Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Snapshot of Mandela’s South Africa

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Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) adopted a Soviet-inspired Freedom Charter which promised that “All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose,” which signaled open season on white farmers and their land.  Author Ilana Mercer writes of how the ANC attempts to tame and rewrite South African history mimics the efforts by American elites to “deconstruct American history and memory.”  The new dispensation is multiculturalism and “the denunciation of America’s Western foundation and a glorification of non-Western cultures.”   Mercer’s book is well-worth reading.   Bernhard Thuersam

Snapshot of Mandela’s South Africa 

“[Former Police Commissioner J.B.] Vorster resigned from the Prime Ministry in 1978 to make way for P.W. Botha . . . [and] Although Botha modified apartheid legislation, sometimes softening it,  the international campaign against white rule – involving shrill demands for disinvestment – intensified.

In 1984 Botha (made President under a new constitution) declared a state of emergency; but the domestic situation grew worse and worse, while the practice – particularly among the Xhosa – of “necklacing” suspected police informers attained international ill repute.  

“With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” proclaimed Mandela’s increasingly deranged wife Winnie to the New York Times of February 20, 1989. 

A severe stroke forced Botha from power in 1989.  Nothing in the background of his successor, President F.W. de Klerk, indicated the revolutionary policies he would pursue. De Klerk scrapped the ban on the ANC and other opposition parties; freed Mandela from incarceration; acceded to Namibia’s independence; and junked the nuclear weapons. 

[A] 1992 referendum, asking white voters if they favored de Klerk’s reforms, resulted in sixty-eight percent of the respondents saying “yes” . . . [as de Klerk promised negotiations with the opposition] “would only be about power-sharing.”  With Mandela, de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize [in 1993] . . . [and a general election in 1994] brought Mandela to power with over sixty percent of the vote.
Even the election report of the Library of Congress, hardly a hotbed of Afrikaner sentiment, admitted that “in ANC-controlled area, some of the party activists intimidated [opposition] party organizers and disrupted their campaign rallies . . . The harsh truth is that “large scale intimidation made it nearly impossible to for rival parties to campaign in the African townships.”

So much about South Africa is reminiscent of the famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, Ilana Mercer, Stairway Press, 2011, pp. 63-65)

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