That old “Mandela was a terrorist” chestnut rears it’s ugly head again
Posted by clubwah on July 11, 2008
A disappointingly simplistic opinion piece was published in The Australian today by author Alan Gold who is described as an “a delegate to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa” to give him some sort of credibility over a subject he seems to know sod all about.
Gold writes of his bemusement that the world would celebrate the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela and how world leaders and the rich and famous all make a bee-line to be seen anywhere near him.
He writes, “what the congregation rocking in Hyde Park probably didn’t know was that long before most of them were born, Mandela was one of the leaders of the African National Congress, who created an armed wing called the Umkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation, which was dedicated to bombing civilian, industrial, military and government targets.
“South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has accused it of torture and executions without due process.”
Gold seems to have attended the Andrew Bolt school of opinion writing where you present so-called facts by hiding the whole truth. What he doesn’t say is that Mandela and his fellow ANC founders and lawyers such as Oliver Tambo worked as hard as they could to use the South African legal system to fight Apartheid, only for blacks to lose all their rights to due legal process.
It was only as a last resort, when all the hurdles meant that even to speak out meant jail, did the ANC embark on a campaign of civil disobedience, with option that would resort to terrorism against structural targets – and not specifically aimed at killing people.
Gold also fails to mention that the torture and executions associated with the ANC mostly happened many years after Mandela was incarcerated.
He also says this: “But before Mandela is accorded the same Mahatma status as Gandhi, who peacefully reclaimed India from the British and a man whom Mandela says was his guiding light and inspiration, it’s important to examine his record as a freedom fighter. What it shows is that like so many black Africans fighting the evil of apartheid or colonialism, he has a record of advocating and condoning violence.”
Again, Mandela only ever condoned violence as a last resort, and only after the white government denied the ANC of all possible political and legal avenues, people were jailed without trial and teenagers were being shot in the back for protesting.
Gold continues: “During his presidency of South Africa, he deliberately courted leaders of nations who abuse the human rights of their citizens.”
Shit, and no Australian or Westen government has ever done this?
And more bullshit from Gold: “It’s by examining his often overlooked past that Mandela is revealed as anything but a saint. And it’s all too tempting to forgive him and his colleagues their excesses because they were fighting a brutal and oppressive white racist regime that treated blacks as subhuman.”
Yes, which is why when he did came to power the first thing Mandela did was create “the rainbow nation” and embraced the white South Africans, knowing that turning the tables of them would have resulted in South Africa becoming a bigger basket case than Zimbabwe is today.
Gold concludes, “It’s a pity that so few people looked beyond the iconic image when he emerged from incarceration and questioned Mandela’s actions and principles. If they had they done so, it’s likely that his 90th birthday flock would have been much smaller.”
What Gold fails to realise is the reason that Mandela is so revered is for his capacity for forgiveness, and his ability to look forward in the interests of peace rather than look back through vengeance. But then when you’re willing to look back and bend the truth this is probably a very difficult concept to understand.
Dave from Albury said
Are you on sedatives today Wah?
Ant Rogenous said
I agree with you, Wah, but you’ve done a similar thing yourself.
Not so long ago, you linked to that bellend Alan Howe’s Herald Sun piece of complete bullshit about Che Guevara.
The cockhead writes:
What Che enjoyed most was summarily executing those who failed to embrace his misguided Marxism.
That’s an outright fucking lie, as anyone who has read any reliable account of Guevara’s life would know.
If anything, what he “enjoyed most” was Argentinean yerba mate and Cuban tobacco. But, of course, that wouldn’t fit into Howe’s narrative, would it?
The rest of Howe’s story is made up of out-of-context quotes from Che’s personal wartime diaries; rampant, shameless revisionism; and the kind of poorly researched twaddle that reveals Howe as a disingenuous ideologue of Boltesque proportions.
Che was no more a murderer than any soldier who’s ever killed another combatant; any judge who has sentenced someone to death in a politically motivated trial, like Sir Redmund Barry with Ned Kelly; or anyone in government who has used his influence to have someone executed for political mileage, like Henry Bolte with Ronald Ryan.
“Conservatives” seem to have no problem with Bolte and Barry — so why Che? The answer is obvious, of course.
Alan Howe can go and fuck himself; or better still, he can go and fuck Alan Gold.
clubwah said
But unlike Che, Mandela isn’t a fasion accessory and his achievments are there for all too see. My problem with kids wearing Che’s likeness is that most have no idea who the cunt was.
Also Mandela was not a mercinary who fought other people’s wars, tried in vain to use all possible legal avenues and, this is the important bit that Alan Gold failed to mention, he never killed, or was responsible for the deaths of anyone.
Yes sometimes I take a one sided view on things, but this was an op-ed piece published in The Australian, despite the fact it would never have failed if handed in as a history essay at university.
JR said
Well, for what it’s worth, I hope this Alan Gold takes his hatred of Nelson Mendela with him to his grave, and not pass it onto some other misguided individuals. How screwed up in the head (has your wish been granted, Ant?) must he be to let his reasoning deteriorate to such a low level.
Ross said
Bolt’s already picked up on this one -
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mandela_no_gandhi/
What a surprise.
clubwah said
I rest my case!
Ant Rogenous said
But unlike Che, Mandela isn’t a fasion accessory and his achievments are there for all too see.
First of all, Guevara didn’t ask to become a fashion accessory. I’m quite certain he would have been mortified if, during his lifetime, some cunt companies started making T-shirts with his image on them using cheap labour in (communist) China and selling them at an outrageous profit to fuckwitted middle-class Australian kids who think Che’s face looks “like, kinda cool or sumthin or nuthin”. These kids are clearly wankers, but it’s crass to hold their idiocy against Guevara.
Second, the CIA got to Che in Bolivia when he was just 39 years old. Imagine what people would be saying about Mandela now if he’d been knocked off at the same age, without having had the time to develop into the internationally respected man he is now. He would be remembered by kind historians as a Quixotic revolutionary, and by cunts like Alan Gold as nothing more than a terrorist who was apprehended and dealt the fate he had coming to him.
Che, like Mandela, was an intellectual. But only one of them was lucky enough to mature and mellow into old age.
clubwah said
If you look back at my post about Che Guevara it was primarily having a go at those who where t-shirts with his likeness – http://clubwah.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/anyone-who-wears-a-che-guevara-t-shirt/
Mandela was lucky to mellow into old age, not that he lived a comfortable life. But I maintain it’s what he did in hos old age, more than in his revolutionary younger years, that is being celebrated in his 90th year.
Ant Rogenous said
Fair enough, Wah. I don’t want to keep dragging this out here when we could just be arguing about it over a beer instead.
However… down in the comments of that previous post, you mentioned that these kids didn’t understand that Che was “a murderer” — which, as I mentioned before, I find a very unfair assessment.
Bron said
Oh boy. Arguing over a beer, eh? Someone else better attend just to chaperone you two.
max said
very good response to an article which sickened me when i read it..
how alan gold has the cheek to describe the mandela fans as ‘unquestioning’ devotees i have no bloody idea. how the hell does he know what sort of devotion they have? how many countless thousands of people are devoted to mandela after reading about him, studying about him, and being inspired by his remarkable deeds?
a pathetically simple and uneducated article. his low-grade fiction thrillers are no better.
shame on the australian for publishing such drivel.
Bill Gibbons said
Neslon Mandela was a terrorist – at least in his younger days. He planned a bombing campaign against a former white government, including bombing strikes against white school children – soft targets in other words. The SA government even offered to release him as early as 1975 under certain conditions (that he renounce violence) but Mandela refused and remained incarcerated. Although he came out of prison with a spirit of reconciliation (which I applaude), Mandela was mere window dressing for the hardline, Marxist ANC. He quickly made friends with some of the world’s most evil dictators, which did not deter self-hating white liberals from lining up to prostrate themselves at his feet in displays of sickening, naive adoration. Today, the so-called rainbow nation is a basket case of violence, corruption, 60% unemployment, ever increasing blackouts, horrendous levels of black-on-black violence and a huge brain drain of qualified South Africans of all colours getting out while they can. With Mbeki claiming that HIV does not lead to Aids, and the health mimister, Manto Tshabalala Msimang stated that garlic, lemon and beetroot can treat HIV effectively, the country is finished. Even the chief of police, who was also the head of Interpol (Jackie Selebi), has been arrested on charges of corruption and private deals with organized crime. Mbeki even tried to intervene to stop the arrest. the ANC rides rough shod over the law, ignores the nation’s constitution if it gets in the way of its corruption and duplicity, and shouts down opposition MP’s who call for probes into government level corrupution and mismanagement. Helen Zille, the leader of the official opposition, is regularly slandered and called a racist simply becuase she is white and takes the ANC to task over these issues. We can argue about the sins of colonialism and Apartheid, but the so-called “rainbow nation” is becoming just another black governed Marxist/socialist disaster. The official policy of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) is placing blacks in jobs over the heads of skilled whites, asians and east indians. White South Africans can no longer get a state pension, and over 1,700 white farmers have been murdered since 1994 by roving gangs of black thugs. The ANC purchases well run and efficent white farms, then lets the land go fallow and the machinery rust away. Like Zimbabwe, there are no qualified blacks that are able to run large commercial farms in order to feed the country. The so-called “ranbow nation” has now become a prisoner of politically correct apartheid, where the Khosa-backed ANC runs the country into the ground and discriminate openly against minorities – including other tribes. Johannesburg is now the rape and murder capital of the world in a country which is now the third most dangerous place in the world behind Columbia and Iraq. Africa is the only continent in the world going backwards. Once South Africa goes the same way as Zimbabwe, it’s all over. The entire continent will be plunged into an economic death dive as tribal warfare, disease, starvation and a mass exodus of refugees flood into Europe the USA, Canada and the UK. Yet, just like the Rhodesians before them, the qwhite South Africans, who knew their country better than the liberal elites of Europe and North America, warned the world that South Africa would turn out like Zimbabwe and the other black socilaist dictatorships that surrounded them. But nobody listened and nobody cared. The smiling, benevolent Mandela who still sings songs about killing “Boers” paved the way for the destruction of Africa;s most advanced nation, and sealed the fate of an entire continent.
clubwah said
If the whites gave black South Africans proper access to education plus full political and legal rights than South Africa wouoldn’t be such a basket case? South Africa’s wealth was never shared with the blacks and now you have the result of having the bulk of the poulation without an education and in poverty.
And I maintain that Mandela was forced into adopting a paramilitary manifesto because all legal and political means to secure better rights for blacks continued to be closed.
The fans of Apartheid have reaped what they sewed.