Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 11, 2013 at 23:50

The Mandela Beatification apparently went on for hours.  And all the world's leaders had their saccharine thoughts translated into sign language.

Only they didn't.  The man stood there and flapped his hands and arms meaninglessly for hours.  Just goes to show how corrupt and fake the whole thing was.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/11/nelson-mandela-memorial-...

The organisers were probably guilt-tripped at the last hour into having a signer (for the 0.001% of the audience who were deaf and who don't have access to the internet or newspapers - only 13,000 people in Britain use sign language).  So the Africans thought "who cares, just put anyone up there waving his hands around - as long as it looks correct who cares".

Why didn't they have someone up there doing a simulatenous translation into Welsh?  There are 3 million Welsh speakers.  Probably more than the global audience of deaf people watching the Mandela Beatification.

Permalink Reply by Kinana on December 12, 2013 at 15:13

it is not clear that that 'Signer for the deaf' is on stage with government sanction; he could be a lone wolf/clown act, someone seeking his '15 minutes' fame that last a few hours!  If the latter, then it is an amazing security breach but also an amazing feat of acting.  I look forward to how this one plays out.

Permalink Reply by Antony on December 12, 2013 at 18:00

According to this article the Signer was a schizophrenic ; http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/12/12/mandela-sign-la... - but hey, never mind, he's probably a lot less harmful than most of the tin pot dictators up there with him.

Permalink Reply by Alan Lake on December 13, 2013 at 4:11

Why is Nelson Mandela so revered?

So, why is Mandela so revered? Partly it’s a carefully cultivated mythology that this saintly man presided over a saintly process. Type "South Africa peaceful transition" into Google and over a million hits appear.

There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world.

Fine, soaring sentiments. And quite untrue.

Between 1985 and 1996 deaths from political violence in South Africa exceeded 20,000, with a large number taking place in the KwaZulu/Natal area. In Poland by contrast deaths from political violence of different shapes and sizes during the Solidarity period and through to the first free elections were very rare, to the point where individual killings of pro-democracy activists such as Father Popieluszko were a major mobilising event. 
... cont ...

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4424/why_is_nelson_mandela_so...

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 14, 2013 at 13:42

60% of South Africans (blacks and whites) think the country was better when run under Apartheid. In the first 5 years of Saint Nelson's reign, the average income of all South Africans dropped by 40%. The rape and murder capital of the world.

 

I saw an interview with Obama's cousin in Kenya, who said that Kenya was better off under British rule.

--
The text associated with the above video:

Published on Dec 9, 2013
Nelson Mandela is portrayed in the mainstream media as a peace-loving anti-apartheid revolutionary and philanthropist. But what is the truth about Nelson Mandela?

Correction: For decades, Mandela supported nationalization, but abandoned his plans after being informed of the negative effects they would likely engender.

60 percent of South Africans felt the country was better run under apartheid, with both blacks and whites rating the current government less trustworthy, more corrupt, less able to enforce the law and less able to deliver government services than its white predecessor.

Transparency International released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer report. It found South Africa to be among the most corrupt countries in the world. According to its findings, an astounding 83 percent of South Africans believe that the police force is corrupt. And 36 percent of respondents admitted to paying at least one bribe to the police.

A 2010 Medical Research Foundation survey found that more than 37 percent of men admitted to raping at least one woman. Seven percent said they had participated in a gang rape.

59 murders, 145 rapes and 752 serious assaults out of its 42 million population. The new crime is the rape of babies; some AIDS-infected African men believe that having sex with a virgin is a cure. Twelve percent of South Africa's population is HIV-positive, but President Mbeki says that HIV cannot cause AIDS.

In response to growing violence, South Africa's minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete, says: "We can't police this; there's nothing more we can do. South Africa's currency, the rand, has fallen about 70 percent since the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994. Emigration from South Africa (mainly of skilled people) is now at its highest level ever."

The tragic fact of business is that ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism. Colonial masters never committed anything near the murder and genocide seen under black rule in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, and other countries, where millions of blacks have been slaughtered in unspeakable ways, which include: hacking to death, boiling in oil, setting on fire and dismemberment.

The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average income of all races in South Africa dropped 40% between 1995 and 2000. The UN 2006 Human Development Report found that over the last 3 decades Africa has had a "virtual reversal" of human development; South Africa dropped 38 places on the Human Development Index since 1994. (UN Development Programme, 2007). The country of the world's first heart transplant (Christian Barnard, Dec., 1967), the Union of South Africa, is now the rape and murder capital of the world. [15]

At the start of the year 1900, the number of African South Africans was found to be 3,5-million according to the British colonial government census. By 1954, our African population had soared to 8,5-million — and by 1990, there were a full 35-million of us

in the decades prior to the official policy of apartheid, (which was started in 1948), the average life expectancy of African South Africans was only 38 years.

However, during the last decade of the apartheid era from 1948 to 1994, our average life expectancy had risen to 64 years — on a par with Europe's average life expectancy.

While China had lifted some 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line.

A United Nations report said that Africa was the only continent where poverty had increased in the past 20 years. South Africa's HDI figure was far higher in 1995, after nearly 50 years of apartheid, than it was in 2010 after 16 years of ANC rule. Moreover, the trend continues to be downward.

Permalink Reply by paul collings on December 14, 2013 at 21:56

Been watching BBC news and apparently Mandela is off to his Ancestral home of Qunu (to be buried).  It's like some long lost son returning home after putting the world right.  It's way more story book than reality.

If I remember rightly Mandela's Father was a Chief who got ousted and Qunu was where they went to live. If I'm wrong i'll be happy to admit it. But 'Ancestral' home! that is pushing it. 

Permalink Reply by Alan Lake on December 15, 2013 at 6:43

More problems with the Mandela funeral: anger after the coffin speeds past the Hoi Polloi, giving them no chance to look, and Archbishop Tutu, a close friend of Mandela, was not invited, obviously, because he's criticised the gangsters running the ANC (a party the Left obviously love because, well, they're black aren't they?)

http://news.sky.com/story/1182289/mandela-funeral-mourners-angry-at...

Permalink Reply by Alan Lake on December 15, 2013 at 6:45

I think this is a case of the "Chickens coming home to roost".  There have so far been 4 spoilers to Mandela's funeral.

• the fake deaf signer
• the continual load booing of Jacob Zuma, the gangster leader of SA, which was so bad that they had to stop putting any of his images on the display screens
• Archbishop Tutu snubbed and not invited (due to his criticism of the ANC)
• anger at the motorcade speeding past the "little people" - the blacks that clearly don't matter to the ANC

I can't help feeling that if they'd been honest about Mandela, than man and his legacy, in a more humble way that he himself would have preferred, then the funeral itself would have been a more solemn and respectful event, instead of being the circus pantomime that it was

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 15, 2013 at 15:55

Lots of empty seats at Mandela's funeral.  So, the claim that people stayed away because of rain (at the other service) looks increasingly hollow.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2524036/Soldiers-seats-Nels...

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 15, 2013 at 16:17

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/366317/print

DECEMBER 14, 2013 4:00 AM

Remembering Mandela, without Rose-Colored Glasses

The South African reality differs from the Western lore.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

‘Go safely Umkhonto. Umkhonto we Sizwe. We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them — kill the whites.” These are lyrics from the anthem of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” The organization is better known as the MK, the military wing of the Marxist African National Congress (ANC). The MK was established by its commander, Nelson Mandela, to prosecute a terrorist war against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime.

Mandela had been out of prison for about two years in September 1992 when, fist clenched in the “black power” salute, he was filmed singing the anthem with a number of his comrades. Interestingly, but not ironically, as Mandela and others repeated the refrain about killing Boer farmers, it was a white man who stood next to him, similarly clench-fisted and singing. The man’s name is Ronnie Kasrils. A Soviet-trained terrorist who helped Mandela found the MK, Kasrils was a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

So was Mandela. No surprise there: Communism was, and remains, the animating ideology of the ANC. That makes it the enduring tragedy of South Africa.

I admit to finding this week’s Mandela hagiography tough to take. It was, to be sure, predictable. As we’ve observed time and again, once the culture and the institutions of opinion have been surrendered to the Left for two or three generations, you cannot be too surprised to wake up one day and find that the United States is no longer the country you’ve so confidently described as “right of center.” Still, while high-wattage fawning was to be expected in the mainstream media, the conservative press, too, tripped over itself to praise Mandela. That was disheartening.

Race, of course, is at the bottom of all this. We are all properly repulsed by the apartheid system of legally coerced racial segregation. Institutionalized racism is a thing of the past in the United States, but the blight lingers, overshadowing the heroic moral crusade to overcome it and become a nation that fully lives its founding ideals. An event like Nelson Mandela’s death, like the airbrushing of Mandela in life, becomes less about him than it is an occasion to reaffirm our historic, impersonal guilt — it being as facile to proclaim the ability to redeem other people’s sins as to exhibit charity with other people’s money.

Nevertheless, it is worth remembering — particularly here at National Review — that the modern conservative movement has never been about liberty as an abstraction. Its trailblazers, led by William F. Buckley Jr., championed liberty in the context of a death struggle against Communism — a “death struggle” precisely because Communists were committed to the destruction of liberty, typically posing as champions of “democracy” as they labored to divide and conquer societies.

In South Africa, the fissure to exploit was race — with the added advantage that apartheid was immoral because it rejected the equal human dignity of every citizen. The ANC, however, were no freedom fighters. The armed struggle Mandela led was not to give every South African an equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of liberty. It was a will-to-power struggle to give the Communists dominion over the country.

As Ron Radosh recounts in the most clear-eyed Mandela remembrance to be found this week, Mandela fully accepted the positions of the South African Communist Party and used its strength to turn the ANC to terrorism. Western journalists want to bleach this history into a noble “people’s war” against an evil, murderous, racist regime. It was hardly that.

The MK led a terrorist insurgency that included bombings of public places. It killed many, many more civilians than it did members of the regime’s security forces — copiously including women and children. Indeed, it killed many more people than the approximately 7,000 black South Africans who, according to the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, were killed by the regime during the 46 years of apartheid. In fact, twice that number, over 14,000 people, were killed between 1990 and 1994 — the period during which the ANC was legalized and black-on-black violence became rampant, just as it is in South Africa today. The ANC systematically killed rivals for power and suspected regime informants — most notoriously, by the savage method of “necklacing,” in which a tire filled with gasoline was hung around the terrified victim’s neck and then set on fire.

As Ron Radosh further recounts, Mandela struck alliances with the world’s worst Communist thugs. A particular favorite was Fidel Castro, the leader of a Cuba that, Mandela brayed, “stands out head and shoulders above the rest . . . in its love for human rights and liberty.” He similarly courted Moammar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the totalitarian regimes of North Korea and Iran.

Mandela was thus, naturally, stinging in his rebukes of the United States. In 2002, President Bush — much like the press this week, preferring to see the Mandela of Western lore rather than of South African reality — presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A year later, after the American invasion of Iraq, Mandela ripped the U.S. as “a power with a president who has no foresight and cannot think properly,” who was “now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. . . . If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.”

He is deservedly lauded for not following the path of Zimbabwe’s monstrous Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe. Nevertheless, the thunderous ovation Mugabe received upon arriving at the Soweto stadium for Mandela’s memorial service spoke volumes about “democratic” South Africa, and where it is headed.

Defying fears justified by his past, Mandela did not allow South Africa to slide into civil war upon becoming president in 1994. Nor did he immediately fulfill the revolutionary hopes of his fellow Communists. Nevertheless, as the South African journalist Ilana Mercer recounts in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, a searing if depressing account of her country post-apartheid, approximately 300,000 South Africans have been murdered since the day, almost 20 years ago, that Mandela took office.

Admirably, Mandela served one term and relinquished power, setting an example of political transition rare in his corner of the globe. In his term, however, he made capitalism the scapegoat for apartheid and set in motion the government-orchestrated redistribution of wealth, to the great benefit of his ANC cronies. He perversely called the program “deracialization of the economy” — even though the gradual, racially driven divestment of white South Africans is the program’s obvious aim. He made Ronnie Kasrils minister of the defense forces. Kasrils would continue to serve the Communist party and the post-apartheid government for years after Mandela stepped down, including in a stint as head of the intelligence service.

Under one-party leftist domination since 1994, South Africa has become a Third World basket case. It vies with Iraq and Colombia to be the world’s most violent country. In a country of 43 million, the official estimate of 60 annual murders per every 100,000 people (compared to six in the U.S. and fewer than two in the EU), is a gross understatement: Interpol pegs it at nearly twice that amount, for a staggering 54,000 homicides per annum. Rape is so commonplace it is estimated that one occurs every seven minutes (with one report putting it at one every 26 seconds). Most of the crime is black-on-black, but it is open season on whites — especially white land owners — as one would expect in a place where ditties like the one Mandela was filmed singing in 1992 remain immensely popular. A million white South Africans have fled the country.

It may not be a civil war. But it is surely the slide into dystopia that is Communism’s inevitable end. Giving Nelson Mandela his due should not mean obscuring that fact.

 

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 16, 2013 at 14:50

I was fairly certain that the "signer" would be an intimate of Mandela's circle.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sout...

Nelson Mandela signer in group that burned men to death, says relative

"Instead of standing trial, Jantjie was institutionalized for a period of longer than a year, the four said, and then returned to live in his poor township neighborhood on the outskirts of Soweto. At some point after that, they said, he started getting jobs doing sign language interpretation at events for the governing African National Congress Party."

No doubt he was getting these sinecure jobs,even though he couldn't sign. The signing company that provided him to the ceremony has since disappeared.

Since there are only 13,000 people in Britain who read sign language, we can be confident that there was not a single deaf person at any of the events where this man had been employed (for years) to act like the ANC was some kind of caring organisation. The article goes on to say that this man claimed to have been taught sign-language in the Eastern Cape Province, where there is not a single signing school.

Probably 10 years of fakery/corruption by the ANC has been exposed on the world stage.

Permalink Reply by Joe on December 19, 2013 at 16:25

I thought when I caught 10 minutes of the Mandela memorial "there's not many white faces there".  Those I did see were people like Prince Charles and Richard Branson.  Turns out, Afrikaners were not invited (just like Desmond Tutu was not invited).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25413501

Remember: there were so many empty seats, even half way through the service, they were sending in soldiers to occupy empty seats.

As someone else said: South Africa is probably just 10 years behind Zimbabwe.

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