Mandela - The Legend and the Legacy. Part 2

 

In the second of two articles examining the life of Nelson Mandela, in advance of Friday's concert in Hyde Park celebrating the living legend's 90th birthday, I shall look at his legacy and the new South Africa which he created after coming to power on a surge of worldwide optimism and hope in 1994, when, following the end of Apartheid, he and his followers promised a new dawn for what became termed the Rainbow Nation.

Today South Africa stands out as one of the most dangerous and crime ridden nations on Earth which is not actively at War. In 2001, only seven years after the end of Apartheid, whilst the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with 5,6 murders per 100,000 population was declared the "murder capitol of Europe", Johannesburg, with 61.2 murders per 100,00 population and remains the world's top murder city.

In South Africa as a whole, the murder rate is seven times that of America, in terms of rape the rate is ten times as high and includes the ugly phenomenon of child rape, one of the few activities in which South Africa is now a world leader. If you don't believe me, you can read what Oprah Winfrey has to say about it here.

All other forms of violent crime are out of control, and Johannesburg is among the top world cities for muggings and violent assault, a fact seldom mentioned in connection with the 2010 World Cup which is scheduled to be hosted in South Africa.
As always with black violence the primary victims are their fellow blacks, however, the rape, murder and violent assault of whites is a daily event, and there is more ...

As with the Matabeleland massacres, news of which the BBC, together with much of the world media suppressed for twenty years to protect their one time hero, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, another secret genocide is being ignored by the world media, the genocide of white Boer farmers, thousands of whom have been horribly tortured to death in their homes since the end of Apartheid. Anyone who clicks on this link should we warned that it includes some very gruesome images as the savagery of these attacks belie the authorities attempts to dismiss them as nothing more than a "crime wave".

Given that it is now all but illegal in South Africa to report the race of either victim or the perpetrator of a crime (unless the perpetrator is white and the victim black) and as modern South Africa's official crime statistics are notoriously massaged, it is impossible to know the exact numbers of farm murders that have taken place. Many reliable sources estimate the figure as close to 3,000, but even if we take the more conservative figure of 1,600 quoted in the politically correct South African press (but not quoted at all in ours) this is three times the numbers killed by the South African security forces over a period of 43 years, and which the UN calls a crime against humanity.

To put this in perspective, the population of South Africa is 47 million, (13 million less than Britain despite its far greater land mass) of which the 4.3 million whites account for 9.1%, about 1% less than the immigrant population of Britain. Can you imagine the outcry if 1,600 (let alone 3,000) members of a minority community in Britain were tortured to death by the native population?.
Yet when the victims are white, there is hardly a peep in the South African press and silence from the international media. Compare this to when a white youth is the killer, such as in the case of Johan Nel, who shot three Africans, a story which became instant world wide news with the predictable screams of racism and machete wielding mobs baying for his blood.
(And they accuse us of hate?!! Don't such people nauseate themselves with their hypocrisy?!)

Crime aside, Mandela and his ANC inherited the strongest economy in Africa, indeed, despite economic sanctions, South Africa was still one of the richest world nations, and indeed initially there was a brief post Apartheid boom, resulting from the lifting of sanctions and due to the fact that until affirmative action forced most of the whites out of their jobs to be replaced by under qualified blacks, those who had built South Africa were still in place.

However, any optimism was to be short lived. Now, after just 14 years of rule by Mandela and his grim successor Mbeke, corruption is rife, the country is beset with power cuts and the infrastructure is crumbling.

The nation's great cities like Durban and Johannesburg, which could once rival the likes of Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco, had descended in to decaying crime ridden slums within a decade.
And in the last few weeks we have seen the so called Rainbow nations ultimate humiliation, as xenophobic anti immigration violence spreads across the country. (“xenophobic” is what the media call racism when blacks do it) As poverty and unemployment explodes and is exacerbated by the floods of immigrants flooding in to escape the even more advanced Africanisation of the rest of the country, the mobs turn on those they blame for stealing their jobs, their homes, and their women.

Thus the cycle turns, and, like watching some barbaric version of “back to the future", on the news we see exactly the same scenes we saw on our televisions twenty years ago, wrecked buildings, burning vehicles, mobs brandishing machetes, axes and knives hacking at everything and everyone which comes within their reach. Most horrific of all, we see the return of that most savage symbol of African brutality, the necklace where, to the cheers of a blood thirsty crowd, some poor trembling soul, with a tire around his neck, is dragged from his home and set alight, exactly as all those other poor souls were set alight throughout the Apartheid years, when we were told it was all the evil white man's fault.

As nothing else the return of the necklace exposes the failure of Mandela's revolution, and those who fought for him should weep.
Under Apartheid, blacks and whites went to separate hospitals but they received world class health care, whatever their colour, now the facilities are collapsing or non-existent. Black children went to different schools than white children, but they received an education, something which is now a privileged luxury. When they grew up, their bosses may have been white, but they had jobs and a living wage, as the recent violence shows us, such security is but a memory for most South Africans.

Eighteen years after Nelson and Winnie made their historic walk towards the cameras, and 14 years, since Mandela assumed power on a tide of optimism, a once proud South Africa slides like a crumbling, crime ridden, wreck towards a precipice created though greed, corruption and incompetence.

For all his gleaming smiles, grandfatherly hand gestures, and folksy sound bites, tomorrow night, when crowd cheers the retired terrorist in the gaudy shirt, they would do best not to focus too closely upon his much admired legacy, as they might just find that the Xhosan Emperor has no clothes. For Nelson Mandela's lasting achievement is that, in the face of a wold wishing him well, he, and the party he leads, have shown the world that, for all its flaws, Apartheid was a more benign system than what replaced it, and that the average South African was immeasurably better off under the hated white rule than they are under the alternative which black rule has created.
That is quite an achievement, Mr Mandela, happy birthday.

source Mandela - The Legend and the Legacy. Part 2

Mandela: The legend and the Legacy. Part 1

 

It is often said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, however, this usually means that the other man has been less than fastidious in his choice of hero, or that the “freedom fighter” in question was on the crowd pleasing side.

On the 27th of June, London's Hyde Park will play host to a concert in honour of Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday and we can be assured that it will receive wall to wall coverage by a star struck and worshipping media, who will continue to laud Mandela as one of the greatest, or indeed the greatest, heroes of our time.

No doubt the beaming old man will appear on stage in one of his trademark multi-coloured shirts and cheerily acknowledge the cheers of the adoring crowd, most of whom have been taught to believe in his sainthood since their first days in primary school, which, for many of them, will have occurred around the same time their hero walked free from Robben Island.

The unquestioning belief in Mandela's universally admired saintliness will again be displayed in the press and by the unending line of politicians and dignitaries who will queue up to genuflect before him and sing his praises. It is a brave politician or journalist who would dare to question the godliness of this legend and consummate showman, and hence no such questions will be raised, nor will his much vaunted “achievements” be subjected to any objective scrutiny.
No matter how many speeches are given or how many news articles are written, it is safe to bet that the full truth about Mandela will not be told.

In fact the truth about Mandela is so hidden in mythology and misinformation that most know nothing about him prior to Robben island, and those who do tend to exercise a form of self censorship, designed to bolster the myth whilst consigning uncomfortable facts into the mists of history.
For most people all they know about Mandela, prior to his release in 1990, was that he had spent 27 years in prison and was considered by many on the left at the time (and almost everyone now) to be a political prisoner. However, Mandela was no Aung San Suu Kyi, he was not an innocent, democratically elected leader, imprisoned by an authoritarian government.

Mandela was the terrorist leader of a violent terrorist organisation, the ANC (African National Congress) which was responsible for many thousands of, mostly black, deaths. The ANC's blood spattered history is frequently ignored, but reminders occasionally pop up in the most embarrassing places, indeed as recently as this month the names of Nelson Mandela and most of the ANC remained on the US government's terrorist watch list along with al-Queda, Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers. Of course the forces of political correctness are rushing to amend that embarrassing reminder from the past. However, Mandela's name was not on that list by mistake, he was there because of his Murderous past.

Before I am accused of calumny, it should be noted that Mandela does not seek to hide his past, in his autobiography “the long walk to Freedom” he casually admits “signing off” the 1983 Church Street bombing carried out by the ANC and killing 19 innocent people whilst injuring another 200.

It is true that Mandela approved that massacre and other ANC killings from his prison cell, and there is no evidence that he personally killed anyone but the same could be said about Stalin or Hitler, and the violent history of the ANC, the organisation he led is not in question.
According to the Human Rights Commission it is estimated that during the Apartheid period some 21,000 people were killed, however both the UN Crimes against Humanity commission and South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission are in agreement that in those 43 years the South African Security forces killed a total of 518 people. The rest, (some 92%) were accounted for by Africans killing Africans, many by means of the notorious and gruesome practice of necklacing whereby a car tyre full of petrol is placed around a victim's neck and set alight. This particularly cruel form of execution was frequently carried out at the behest of the ANC with the enthusiastic support of Mandela's demonic wife Winnie.

The brutal reappearance of the deadly necklace in recent weeks is something I shall reluctantly focus upon later.
Given that so much blood was on the hands of his party, and, as such, the newly appointed government, some may conclude that those who praised Madela's mercy and forgiveness, when the Truth and Reconciliation tribunal set up after he came to power, to look into the Apartheid years, did not include a provision for sanctions, were being deliberately naive.

Such nativity is not uncommon when it comes to the adoring reporting of Nelson Madela, and neither is the great leader himself rarely shy of playing up his image of fatherly elder statesman and multi-purpose paragon. However, in truth, the ANC's conscious decision to reject a policy of non-violence, such as that chosen by Gandhi, in their struggle against the white government, had left them, and by extension, their leader, with at least as much blood on their hands as their one time oppressors, and this fact alone prevented them from enacting the revenge which might otherwise have been the case.

As the first post Apartheid president of South Africa it would, be unfair if not ludicrous to judge Mandela entirely on the basis of events before he came to power, and in any event there is many a respected world leader or influential statesman with a blood stained past so in the next part I shall examine Nelson Mandela's achievements, and the events which have occurred in South Africa in the 14 short years since he took power in following the post Apartheid election in 1994.

source : Mandela: The legend and the Legacy. Part 1

A simple recipe for xenophobia

Justice Malala: Monday Morning Matters

Published:May 19, 2008

Cocktail’s main ingredients are ANC’s failed policies

President Thabo Mbeki and his ANC successor Jacob Zuma were refugees in London, Zambia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Mozambique, among other places, between 1962 and 1990.

I mention this for those of my countrymen and women who have short memories. We should be ashamed that it is us who are today raping, looting and killing foreigners apparently because they “steal” our houses and “our women”.

What caused the terrible scenes unfolding in our country today: children beaten and displaced, women raped and men left with pieces of flesh hanging from their faces, homeless and hungry and desperate?

What led to a situation where young men were unashamed to stand in front of television cameras and say they will kill foreigners?

We should not be surprised. For the ANC, led by Zuma and Mbeki, the chickens are coming home to roost.

A cocktail of factors, mixed by the ANC over the past 10 years, is responsible for the barbarism.

These people are behaving like barbarians because the ANC has failed — despite numerous warnings — to act on burning issues that are well known for having sparked similar eruptions across the globe.

This cocktail is made up of stubborn denialism on Zimbabwe, an increasingly incompetent and corrupt police service, poor service delivery and corruption in government departments.

The crime-does-pay culture fostered by the ANC — criminals such as the Travelgate fraudsters walk away scot-free — is a central ingredient of the cocktail.

But the bulk of the cocktail comprises the failed state that is Zimbabwe. The country’s economy has collapsed. Its political leaders, security services and agents are looting the treasury. Zimbabweans are fleeing.

When a state fails, crime goes through the roof. Corruption, characterised by bribery at every turn, becomes the norm. Crucially, crime is exported across the borders of the failed state to neighbouring states.

The Mbeki government’s refusal to even acknowledge the crisis in Zimbabwe has resulted in as many as 3-million Zimbabweans walking the streets of South Africa.

If Mbeki and his deputy president, Zuma, had acted decisively on Zimbabwe nine years ago, when they were told repeatedly by fellow leaders at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Durban to do so, these Zimbabweans would not be here today.

Mbeki’s resolute refusal to address the crisis in Zimbabwe — and his friendship with President Robert Mugabe — has brought them here. His block-headedness is directly responsible for the eruption of xenophobia.

Add to the cocktail the fact that the SA Police Service has become so incompetent and overstretched there is no way that any of the perpetrators of the past week’s atrocities will be brought to book.

Ordinary citizens predicted last week that these riots would spread to the Joburg CBD. When violence erupted downtown on Saturday night, the police were unprepared.

The police have no intelligence- gathering capacity and can hardly explain what is happening today, let alone contain it.

Their failure is rooted in the fact that many of them are taking bribes from foreign refugees anxious to avoid being deported.

Their incompetence is also responsible for the culture — entrenched during the Mbeki-Zuma regime — that crime goes unpunished. After all, these marauding hordes know that Mbeki protected his crony, Jackie Selebi, for years.

There is no respect for the law. These hordes can rape and loot without fear of arrest, let alone prosecution.

The endemic corruption among government officials is an integral part of the cocktail. There is so much corruption in the construction and allocation of government housing that resentment, misplaced or not, is inevitable.

There are no quick fixes to this mess. The removal of Mbeki, as suggested by Mathews Phosa, is not a solution. The problem is that the ANC’s policies have failed.

In the short term it would be an idea for the incompetent minister of safety and security, Charles Nqakula, to get his charges to come down harder on perpetrators. Better intelligence-gathering, including the early identification of potential trouble-makers, would help.

Government leaders such as Mbeki should visit the communities afflicted by this xenophobia, instead of issuing condemnations from Mozambique.

In the long term, some cool heads, efficiency and moral fibre would help. But asking that of the ANC today is asking a little bit too much. These are the same people who are disbanding the Scorpions. Asking them to act in the interests of the country, and not their own narrow interests, is useless.

 

source

'RAINBOW OF LIES'

Sam van den Berg
Jacob Zuma has done the country a service long overdue — he has finally exploded the fairy-tale of the Rainbow Nation.

Politicians came together in the nineties and 'solved' the problem of racism. Mandela and De Klerk presided as patron saints over the labours of those who drafted a democratic constitution - stumbling along the path so clearly laid out by the reviled Liberal Party more than 30 years before. They also presided over the Truth and Reconciliation process.

No-one seemed to notice that the process ignored those who had suffered most -innocent victims of decades of socio-economic brutality, and victims of a dirty war (approved by Mandela and the leaders of the National Party in their separate ways) of cowardly and indiscriminate bombs in public places, necklacings provoked by gossip and provocateurs on both sides of the struggle for power. 'Truth and Reconciliation' were reserved for those whose acts of brutality were 'politically motivated' - a principle which would have exonerated all those hanged at Nurnberg. Did this establish a new principle in law - that the ruthless pursuit of power is an excuse for murder?

Nor did anyone notice that the whole process of 'building the rainbow nation' was merely a smooth process of one nomenklatura handing over power to another. Golden handshakes in return for guaranteed positions in government and business. Also, no-one seemed unduly concerned about the small loophole in the constitution that opened the door to black racism, nepotism and general corruption - in the name of redressing the wrongs of the past.

Poor paid the price
In the end, it was not white millionaires who paid the price for this, but the poor - who can forget the pitiful accounts of pensioners dying while queuing for pensions they would never receive because the money had been pilfered by beneficiaries of Black Empowerment?

On the National Party-NG Kerk (Dutch reformed churches) side, copious crocodile tears were shed. Apologies for the sin of apartheid were made. Feet were washed. Yet, remarkably, neither PW Botha and his bloody-handed accomplices, nor Thabo Mbeki and his equally blood-spattered collaborators, were willing to come forward and reveal the truth about their involvement in the dirty war over which they presided - from far behind the trenches.

To con the masses into voting for their new tormentors, the myth of a War of Liberation was created. A war that never was. How many ordinary people realise that no MK armies ever fought real battles against the SADF in South Africa itself? The reason for this was simple — they were too busy doing the Kremlin's dirty work in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia. Those MK soldiers who actually wanted to fight a real war against Apartheid were brutally punished by the Tambo-Hani-Mbeki gang.

Suicide squads
The only battles in South Africa were fought by suicide squads sent in to their certain death - and useful martyrdom; and by provocateurs starting the chain of gossip that would lead to the burning alive of supposed enemies. They talked endlessly of the problem of racism - but what was the reality? Not racism - but poverty, hunger, disease and misery. They still talk endlessly about racism - and the misery increases by the day.
Fat-cats

The rainbow nation, the process of 'reconciliation', the smooth handover of power from one gang of fat-cats to another, none of these changed the lives of the poor by one jot. Indeed, their misery has increased. The rich partially changed their colour, but they have grown wealthier. The poor partially changed their colour - and got poorer. It is ironical that it took another morally tainted fat cat to blow this myth to pieces.

Unfortunately, history has taught those of us who still bother about such things as history in the postmodernist world, that populism may well plunge the masses into worse misery than before. Mbeki’s arrogance, his sense of imperial entitlement (which exceeded even that of the monstrous PW Botha), his hubris, have brought the country to the brink of disaster.

Blame for their sins
Those most deeply involved in the evil, tried to set up one of their own, Zuma, to take the blame for their sins. The scapegoat is now turning on his former comrades. It is a brawl that may still plunge the country into the worst crisis in recent history. If we allow the ANC to interfere with the constitution, with the judiciary and with the freedom of the media — as they are aching to do — South Africa may soon join Zimbabwe and others in darkest Africa. We can only hope that the ANC will now shatter into its irreconcilable parts so that a viable multiparty system can emerge from the mess that Mbeki, Zuma and their comrades have made.

(Ed.-If Pretoria (now renamed Tshwane) was the citadel of the apartheid system, the brothers Sam, Maritz and Johann van den Berg - from an Afrikaans-speaking family - stood up against the rule of apartheid in the centre of the citadel from 1958 as members of the Pretoria University Students' Branch of the Liberal Party, and continued as active members of the party until its dissolution in 1968. That required moral courage of a very high order. The Van den Bergs were among a group of young Afrikaners and others in Pretoria who joined the Liberal Party in the late fifties. They chose the Liberal Party as what they saw as the only nonracial party, and the only one which articulated the principles of liberal democracy based on universal suffrage and nonviolence. They distrusted the Congress Movement for several reasons - because of its division along apartheid lines, and because of what they saw as its infiltration by Stalinists and by people 'who talked too easily of violence'.