₦airaland Forum

Fela was a great and selfless man who led from the front just like Mandela, but the only problem was that unlike Mandela he did not have a huge following. Many Nigerians looked down on Fela and were not interested in understanding what he stood for, the problem with revolutions is that you cant force people to follow you if they are too st.upid, cowardly or timid to understand your message. The people of south Africa stood firmly behind Mandela and continued to fight the apartheid system even during his incarceration, sadly in the case of Fela Nigerians refused to get behind him and give him the necessary backing that a revolutionary leader requires in order to be victorious. Fela went through all the beatings and persecution with very little support from the Nigerian people, had he not been from a prominent family he would have been murdered by the military long before he died. All revolutionary leaders require the support of the masses in order to be successful - a good example is Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, without the support of the masses these charismatic leaders would never have succeeded.

So to answer your question both did their best, I wouldn't say one did more than the other as their individual circumstances were different. South Africans are more aware of who their real enemies are and therefore got behind Mandela and gave him their full support, if Nigerians were more aware of who their real enemies are they would have given Fela the full support that he required in order to be a successful revolutionary leader. This is probably the reason that Fela became disillusioned with the Nigerian masses and released a song called Look and Laugh, where he finally gave up on the NIgerian masses because he realised that the average Nigerian does not understand who their real enemy is. Fela lost all hope in NIgerians during the 1993 elections when Nigerians voted for MKO Abiola a known thief, coup d'état financier and enemy of Nigeria, here is a man who was as fraudulent as they come but who many Nigerians bent over backwards to vote in as president. I think at that point Fela completely gave up on Nigerians and it was at that point that his health also started deteriorating.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uby1iMtfuCM

ROSSIKE: Nzeogwu was a murderer. You do realise it wasn't legal to go around shooting dead the prime minister and other officials in their homes. Nzeogwu and friends' actions were what led to the descent into civil war and military dictatorship from which we are yet to recover.

That so called "prime minister" was a british stooge so were the rest of his cabinet, as a matter of fact many Nigerians rejoiced at their demise especially the demise of Okotie Eboh who was a notorious criminal and looter. The only reason Nzeogwu is vilified today is because his coup did not succeed. Had he been victorious people like you would be singing an entirely different tune today. As far as I am concerned Nzeogwu remains one of the most courageous men that NIgeria has ever produced, even the northerners respected him and regarded him as a brother, given that he spoke hausa more fluently than his native Igbo.

The descent into civil war was instigated by the british who were hell bent on regaining their grip on our oil via their northern puppets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKSiaf3hhkw

Here is what British and US politicians had to say about Mandela before his release from prison in 1990:

"A Typical Terrorist Organization": What They Said About Mandela

In the wake of Nelson Mandela's passing, a great many people will come forward to offer their reflections on a man who suffered for decades in order to help black South Africans defeat Apartheid. Let's not forget, then, there once was a time when mainstream political notables had no qualms slurring Mandela and the African National Congress—and whitewashing the crimes of Apartheid South Africa. Here are some of those instances.

President Ronald Reagan: In 1981, Reagan asked "Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought, a country that strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have and so forth? I just feel that, myself, that here, if we're going to sit down at a table and negotiate with the Russians, surely we can keep the door open and continue to negotiate with a friendly nation like South Africa."

Four years later, in a 1985 interview, Reagan claimed that South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated."

He later went on to condemn in 1986 the "calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress: the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression." This same year, Reagan fought tooth and nail to block lawmakers eager to put sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, which he considered a valuable ally in the fight against communism. He vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, though his veto was overridden by Congress. He also had the ANC and Mandela placed on America's terrorist watch list.

Dick Cheney: Cheney, a Wyoming congressman, voted against a 1986 resolution calling for the release of Mandela from prison and the recognition of the African National Congress as the legitimate representative of South Africa's black majority. Despite his vote, the resolution passed. Decades later, Cheney would explain that he voted as he did because "the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization." He went on to say Mandela was "a great man" who had "mellowed."

Ron Paul: James Kirchick gave a good rundown of Ron Paul's hardline racist newsletters in a 2008 New Republic article, including this tidbit regarding what the newsletters had to say about Nelson Mandela: "South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a 'destruction of civilization' that was 'the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara'; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending 'South African Holocaust.'"

Margaret Thatcher: Just like Reagan, Thatcher preferred "constructive engagement" with the racist Apartheid regime to issuing tough sanctions. In 1987, she said this: "The ANC is a typical terrorist organization ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land." One of her allies and supporters, Member of Parliament Teddy Taylor, said Mandela "should be shot." When Thatcher died earlier this year, former ANC executive Pallo Jordan said "good riddance": She was a staunch supporter of the apartheid regime. She was part of the right-wing alliance with Ronald Reagan that led to a lot of avoidable deaths."

Richard Quinn: On his run for president in 2000, Senator John McCain picked up the services of Richard Quinn, a South Carolina political consultant. Quinn, it turned out, was also the editor of a magazine called the Southern Partisan Quarterly Review. Besides using the Southern Partisan to once air his belief that the purpose behind Martin Luther King Day is "vitriolic and profane," in 1990 Quinn wrote that Nelson Mandela is "a bad egg," according to People for the American Way. He added, "After all, Mr. Mandela was put in jail 27 years ago—not because of his humanitarian philosophy—but because he was a terrorist who openly advocated (and personally committed) violence against the government."

Jesse Helms: In 1985, two years after attempting to block a bill establishing Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday, the notorious senator from North Carolina launched a filibuster on a bill to put sanctions on South Africa. Senators Strom Thurmond and Phil Gramm joined Helms in his obstruction. When California Senator Alan Cranston accused Helms of being at least partially motivated by racism, Helms called the charge "nonsense" and insisted that his only concern was sanctions taking jobs away from black South Africans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol as South Africa's new president, Helms turned his back on him.

In July 2008, just before Mandela's 90th birthday, George W. Bush finally signed a bill removing the Nobel Peace Prize winner from America's terrorist watch list. That year, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was "rather embarrassing" that she still had to personally waive Mandela's entry into the US.

http://gawker.com/a-typical-terrorist-organization-what-they-said-abou-680573112

Palpable hypocrisy: Vultures feed off Mandela’s memory!

Posted on 7 December 2013 by truthaholics


The vultures feeding off Mandela’s memory ~ Nureddin Sabir, Editor, Redress Information & Analysis.

The death of Nelson Mandela, the world’s most revered fighter for freedom, justice and dignity, has been met with genuine, spontaneous sadness all over the world.

Whether it is because of Mandela’s selfless sacrifice for his people, his 27 years of perseverance in the face of adversity or his willingness to forgive his wicked incarcerators, millions of people in all corners of the world are genuinely grief stricken at the passing of this giant of giants. They mourn not only the huge gap he leaves behind, but also the fact that the standards of decency he had set are unlikely to be met by any living politician. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says,


…he will go down in history as South Africa’s George Washington, a person who within a single five-year presidency became the principal icon of both liberation and reconciliation, loved by those of all political persuasions as the founder of modern, democratic South Africa…

[T]he crucible of excruciating suffering which he had endured purged the dross, the anger, the temptation to any desire for revenge, honing his spirit and transforming him into an icon of magnanimity. He used his enormous moral stature to good effect in persuading his party and many in the black community, especially young people, that accommodation and compromise were the way to achieve our goal of democracy and justice for all.

The hypocrites and vultures

But there are also the hypocrites and vultures seeking to feed off the outpouring of emotion unleashed by Mandela’s death. At the top of the list of these scoundrels are, as one would expect, Israeli, US and British politicians. As Ami Kaufman says in +972 Magazine, “Israeli politicians have begun updating their Facebook pages with eulogies for the late Nelson Mandela,” and, he asks: “What do statesmen of the Jewish state – one of the last Western countries to support the South African apartheid state and which today practises apartheid-like policies between the [Jordan] river and the [Mediterranean] sea – have to say about the man who brought racism to its knees? (You can read what these despicable bigots have to say in Kaufman’s article here.)

Indeed, as Juan Cole points out,


The attempt to make Nelson Mandela respectable is an ongoing effort of Western government spokesmen and the Western media.

He wasn’t respectable in the business circles of 20th-century New York or Atlanta, or inside the Beltway of Washington, DC. He wasn’t respectable for many of the allies of the United States in the Cold War, including Britain and Israel.

Cole reminds us of the facts which the forked-tongued hypocrites in the US and among its Israeli and European allies would rather we forget:


The US considered the African National Congress to be a form of communism, and sided with the racist prime ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and P.W. Botha against Mandela.

Decades later, in the 1980s, the United States was still supporting the white apartheid government of South Africa, where a tiny minority of Afrikaners dominated the economy and refused to allow black Africans to shop in their shops or fraternize with them, though they were happy to employ them in the mines. Ronald Reagan declared Nelson Mandela, then still in jail, a terrorist, and the US did not get around to removing him from the list until 2008! Reagan, while delivering pro forma denunciations of apartheid or enforced black separation and subjugation, nevertheless opposed sanctions with teeth on Pretoria. Reagan let the racist authoritarian P.W. Botha come to Washington and met with him.

Likewise British PM Margaret Thatcher befriended Botha and castigated Mandela’s ANC [African National Congress] as terrorists. As if the Afrikaners weren’t terrorizing the black majority!…

The Israeli government had extremely warm relations with apartheid South Africa, to the point where Tel Aviv offered the Afrikaners a nuclear weapon(presumably for brandishing at the leftist states of black Africa). That the Israelis accuse Iran of being a nuclear proliferator is actually hilarious if you know the history. Iran doesn’t appear ever to have attempted to construct a nuclear weapon, whereas Israel has hundreds and seems entirely willing to share.

In the US, the vehemently anti-Palestinian Anti-Defamation League in San Francisco spied on American anti-apartheid activists on behalf of the apartheid state. If the ADL ever calls you a racist, you can revel in the irony.

Ronald Reagan imagined that there were “moderates” in the Botha government. There weren’t. He wanted “constructive engagement” with them. It failed.

Principles vs unscrupulousness

Mandela subscribed to a value system a world apart from that of the Western and Israeli vultures now seeking to make political capital by heaping praise on him,postmortem. He, as Cole says, “was a socialist who believed in the ideal of economic equality or at least of a decent life for everyone in society. He was also a believer in parliamentary government. So, he was a democratic socialist.” They, on the other hard, are out and out capitalists, the spokesmen and slaves of global corporations and, in the case of the Israelis quoted by Kaufman, racists, bigots, land thieves and squatters.



is a pioneer to be emulated. We honour him by standing up for justice even in the face of enormous opposition from the rich and powerful, by taking risks for high ideals. We won’t meet his standards. But if all of us tried, we’d make the world better. As he did.

http://truthaholics./2013/12/07/palpable-hypocrisy-vultures-feed-off-mandelas-memory/

CAMNEWTON4PRES: This is why I was talking about, double faced and hypocrite animals/pigs . Tribute to Mandela my foot .
Thanks cap28 you just confirmed what I have always said, white people don't like you and they will do everything to throw sticks in your wheels.

They hate to see Africans/African countries emerging , they are scared, they know their place is under our boots ,that's why they don't hesitate to assassinate our saviors like lumumba , sankara etc .
They don't hesitate to sabotage our industrial and technological efforts and are ready to spend money to maintain puppet governments/leaders all over our continent

very true

jp philips: during my analysis of the PIB, one of the concerns i raised was the vessels plying the Nigerian waters but as expected nobody gave a hoot.
i was actually inspired by this incident. i was in escravos at the time, it was during the precomissioning of the EGTL gas pipeline, i saw them when they came for supplies in escravos, i think they had some delays for a while, nobody knew it will be their last, that morning when the tug boat disappeared, there was panic, fortunately, they had divers on board jascon two who were dispatched that night with no results, later they came back with few bodies but marcus the divers supervisor insisted they must get a full POB, that guy owes his life to markus IMO.
the rest bodies where recovered in the safe heaven so i doubt the shark/ barracuda eating part.
i saw some of the bodies too just like everyone who was part of that project.
My concerns are as follows;

why was west african ventures not black listed by chevron?
The funny part was that they continued with the project and even attempted covering it up reason the video was released late.
That speaks volume of our DPR and other stakeholders.

What workman compensation was enshrined in the PIB for workers who lose their lives on a daily basis in related circumstances?

If companies like WAV are allowed to continue their operations in the face of this disaster with no official enquiry or investigation to determine culpability, then i have no doubt in my mind that the Nigerian authorities have graduated from ineptitude to impotent.

What role did NUPENG and PENGASSN play after the video went viral? the last time i checked, they are in the buisness of protecting workers interest.
This is just one out of so many, the amosco and iriama incidents are still fresh in our minds.

very good questions raised

Nelson Mandela Tributes Expose Hypocrisy of Developed World

The death of Nelson Mandela this week produced thousands of glowing tributes from celebrities, world leaders and politicians from across the political spectrum.


After spending three decades in jail in his struggle to free South Africa from apartheid and leading the country as its first black president, Mandela is now almost universally lauded as a moral icon.

Yet at one time those now falling over each other to express their adulation for 'Madiba' were not quite as forthcoming in their praise.

Here is a small selection of global figures who have changed their tune.


David Cameron and the Conservative party
"A great light has gone out in the world," said Cameron this week. Mandela was "a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death - a true global hero", the UK prime minister said.


However, it was revealed recently that in the 1980s Cameron took off on a "jolly" to South Africa while Mandela was still in jail, with all expenses paid by a firm that lobbied against sanctions being imposed on the apartheid regime.

Cameron's Conservative party repeatedly refused to back sanctions in the 1980s, and in a speech then prime minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela's ANC party a "a typical terrorist organisation".

"Hang Nelson Mandela" badges were produced by the now defunct Tory youth wing when current speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow was chairman.

On Thursday, Bercow tweeted: "He was Tata, father, to us all. His extraordinary commitment to democracy, peace and the fight against injustice has motivated generations to stand up for freedom."

One Tory grandee from the 1980s remains unrepentant.

"He was the leader of a political movement which had begun to resort to terrorism," Lord Tebbit, former Conservative party Chairman told the Daily Mirror.

George W Bush and the Republican party
The former US president declared Mandela "one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time," when news of his death broke, but as recently as 2008 the ANC was still listed as a terrorist organisation by the US State Department, and Mandela had to be given special permission to visit the country.

Republican party hero president Ronald Reagan was firmly opposed to sanctions being imposed against the apartheid regime, and in a 1981 interview, with no trace of irony, declared South Africa to be "essential to the free world," before placing the ANC on the terror blacklist.

Dick Cheney, who went on to become Bush's vice-president, voted against a bill calling for the release of Mandela. "I don't have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago," Cheney told ABC this week, but went on to call Mandela a "great man" who had "mellowed with age".

After Mandela criticised the US invasion of Iraq under Bush in 2004, a writer in the right-wing National Review opined that Mandela's "vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists".

Sepp Blatter
In his statement following Mandela's death, the Fifa president paid tribute to "an extraordinary person, probably one of the greatest humanists of our time".

However, during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa Mandela - who was in mourning for his 13-year-old great granddaughter, who had died in a car accident - was placed under extreme pressure by Blatter to appear at the tournament's final, according to the Mandela family.

At the draw for the finals of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil on Friday, Blatter interrupted a minute's silence he had called to mark Mandela's death after 10 seconds, declaring: "Let's celebrate humanity, celebrate Nelson Mandela and most of all celebrate football. Applaud please!"

Blatter has faced calls to resign after stating in 2011 that players who are racially abused by opponents should sort out their problems "with a handshake", and refusing to back calls for clubs that fail to clamp down on supporters' racist behaviour to be penalised.

Elton John
Mention should also go to Sir Elton John, who serenaded Mandela with a version of Happy Birthday at a special concert held in his honour in 2008.

Yet in 1983, at the height of apartheid, Sir Elton was happy to accept thousands of dollars to play at South Africa's Sun City casino resort.

Two years later the Sun City album was released by Artists United Against Apartheid, which featured musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis and U2, and raised more than $1 million for anti-apartheid projects.

"You can't buy me, I don't care what you pay. Don't ask me Sun City because I ain't gonna play," they sang on the title track.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/528290/20131207/nelson-mandela-hypocrisy-hypocrites-david-cameron-geroge.htm

Another article exposing the utter two faced hypocrisy of these monsters:



The Hypocrisy on Mandela is Palpable

John Glaser, December 06, 2013


Today you can watch much of the world praise the life and mourn the death of former South African President anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela. Scores of U.S. leaders and political pundits with platforms to reach millions of Americans are expressing admiration for Mandela today, but I have barely seen a single acknowledgement of the fact that the U.S. strongly opposed Mandela’s struggle and strongly supported the white supremacist apartheid system in South Africa. There has been almost no mention in the mainstream that Mandela remained on the U.S.’s terrorism watch list until 2008. Mandela spent 27 years in prison, thanks in part to the CIA assisting the apartheid regime’s secret police in his arrest.

This white-washing mostly occurs on television. Cable news is especially vapid. There are a few exceptions in print/digital media. One comes from Peter Beinhart:


In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted againsta resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

…In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”

Believe it or not, there is an aspect of this hypocritical praise of Mandela that is mentioned even less than the media coverage of his passing. That is the uncomfortable similarity that Israel’s occupation of Palestine now has with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The Times of Israel reported last February that Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, believes Israel currently qualifies as an apartheid state. “In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state,” Liel said in Jerusalem.

Israel’s plan for military occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement construction for Israeli-only areas, was compared to South African apartheid by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself, who actually used the word “bantustan” to describe the separating of Palestinians into cantons.

Here is a Haaretz piece from 2003 reporting on Sharon’s reference of the Bantustans:


Sharon’s map is surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same – 10 in the West Bank (and one more in Gaza). Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their 10 planned Bantustans.

The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa’s territory.

So the hypocrisy on Mandela isn’t just a case of an ugly past that we’ve now learned from (and erased). Rather, that kind of hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy is still going on today. One wonders how much of that history will be erased when Israeli apartheid becomes as universally opposed as South African apartheid.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/12/06/the-hypocrisy-on-mandela-is-palpable/

As Ive said before and will continue to say Cameron is nothing more than a two faced pi.ece of shi.t who is basically nothing more than a political prostitute- for sale to the highest bidder. Cameron and his cronies are merely puppets of the international banking cartels and the corporations they have no idea what democracy, justice and equality mean they just use these words as sound bites to fool the mugs who still believe in their fraudulent and corrupt system of govt.

another article highlighting the hypocrisy of these western scumbags:

The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA

By Jeff Stein / December 05 2013 6:20 PM

One of the great things about the late great Nelson Mandela is that he didn’t hold grudges.

How else could he have accepted normal relations with the CIA, which tipped off the white-supremacy regime to his whereabouts in 1962?

According to a 1990 Johannesburg Sunday Times newspaper account, a CIA agent by the name of Millard Shirley fingered Mandela for the apartheid regime’s secret police, allowing them to throw up a roadblock and capture him.

“Shirley had a high-ranking ‘deep throat,’ a Durban-based Indian, within South African Communist party ranks,” Gerard Ludi, a retired senior South African intelligence agent told the paper.

“I can only guess that Shirley was instructed by his government to supply the information to the South Africans because it was in America’s interest to have Mr. Mandela out of the way.”

A dozen years later, Ludi told me in 1996, he went into business with Shirley, who had officially retired from the CIA. Naturally, they ran a private security business.

Then, in 1985, came the call from a secret South African government unit called Stratcom (Strategic Communications), whose function was to disrupt and destroy anti-apartheid groups, I reported for Salon. Shirley was hired to train the unit’s operatives and develop a covert operations training manual.

My Salon story continued:

“The South African intelligence services didn’t have decent training materials,” Ludi said. “They asked Millard to update and do a proper training manual. He did it for a year off and on for a year.”

Asked whether his friend was still working for the CIA at that point, Ludi answered, “Who knows? Shirley tried to retire many times, but the CIA kept calling him back to duty. We gave him about 20 retirement parties.”

According to Mike Leach, who also worked for Stratcom, the manuals used by Shirley had U.S. Department of Defense stamped on their covers. But Shirley’s activities went beyond designing training manuals, according to Leach.

“One of the things Shirley did during the negotiations with unions was to doctor the water on the table with chemicals to induce stomach cramps, to bring about a point where the union officials would want to hurry up the negotiations and just settle because they were physically uncomfortable.”

Another trick was to launder anti-apartheid T-shirts in a fiberglass solution and hand them out to demonstrators, who would soon be convulsed in uncontrollable itching.

The Stratcom unit also intercepted foreign donations to anti-apartheid groups, then sent back thank-you notes on phony letterheads and put the money into more “psychological warfare operations,” said Leach.

The CIA’s involvement in these activities is unclear, but Leach claims the agency sent South Africans to a facility in Taiwan for advanced psychological warfare training. The Telcom auditing official called the CIA’s alleged wiretap training “very sinister.” He suspects the CIA used the program to develop its own spies in Telcom, to protect its assets in the country at this time.

“The American government wanted to know which way the cookie would crumble,” he said
http://www.newsweek.com/day-mandela-was-arrested-little-help-cia-223935

We are yet to have a great leader but if Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu had not been let down by those cowards who he staged the coup of January 66 with and had been given the chance to lead Nigeria I believe he would have made Nigeria a country that blacks all over the world would have looked up to.

He was intellectually astute and more importantly was a nationalist as opposed to being a tribalist, to date we have not seen anyone with similar qualities come forward to lead Nigeria.

This is dedicated to that useless ars.ehole called Okupe:


Love, forgiveness and the hypocrisy of Nelson Mandela's phony fanclub

Matt Carr 07 December 2013. Posted in News

Mandela’s legacy should not be left in the hands of hypocrite politicians, millionaires and moronic celebrities

The death of Nelson Mandela is an event to be mourned, but his magnificent life is also something to be celebrated, for his exemplary moral courage and for the heroic struggle against one of the most oppressive and vile political systems ever created, a struggle that he symbolized and brought to a triumphant conclusion after spending 27 years in prison as a ‘terrorist.’

Few politicians have ever achieved as much as he did, and few have generated such enormous goodwill in their own lifetime.

Long before his death, Mandela had acquired – regardless of his own intentions – the status of universal celebrity and secular sainthood, and the glow that he created had already begun to attract some very dubious admirers.

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek,’ wrote the poet Thomas Wyatt. In Mandela’s case the reverse is true. Take for example John ‘bomber’ McCain. Last month McCain attended the screening of the Mandela biopic Long Walk to Freedom, in Washington, where he delivered a eulogistic address which declared:


‘It is hard not to be in awe of Nelson Mandela. His character is awe-inspiring – his courage, resilience, generosity, selflessness, wisdom. History offers few examples of people who were as devoted or sacrificed more for a cause greater than their self-interest than Nelson Mandela.’


McCain went on to praise Mandela’s ‘capacity for forgiveness. Imprisoned unjustly for 27 years, he bore no hate for those who took his freedom from him, who denied his dignity.’

The man who once sang ‘Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb Iran’ cited Mandela’s close relationship with one of his guards on Robben Island as evidence of ‘a mutual regard that ancient hatreds could not prevent. Love, you see, comes more naturally to the human heart than hatred.’

Noble words. But what was McCain doing when Mandela was in prison? Well back in 1987, he voted various times in an attempt to persuade the Reagan administration to back the RENAMO organization in its violent campaign against the left-wing FRELIMO government of Mozambique.

Initially created by the Rhodesian secret services, RENAMO or the ‘Mozambican National Resistance’ became a tool of South Africa in its ‘total strategy’ against the anti-apartheid ‘frontline states.’

RENAMO’s contribution was a reign of absolute terror in rural Mozambique, in which as many as 100,000 civilians were deliberately slaughtered. Funded and equipped by the apartheid regime, it barely even bothered to fight a ‘military’ campaign against the Mozambican security forces.

Its ‘resistance’ was so insanely murderous that even the Reagan administration wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. McCain was less scrupulous. In 1987 he voted alongside the racist Jesse Helms and other senators to oppose the appointment of a State Department nominee for ambassador to Mozambique, because she was not seen as sufficiently pro-RENAMO.

So much for love and forgiveness. Do people change? But there’s no evidence that McCain has, and his pious praise of Mandela positively reeks of hypocrisy.

And he isn’t the only one. Closer to home there is our own Prime Minister, who has described Mandela as the person he most admires, and praised him for his ‘grace and complete lack of bitterness.’

Yet what’s this? Back in 1989, Cameron visited apartheid South Africa, not to show solidarity with the prisoner on Robben Island, but on a ‘fact-finding’ freebie organized by the anti-sanctions lobby firm Strategy Network International (SNI).

There are many other people who have showered praise on Mandela in order to try and bathe in his light. Some of them are merely ridiculous, Like Donald Trump, who tweeted that ‘ Nelson Mandela and myself had a wonderful relationship–he was a special man and will be missed.’

Or Lindsay Lohan, of all people, who has responded to his death by tweeting ‘A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.’ Well she ought to know.

Lohan is merely an idiot. But too many of the politicians and celebrities who are lining up to pay tribute to Mandela praise him for things that they would never even dream of doing themselves, in ways that conceal and obscure what he actually did.

They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, and when they do, we should call them out. Because Mandela’s legacy should not be left in the hands of hypocrite politicians, millionaires and moronic celebrities who seek to bathe in the light that he left behind him, and his funeral shouldn’t become a Hello-style watch-the-celebrity event that obscures the struggle he fought so bravely.

Because there was once a time when he wasn’t famous, but chose to fight for truth, justice and equality without knowing whether he would ever succeed.

How many of those empty vessels who now praise him, who have spent their lives pursuing nothing but fame, power and money can say the same?

Source: Infernal Machine

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/love-forgiveness-and-the-hypocrisy-of-nelson-mandela-s-phony-fanclub#.UqOUlKdFDMM

BabaTony: I first saw this news on bbc, I was shocked NONE of the nigerian media carried it. It shows the kind of society we are, if it we to be some political news it would be everywhere. The Nigerian media unfortunately have failed us, they prefer yellow journalism massaged by the pockets of politicians.

the Nigerian media are a bunch of ar..se licking sycophants who have zero interest in the well being of their own citizens.

apparently the boat he was in capsized and sank 30 metres below the surface of the atlantic not right to the bottom as the title of this post misleadingly states , hence the air pocket that he was able to survive on:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsN5bB3xE04

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo

the reporter on another video of this incident says that he had to endure hearing the sound of the bodies of his dead crew members being eaten by sharks Jeez..........

This man needs to get down on his knees and give thanks to the Lord almighty for delivering him from this situation.

Im sure he will make the most of evry day of his life from now onwards as this ordeal must have taught him just how quickly it can be taken away from you.

walezy14: For those who cast aspersion on the personality of OBJ, Our great hero in Africa ditto Mandela, a prophet does not have value in his land. History made us to understand obj played a prominent role for Mandela to be released from prison, this involves mental and financial assistance to ANC in south africa. Get it clearly that Mandela dropped his 2nd term bid due to physical and health problems which he had suffered during his 27 year incarceration in the prison. I see Obj as Africa Legend.

I wish you could explain why you regard this human waste aka Obj as your hero and a prophet, unless the reason for your verbal diarrhea is that you have mental health issues and just like spouting off baseless platitudes.

ROSSIKE: Are you saying if OBJ was a young Nigerian in the 60s he couldn't have been an activist against a hypothetical white apartheid regime in Nigeria?

Remember that is all Mandela was, before he was picked up and locked in jail on trumped up charges of conspiring to overthrow the government in 1962 - an anti-apartheid campaigning lawyer. No different from say Femi Falana or Gani Fawehinmi in Nigeria. It was the time he spent in jail (27 years) that made him an African hero and global icon. A rallying figure in the fight against oppression. In many ways he was a creation of the apartheid regime. Any country that went through what the blacks did in South Africa would have had a 'Mandela'.

On whose side did OBJ fight during the Nigeria/Biafra civil war? The British backed northerners or the secessionist igbos?

The answer will tell you everything you need to know about where Obj's loyalties lie.

Your attempt to reduce Madiba's greatness by describing him as nothing more than an activist is a pathetic attempt to distort history, I don't know if you know this but Madiba was at the forefront of anti colonialist politics right from his days as a member of the ANC youth league, he led from the front and was never afraid to get his hands dirty.

I don't remember Obj being anything more than a white man's lackey and CIA agent since the 1970s.

HOw many "activists" do you know that sacrifice 27 years of their life in prison for a cause? You might as well say that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were mere activists despite the fact that they paid the ultimate price.

I can assure you that if the apartheid govt of south Africa coudl have had Mandela murdered while he was in prison they would have done so in order to erase him from the minds of the black south African people but they knew that in doing so they would make him a martyr so they had no choice other than to keep him alive in prison, therefore giving them credit for his creation is pure lunacy.

The fact that Nigerians have not have to deal with the physical presence of white minority rule does not mean that Nigeria does not experience the same things that black south Africans experienced under a racist apartheid system.

I would aruge that Nigerians are actually living under an apartheid system right now but the difference is that the perpertrators are their fellow black African leaders who are puppets of their European and American masters.

Lest I forget Obj recently handed out vast tracts of agricultural land in Nigeria to the racist white farmers that Mugabe kicked out of Zimbabwe and as we speak GEJ is involved in selling off fertile Nigerian farmland to European and American investors, very soon Nigerians will end up in the same position as black south Africans where they do not even own land in their own country.

Gabangel: Either some of don't understand what is going on. Mandela's ANC really had terrorist inclinations, and that was the reason he as a person divorced his first wife. It is said that she kidnapped, killed and even did some horrible things which Mandela in prison did not approve of. If you watch the movie of Mandela (the old one) you would realize that at the beginning he was of the violent type...destroying electricity masts...but he changed. Still the past does have a way of catching up with us.

Something is seriously wrong with your brain.
What do you think the racist apartheid govt were doing to black south African civillians and anti apartheid activists?

What happened to Steve Biko and Chris Hani?

What happened to those black youth during the Soweto uprising?

Don't ever post this garbage again if you don't understand the history of apartheid in south Africa

Will those 3 days be used as a time of reflection by GEJ and his cronies ?

Will GEJ use the time to take a step back and reflect on the huge difference between himself and Madiba, will he marvel at the selflessness of a man who gave up everything in order to give his people a chance to be allowed to get an education, eat three square meals a day and have a fighting chance in life?

No those 3 days will probably be used to hatch more plans to take Nigeria down the path of ruin that it is currently on , it will be used as a time to dream up more looting schemes, more ways to hand over Nigeria's wealth to european and American predators in exchange for crumbs.

Nigeria is cursed.

How the CIA (Obasanjo's buddies) helped jail Mandela:

Crocodile Tears: It was the CIA that helped jail Nelson Mandela

Crocodile Tears to mask US imperialism's role as the enemy of African liberation

This article was published in July 2013

Today is Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday, but forget the crocodile tears from the U.S. government about Mandela’s poor health. Imperialist diplomacy with all of its sugar-coated phrases is nothing more than a form of historical perjury.

Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which led to 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robbins Island, was based on the work of the CIA. The CIA and National Security Agency worked as partners with the racist, apartheid regime’s vicious military and intelligence services.

Mandela was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) that organized civil resistance and an armed struggle against South Africa’s white racist apartheid regime. The United States and the other western capitalist governments supported the racist, fascist apartheid regime.

Mandela was labeled a terrorist by the United States. So was the entire ANC. Even as late as 2008 the U.S. State Department had to pass special waivers so that Mandela or any ANC leader could visit the United States because he and the ANC were still on the “terrorist watch list.”

The ANC’s struggle for Black majority rule and the liquidation of apartheid received critical support from Cuba, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The ANC had an active alliance with South African Communist Party in the struggle for Black majority rule.

Even after the fall of the apartheid government ANC members applying for visas to the USA were flagged for questioning and forced to ask for waivers to enter the country. Former ANC chairman Tokyo Sexwale was denied a visa in 2002

In an act of shameless duplicity, the various leaders of the U.S. imperialist government have pretended that they were always opposed to Mandela’s imprisonment.

In 2007, Barbara Masekela, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States until the year prior was denied a visa to visit a dying cousin living in the United States.

U.S. Imperialism was the enemy of African Liberation

The CIA and NSA spy services—with the full collaboration of such transnational corporations at IBM, Kodak and many others—worked at all levels and for decades for apartheid and against the African National Congress activists who were routinely murdered, tortured and sentenced to life terms in the hell holes of South Africa.

The ANC was labeled and treated as a terrorist organization and pro-communist by the CIA and successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. Congress, too, was an enthusiastic cheerleader for this vile partnership with the planet’s most disgustingly racist regime.

The House of Representatives only voted to call for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1986 when it was clear that the fascist apartheid regime’s days were numbered, leading the United States and Britain to abruptly shift course and broker a negotiated end to the white supremacist system. A mass worldwide anti-apartheid movement had completely isolated South Africa. Dick Cheney voted against the House resolution in 1986, pointing out that the U.S. government was still retaining the ANC on the official U.S. “terrorist list.”

The U.S. and Britain knew the end had finally come for the usefulness of the apartheid government when its seemingly invincible military was decisively defeated by the Angolan army and thousands of Cuban volunteers in the historic battle of Cuito Canavale.

As Mandela said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.”

Shameless duplicity

In an act of shameless duplicity, once Mandela was released from prison, each successive U.S. administration has pretended that the United States was always opposed to Mandela’s imprisonment and stood with him against apartheid.

After getting out of prison, Mandela came to the United States to meet President George H.W. Bush on June 25, 1990. He was being touted as a hero and a champion in the fight against racism. The U.S. government, working through propagandists in the corporate-owned media, tried to instill a society-wide case of amnesia about the fact that they were the defenders of apartheid and directly responsible for Mandela’s imprisonment.

But one reporter had the gall to ask an unscripted question.

Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, was asked in the days before the June 25 meeting with Bush whether the president would apologize to Mandela for the U.S. role in his arrest.

Fitzwater was angry and caught off guard. He said, “I just don’t like it when people question our motives on blacks or on Mandela because of an incident that happened 20 years ago in another administration.”

Today, on Mandela’s 95th birthday and when the U.S. government celebrates Mandela, will any of the corporate media expose the bloody role of the CIA, NSA and other U.S. intelligence services in their war against the African liberation movements?

Nelson Mandela is a beacon for the oppressed. He is a hero and he will be remembered as such. Not true for the CIA and NSA which worked as the spy service for the racist, apartheid regime as it hunted down and captured Mandela and captured or killed his comrades.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/crocodile-tears-it-was-the-cia-that-helped-jail-nelson-mandela/5360582

I don't understand why Mandela gave this shameless old CIA stooge the time of day. The fool might have been sent by his white masters to spy on Mandela because that is all the old sell out bas.tard is good for.

Can this old fool sacrifice one day in prison for the people of Nigeria not to talk of 27 years?

Obj should rest assured that the day he kicks the bucket no sane Nigerian will mourn him.

Mandela a man who sacrificed 27 years of his life for his people and country because he was unwilling to live under a disgusting racist system which stipulated that blacks were the lowest form of human life. A system that consigned blacks to the lowest social strata of society. A system that stipulated that blacks should never be allowed to go beyond a primary school education as there lot in life was to remain servants and slaves of their white masters.

A man who stood up and challenged this odious system, who fought with everything he had to overturn this sick system is now being compared to a weak, gutless puppet who has no say in the running of his own country. A puppet who was assisted into office by his buddies in Washington and London, a puppet who handed Nigeria , lock stock and barrel to the IMF and shell bp and said : Oga sahs its all yours, ra..pe until you can't ra..pe anymore......this piece of human waste is what is being compared to Mandela.

Because he let them get away with all the atrocities they committed against the black people of south Africa and he calmed the black south African youth who were ready to plunge the country into civil war rather than go on living like slaves in their own country. The white parasitic population of south Africa and the white owned corporations would have had to sit back and watch all of their loot go up in flames. Whitey being the snake he is realised the game was up and decided to broker a peace deal with someone who could calm the teeming angry black masses in south Africa and that person was Mandela.

Not only did he let them get away with their terrible treatment of the rightful owners of the land he also let them keep all of their ill gotten wealth as well. THis is why he is lauded as a hero today by these snakes. NO white man has anything good to say about a freedom fighter because that freedom fighters ideals are usually diametrically opposed to their own greedy and selfish ideals.

Mugabe started out as their boy but later turned against them by speeding up the land reform programme which the whites had no intention of honouring.

Moral of the story - the only good black man to whitey is an obedient, non threatening submissive one who puts the interest of the west and its multinational corporations above the interests of his own people.

Not that I am criticising Madiba - I think a man who sacrificed 27 years of his life for his people is a man who should be idolised and respected despite any other mistakes he might have made.

U.S. Glorifies Nelson Mandela In Death. But Treated Him as a Terrorist While Alive.

CIA Central In Mandela’s Arrest … Labelled Him a Terrorist Until 2008

Everyone from President Obama to the mainstream news is lionizing Nelson Mandela.

But the New York Times reported in 1990:


The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.

The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.

***

Newsweek reported in February that the agency was believed to have been involved.

***

At the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security service.

***

A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.



Indeed, Nelson Mandela was only removed from the U.S. “terrorist” list in 2008.

Mandela was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy. And anyone – even U.S. citizens – critical of U.S. policy may be labelled a bad guy.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-glorifies-mandela-in-death-but-treated-him-as-a-terrorist-while-alive/5360569

The following article was written on 18 July 2013 on Madiba's 95th birthday:

It was the CIA that helped Jail Nelson Mandela

Crocodile tears to mask US imperialism's role as the enemy of African liberation

Today is Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday, but forget the crocodile tears from the U.S. government about Mandela’s poor health. Imperialist diplomacy with all of its sugar-coated phrases is nothing more than a form of historical perjury.

Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which led to 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robbins Island, was based on the work of the CIA. The CIA and National Security Agency worked as partners with the racist, apartheid regime’s vicious military and intelligence services.

Mandela was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) that organized civil resistance and an armed struggle against South Africa’s white racist apartheid regime. The United States and the other western capitalist governments supported the racist, fascist apartheid regime.

Mandela was labeled a terrorist by the United States. So was the entire ANC. Even as late as 2008 the U.S. State Department had to pass special waivers so that Mandela or any ANC leader could visit the United States because he and the ANC were still on the “terrorist watch list.”

The ANC’s struggle for Black majority rule and the liquidation of apartheid received critical support from Cuba, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The ANC had an active alliance with South African Communist Party in the struggle for Black majority rule.

Even after the fall of the apartheid government ANC members applying for visas to the USA were flagged for questioning and forced to ask for waivers to enter the country. Former ANC chairman Tokyo Sexwale was denied a visa in 2002

In 2007, Barbara Masekela, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States until the year prior was denied a visa to visit a dying cousin living in the United States.

U.S. Imperialism was the enemy of African Liberation

The CIA and NSA spy services—with the full collaboration of such transnational corporations at IBM, Kodak and many others—worked at all levels and for decades for apartheid and against the African National Congress activists who were routinely murdered, tortured and sentenced to life terms in the hell holes of South Africa.

The ANC was labeled and treated as a terrorist organization and pro-communist by the CIA and successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. Congress, too, was an enthusiastic cheerleader for this vile partnership with the planet’s most disgustingly racist regime.

The House of Representatives only voted to call for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1986 when it was clear that the fascist apartheid regime’s days were numbered, leading the United States and Britain to abruptly shift course and broker a negotiated end to the white supremacist system. A mass worldwide anti-apartheid movement had completely isolated South Africa. Dick Cheney voted against the House resolution in 1986, pointing out that the U.S. government was still retaining the ANC on the official U.S. “terrorist list.”

The U.S. and Britain knew the end had finally come for the usefulness of the apartheid government when its seemingly invincible military was decisively defeated by the Angolan army and thousands of Cuban volunteers in the historic battle of Cuito Canavale.

As Mandela said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.”

Shameless duplicity

In an act of shameless duplicity, once Mandela was released from prison, each successive U.S. administration has pretended that the United States was always opposed to Mandela’s imprisonment and stood with him against apartheid.

After getting out of prison, Mandela came to the United States to meet President George H.W. Bush on June 25, 1990. He was being touted as a hero and a champion in the fight against racism. The U.S. government, working through propagandists in the corporate-owned media, tried to instill a society-wide case of amnesia about the fact that they were the defenders of apartheid and directly responsible for Mandela’s imprisonment.

But one reporter had the gall to ask an unscripted question.

Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, was asked in the days before the June 25 meeting with Bush whether the president would apologize to Mandela for the U.S. role in his arrest.

Fitzwater was angry and caught off guard. He said, “I just don’t like it when people question our motives on blacks or on Mandela because of an incident that happened 20 years ago in another administration.”

Today, on Mandela’s 95th birthday and when the U.S. government celebrates Mandela, will any of the corporate media expose the bloody role of the CIA, NSA and other U.S. intelligence services in their war against the African liberation movements?

Nelson Mandela is a beacon for the oppressed. He is a hero and he will be remembered as such. Not true for the CIA and NSA which worked as the spy service for the racist, apartheid regime as it hunted down and captured Mandela and captured or killed his comrades.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/it-was-the-cia-that-helped-jail-nelson-mandela/5343409

United States, Israel opposed Mandela, supported Apartheid

By Juan Cole | Dec. 6, 2013 | 26 Responses



The attempt to make Nelson Mandela respectable is an ongoing effort of Western government spokesmen and the Western media.

He wasn’t respectable in the business circles of twentieth-century New York or Atlanta, or inside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. He wasn’t respectable for many of the allies of the United States in the Cold War, including Britain and Israel.

I visited Soweto in 2012 and went to Mandela’s old house. It was a moving experience. I don’t want him to be reduced to a commercialized icon on this day of all days.

We should remember that for much of the West in the Cold War, South Africa’s thriving capitalist economy was what was important. Its resources were important. Its government, solely staffed by Afrikaners and solely for Afrikaners, was seen as a counter-weight to Soviet and Communist influence in Africa. Washington in the 1980s obsessed about Cuba’s relationship to Angola (yes).

That the Afrikaners treated black Africans like dirt and discriminated against them viciously, denying them the franchise or any hint of equality, was considered in Western capitals at most an unfortunate idiosyncrasy that could not be allowed to interfere with the West’s dependence on Pretoria in fighting the international Left.

The African National Congress had attempted nonviolent protest in the 1950s, but the white Afrikaaner government outlawed all those techniques and replied with deadly force. In the early 1960s when Nelson Mandela turned to sabotage, the United States was a nakedly capitalist country engaged in an attempt to ensure that peasants and workers did not come to power. It was a deeply racist society that practiced Apartheid, a.k.a. Jim Crow in its own South.

The US considered the African National Congress to be a form of Communism, and sided with the racist Prime Ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and P.W. Botha against Mandela.

Decades later, in the 1980s, the United States was still supporting the white Apartheid government of South Africa, where a tiny minority of Afrikaaners dominated the economy and refused to allow black Africans to shop in their shops or fraternize with them, though they were happy to employ them in the mines. Ronald Reagan declared Nelson Mandela, then still in jail, a terrorist, and the US did not get around to removing him from the list until 2008! Reagan, while delivering pro forma denunciations of Apartheid or enforced black separation and subjugation, nevertheless opposed sanctions with teeth on Pretoria. Reagan let the racist authoritarian P.W. Botha come to Washington and met with him.

Likewise British PM Margaret Thatcher befriended Botha and castigated Mandela’s ANC as terrorists. As if the Afrikaners weren’t terrorizing the black majority! She may have suggested to Botha that he release Mandela for PR purposes, but there is not any doubt on whose side she stood.

The Israeli government had extremely warm relations with Apartheid South Africa, to the point where Tel Aviv offered the Afrikaners a nuclear weapon (presumably for brandishing at the leftist states of black Africa). That the Israelis accuse Iran of being a nuclear proliferator is actually hilarious if you know the history. Iran doesn’t appear ever to have attempted to construct a nuclear weapon, whereas Israel has hundreds and seems entirely willing to share.

In the US, the vehemently anti-Palestinian Anti-Defamation League in San Francisco spied on American anti-Apartheid activists on behalf of the Apartheid state. If the ADL ever calls you a racist, you can revel in the irony.

Ronald Reagan imagined that there were “moderates” in the Botha government. There weren’t. He wanted “constructive engagement” with them. It failed. The Afrikaners imposed martial law. Reagan tried to veto Congressional sanctions on Pretoria in 1986 but Congress over-rode him.

Nelson Mandela was a socialist who believed in the ideal of economic equality or at least of a decent life for everyone in society. He was also a believer in parliamentary government. So, he was a democratic socialist.

The current Republican Party is implementing Apartheid policies of making it difficult for minorities to exercise their right to vote. And they are changing tax laws to throw ever more of society’s wealth to the top 1%. And they just threw millions of Americans off food stamps, including children and Veterans. The US House of Representatives still stands against everything Mandela stood for.

President Obama first became interested in politics at Occidental College in California and attended anti-Apartheid demonstrations. It was then that fellow activists informed him that Barack would be a better name for such an activist than “Barry.” In many ways Mandela’s cause started Obama on his path to the White House.

In the meantime the UK also has a right wing government that is punishing students and the poor on behalf of the rich. And the Likud Foreign Minister in Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, wants to take away the citizenship of Palestinian-Israelis (20% of the population) just as the Afrikaners took citizenship away from blacks and pushed them into Bantustans. Mandela said, ““We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

The world will celebrate Nelson Mandela. But for most of those global leaders, it is only lip service. With the partial exception of President Obama, they don’t share his actual ideals and wouldn’t approve of him when he was at his most active, in the early 1960s, trying to figure out how to sabotage the Afrikaner establishment. (I say partial in Obama’s case because obviously he admires the struggle against Apartheid, but on economic issues he is an Eisenhower Republican and Mandela wouldn’t approve). In the 1990s on his release from prison Mandela did stand out for his belief in peace and reconciliation. But that was only because the Afrikaners had lost and he could afford to be magnanimous in victory. He was not a pacifist. He did not believe in taking lives as part of his struggle, but he was willing to resort to violence. He was not a capitalist. He wanted uplift for the workers. He could not overlook racism the way Reagan, Thatcher and Shamir did.

South Africa itself, for all its economic and social dynamism, has also not fully attained Mandela’s ideals. Its poor are becoming worse off. Labor relations are roiled. And the ANC leadership is in disarray.

Mandela is not a birthday cake to be celebrated. The funeral with its hypocritical heads of state won’t honor him. He is a pioneer to be emulated. We honor him by standing up for justice even in the face of enormous opposition from the rich and powerful, by taking risks for high ideals. We won’t meet his standards. But if all of us tried, we’d make the world better. As he did.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/mandela-supported-apartheid.html#comments

Victorious over Apartheid, Defeated by Neoliberalism

Nelson Mandela: A dissenting opinion

by Jonathan Cook / December 6th, 2013


Offering a dissenting opinion at this moment of a general outpouring of grief at Nelson Mandela’s death is not likely to court popularity. It is also likely to be misunderstood.

So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous respect for the great personal sacrifices he made, including spending so many years caged up for his part in the struggle to liberate his people. These are things impossible to forget or ignore when assessing someone’s life.

Nonetheless, it is important to pause during the widespread acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.

Perhaps the best way to make my point is to highlight a mock memo written in 2001 by Arjan el-Fassed, from Nelson Mandela to the NYT’s columnist Thomas Friedman. It is a wonderful, humane denunciation of Friedman’s hypocrisy and a demand for justice for the Palestinians that Mandela should have written.

Soon afterwards, the memo spread online, stripped of el-Fassed’s closing byline. Many people, including a few senior journalists, assumed it was written by Mandela and published it as such. It seemed they wanted to believe that Mandela had written something as morally clear-sighted as this about another apartheid system, an Israeli one that is at least the equal of that imposed for decades on black South Africans.

However, the reality is that it was not written by Mandela, and his staff even went so far as to threaten legal action against the author.

Mandela spent most his adult life treated as a “terrorist”. There was a price to be paid for his long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.

In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years.

First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.

Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was required to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.

It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.

It is for that reason, rather simply to be contrarian, that I raise these failings. Or rather, they were not Mandela’s failings, but ours. Because, as I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.

For too long we have slumbered through the theft and pillage of our planet and the erosion of our democratic rights, preferring to wake only for the release of the next iPad or smart phone.

The very outpouring of grief from our leaders for Mandela’s loss helps to feed our slumber. Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those watery-eyed leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber. Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters.

No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/victorious-over-apartheid-defeated-by-neoliberalism/

RIP Madiba.

dhrey: I can see you are frustrated,but you can't blame ejanla cos this is where he is making his dooo.if you can't appreciate good work,I beg adjust yourself.

Nigerians - forever suffering and smiling. How many youths in Nigeria live the type of lifestyle of the average American or European, yet you will still hear an American or European youth criticising the likes of Rozay, Lil Wayne, 2 Chaiinz and other materialistic posers for their empty and meaningless lyrics. The suffering and smiling Nigerian on the other hand will keep pretending as if its normal to be promoting mindless materialism in a country where unemployment is over 40%, a country where having access to constant electricity and running water is regarded as a luxury and where poverty is the order of the day.

psalmdave: BROS PLEASE,NO OFFENSE BUT I THINK U GUYS ARE BEEN A LITTLE TOO HARD ON THIS NEW GENERATION ARTISTS,SO U EXPECT TUFACE,DAVIDO ETC TO BE SINGING LIKE SUNNY ADE AND CO........

THESE GUYS ARE JUST LIKE EVERYODA HUMAN BEING AND THEY WERE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS SO I SEE NO REASON Y EVERYONE SHOULD BE SO HYPOCRITICAL AND START BLAMING THEM FOR EVERYTHING THEY DO,CAR THEY BUY,FOOD THEY EAT,WHERE THEY GO,WHO THEY MARRY ETC

GREAT MINDS DONT HAVE TIME FOR ALL THESE AND LASTLY IF ALL OF U CONDEMNING THESE ARTIST WERE SO RESPONSIBLE U WILL BE LISTENING TO ARTIST LIKE DON MOEN,SINACH,LIONEL RICHIE,CARRIE UNDERWOOD,JOHN LEGEND ETC AND NOT BLAMING NIGERIAS POVERTY,CORRUPTION,HUNGER ON EVERY HIT DAVIDO,WIZKID ETC RELEASE


LETS DO SOMETHING RESPONSIBLE WITH OURSELVES

You need to go and google Kendrick Lamar a young African American brother whose major inspiration in life is Tupac Shakur, despite his youth (born in 1987) which makes him 26, he is very knowledgeable and aware of the decline in the quality of hip hop artists in America . I have a lot of respect and admiration for this youth because he says that he is totally fed up of the pathetic state of the hip hop genre in America today and wants to resurrect the great and golden era of early hip hop. We need youths like him in Nigeria to stop buying into empty materialism and continue the legacy of the late great Fela Kuti. Enough already of these talentless muppets who keep mimicking the likes of Ricky Rozay, lil wayne 2 chainz, kanye waste and other illuminati posers.