President Barack Obama has compared him to George Washington. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews heralded him as “perhaps the world’s greatest hero.”
The Las Vegas Guardian Express dispensed with the “perhaps,” declaring in headline: “Nelson Mandela World’s Greatest Hero.”
Others have christened him “the greatest man of the 20th century.” Many revere him as “the savior” of South Africa. School children worldwide read books, write essays and sing songs about him, and watch movies extolling his virtues and heroic accomplishments.
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As we write, the 94-year-old Mandela has been hovering near death for days, the subject of hourly news updates and the beneficiary of tearful prayer vigils worldwide. With the announcement of his death, the eulogies will soon be sounding and in his honor innumerable streets, highways, schools, stadiums, parks, and public buildings will be renamed.
For the past three decades, Nelson Mandela has been swathed in global media adulation unlike any other human being in history. No pope, president, king, war hero, movie star, or rock star can boast of having been the beneficiary of such undiluted, unalloyed, and unbroken acclaim. It is common for totalitarian dictators to employ their state-controlled media to create a worshipful cult of personality about themselves — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung — but outside of their countries there are usually journalists and media organs that will report their crimes, failings, and misdeeds. Mandela has not had to worry about dirty laundry; he is the first individual to achieve a near-universal cult of personality on the global level, thanks entirely to the unparalleled glorification campaign bestowed upon him by the major media in the United States and Europe.
As we reported in 1990 regarding his world tour that year, following his release from prison, his media saturation coverage (and infatuation coverage) was unprecedented — and has not been matched by anyone since. He has received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union, and numerous other honors from countries, universities, and institutions.
What is it about Nelson Mandela the man that justifies this global adoration? To be sure, his mien contributes; he is tall, dignified, and statesman-like in appearance, gracious in public speech, and grandfatherly in tone. He does not exude the radical, self-promotional hucksterism of, say, Al Sharpton, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or the ANC’s current head, Jacob Zuma. And, yes, he served many years in prison, but not merely for opposing injustice and racism, as his legions of hagiographers would have us believe. He was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC), an organization designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department and many governments and intelligence agencies. He was also a co-founder of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), a militant terrorist group within a terrorist group. He was tried and convicted for his terrorist and subversive activities within those organizations (more on which in a moment).
Countless thousands of genuine prisoners of conscience, who have never done anything more “criminal” than praying, or speaking out against tyranny, are languishing in prisons all across the planet without so much as a peep of protest from the legions of Mandela worshipers and his chorus of media promoters. How many of those praising Mandela as the world’s moral compass have ever heard of Ignatius Cardinal Kung, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanghai, who was imprisoned in Communist China for 33 years, most of it overlapping the same period in which Mandela was in prison? Cardinal Kung’s heroic incarceration was in many ways more severe than that faced by Mandela, but no media love-fest awaited him when he was released in 1988. Ditto for Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a black Cuban physician who was released from Fidel Castro’s prison system in 2011 after brutal captivity for the “crime” of criticizing the island’s communist regime. But did Nelson Mandela chastise his comrades in Beijing and Havana when he visited there, or did he bring up the plight of the countless political and religious prisoners in their gulags? If so, there is no public record of it, though there is plenty on record of him praising those oppressive regimes.
Mandela: Communist, Terrorist, Liar
This leads us directly to one of the most important issues concerning Nelson Mandela: Was he a Communist with a capital “C,” meaning a disciplined member of the Communist Party, which, in this case means the South African Communist Party (SACP)? In the 1958 treason trial, Nelson Mandela denied being a member of the SACP, a denial he has repeated many times since, and has maintained to the end. His defenders fall into two general categories on this issue, those who believe his denial and those who say, in effect, “So what? What does it matter if he was/is a Communist?”
Those who say they believe his denial must ignore an overwhelming mountain of evidence to the contrary, much of which has been available for decades and much which has only recently come to light from: previously unavailable SACP records; government archives of Communist countries; memoirs and biographies of, and interviews with, SACP and ANC members of the period.
Those who say “So what?” to the question of Mandela’s membership in the SACP must ignore the well established facts that show:
• The SACP was, and remains, a hardcore Marxist-Leninist organization in which all members must pledge unquestioned obedience to the will of the Party, as determined by its Central Committee;
• The SACP took its direction from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and, as such, was an agent of a hostile foreign power;
• SACP members, including Mandela, secretly took control of the ANC, pushing aside and sabotaging ANC leaders committed to reform and change through peaceful, political means;
• ANC and its terrorist arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was also controlled by the SACP, were trained in Soviet Russia and Red China, or in Communist “Frontline States” — Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe — by Soviet, Chinese, East German, Cuban, Czech, and other Communist instructors;
• The SACP-controlled ANC and MK exploited the conditions of apartheid, racism and colonialism not to help South African blacks, but to further the objectives of the Soviet Union and the world Communist conspiracy;
• The SACP-controlled ANC and MK used the Communist-provided training and arms to direct their terror, torture, and murder against South Africa’s black majority even more often than against the white minority;
• If Mandela was not only a Communist Party member, but also a top SACP leader — which the evidence irresistibly shows he was — then he is not only a colossal and persistent liar, but he is all the more culpable in the innumerable acts of terror, torture, and murder committed by ANC mobs and MK cadres over the past several decades;
• Mandela has bequeathed South Africa a one-party state ruled by the increasingly tyrannical and kleptocratic ANC/SACP, which is leading the country down the path toward economic destruction, record-level violent crime, chaos, and genocide.
The coming wave of terror and genocide
The last point mentioned above is especially relevant, since the ostensible purpose of the ANC/SACP revolution was to ameliorate the plight of the disadvantaged black population. Instead, they are transforming what was by far the most prosperous state in Africa (and the one to which black Africans were fleeing to escape Red/black oppression, despite South Africa’s apartheid system then in place) into a corrupt despotism with: squashing of dissent; looting of the treasury by top government officials; sky-high unemployment; increasing poverty and homelessness; some of the world’s highest rates of murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, car-jacking; and the world’s highest HIV/AIDS infection rates.
Resolving the issue of Mandela’s role in the SACP is all the more important when viewed in its proper historical context, which is in the context of the Cold War and the Soviet’s aggressive campaigns in the Third World through “wars of national liberation.” During that period the Communists were killing tens of millions of their own subjects in what Professor R. J. Rummel calls “democide,” or mass murder by government.
Dr. Rummel, who has painstakingly catalogued the top 15 of the mega-murderer regimes, puts the number of their victims during the 20th century at a conservative estimate of more than 151 million — and that was only up to 1987. The vast majority of those were slaughtered by Communist regimes that claimed to be the forces of “liberation.” A significant portion of that slaughter took place in Africa by those same forces of liberation. And it hasn’t ended. In fact, as we have reported, the stark ominous signs, as cited by genocide experts, are that the ANC is preparing to unleash a Communist-style genocide campaign in the “Rainbow Nation” against the remaining white population (see here and here) that will surely also be directed against Indians, Chinese, and millions of blacks.
The genocide campaign against white South Africans has already been underway for several years, but has not yet reached the all-out intensity of the slaughter stages witnessed in Rwanda, Burundi, or Sierra Leone. But that time may be coming soon, and if it does, Nelson Mandela will have helped to launch it. Chilling video footage of Mandela singing an ANC/MK genocide song about killing whites belies the sainted image.
Similarly, in another stunning video, which has since been removed from YouTube for violating its “hate speech” policy, Mandela’s longtime comrade in the ANC and the SACP (and current president of South Africa) Jacob Zuma, sings “Kill the Boer,” meaning kill the white farmer. Even more chilling than the words of the murderous song is the near frenzied behavior it stirs up in many of the assembled mob members. This is clearly incitement to genocide by the top members of South Africa’s ANC ruling regime, the same individuals who incessantly pose as peace advocates. (See both of the videos imbedded at the bottom of this article.)
Yet, the “hate speech” police in our media, who are quick to pounce on any real or fabricated racial or “homophobic” gaffe by politicians, celebrities, or common citizens, have hypocritically ignored the Mandela/Zuma genocide endorsements — or have attempted to exonerate them of any malice with lame excuses about the songs being mere cultural/political slogans.
But with the fires, violence, and chaos already burning in South Africa, these actions by the ANC’s most revered leaders are pouring gasoline on the fire. They are stoking a genocidal inferno. We have already seen what this will look like and it is horrible beyond the ability of words to convey. Videos of the ANC’s “necklacing” torture/executions have documented the kind of grotesque “justice” that is meted out by the comrades and minions of Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma. In this unutterably vicious method of terror/murder the victim is seized by a howling mob, beaten, stabbed, stoned, and then, while still alive, has a tire soaked in petrol placed around his/her neck and set ablaze. It can take agonizing minutes for the unfortunate victim to die. (See videos of necklacing here and here.)
Hundreds of victims, the vast majority of whom were black, were killed this way by ANC-led lynch mobs. Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Mandela, was caught on video infamously shouting to a huge mob: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country!” Despite this and the fact that she was convicted in court in the torture/murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and found by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be guilty in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of numerous men, women, and children, Winnie Mandela is free as a bird and still sits on the ANC’s Executive Committee. If Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma have any “moral authority,” it has not evidenced itself in the form of condemning and removing this murderess from the ANC’s highest body.
Necklacing is one of the ANC’s enduring “gifts” to humanity; it has been exported to Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mexico, and many other countries. And, over the past couple of years, many news stories from South Africa report on its revival there.
Overwhelming evidence: guilty beyond reasonable doubt
The evidence that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party is so enormous that we will be able to detail only a tiny fraction of it. Dr. Henry R. Pike solidly established the record on this matter in 1985 with his 600-page monumental work, A History of Communism in South Africa, which is massively documented with many photographs and reproductions of official court records and SACP, ANC, and MK documents.
Important new evidence has been made available since 2012, with the publication of historian Stephen Ellis’ extraordinary book, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990. Dr. Ellis, a professor based at the Free University of Amsterdam is no conservative and no apologist for apartheid; he is a former researcher for Amnesty International and was a researcher on the Mandela-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In fact, he seems to bend over backwards to put the best slant possible on Mandela’s SACP involvement. Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves — and they are damning. (For articles on and reviews of Dr. Ellis’ book see The New American here and The Telegraph (U.K.) here. A lengthy abstract of an article by Ellis surveying much of the material in External Mission is available here.
In addition, we now have many admissions against interest from interviews and articles over the past decade in the official Communist Party press and in the books and articles of Vladimir Shubin, a Soviet official who was stationed in South Africa for many years and played a key role in the Kremlin’s policies vis a vis South Africa and, more specifically, its aid to and direction of the SACP and the ANC.
In his book, ANC: A View from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye, 1999), although Shubin is careful to still put the Kremlin spin on his revelations, he nonetheless confirms much of what anti-communist critics had long claimed (and which the so-called intellectuals and media mavens had long scorned), as well as providing details not previously in the public domain.
Here is a brief sampling of the mountainous record documenting Mandela’s long, conspiratorial role in the South African Communist Party:
• Among the evidence uncovered recently by Prof. Ellis are the official minutes of a secret 1982 SACP meeting at which veteran Party leader John Pule Motshabi explains to the comrades that Mandela has been a (secret) SACP member for two decades;
• Rowley Israel Arenstein, a lawyer and leading SACP member since the 1930s, said that Mandela was chosen by the SACP to create Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and Mandela was the SACP’s main instrument in “hijacking” the ANC and marginalizing its longtime leader and president Albert Lithuli, an opponent of the SACP’s program of “liberation” through armed struggle.
• During the Rivonia Trial (October 1963-June 1964), Bruno Motolo, a black member of SACP, ANC and MK, provided devastating testimony of Mandela’s involvement in all three groups. Despite death threats, he later provided even more details in his memoir, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The Road to the Left;
• Other prominent SACP members that have publicly identified Mandela as a fellow Communist include Paul Trewhela,3 Joe Matthews, Hilda Bernstein and Brian Bunting;
• Paul Trewhela, an SACP member who was imprisoned (1964-1967) for his communist activities, and more recently assisted Prof. Ellis in his research in the archives of the Stasi (the KGB’s East German subsidiary), has said: “Mandela was indeed a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.”
• During the Rivonia Trial, more than 10 documents in Mandela’s handwriting were introduced into evidence, totaling hundreds of pages. One, entitled, “How to be a good communist,” stated: “Under communist rule, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey… In our country the struggle of the oppressed masses is led by the South African Communist Party and inspired by its policies.” He also wrote: “The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.”
• Mandela’s Rivonia documents also declared that “traitors and informers should be ruthlessly eliminated,” and he recommended “cutting off their noses” — among other barbarities — a tactic he had adopted from Algeria’s communist FLN terrorists and which he put into practice by MK;
• Mandela did not deny writing the damning material, but merely attempted to explain it away by claiming they were notes he had taken down for study purposes;
• A Rivonia trial surprise witness was Gerard Ludi, a top SACP member who was actually an infiltrator, Agent Q-018, for the Special Branch of the South African Police. Ludi provided detailed incriminatory evidence on the SACP’s leadership and illegal activities. He identified Mandela as “a top man in the central committee of the underground communist party.” Subsequent revelations have proven the reliability of Ludi’s testimony.
• Comrade Slovo, a Lithuanian-born Communist and a colonel in the Soviet KGB, was for decades one of Mandela’s closest associates in the SACP, ANC, and MK;
• Slovo himself stated, in his 1986 propaganda article, “The Sabotage Campaign”: “To constitute the High Command [of Umkhonto we Sizwe] the ANC appointed Mandela and the Party appointed me.” Since Mandela was himself a secret top member of the Party, this constitutes a admission that the SACP appointed and thereby controlled MK from the start.
So, Nelson Mandela was not only a SACP member, but a top Communist at that, a member of the ruling Central Committee. And not only that, but he was selected by his fellow top Communists to be the key Red who would launch the Kremlin-approved, Soviet-backed terror war against the South African government.
The ANC had begun as a non-communist organization, and, as a broad-based mass organization, always had many non-communist and anti-communist members. However, they were no match for the rigidly disciplined and conspiratorial SACP, which quickly infiltrated and took control. “The first real alliance between the ANC and the communists,” Dr. Pike wrote, “dates back to 1928, when E.J. Khalile, the ANC general-secretary, was elected to the SACP’s central committee. From this time onward, the alliance continued.” Albeit the alliance went through rocky periods when the non-communists tried to extricate themselves from the communist grip; but they never succeeded.
The new colonial masters: Moscow, Beijing, Havana
Here is a small sampling of the overwhelming evidence of the SACP’s ties to Moscow and Beijing and SACP’s decisive control over the ANC and MK:
• In 1960, top members of the SACP went to Moscow and Beijing for aid. In Beijing they met personally with dictator Mao Zedong and Den Xiaoping, Mao’s assistant and eventual successor. It was only with the blessings of the Kremlin and Mao that the SACP-led ANC launched their armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The meetings with Mao and Deng had not been public knowledge until revealed by Dr. Ellis’ research;
• Bartholomew Hlapane, a former member of the SACP Central Committee, testified in court: “All policy-making in the ANC was first discussed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.” He also stated: “Umkhonto we Sizwe’s policy was formulated by the communist party and the organization received its instructions from this party.” For this and other testimony Hlapane and his wife were brutally murdered and their daughter shot and left paralyzed;
• In 1982, Jorge da Costa, a personal friend of Joe Slovo and the head of security for Communist Mozambique’s dictator Samora Machel, defected to South Africa, bringing irrefutable proof of the Soviet/SACP/ANC connection. Regarding the SACP’s Slovo, da Costa said: “There is no doubt in my mind that Slovo is behind every operation launched by the ANC against South Africa. He has a brilliant mind and is one of the best-informed people about this country.”;
• SACP general secretary Joe Slovo, a KGB colonel, was in regular touch with fellow KGB agents, such as Vasily Solodovnikov, the Russian ambassador to Zambia, through which Moscow directives were channeled to the SACP/ANC/MK;
• The World Peace Council, a KGB-directed international communist front organization has been one of the ANC’s most durable allies and can claim much of the credit for organizing the decades-long “Free Mandela” media campaign that resulted in his release from prison;
• In his 2003 memoir, Nothing But the Truth: Behind the ANC’s Struggle Politics, SACP leader Benjamin Turok recalled “how easy it was for a small group like ours to exert much influence in the mass movement without giving away our existence.”
• In They Were Part of Us and We Were Part of Them: The ANC in Mozambique from 1976 to 1990, published in 2008, veteran ANC members reminisce on their experience. Among the many nuggets is an interview with Franny Rabkin and Ronnie Ntuli which contains this admission: Franny: “For us: We were Communists, and we were ANC.” Ronnie: “And so was everyone else.”
• Soviet official Vladimir Shubin wrote: “The Russian press has calculated that from 1963-1991, 1,501 ANC activists were trained in Soviet military institutions.” Thousands more were trained in the Frontline States. Communist veteran Gerald Horne, stated in Political Affairs, the official journal of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA): “There can be no doubt that the direct involvement of Soviet officers helped to raise the level of combat readiness of ANC armed units and, especially, of the organizers of the armed underground.”
• Mandela passed on control over the ANC and South Africa to Thabo Mbeki, his longtime comrade and a “former” SACP member. Mbeki subsequently lost out in a power struggle with another Mandela comrade and prison mate, Jacob Zuma, also a “former” SACP member, who is accelerating the ANC’s destructive policies as the current president of South Africa.
• Zuma has continued the Tripartite Alliance, the formal agreement among the ANC, SACP and COSATU, which guarantees that the SACP and the Communist-dominated COSATU will back the ANC as the Communist-run front group that runs South Africa.
• In 1998, at age 80, Mandela married for the third time, to Graca Machel, the widow of Mandela’s longtime ally, Samora Machel, the ruthless Communist dictator of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Graca was a longtime member of FRELIMO, the communist terrorist organization run by her husband that took control of Mozambique in 1975. For more than a decade, she was a partner in Samora Machel’s vicious reign of murder and torture of men, women, and children, including even many of his FRELIMO comrades whom he turned against.
Media propagandists unfazed by the evidence
Again, we have barely scratched the surface. But the enormity of the damning evidence notwithstanding, the doyens of the Establishment chattering classes continue to sing the same pro-ANC, pro-Mandela rhapsodies and offer the same lame excuses. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor and the Times’ former bureau chief in Johannesburg, attempts to dismiss the communist commitment of SACP members with the assertion that “Most [SACP] members weren’t all that Communist.” Yes, goes the argument, they were merely a bunch of African nationalists dressing up their rhetoric with some Marxist ideology for effect. That was the argument Keller, the Times and their ilk would drag out time after time during the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s whenever a startling new revelation threatened to make it obvious that the ANC were not freedom fighters but instead a bunch of Kremlin-backed, bloodthirsty, communist thugs. South African author Rian Malan takes Keller to task, pointing out that among the many SACP veterans refuting Keller’s claim is Hilda Bernstein, friend of Slovo and wife of SACP Central Committee member Rusty Bernstein. “Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists,” she said in a 2004 interview. “Anything the Soviets did was right. They were very, very pro-Soviet.”
But Keller is unmoved. In a reply to letters to the editor from Malan and former SACP member Paul Trewhala, he dismisses their evidence and that of Prof. Ellis, saying he disagrees “that the alliance with the Communists damns the ANC as a Stalinist front. That is simply Red-baiting nonsense.”
It is virtually axiomatic that no matter how iron-clad the evidence presented, MSM “journalists” such as Keller will see any charges of communist conspiracy as “Red-baiting” and “McCarthyism.” And, conversely, no matter how contrived, flimsy and false the charges by leftists and communists against conservatives, anti-communists, pro-lifers, Christians, Tea Partiers, Birchers, military veterans, etc., the Kellers of the Fourth Estate will rush to give these smears credence. (See here, here, here, and here.)
Unsung Hero, Genuine Freedom Fighter: Tomsanqa Linda pictured on U.S. Speaking tour. Despite serious dangers to himself and his family, Tomsanqa Linda, the mayor of Ibhayi Township (population 400,000) and president of the Eastern Province Council Association (representing 74 townships with a total population of nearly 14 million) came to America in 1990 for a national speaking and media tour to expose Nelson Mandela and the ANC. In city after city, he preceded by two or three days Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour. Although he was ignored by the national media, he reached millions of Americans with his powerful message through local television and radio news programs and talk shows. He was sponsored on this important national tour by The John Birch Society.
Photos of Nelson Mandela in this article: AP Images
Update: After Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, both the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress acknowledged in official statements that Mandela was a high-level member of the South African Communist Party. For an updated article about this admission after decades of denial, click here.
Related articles:
Mandela’s Messianic Image: The Rest of the Story
New Evidence Shows Mandela Was Senior Communist Party Member
