Mandela and Castro: Too old, fortunately

Business pressures aka the need to earn a living have forced me into a blogging sabbatical, out of which I have been washed by the tidal wave of mendacious rubbish pouring from the MSM on the death of Nelson Mandela. John Derbyshire is too kind about it.

James Kirkpatrick is correct of course that the concrete legacy of Mandela will be the end of South Africa as a First World country. Ilana Mercer has written an excellent book about this process which will take time but which is inevitable.

But Mandela worship is not just another case of MSM Magic Negro mania. It is a flat lie as I noted in Don’t mess with the Mandelas

Mandela was actually a nasty individual who freely admitted assembling a large arms dump and planning a terrorist campaign - see this free definitive discussion - (and to being a Communist). Had he obtained power as a younger man, the world would know him as at least a Mugabe, possibly a Pol Pot. And the fears of those who opposed Black rule are inevitably being proved to be justified as Ilana Mercer has documented here and here.

Furthermore it is a dangerous lie. When Mandela emerged from prison the (probably not coincidental) collapse of Soviet Imperialism robbed of him of achieving his ambitions. But as Stephen Ellis conclusively demonstrates in the just published External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990  the party of which he was the mascot was in fact an instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy:

Mandela always denied being a card-carrying convert to communism. But Ellis, in his most recent book, "External Mission: The ANC in Exile," claims to have uncovered documentary proof suggesting otherwise, though also suggesting that Mandela was more interested in securing support from Moscow or Beijing than in being a "heart and soul believer."

"If you talk to many American liberals, they think Mandela was Martin Luther King," Ellis said. "If you say, 'No, Mandela started a guerrilla army, he was a communist, he did this, he did that,' they just don't get it. They don't know what you're talking about."

Yet even later, as South African president from 1994 to 1999, Mandela would irk his friends in the West by expressing solidarity with leaders such as Cuba's Castro and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, as well as finding common cause with the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood.

Mandela's radicalism often ignored by Western admirers Aljazeera America December 6, 2013

To anyone under 30 the threat to the West posed by the Communist effort in the Cold War is difficult to credit – the Education Gulag makes sure of that. But those were desperate years. Capturing or even disrupting mineral-rich South Africa would have been a great victory.

What America should be celebrating is the courage and wisdom of the leaders of White South Africa in keeping this monster away from power until it was, for his purposes, too late.