Stalinism Lives in South Africa: Was Nelson Mandela a Secret Communist?
Last week, a book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal by South African journalist Rian Malan, a man from the Afrikaner family who ran the apartheid regime but broke with them and became an opponent of apartheid. Still, he was a journalist of integrity who did not hesitate to report on and to write about the dark side of the African liberation movement.
His first book, My Traitor’s Heart, was an international bestseller in which Malan traced out his return from exile as he sought to learn the truth about his racist ancestors, as well as about the liberation movement that arose in response to the brutal apartheid regime. His new book, just out, is composed of a series of essays about South Africa today, including his investigation of the origins of the hit song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” made famous most recently by the hit play and film The Lion King.
In his book review, Malan reports on what to my knowledge is a little-known fact about Nelson Mandela, the first president of the post-apartheid South Africa and the titular leader of the African National Congress, which he became the symbol of during his many years of imprisonment on Robben Island.
Mr. Malan refers to the fact that all the contemporary black South African leaders, from Mandela on, have sung the praises of leftist dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and among other things have been vigorous opponents of Israel. Led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they all depict Israel, as Tutu recently put it, as a state even worse than apartheid South Africa. Malan writes, commenting on how liberal journalists have dealt with this:
Mr. Foster finds it “strange” that the leader of a noble liberation movement should side with a nasty dictator. Well, yes. American liberals have always viewed the ANC as an army of hymn-singing moderates, striving for democracy in a Western sense. Readers of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s will recall Thomas Karis’s campaigns against troglodytes who claimed that the ANC was communist-dominated. The New York Times’s Joseph Lelyveld took a similar line in his reporting, then offered readers of “Move Your Shadow” (his Pulitzer-winning 1986 book about apartheid) several witty caricatures of seemingly demented anti-Communists who cast South Africa as a Cold War battlefield. At the time, it was fashionable to laugh at such people. But I am not laughing anymore.
Why is Malan at this late date looking at this issue again, years after the Cold War’s end? The answer comes from reading one of the books he reviews, Stephen Ellis’s External Mission. What he found is the following:
“External Mission” begins by annihilating conventional understandings of the circumstances surrounding the ANC’s 1961 declaration of war on apartheid. According to Mr. Ellis, all critical decisions were actually taken by the South African Communist Party (SACP), which sought support from Moscow and Beijing and then “bounced” the ANC into following its lead. Since white and Indian Communists couldn’t join the racially exclusive ANC, much of this bouncing was done by a charismatic black lawyer who was secretly a member of both organizations: Nelson Mandela. Indeed, Mr. Ellis goes so far as to report that Mr. Mandela was almost certainly a member, at least for a time, of the SACP’s central committee. (emphasis added)
As Mr. Ellis tells it, Mr. Mandela and those around him were intoxicated by the ease of Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba and imagined a similar outcome for their own military venture. They sidelined ANC President Albert Luthuli, who was opposed to violence, and launched an amateurish bombing campaign. Within two years, they were all in prison or in exile.
Mr. Mandela’s membership of a militantly pro-Soviet movement was unlikely to win friends in the free world. More could be gained by portraying him as a black liberal, and Mr. Mandela and his lawyers crafted a masterful speech for Mr. Mandela to deliver from the dock during his 1964 trial for treason.
“The ideological creed of the ANC is 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.” Mr. Mandela went on to describe himself as a democrat in the classic Western sense, an admirer of the British and American systems of governance. “Africans just want a share in the whole of South Africa,” he concluded. “Above all, we want equal political rights. … It is an ideal I hope to live for. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
If Mr. Ellis is correct, Nelson Mandela was pulling wool over the eyes of the West. The SACP advocated not “equal political rights” but the establishment of what SACP theoretician Joe Slovo called a “vigorous dictatorship” in the Soviet style, with Slovo himself as Lenin. Comrade Slovo, a white man, dreamed of becoming black South Africa’s supreme leader after the Marxist takeover. His day never came. The Boers rumbled his bomb plot, and Mr. Slovo fled to London. His followers, the ANC’s rank and file, were consigned to military camps in Tanzania and later, Angola.
The bombshell, of course, is the news that Mandela himself was not only a Communist Party member, but a member of its central committee as well.
The truth is that the ANC leaders — all Communists — accepted “the logic of Stalinism.” That is why, he writes, the ANC guerrilla camps composed of rank and file young recruits treated dissidents in the old Stalinist way — through imprisonment, torture, and execution.
Some of us were not surprised to learn of this, although I must admit that I too never even thought that Mandela himself was a bona fide Red. Yet, on the general question of the ANC’s anti-Western radicalism, we were not fooled. Writing in Commentary about Mandela’s reception in America after he was released from prison, Josh Muravchik noted that “Mandela took the lead in persuading the ANC to abandon its policy of nonviolence in favor of armed struggle,” the strategy favored at the time by the hard international left. Muravchik quoted the late left-wing writer Andrew Kopkind, who wrote in The Nation that Mandela “reaffirms revolutionary values, socialist ideals, and egalitarian sentiments,” hence giving the Left “a sense that all is not lost.”
Mandela, Muravchik reminded us, supported Yasir Arafat, Libya’s Qaddafi, and, of course, Fidel Castro.
When asked about the repressive policies of such regimes, Mandela replied that “we have no time to be looking into the internal affairs of other countries.” Of course, the ANC and Mandela had argued that the rest of the world had to call into question the legitimacy of the apartheid regime, and indeed, look into its internal affairs.
Muravchik concluded: “That Mandela is a man of the Left there is no question,” but even he stopped short of claiming that Mandela was himself a Communist, writing only that he had said he believes in “socialism” and was influenced “by Marxist thought.” Muravchik himself, however, believed that Mandela’s chosen “rhetoric bears the earmarks of years spent within a Communist milieu.”
As for me, after a trip to South Africa for journalists, I wrote about my impressions in The American Spectator in an article titled “Red Hills of Africa.” I argued the following about the hopes of the South African Communist Party:
But with Communism fallen and apartheid falling, why should we care that a powerful Communist party still holds forth in South Africa? The answer is put succinctly by the leading Western scholar of South African Communism, Heribert Adam. … “Because SACP members are the major force that dominates the theoretical debates and strategies within the broad apartheid opposition, its own practice of [or lack of] internal democracy influences the style of the entire movement.” Americans sympathetic to Mandela prefer to ignore that the SACP has cemented its ‘people’s alliance’ with the ANC.”
When I wrote that article in 1992, I pointed out that the Communists recruited scores of 25- to 30-year-old militants from the township underclass, which one writer called “street Jacobins of the 1970s ghetto revolts.” At the time, the Communists controlled three-quarters of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, as well as all the major posts in its policymaking divisions. One of the South African Marxist dissidents, ANC leader Pallo Jordan, wrote in that year that the Stalinist political culture in the ANC had “produced a spirit of intolerance, petty intellectual thuggery and political dissembling.” Although he too saw himself as a Marxist revolutionary, Jordan wrote that socialism had developed “in an authoritarian and totalitarian fashion.”
Writing in Dissent in that same period, professor of African studies Richard L. Sklar pointed out that South Africa’s Communists had rejected “a fundamental ideological shift from Leninism to democratic socialism,” thereby revealing its members were sticking to their true Leninist roots. Jordan at the time feared that internal tensions in his country “might cause us to move in a Stalinist one-party direction.”
More than a decade has passed, and one must say that Rian Malan’s fears, expressed in his recent book review, are well-taken.
Currently, one corrupt government after another has taken power, and instead of a thriving multi-party democracy, the seeds of one party rule, led by the ANC and its Communist allies, are doing all they can to hold onto power. Under the leadership of Jacob Zuma, he writes, “the rich have grown richer; hospitals and schools continued to degenerate; corruption remained endemic.”
Totalitarianism and the Soviet Union may have disappeared, but as Malan puts it, it “lived on in our political style.” He reveals how just as Zuma and his side purged the former president and once Marxist Theo Mbeki, when the press arrived, they pretended to have a united front and that no one was opposed to the brutal manner in which Mbeki’s removal was orchestrated by Zuma’s thugs. “The ANC,” Malan writes, “was serenely united; any talk of divisions was the work of enemies.” The ANC leaders, “like their Soviet mentors, thought their subjects were entitled to nothing, not even explanations.”
The question, as Malan says: how long can revolutionary martyrdom be used by the ANC “to discredit opponents and stifle dissent?” How long can the ANC leaders see themselves “as the only legitimate power in South Africa, entitled to rule ‘until Jesus comes back?’” Last August, police of the ANC regime fired on striking miners near Johannesburg, killing 34 and wounding hundreds, just as the apartheid government had done in well-chronicled attacks on the old liberation movement in the years of apartheid.
Malan says that “violent strikes are spreading, and the smell of anarchy is in the air.” All Malan can say, looking towards the future of his country, is “God help us.”
So it seems that the ANC now sees fit to use the same tactics the old Soviet state used against its opponents. Killing miners, the very working-class whose support it once sought, is now fair game to preserve stability and to prevent any movement rising that could challenge the hegemony of the ANC as the only force that holds political power. Leninist tactics, without a socialist regime, is the mechanism of political rule, evidently, to this day.
At least, now that the truth is out about Nelson Mandela’s political roots and the influence of the Communists in South Africa, we should not be surprised when, soon, that country’s troubles again hit the front pages.
UPDATE:
My friend, the journalist James Kirchick, has just informed me that Malan had a longer article on Mandela and his Communist Party membership last year. Indeed, Malan provides much more substantial evidence in this version, and as he writes, it was completely ignored in South Africa.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of communist influence in South Africa is the subsuming of Afrocentrism or Pan-Africanism or “black supremacist” doctrines throughout formerly segregated societies. I see this same melding of communism and black nationalism in the U.S.A., often taking the form of anti-white, anti-”money power” populism among American blacks. See http://clarespark.com/2012/12/01/petit-bourgeois-radicalism-and-obama/.
You mean like Liberation Theology “churches” that demand their members “eschew middleclassness” or however it was phrased?
We got a Mandela right here haven’t you noticed,even a hawk is an eagle among crows,my god how long have we been crows.
Huh. I thought Mandela was a communist, back in the 1980s. Wasn’t sure how ideological he was, versus being a communist of convenience, given that the West supported, to a degree, the apartheid government, and the USSR supported the ANC.
Yeah, I’d always thought it was well-known Mandela was a Kommie. Why is this news?
He was ABSOLUTELY a communist and this blogger wrote a policy paper re this issue for the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, a policy center she assists.
It can be found within the following commentary – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/19/comrades-in-arms-always-have-each-others-backs-whether-black-white-or-islamic-supremacists-the-redgreen-alliances-common-denominator-seriousness-of-issue-necessitates-its-length-commenta/…hold onto your seats, it is a lot worse they you can imagine!
Of course, Mandela’s crimes were hidden by a fawning, groveling media and their back benchers in academia too. After all, he is a minority…a third worlder too. Vomit.
Mandela hardly committed any crime, he was one of the front guys. His associates were the ones who engaged in the early days, until he was locked up with some bomb making, but he was pretty much out of it. Additionally, the only countries that were prepared to help these fellows were the Communists countries and they had to show some affinity to their ideas otherwise, the reds in Moscow would not show kindness to them. Furthermore, the South African P A C, and the SAF Communist Parties were “all in”, yet the ANC had the numbers, and they all banded together much like the PLO, Hamas, Salafists, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, etc…By the time the newly trained “revolutionaries” came back from Cuba, Moscow, Mandela was cutting stones in the prison ‘s quarry, as soon as they got to power all that remained from the “Communist operating System” were some empty slogans, lots of bad habits, like thieving, stealing, bullying and bribes. Surprised?
Agreed. This is ancient news.
A conservative Canadian Member of Parliament was censured and shamed for refusing to participate in the usual “All Praise Nelson Mandela” shennanigans, citing the same objections, that is, that the Great Leader was a Commie.
Of course, he’ll never get an apology.
ALL South Africans, regardless of color, were safer and more prosperous under the old apartheid regime than they are now.
Mandela’s Communist proclivities seem to have been a secret only from Mr. Radosh. The worldwide, “anticolonial”/”Third World liberation” movements were Soviet-funded from the get-go, and sought to replace Western colonialism with the Soviet variety. Same with the “civil rights movement” in the US. Even though the USSR is no more, its successors remain in the US, in South Africa, and many other places.
Exactly 1389AD, I’m always amazed at how the red diaper doper babies seem to be all agog at the creeping communism in all the black liberation crap movements of the world. Thanks to these lefty tools in Britain, US and the West, a lot of innocent whites have been murdered by their precious 3rd world black savages. Read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” by Ilana Mercer for more on SA.
agreed
although i never really cared about all the hoopla surrounding this guy the simple fact he is praised by the lefties around the world is reason enough to suspect the “red mist” tendencies
I remember all the excitement when Mr. Mandela was released from Prison on Robben Island in The Republic of South Africa. The media was there for his first speech to crowds on his release. “Comrades” was one of the first 3 words out of his mouth. That’s when he told me who he was….
Yes, but most Americans are completely unaware of it. Amnesty International, a group that had pretty loose rules for who it considered to be a political prisoner, never considered Mandela to be one. While American radio stations played the popular “Free Nelson Mandela” and the nation called for his freedom Amnesty saw him as a criminal – a murderer of innocent people.
– Slovo.
Radosh continues to publish his personal version of Red Channels. Pathetic.
A well-documented, highly plausible one. If that’s the best you’ve got, then someone’s “pathetic” indeed … but it’s not Radosh.
Why does Mr. Ellis think “Mandela was pulling wool over the eyes of the West”? They knew, we all knew. Conservatives couldn’t say anything for fear of being labeled racist. Democrats and their European counterparts simply didn’t care.
So everyone played along like Mandela was some kind of African George Washington.
Exactly. Strong suspicions but unable to voice due to ‘Angel’ status appointed to black men like Mandela. One can build a very strong case that life is much worse in South Africa now than 20 years ago. But, hey, the important thing is that those evil white men were forced to give up their farms, banks, and businesses.
It does seem that the World is setting itself up for a race war of epic proportions. I am not advocating for this, merely making an observation.
I dont think this was a particularly well kept secret.
Old Soldier has the right of it.
of course he was a communist. …most everyone in the 70′s knew that unless they were daft.
Roger the question you should be asking is who in the west supporting these communist were. Because they are still in power or pulling the strings …either as fellow travellers or useful idiots.
Why is this “news” to anyone? Mandela’s closest white friend/supporter in South Africa was, famously, Joe Slovo, the most well-known Communist in the country. Did anyone believe that this was coincidence?
People are willing to overlook the same coincidences with our own President.
Wondering if O’s daddy knew/was acquainted with Mandela.
Sadly, this is something the author should have known about because the champions, facilitators of Mandela were guilt ridden Jewish and Indian Communists, (members of the media, legal profession) much like Radosh’s parents and their buddies. Not only that he was a believer, he was fed with the Communist myth going to college and becoming a lawyer. The entire ANC operating system, was based on Communist principals and talking points. It was simply a way to attain power, anyone who spent enough time in the region knows that this was not out of core beliefs, but simply a method of taking charge. They got power and proved to be bad Communist and even worse capitalist, they are proceeding in killing the Afrikanner farmers who feed the continent, many platinum mines are closing because of labor unrest, if Mandela lives long enough he will be able to see with his own eyes how a country goes from being the most prosperous nation in the continent to become one more failed state-another Zimbabwe. Give it time…it rots from within….
“Give it time…it rots from within….”
Even old Van Rensburg could see that coming.
Are you referring to one Patrick Van Rensburg, who defected from the Afrikaners, and wrote a book called Guilty Land?
Another interesting figure was Philip Kgosana, who talked an angry African crowd out of massacring some white police officers – only to be imprisoned later by the regime of Verwoerd, and later to escape abroad.
No. Never heard of Patrick.
I was refering to Nicolas Van Rensburg– the christian Boer who made prophecies about 100 years ago.
It’s definitely headed that direction. They recently started net importing food, for the first year ever and going forward.
As British Africa decolonized after WW II, there were two ways many African students found to study abroad. One was through Commonwealth Scholarships, http://cscuk.dfid.gov.uk/ which still takes many Africans for study to universities in Canada, the UK and to a lesser extent, New Zealand and Australia. The other was to Patrice Lumumba university in Moscow, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-11-05/news/1995309007_1_patrice-lumumba-dream-school-moscow , a notorious recruiting ground for Soviet era agents and their fellow travelers. A few received training in other places notably Israel, France, Belgium, & the United States.
One could argue that the totalitarian / militaristic methodology of Stalinism is naturally & easily adapted to the customs of African tribalism & that the Brit Colonial Office people of the 1950′s forward were willfully blind to the notion that leaving Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana et. al with a “parliamentary system” didn’t automatically engender forthwith the functioning of those places as parliamentary democracies along the lines of the established Dominions.
I also think that its fair to say that the deification of Mandela in the West and the loss to the West of the resources of first Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and now South Africa represents the greatest Soviet / Russian triumph of their foreign services since the 1917 Revolution.
As side points, several items: First, its interesting that Obama senior came to the USA–not the USSR–for his studies and STILL turned into a dyed in the wool Marxist as is evidenced by his writings.
As an “honorary” (I am white with no connection to Africa) member of the African Students’ Union at a Canadian campus thirty years ago (my organization shared an office with them), I was a frequent guest at the campus African parties. I once asked a particularly vocal individual if it was theoretically possible for a black man to be a racist. His response was loud and vociferous that it was racist even to ask the question.
It would also be amusing to tally up the numerous African employees of the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations and see how many list Patrice Lumumba U as their alma mater.
So the western leftists and media mostly swept Mandela’s Communist ties under the rug. They would never do something similar for some other black figure, would they? Of course not. /sarcasm
Can anyone name 1 member of the ANC during the bad old days that was NOT a communist?
You missed the reference to Chief Albert Luthuli who was president of the ANC from 1952-1967. He was a Christian who put his principles before politics and a man opposed to resorting to violence. That is why Mandela (and certain other people in the ANC) went behind his back to promote the armed struggle and establishing of the militant wing of the ANC.
It would be worth reading a recent book “Albert Luthuli: Bound by Faith” by Scott Couper (2010).
You can also download Couper’s Lecture on Luthuli which picks up some of the main points from the book:
Chief Albert Luthuli: How did he translate his faith into action?
http://www.diakonia.org.za/attachments/24_Bound%20by%20Faith.pdf
Here is an article by Couper that will be even more useful that the previous one I mentioned:
‘An Embarrassment to the Congresses?’: The Silencing of Chief Albert Luthuli and the Production of ANC History
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03057070902919884
Anything left/liberal adores commies and is heavily infiltrated by them… look at Democrats now.
Mr. Radosh, I thought it was well known that Mandela had been a communist. This wasn’t a debate I followed the most closely, but my recollection of the Reagan adminstration’s response to the attacks on our relationship with South Africa in the 1980s was that many of the leading ANC figures were communists and that we did not want South Africa following in the direction of Nicaragua. Personally, I was surprised and pleased that Mandela actually did seem to change a bit and that he did not take South Africa in a more totalitarian direction (although there’s room for criticism.
I just read Dana Milbanks article at investors.com about the absence of transparency in the 0bama administration. The point of the article was how Pres 0bama talks about it but doesn’t practise it. Then there is Pres 0bamas mystery trip to Pakistan in the ’80s. Frame this all up with departing Ron Pauls speech about what a hard sell Freedom has become. Very interesting, kind of feels like an “invisible hand.”
so, another african country bites the dust. gosh, i’m shocked! shocked i say! recently i watched a documentary on how the white african farmers were being killed or forcefully removed to turn their land over to the ‘real africans’. it then showed the same once productive farm land overgrown and wasted. followed, once again, by the mental images of the bloated bellies of really poor children w/o food. one follows the other, like night follows day. even as i look out my door and watch the 250+ lb. ‘poor’ kids in this country waddle down my street eating twinkies and talking on their free obama-phones.
its comforting to see how socialist/communist/marxist doctrine still produces such a wealth of fairness and prosperity in a once prosperous continent. the name of the ravaged country changes, but the cause and the catch phrases remain the same.
reminds me of my high school football team. we never won a game, but we always had the best cheering section.
You were shocked about Nelson Mandela? Wow. Shocked you were shocked. I am waiting for the day when planeloads of white South Africans flee from the murder and racism hunting them down and seek asylum here. And then we’ll see the left expose themselves even further for the racialist scum they are by DENYING them never having the guts to say it’s because they are WHITE. And we need the room for the brown Mexicans whom we can count on to vote Marxist/socialist.
Whites have been fleeing South Africa since 1994.
NPR, a while back, ran a feature on Morning Edition whose gist was, “It’s so bad in South Africa that even the blacks are leaving in droves.”
“Whites have been fleeing South Africa since 1994.”
Half of them left since 1994 and more whites have been murdered then than all the losses in the Bush Wars from 1966-1989.
And where is the international outrage? Where are the awareness concerts? Where are the frequent marches in the street? Where are the non-governmental Human Rights Organizations?
White Europeans have to develop Identity Political organization and a racial consciousness, else they will become the new Jews. Abused and ill treated, picked off as individuals by other organized tribes.
It’s as simple as that. Either rejoin the natural fight for survival on this planet, or shrivel and die. That really is the choice.
that should be “racial consciousness AND solidarity.”
The problem isn’t too little “race consciousness”, it’s TOO MUCH.
You cant change other peoples behavior, only your own. Adapt or die, the choice is yours.
Whites in South Africa know this. Jews in Israel and elsewhere know this.
Your statement of half the whites having left South Africa since 1994 is a guess.
The comparison of the murders to the Iraq wars depends on how many were actually killed there. However, according to the South African government’s own figures (Department of Statistics) about 350 000 have been murdered in South Africa between 1994 and 2012. A study by the reputable South African Medical Research Council to test these numbers has found that the actual number of murders is significantly higher. I am convinced that these crimes have been encouraged by the philosophy of the African National Council and Mandela that the end justifies the means.
To Canada’s credit, they allowed a white South African asylum seeker entrace to Canada under the UN Refugee agreement a couple of years ago. Mine own Brother in Law, my sister born and raised in America is married to a Boer and has permanent residence status there, he had a devil of a time getting paperwork through to allow him to immigrate to the US. So they are ready to leave fairly quickly if things deteriorate rapidly. There children hold dual citizenship do to my sister being their mother….so she and the kids can come without any other papers. The US really gave him a run around and eventually we had to contact Jim Demint’s office to get it out of bureaucratic stalling and obfuscation.
I have no idea why the Netherlands doesnt have a Law of Return with regards to the Boers, whilst they import Morrocans hither and tither, to destroy their country.
European peoples better wise up, and that includes White European Americans, and the other Anglo Nations.
Is it possible? Some of Saint Mandela’s congregation now see him with feet of clay? “Have had the wool pulled over…”?
Highly cultured persons of superior intellect, historical awareness, insight, wanting only “the good of the people” could not possibly have been mistaken. In their choice of champion, methods and putative aims? Which HE never made secret.
We’ve been here before with other Saints to follow to paradise. They too were highly cultured, intelligent, with historical awareness and insight, wanting only the “good of the people”. They too knew all about the importance of racial and sexual differences among the peoples in their charge.
Their fans in all civic institution of propaganda/education, law and courts with the drive from the People cheered them on. The murders of millions and millions of compatriots and foreigners and the material destruction of their worlds to pave the way to their paradises. One short-lived, another for over 70 years. A third extant.
Those who became disenchanted did not however say they “had the wool pulled over” but simply “We Didn’t Know”.
Are we now embracing a New Age Messiah with power over “how the world turns” with his/their Dream of a postmodern, post-racial, post-sexual world? At what price?
What shall his congregation say when his/their Dream has been fulfilled?
See South African Israel and the West in Midstream January 1995 and don’t forget the Zulu opponents of both apartheid and Mandela. Also see Peter Pham’s article in Foundation for Defense of Democracies: The Russian Bear Returns to Africa or check world defense review http://worlddefensereview.com/pham082108.shtml
Whatever part of the political spectrum you are on it’s very obvious that Mandela supported Gaddafi because Gaddafi supported him.
And he doesn’t support Israel because Israel had a military relationship with his enemies.
It’s that simple.
These relationships are not related to his being a Communist.
If someone gives you money he’s your friend. If someone is a friend of your enemies, he isn’t.
During the 1990 Mandela Victory Tour across America, he stated that Fidel Castro and the principles of Cuban communism were to be admired and emulated. Mandela also down played the roles of Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush for his release from prison. So not only is Mandela a communist but he is an ungrateful communist at that. The current regime in DC reveres Mandela. Hillary Clinton made a trip to South Africa in August to pay homage to him. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak…
Africa is a cesspool of despotic and corrupt Marxist/Moslem leaders who live in palaces while their hapless subjects starve. I remember as a kid watching the commercials depecting the starving children. 40 years later, the grandchildren of those pathetic souls are still starving. 40 years from now their grandchildren will most likely still be starving. This is the fault of the rulers of all the African nations who don’t give a damn about their own people.
He was and is a perilous communist agent at the service of HM Government. lol lol lol
Mandela was never a commie. The ANC was composed of lefties and liberals that had nothing to do with communism, socialism.
You are delirious!!
This is a “bombshell”, that Mandela was a communist? Are you kidding me? Among people who know anything about the ANC, who didn’t know that?
Frankly, who cares whether he was a Communist or not. (Commentary Magazine made a claim to that effect in the 1980′s — can’t find the source). The big thing was he was able to cut a deal with the Boer leadership to keep the lid on for at least a generation, and it worked.
As I recall, there was never any question as to Nelson Mandela being a communist. He made no secret of it.
Would be argue that because Mandela was a Communist somehow the goals of the ANC and the overthrow of apartheid were illegitimate? SA is not now a Communist country and is unlikely to become one it is against the course of history. That Mandela was a Communist is of no consequence then or now. Black South Africans were brutally repressed under apartheid and they are far better off now than when Mandela came on the scene. They are at least in control of their own destinies.
Brutus you can make the claim that “Black South Africans were brutally repressed under apartheid and they are far better off now” if you conveniently ignore history.
During the National Party apartheid rule from 1948 till 1994 less than 30 000 were killed in South Africa (about 7 000 “political killing” by the police and military and much of the rest in blacks on black conflict. Compare this to the number murdered in South Africa since 1994 of around 350 000 or to the 40 000 and more killed in the current Syrian conflict over 18 months.
Speak to intelligent black and white South Africans with a clear memory of the situation going back to the fifties. Ask specific questions about the actual situation to determine if it is in fact better now for the majority than it was say in 1960 or 1970. Compare the health care at government hospitals, the public schools, the ability of people to get a job and feed themselves, the relative cost of living, and the levels of crime between then and now. You may be surprised at how many are certainly not “far better off now” but facing appalling poverty while the ruling political elite have grossly enriched themselves with the president earning more than many first world leaders.
It is time to drop the political rewriting of history, to go back to the primary sources and rewrite South Africa’s history honestly. That country has a messy history (like most others) but while many whites there patronized blacks they were certainly not brutal. Similarly many blacks have been given a bad name because of African Nationalism but there were people like Albert Luthuli, a far better role model than Nelson Mandela. (see my reply to 12 above for references)
Far better off now?
see report:
http://www.polity.org.za/article/sa-statement-by-statistics-south-africa-report-on-the-social-profile-of-vulnerable-groups-in-south-africa-2002-to-2011-06122012-2012-12-06
Makes no difference now if he was a communist.
The real question is what will happen going forward in S.A.
My guess is that the tribal/ethnic (e.g., black tribe vs black tribe; all blacks vs whites) values and cultures will once again predominate and SA, like most African nations will become a bloodbath of warring tribes.
Tribal cultures are simply incompatible with a representative democratic (just look at the Arab nations) form of government.
Within a few years after the passing of Mandela, look for a new black govt. in SA to “divest” all assets from whites, nationalize all means of production, and begin very harsh discriminatory policies against black tribes that do not have power. The aggrieved black tribes will of course fight back and the mass exterminations will begin.
What else is new in Africa?
As for the whites, well, most will leave.
Was Nelson Mandela a secret communist?
I never knew there was anything secret about it, or even that his Marxist leanings were in question.
You mean you didn’t know??!
I am ‘gob-smacked’, as they like to say.
The ANC was founded by the SACC.
Yes, well, Americans were sticking it to the “brutal” apartheid regime all these years in blissful and self-righteous ignorance and now the chickens have come home to roost.
“Was Nelson Mandela a Secret Communist?”
Is the Pope Catholic?
Does a bear use Charmin in the woods?
It should certainly be no surprise to Mr Malan that Mr Mandela was a communist in the 60s : Rian was a member of the white liberal intellectual mafiosi in the 70s where communism had the extra elan of being illegal. Nelson Mandela spent the time in prison, separated from the ANC in exile, while his successor, Thabo Mbeki was being groomed, with finishing school after Sussex University at Patrice Lumumba. After 1994, Mandela was a unifying figure but the real power always lay with Mbeki who organised the Gramscian long march through the institutions of state and tried to silent any debates within the ANC, to the detriment of the genuine democrats of the UDF who fought injustice from within South Africa during the 80s and found themselves, trade unionists included, displaced by the cadres returned from exile. Zuma may have been a foot soldier for the ANC but he is a crude populist not an ideologue who has bought loyalty with financial favours. South Africa is rapidly becoming a kleptocracy for the well connected. Communism as a coherent ideology may have facilitated the transition but greed has overwhelmed any idealism. And the left in the west remains as silent as it does on the rise of islamism.
And next you’ll be shocked, SHOCKED! to hear he knew about Winnie’s involvement in necklacing.
Mandela underwent training in terrorism in Libya. He wrote a paper titled “How To Be A Good Communist”. All this was well known, often published, and totally ignored by the bien pensant Western world.
every white in South Africa was aware that Mandela was a communist. Indeed, because of legal pressures, most of the opposition had the choice between silence or joining with the communists, except for a few church groups which quickly morphed into communist backers.
The real problem is that Xuma has been openly planning to copy Robert Mugabe. So if he throws out all the whites, coloured and Asians from South Africa, presumably the European liberals will look the other way at the millions of refugees whose famlies have lived there for 400 years.
Mandala, like Obama, bought a constituency of sloth and stupidity with the promise to “redistribute” the nation’s paychecks to anyone who who would rather vote for a living than earn one. The problem in every country in the world is not communism or any other ism; the problem is the world’s billions of contemptible human garbage who vote themselves onto other people’s paychecks and with the help of their media/academia accomplices maintain an acceptable self image by redefining their tax funded, work-free profits as “social justice,” instead of political exploitation.
“Readers of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s will recall Thomas Karis’s campaigns against troglodytes who claimed that the ANC was communist-dominated.”
I didn’t read Foreign Affairs, but I thought it was generally understood that the ANC was a communist movement, and that the only people bothering to deny it were the kind of people who wouldn’t have been upset by yet another communist take-over anyway.
I always assumed that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union — the driver of most worldwide communist subversion — that made Nelson Mandela consider alternative models, and which made the yielding of power by South African whites an option.
Serious historians of the ANC have long demonstrated that communism, anti colonialism etc were only some of the ideologies that shaped the movement. Social liberalism was another.
Mandela was not and is not a Mugabe.
You claim he was a stalinist. Had he been one, he would still be in power.
The whites of south africa!!!!! Well, my family is certainly white and they had plantations in Africa (Mozambique, Angola and South Africa.
Well, let me put it this way: they were and are a bunch of nazis!! I certainly do not agree with what happened to them but…they were damn racist…my cousin had blac servants and treated them like sheit!! This TOO was a TRIBAL CULTURE, wholy incompatible with western democratic virtues. Are these the whites that you are referring to???? The whites that support Le Blanche embody these western, whitish, democratic culture???? Fine exemplars of democratic virtue indeed!!
As for the paper How to be a Good Communist, I am very familiar with it. Yet, is it not strange that Mandela did not implement any of the ideas contained in it?? (single party rule, radical redistribution of wealth, nationalization, class warfare)
Should we regard the FM Botha and DeKlerk as Mandela’s co-conspirators??? Would they have negotiated with a Stalinist??? Or with a communist?????
The ANC was a movement inspired by many ideals. As with all movements it lacked a coherent ideology. They were more united by their hatred of apartheid than by any common ideology. Most of Mandelas best allies were LIBERALS, not commies.
A Gramscian?? Maybe.
Thanks for the display of emotive white guilt. It was entertaining. What ever happened to DeKlerks ex-wife by they way? Your cousins servants could have sought other gainful employment, no? He was a nazi. Gotta it. Ummm.. yeah.
Would 350 000 South Africans have been murdered since 1994 when Mandela became president of South Africa had he followed the example and advice of Albert Luthuli and not undermined this wise man? I think not.
A man should be judged by his actions.
Mandela may have entertained leftist ideals but his political life was characterised by accommodation and negotiation.
This great man was never a fanatical ideologue. He was and is a pragmatist, above all.
You lot are the fanatics!! The present President of the European Commission was in his university years a radical leftist, a maoist. Would you classify him as a commie today???? Churchil was a liberal and a conservative?? What was he???? Thomas Jefferson was inspired by the revolutionary ideals of European enlightenment (equality under God). Was he a communist? The Kibutz was a communitarian experience that some could justifiably consider leftist. Would we consider Israel a communist country????
Do not judge the whole of a man’s life because of 1 pamphlet. Its not only intellectually dishonest. Its quite repugnant.
Would 350 000 South Africans have been murdered since 1994 when Mandela became president of South Africa had he followed the example and advice of Albert Luthuli and not undermined this wise man? I think not.
Has Mandela ever admitted the terrible consequences of his ideology that the end justifies the means (which continues to damage South African society every day) and that Luthuli was right? Certainly not! (Incidentally much of the hurt caused by white nationalists in apartheid South Africa was for the same reason – following the same ideology)
Anyone who still thinks there was any merit to apartheid South Africa should read Tramp Royale by the late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Tramp Royale is not fiction; it’s a travel book he wrote in the 1950s and couldn’t sell to a publisher. One of the countries he visited was South Africa, and he saw clearly (and reported frankly) on the nature of the regime.
(Note to anyone who thinks Heinlein was a wussy liberal: read Starship Trooper, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Red Planet.)
We live in a messed up world and part of that messed up world are the ideologies and the consequences that flow from them. One of these is apartheid. But having said that, responsible and honest South Africans who were adults in the 1950s and see what is happening there today see that it is far worse for the majority of citizens because of a foolish, self-serving, self-enriching leadership clinging to another messed up ideology that should have died like the dinosaurs.
Read of the financial scandals around the South African president Zuma that were exposed in detail today. Even Mandela does not have clean hands and has been stunningly silent about all the corruption in the presidency and among the ANC leadership.
This is from the best liberal newspaper in South Africa:
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-07-00-secret-report-reveals-how-millions-flowed-to-zuma
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-06-all-the-presidents-willing-benefactors-part-one
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-07-00-all-the-presidents-willing-benefactors-part-two
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-07-00-zuma-corruption-south-africans-have-a-right-to-know
Buckeye Abroad
Why the hell should I feel guilt when I did not partake in any of it?
I do not feel guilt at all, dear Sigmund.
Dont try to psychobabble me!!
Oh, I am the emotive one: you are the one using the killing of Marina as an argument.
Should I use the thousands of blacks killed during apartheid to win the argument?????
My cousin, my Unt and her husband were and are profoundly racist. To be honest with you, they got what they deserved. They escaped, smuggled funds accross the border into south africa and moved into Lisbon, where they still live in luxury.
Is that FAIR??? You gotta be kidding me!!
Apartheid was an insidious system. Im sorry, but if you treat people like sheit, what the hell should you expect?? That they will treat you nicely?????
Ive met racist afrikaners. These were the people that sought support from Hitler against the Brits.
Enuf said.
Calm down Mr Liberal… I cannot respond to all your allegations, but let me try.
Boers fought a bitter war against the British in 1899-1902 in which they saw 20% of their population perish in concentration camps. Large numbers of surviving Boer girls and women were raped and sexually exploited by English soldiers in that war. The result was a latent hatred of all things English. This is the underlying reason for Afrikaners culturally neutral stance during WWI and WWII. But Afrikaner leaders of South African did fight on the Allied side in both these wars — in spite of the bitterness about the Boer War. You smearing them as Nazi’s is not only outrageous, but indicates quite a bit more about the failure of the leftist mind to parse facts into coherent conclusions.
As for the apartheid era, SA economy grew at double its pace today. Living standards and life expectancy of South Africans peaked in 1992, when social development was at its best ever. Apartheid was racial segregation similar in scope to the segregation of the American South, but it lasted longer and was more draconian. During the apartheid years, the Boer Government of South Africa built more than 20 colleges and universities for blacks, and by 1992 some of these were reaching the status of good to excellent. After 1992, well, let us say.
As for treating workers like shiite, I am sure this happened, and also happens in the USA, even today. I do not extrapolate that to the entire American population, as you do to Boers. You see, conservatives do not stereotype people in this way.
“Should I use the thousands of blacks killed during apartheid to win the argument?????”
What blacks? Who did they represent? Who did the die for? Who killed them? You are one emotional twat.
“My cousin, my Unt and her husband were and are profoundly racist. To be honest with you, they got what they deserved. They escaped, smuggled funds accross the border into south africa and moved into Lisbon, where they still live in luxury.
Is that FAIR??? You gotta be kidding me!!”
I’ve been to Lisbon. Luxury isn’t what I call it. Racist, communist ANC was limiting the transer of every white family funds out of SA to $60,000 IIRC back in 94′. I am sure there were banks willing to hide that, for a fee of course, on the way out. More power to them. You seem to have an “envy” schtick regarding your family. Heh.
“Apartheid was an insidious system. Im sorry, but if you treat people like sheit, what the hell should you expect?? That they will treat you nicely?????”
White people are being murdered today in SA for their skin color. You can Google the Afrikan murders… I won’t post the link here. The 6 month year old white baby burned to death was enough for me.
“Ive met racist afrikaners. These were the people that sought support from Hitler against the Brits.”
Maybe the fact that the Brits sent those rebelious Boers women and children into concentration camps and over 26,000 of them Afrikaners died back in 1901. Hate isn’t spontaneoues.
We hate you for reason.. Liberal.
errata: they DID NOT get what they deserved.
Prison should have been their final abode. Not Lisbon.
The nazi mufti relation is often invoked, rightly so (arab elites were/are(?) racist germanophiles, generally speaking)
But if one mentions the (nationalist) Afrikaner-Nazi nexus..well..well…well…wizzling to the wind….
what the hell is wrong with you gentlemen??????
do you honestly think that we, liberals, are STUPID?????
“do you honestly think that we, liberals, are STUPID?????”
Well, uh, yea; actually we do think liberals are stupid.
We also think liberals are deceitful, intolerant, narcissistic, selfish, arrogant, elitist, dangerous, oblivious to facts and easily taken in by any mass murdering dictator (Mao, Stalin, etc) as long as the dictator claims to be a socialist or communist.
As Lenin succinctly put it, liberals are “useful idiots.”
Anyway, thanks for asking.
So you’re saying the Afrikaner-Nazi connection is relevant, but the ANC-Communist connection should be ignored?
In the late 50′s or early 60′s, when the MSM still had a streak of honesty, it was reported that of the 32 members of the ANC’s Central Committee 23 (TWENTY-THREE) were open members of the South African Communist Party,forever removing any doubt in my mind that Mandela was a Stalinist stooge and no suffering, Christ-like figure.
Any other nation on this planet ever gone from total domination by a minority to ‘let’s start over like nothing happened’? I don’t think so. The chances of bouncing back without a ripple are zero, had the situation been reversed the ‘civilized white man’ would have exacted a revenge that left the former oppressors decimated if not annilated.
The backlash has been significantly less than predicted, of the whites I know who ran for cover have at one time or another expressed their desire to return ‘ home’ but financially they are unable to reverse their flight. They left in haste saying we were mad to remain in the land of Cain, but I’m happy here except for the fact that there is still a hungry mass of humanity fed on lies and empty promises. Our future rests with the younger generations, schooled as equals and less prone to harbouring fanciful thoughts of being superior.
Instead of living in the past and scratching the scabs off of old sores we should look to a brighter future, because after all is said and done the future is all we have to live for. I love the New South Africa and the freedom that we have. There is no high wall nor electric fencing around my home to afford me a false sense of security. The ‘free world’ is facing hard times and are no longer free, as I go about my daily tasks I can’t help noticing that the despicable laws we suffered under Calvanistic apartheid rule are now being entrenched in the former ‘free’ states/ countries in the west. Detention without trial, prison sentences for reasons undoubtably obscure, media one sided and censored – designed to protect the ruling ‘elite’, dubious laws being passed in secret, citing “National security” as the reason why you can no longer trust your neighbour, a harsh and jackbooted approach to citizens by all forms of Authority from customs and border control to police and Security Agencies, prisons filled to overflowing and drastic steps to control the masses from peacefully declaring their opposition to the status quo. To name a few.
It’s you my friends that have mountains to climb, freedoms to regain, atrocities to to survive, while our people heal and build anew. Hope is alive and well in this wonderful land of ours and yes, time will tell. While we ponder our own fate the writings on the wall, the hurdles that we’ve passed are now in your domain, but you have electronic spies from which escape is rare, so instead of condemning us you should say a prayer for the freedoms that united you are no longer there.
The true mark of an idiot is the manner in which he generalizes.
You were easily taken by Lenin’s maxim, Sir. To the point of quoting him in support of your argument.
Lets see: all liberals are idiots because they are taken by commie propaganda but you do not hesitate to quote Lenin, the supreme commie!!!
How should I interpret this??: 1) that you are an idiot or 2) that you are a commie???
I would appreciate any help with this conundrum.
You should be pleased to learn that when the term was used it DID NOT refer to LIBERALS but rather to pacifists like Bernard Shaw and others. Liberalism is NOT socialism. Would you consider John Stuart Mill a socialist??? Or Rawls?
You are most welcome.
PS: recently you were defeated by “useful idiots.” What does that make you? An idiotic loser?
kind rregards
Liberal
Its amazing.
Some of you are very close to defending apartheid but we, the liberals, are intolerant!?!?!?!
Beyond belief, i tell ya!!!
What is the point of trying to have an intelligent discussion with imbeciles like these????
See, im pretty tolerant. I tried my best top learn something from you.
Very disappointing!
I learnt nothing!!
“I learnt nothing!!”
Your moniker revealed that from the beginning.
Good luck.
I was not aware that Mandela’s Communist background was not previously widely known (and acknowledged). I can remember reading about his connections to the South African Communist Party 30 years ago in John Birch Society publications.