dividing of Americans into antagonistic classes—"haves" and "have-nots" pitted against one another—is that so far removed from apartheid? Is the suppression of our individual liberty in the cause of a society managed for preconceived and failed notions of social welfare really that different from pre-Mandela South Africa? Perhaps we as a nation can draw inspiration from the memory of Nelson Mandela to fight for traditional values that will continue to keep American great and free well into the future.
“Nelson Mandela’s Trial has been properly conducted. The judge has been scrupulously fair.”
By Humberto Fontova, on December 5, 2013
BIO-MANDELA-COOK
From NPR:
His (Nelson Mandela’s) cell became a private home with a swimming pool, complete with white servants. In this picture Nelson Mandela chats with his former chef Jack Swart outside the house he spent the last years of imprisonment....Upon his release from the hospital Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison...where he had a secluded cottage with the pool. When he arrived, he was greeted by Coetsee, the justice minister, bearing a case of wine...”The cottage did in fact give me the illusion of freedom,” Mandela wrote. “I could go to sleep and wake up as I pleased, swim whenever I wanted, eat when I was hungry...It was altogether pleasant, but I never forgot that it was a gilded cage,” Mandela said of his final prison.”
This post’s title comes from Anthony Sampson, one of the dozens of international observers at Nelson Mandela’s trial for terrorism in 1964.
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 mater. 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.
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 wold embargo for “injustice?” and “human-rights abuses?”
Mandela’s Castrophilia was simple loyalty to someone who had helped out his terrorist group when it most needed help. Actually, I can’t get too worked up over Mandela’s Castrophilia. Loyalty is (usually) a noble human quality, and he owed Castro big-time.
But how about the Castrophilia of the hundreds of other politicians and world “leaders” (many in the U.S.: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, etc., etc.)???
There’s something really perverse there.
I am not reading it
Mandela was a terrorist who helped slaughter innocent people
The revolution fought a war between uniformed (when they could afford them) armies
I’m guessing he wrote a screed about how 9-11 was just like the “shot heard round the world” too. Really - no difference!
I bet he might have.
they are committing genocide against white people in South Africa( stage 6 genocide) . google and check images also
the latest trend is rape , and disembowelment of white women in South Africa, with the Sanction of the black government(legacy of Mandela). google this if you think i’m lying
the U.S. news media celebrates this
they are raping then disemboweling (while alive) white women some as old as 80 and young little girls too
Good lord
Yuck
At some point, whitey, collectively, needs to decide he wishes to live.
Is there a pic of his real “cell” with swimming pool and white servants?
John & Samuel Adams, John Hancock and George Washington did not engage in terror bombings killing innocent civilians to achieve their goals.
No sale.
Google Image - “necklacing” - if you have the stomach for it.
linky?
“George Washington would have hanged for his acts of sedition and terror; he led a bloody revolution against a sovereign government, that of Great Britain.”
The Washington - Mandela comparison is offensive.
George Washington fought a war against an oppressive government.
Mandela committed terrorist acts against an elected government.
I mourned the loss of my grandfather, grandmother, uncle, Father, in-laws, god parents, and life long friends, I don’t for a second mourn the loss of another communist, nor do I mourn or celebrate friggin celebrities.
I will just be glad when a week or so has gone by and I will not have to see all these stories about a terrorist, murdering POS that blacks have turned into a god.
You mean a government elected by whites? Sorry, but if you are disenfranchised and have no democratic outlet, violence is understandable, and probably the only effective chance of gaining that freedom. As for his gaining support from the ussr and other dictatorship, let’s remember that the American revolutionaries were cultivating the support of France and Spain, absolute monarchies of many orders of magnitude worse than Britain, and Churchill cultivated Stalin during wwii out of practical necessity, Mandela was by no means perfect, and whilst the fawning of lefties who consider him to be nothing less than black Jesus are idiots, simply dismissing him as a commie terrorist is also grossly wrong.
I take it you haven’t read about how loyalist civilians were subjected to violence and driven out of their homes, and how John Paul Jones tried to burn Whitehaven in Britain? War is hello, and no one emerges squeaky clean.
Are you seriously suggesting that what they did compared with the ANC's terror campaigns?
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