Nelson Mandela Was a Communist Terrorist, Not a Saint

Waging War on Their Shibboleths

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Nelson Mandela is framed by the powers that be as a political prisoner unjustly locked up because he supported human rights…or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, he was the man who, at his own initiative, turned the African National Congress (ANC) into a terror organization and started a campaign of violence against white South African civilians. Meanwhile, his wife burned the ANC’s enemies alive.

To some of you, this is old news; those aware of Africa’s problems have long known Mandela was a bad actor. But many buy the Invictus-championed lie that the butcher of South Africa was a saint, so it’s worth demolishing that absurd myth, as it gets to a similar issue as both America’s woes and the Rhodesian catastrophe,¹ and shows why South Africa has followed Rhodesia’s path to destruction.²

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

AUDIO: Mandela Was a Terrorist, Not a Saint

Mugabe South of the Limpopo

For those who hadn’t before heard the truth about Mandela, your vision of him is probably similar to that presented by Invictus (or similar propaganda), a figment of the imagination drummed up by the pro-open society,³ “Rainbow Nation” crowd and championed around the 2010 FIFA World Cup hosted in South Africa. That image is Mandela as a kindly grandpa leading a government focused not on racial feuds, ethnic grievances, and revenge, but rather on South African society's national health and well-being.

Of course, that was a lie then, being nearly as untrue of Mandela during his time in power as when he was a young terrorist making bombs alongside Soviet-trained saboteurs.

The Mandela Years

In fact, though Mandela’s years in power have been retconned as a period of bliss and national reconciliation before the current DEI regime⁴ began, even those years were dominated by revenge.

A good anecdote showing this comes from Eeben Barlow’s⁵ Executive Outcomes: despite being a highly trained special forces officer who desired to serve his country under the new government, Barlow was purged from the ranks along with most of the other whites by Mandela’s cronies in the name of equity. The same was true across the government and military, as the new, black rulers purged most of the whites in the name of equity.

But while the later years were bad enough, as they began the process that turned South Africa from a thriving land into a living hell,⁶ Mandela’s early years were far worse.

The Bombing Years

Despite what pro-Mandela revisionists would have you believe, he was extremely violent as a young radical. In fact, he was the one who turned the ANC toward terrorism, the one who precipitated a decades-long bombing campaign across the country that killed hundreds of civilians and wounded countless more.

Such is what happened starting in the early 1960s. Inspired by communist successes everywhere from Cuba to the Congo⁷ and dreaming of being a violent revolutionary in the Che Guevara or Fidel Castro mold, Mandela convinced then-ANC leader Albert Luthuli to let him create an armed division of the ANC.

That was a massively important sea change in ANC policy because the ANC was the locus of black political activity in South Africa, and so its decisions set the tone of resistance to apartheid. Until Mandela decided to follow in Che’s footsteps, the ANC was a generally peaceful political movement, as Luthuli was predisposed against violence and searching for a peaceful solution. So, the movement largely was as well.

But, whatever his predisposition, Luthuli was compelled by fate and Mandela to change his stance. That came in 1960 when a 20,000-member, ANC-connected mob threatened white police officers during a political demonstration,⁸ to the point of pelting until-then peaceful police officers with rocks, and so the police responded with gunfire. Their fire led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of wounds. The incident, called “the Sharpesville Massacre” by leftist historians, was probably a justified use of force given the violence of the demonstrators. However, Mandela was able to use it to his advantage and turn the anger surrounding it into a terrorist movement.

Such is what he did alongside Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian communist trained in the arts of sabotage and subversion by the Soviet Union.⁹ Together, they founded a small group of radicals committed to violence and black rule that they called Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated to “MK”), meaning Spear of the Nation. Slovo and Mandela are pictured below.

Meanwhile, as the ANC admitted in 2011 and the South African Communist Party proudly noted in 2013, Mandela himself had joined the Communist Party around the same time.¹⁰ In fact, in addition to his leadership role within the ANC during his years as a terrorist and his founding role in MK, Mandela was on the Central Executive Committee of the South African Communist Party.¹¹

As could be expected of a group composed of Soviet-trained, African communists, MK soon launched a guerrilla campaign consisting mainly of ineffective but deadly bombings.

MK’s attacks began in mid-December of 1961, around the same time when the supposedly pro-peace Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 57 bombings occurred on Dingane's Day alone, with dozens following; by 1963, the South African government alleged that the group had committed nearly 200 bombings.¹² Those bombings destroyed everything from civilian infrastructure, such as power facilities and crop fields, to government posts across the country, such as buildings housing armed forces service members and their families.¹³

As was the case throughout MK’s history, and indeed across Africa’s anti-colonial conflicts, the attacks mainly targeted and harmed civilians.¹⁴ Further, they were severe enough that the United States thought Mandela might start a major race war inside the country in which it would have to be involved, as he was “completely under the control of the Soviet Union.” So, when the CIA found where he was hiding out while bombing civilians and their infrastructure, it “grudgingly” handed over that targeting package to the South Africans, who arrested him in late 1962.¹⁵

After the so-called Rivonia Trial, which consisted of 173 witnesses and thousands of exhibits being used to convincingly articulate Mandela’s involvement in a communist-aided terror campaign, he was convicted on four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment. Predictably, Mandela tried turning the trial into a political circus, stressing equality and human rights. But, regardless of his antics, the court found what he later admitted from prison — that he was fighting an “armed struggle”¹⁶ against the people of South Africa.

Over the ensuing years, the Mandela-founded MK continued the terror campaign. Particularly, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the group, trained, armed, and funded by the East Germans and Soviets, carried out dozens of bombings and landmine attacks that “deliberately targeted” South African civilians.¹⁷ The most notorious of these was the Church Street Bombing, which left 19 dead and 217 injured, only 11 of whom were at all involved in the South African military.¹⁸ That particularly horrific attack came alongside hundreds of others that consisted of MK using explosives like bombs, grenade launchers, and land mines to attack electrical infrastructure, military bases, and civilian gathering places in an attempt to terrorize the government into undoing apartheid.

Those attacks came alongside increasingly deep Soviet involvement with the ANC: as TIME reports, the post-Rivonia Trial ANC pleaded for help from the liberal West and communist East, and those pleas were “rewarded by the Soviet Union, which beginning in 1963 became increasingly important to the ANC as a supplier of funds, military equipment and scholarships for young members.”¹⁹ The NAACP and similar far-left, egalitarian groups in America aided the ANC as well.²⁰

Quite unlike Rhodesia, where the CIA turned a blind eye to communist involvement,²¹ the American government was concerned enough with what Mandela’s MK was doing to comment on it and label the ANC a terror group. In fact, during a 1986 speech, President Reagan warned of “calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress [including] the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression, the imposition of martial law, and eventually creating the conditions for racial war.”²²

All of that happened under Mandela’s aegis. Though he later presented himself as an anti-violence politician, he remained connected with MK while in prison and routinely conversed via letter with its leaders on tactics and their campaign against the white government, something even MSM outlets like NBC News admit.²³ And beyond just discussing tactics, such as those used to murder civilians in the Church Street Bombing and others, Mandela remained committed to the principles of the MK. As one South African historian put it, “Once he had committed himself to armed struggle, he did not waver until the onset of political negotiations in 1990.”²⁴

So, as MK bombed civilians en masse, Mandela remained committed to the war and killings, and aided MK in its commission of those murders, actions that meant he remained on the US terror watch list until 2008. In fact, he only renounced violence after he won in 1990 and was released from prison, at which point violence was no longer necessary or useful.

Winnie Mandela

How was Mandela able to get messages from Robben Island, where he was imprisoned, to leaders in MK? His wife, Winnie Mandela, who was even more demonic and bloodthirsty than he. Though not integral to the story, as Nelson rather than Winnie is cheered as the Rainbow Nation founder, it’s worth noting her crimes against humanity given her connection with the communist cause.

Particularly, Winnie was known for roasting alive those black South Africans who didn’t cooperate with the ANC. She did so in a horrific process called “necklacing” that consisted of sticking a gasoline-soaked tire around a victim, hacking off his hands or arms so that it couldn’t be removed, and then setting it alight so that he died a slow, painful death. She was known for a saying praising the torturous form of death: “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”²⁵

Winnie and her collection of thugs — the Mandela United Football Club²⁶ — even necklaced teens suspected of working with the South African government, killing them in the aforementioned, brutal way. They did so to countless South Africans in a horrific vigilante campaign characterized mainly by torture and murder.

Despite her crimes, Winnie remained married to Nelson until 1996, well after her necklacing activity reached a fever pitch in the late ‘80s, and retained her official leadership positions within the ANC.

Why It Matters

Nelson Mandela is still presented as a hero. Winnie Mandela is even presented as a hero, still, albeit a “flawed” one,²⁷ leaving one to wonder what form of terror campaign and torture-filled murder would be enough to get the couple from hell described as anything other than heroic.

But they were not heroes. They were communists. They were terrorists. They were murderers.

That installation of violent communists atop the rungs of power is incredibly relevant to us. Not only is it the legacy of decolonization, but it is the legacy of the left’s ascent in America, as is thoroughly documented in books like Days of Rage. Naturally, we can and should expect the same outcomes, outcomes that have been emerging.²⁸ There as here, replacing the old order, the state of things characterized by Ian Smith’s Rhodesia²⁹ or the pre-independence Congo,³⁰ didn’t mean a brilliant, edenic new period of national prosperity. It never did, in fact. Rather, everywhere from Kenya to the Congo, Algeria to South Africa, it meant blood-soaked violence and national dysfunction³¹ as the worst sorts of scoundrels and murderers rose to the top.

Those horrors must be remembered because they are increasingly relevant to us³² as the race communism problem becomes ever more relevant.³³ When leftists, many of them trained or taught by former Weather Underground terrorists, praise “decolonization,” “anti-imperialism,” “equity,” and the like, they are saying that they want to do to you what they did to South Africa.³⁴ They want to butcher you like they butchered Rhodesia,³⁵ and do it just as cruelly.³⁶

So, the truth about those whom they promote as heroes must be told. Most already know that Che Guevara was a murderous thug, that Stalin was the devil incarnate rather than the “Uncle Joe” FDR presented him as. Many are increasingly learning that the Civil Rights Movement was a disaster responsible for most of our present woes, as I spoke with Jeremy Carl about.

But the other shibboleths of the race communist left must be defenestrated as well. The figures they use to justify your destruction must be destroyed first. The most obvious of those is Mandela, the supposed founder of the “Rainbow Nation.” The nation is no rainbow; it’s a disaster zone wracked by crime and racial hatred, and the man at the root of the myth is a communist terrorist, not a kindly uncle. That can’t be forgotten by those who know it, and must be learned by those who don’t.

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5. Barlow was the founder of a private military contracting company called Executive Outcomes. Essentially a more heavily armed Blackwater that existed in the 1990s, it pacified Angola and Sierra Leone, doing what the host governments, post-colonial nations, and the UN couldn’t. It was a model for Erik Prince’s Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and similar groups and turned the Mike Hoare-style mercenaries of Africa into professional forces with a corporate gloss. His book about the company is called Executive Outcomes: Against All Odds, and is quite good.

6. More on that process here:

7. That history discussed in this book review:

8. Even TIME magazine, which was far from being a reactionary outlet, described the mood as “ugly” and noted the police were forced to call in dozens of reinforcements because of the massive crowd’s behavior: https://time.com/archive/6807030/south-africa-the-sharpeville-massacre/

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Slovo

10. https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232040/http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/politics/2013/12/06/sacp-confirms-nelson-mandela-was-a-member

11. https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232040/http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/politics/2013/12/06/sacp-confirms-nelson-mandela-was-a-member

12. The Wikipedia list of attacks is surprisingly helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMkhonto_weSizwe#1960s%E2%80%931970s

13. A helpful timeline: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/umkhonto-wesizwe-mk-timeline-1961-1990

14. https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv02918/06lv02938.htm

15. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/15/cia-operative-nelson-mandela-1962-arrest

16. https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/

17. https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv02918/06lv02938.htm

18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Street,_Pretoria_bombing

19. https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/

20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Resources_Centre

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22. https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/

23. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mandelas-freedom-fighter-days-not-part-saintly-image-flna2d11744279

24. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mandelas-freedom-fighter-days-not-part-saintly-image-flna2d11744279

25. https://web.archive.org/web/20180413095757/https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2018-04-13-has-truth-become-a-casualty-of-winnies-rejection-of-accountability/

26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandela_United_(football_club)#Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_findings

27. https://www.france24.com/en/20180402-winnie-mandela-south-africa-obituary-nelson

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35. The Rebellion of the Helots Against Liberalism's Zimbabwean Telos

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