09.07.2013

• Redistribution of Freedom

  

  The Redistribution of Freedom

  Author: Daniel Greenfield
  Source: the Sultan Knish blog - 12.16.2013

  Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the right to be left alone the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by a free people." It would even be fair to say that without the right to be left alone no other rights exist.

  

  Amendments one through ten of the Bill of Rights are essentially an enumeration of the ways that government is obligated to leave people alone. This is most explicitly true of the First Amendment which definitively sums up areas of human life into which government under no circumstance may trespass on.

  Unlike other amendments, the territory that the First Amendment deals with is intellectual and spiritual, the world of ideas, the realm of faith and the defining right of political advocacy. The freedoms of the mind, heart and voice are the most essential of freedoms because they free us to be individuals. They allow us to have our own values. Without these freedoms, no society is free.

  Those who sought to undermine these "Freedoms from Government" did so by offering alternative "Freedoms of Government." Countering the Founding Fathers' DMZ's of self-determination, they promised freedom from social problems. A second Bill of Rights would offer the freedom from fear and want. Instead of a liberation from government, the new rights would trade social benefits for freedoms. A right would not mean a zone of freedom from the government, but a government entitlement.

  The Orwellian inversion of rights has meant that civil rights perversely take away rights. No sooner is a right created than it is used to deprive other people of their rights. Instead of rights freeing people from government repression, they act as a means of government repression. Freedom is treated as a limited commodity which, like wealth, must be redistributed to achieve maximum social justice.

  The right to be left alone, freedom of speech and conscience, have taken a back seat to the redistribution of freedom. Government rights violate individual rights by compelling everyone to participate in the process of distributing entitlements.

  A wedding photographer in New Mexico was ordered by a court to participate in a gay ceremony violating both her First Amendment rights to Freedom of Religion as a Christian and her right to Freedom of Speech as an artist. A baker in Colorado was ordered to make a gay wedding cake or face penalties ranging from fines to a year in prison. The ACLU is after even bigger game suing Catholic hospitals for not engaging in abortion contending that patients are being deprived of their rights.
  - Gay Activist Admits Truth

  The fundamental issue in all these cases is whether our rights are defined by the ability to be left alone or by the opposing ability to compel others to do what we want them to. Is the right to force someone else to participate in your wedding or perform your abortion more compelling than the right to opt out of being forced to engage in behaviors that violate your deepest religious convictions?

  America is a nation founded by religious dissenters. Its founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights make the moral case for dissent. The Declaration of Independence begins by setting out a moral case for separation, for the divorce of authority, based on the moral principle of individual freedom. It makes government conditional on liberty, rather than making liberty conditional on government.

  Today the national establishment is intolerant of dissent. It traps the current of freedom in dams of entitlements. It pits the right to be against the right to receive and makes certain that the right to receive, not only the property of others, but their very conscience, mind and liberty, always wins out.
  - Deconstructing Liberal Tolerance

  The United States is following the European course of rendering the distinction between the state and the church irrelevant by making the state into the church and mandating that everyone worship it. As in 19th century Europe, deliberate clashes are being stirred up between the values of the state and religious values for the purpose of demonstrating that the values of the state are supreme.

  The expansion of state power is rapidly becoming limitless. The old legal justifications that linked Federal intervention in civil rights to interstate commerce and public accommodation have given way to a redefinition of any and all establishments as public accommodations. Courts argue that once an individual begins to sell a product or service, he loses access to all his Constitutional freedoms.

  The core issue transcends the hot button social issues such as gay marriage and abortion embraced by the elites of a permissive society and addresses the deeper inversion of rights that is at the heart of the problem.

  

  Reproductive rights and gay rights activists both campaigned to be left alone. There are still gay protests with placards arguing that their marriages are no one else's business and pro-abortion rallies demanding that politicians stay out of the bedroom. But if the marriage of Adam and Steve shouldn't be at the disposal of Harry and Julie, why should Harry's bakery and Julie's talent be at the disposal of Adam and Steve? If the government should stay out of the bedroom, then why must it dive into the bedroom to compel the owners of companies like Hobby Lobby to subsidize violations of their faith?

  Cases like these show that the issue is not rights, but control. If the only way to obtain what you call your rights is by compelling someone else to give up theirs then what you are really demanding is not a right, but a means of imposing your values and your convictions on someone else. And that is not a matter of civil rights. It is an ideological and religious war with government siding with whoever has the most money to invest in strategic campaign contributions for the culture war.

  Individual rights exist in the empty spaces that government is forced out of. Government rights however do not exist until everyone is forced to provide them. That is true of the redistribution of wealth and property, but it is even truer of the redistribution of freedom and the confiscation of conscience.

  Whatever right government has to the seizure of wealth, it has none to the seizure of conscience. If there is any place that the government has no right to intrude, not in the name of social justice or political correctness or the progressive utopia awaiting us on the other side of the regulatory mirror, it is the territories of the First Amendment, sacred not only in idea, but also in practice.

  There can be no faith, no ideas and no individuality without the First Amendment. Without the right to be left alone in your beliefs, your values and your convictions, there can be no other rights and the very notion of rights, no matter how often it is used to describe everything from free health care to gay marriage, cannot exist.

  And it is into this sacred territory that the judicial activists of gay marriage have dared to intrude.

  Rights can either be defined by the virtue of the individual in his liberty or the virtue of the government in its authoritarianism. But it cannot be defined by both. Either you have the right to be free or you have the right to the property and the service of another human being. The choice is the fundamental one between freedom and slavery.
  - Trusting God As Freedom Fades

  Social justice denies the virtue of freedom, it rejects the possibility of self-determination without external intervention, it dismisses the idea that people can be free without a system of redistributing freedom from the oppressors to the oppressed so that the oppressed become the new oppressors. It rejects any alternative to entitlements as entitlement and any alternative to privilege as privilege.

  The moral argument for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals. The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of freedom within carefully planned limits.

  

  This abrogation of freedom is the logical end result of the left's entire pattern of reasoning which rejects the individual for the collective, the working man for the planner and the people for the ideological expert. These forms of repression are expressions of its rotten notion that the left may do anything and everything in the name of freedom except actually allow the people to be free.

  Without the right to be left alone, there are no other individual rights. Without individual rights, there is no such thing as a free society.
  - Liberty or Death!

  Every group is sooner or later faced with choosing whether it wants to win a final conclusive victory over its enemies or whether it wants to be free. The tyrannical choice is tempting, but it unleashes a cycle of conflict and repression that can only end with extermination. And once that choice is made, the formerly oppressed forfeit all their moral authority as they abandon freedom for tyranny.

  • 9:54 PM
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• Disregard the Hype

  
  Beware Educational Hysteria

  Author: Robert Weissberg
  Source: American Thinker - 10.12.2013

  

  When it comes to flushing billions down the toilet and relentlessly aggrandizing Washington's power, nothing, absolutely nothing, outshines "fixing" our supposedly woeful schools. This disorder conspicuously erupts every three years with the release of the international education performance data on reading, math, and science issued by the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA). PISA has been around since 2000 and the 2012 results are typical: U.S. students are generally mediocre, especially compared to our economic rivals in Asia. Though hardly unexpected given past outcomes, the findings always elicit a sky-is-falling as if economic doom is eminent. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the results, a "picture of educational stagnation." A December 4th, 2013 Wall Street Journal lead editorial exemplifies this near panic:

  Such results should trouble anyone concerned about America's economic future and the human capital produced by the K-12 system. Economies grow by exploiting scarce resources, people most of all. The ultimate source of wealth is ourselves and the PISA findings suggest that U.S. schools are failing tomorrow's labor force. Too few students are being prepared with the skills they'll need to compete in a worldwide market and sustain America's economic dominance.

  It is easy to dismiss this editorializing as the usual cliché-ridden boilerplate that always bubbles up when the topic is education. Such pronouncements undergird such ill-fated Washington initiatives as Bush's No Child Left Behind and President Obama's Race to the Top that erode American federalism. Predictably, when confronted with the PISA scores, Secretary Duncan said that we must invest in early learning, redesign high schools, raise standards and support great teachers, all expensive nostrums that have repeatedly failed.

  Worse, the prestigious "conservative" Wall Street Journal insistence to "do something" gives cover to all the radicals intent on capturing America's public schools (e.g., today's ideologically infused Common Core standards) under the guise of overtaking education-obsessed China and Korea. It is often (and accurately) said that war is the perfect rationalization to expand state power and limit constitutional rights and this adage now applies to an alleged economic war. In a nutshell, yet more doomed-to-fail fixing education schemes are the Left's perfect Trojan horse, all the while cheered on by the misguided Wall Street Journal.

  Consider the basic premise that the ticket to economic progress is a workforce skilled in reading, math, and science. A partial truth, at best. Ask any employer he will explain that being a "good worker" requires far more than mastering basic science or math. More important are traits like punctuality, a willingness to follow directions, eschewing alcohol and drugs, honesty, agreeability with coworkers and customers, and strong motivation to perform the job correctly and shouldering additional responsibilities if necessary. In today's legal climate an employer might add disdaining filing frivolous discrimination lawsuits, not insisting upon costly "rights" (e.g., gold-plated health insurance), and not striking for economically unjustifiable salaries. What boss would hire Albert Einstein if he was lazy, chronically late, and endlessly connived to collect undeserved disability pay?

  To my knowledge, there is no PISA-like international test assessing these absolutely vital worker traits though businesses deciding where to locate usually know the score. Japanese auto firms typically build factories in the American South or the rural Midwest, not Detroit. Ironically, the South has some of the lowest standardized tests scores in the nation. In fact, Vermont and Massachusetts have test scores comparable to the best worldwide but companies go elsewhere. BMW, Mercedes, Kia and all the rest know that the "good old boys" generally make decent workers -- they can't solve quadratic equations to save their lives but nevertheless do an honest day's work without suing anybody for good but not extravagant paychecks (and keep in mind that assembling cars today is hardly donkey work).

  Moreover, do we really need millions of workers who suddenly have superior reading, math, and science skills? How much algebra must a worker know to cut the grass or help pour concrete? There are millions of such jobs that must be performed well, even in a high-tech economy. After all, today's cash registers permit even a semi-innumerate cashier to calculate taxes and make the correct change. In addition, capable workers can often acquire the necessary proficiency while on the job as opposed to learning in school, and PISA cannot capture this acquired knowledge. A Marshall Plan to boost PISA scores also risks upping production of better-educated but unemployed youngsters more inclined to loll about in Mom and Dad's basement versus doing challenging work "beneath them."

  And just how many super-smart people are really necessary for a nation's prosperity. A million? Ten million? Nobody knows and, I suspect, that the answer is incalculable. Would Apple's net productivity soar if its engineering workforce tripled? Upping a nation's brainpower is not akin to spending billions to extract an ounce of U-235 from tons of U-238.The raw quantity of brainpower is only one of many factors in the national economic productivity and it is foolish to insist that just increasing this one equation element is the magic bullet.

  To appreciate this iffy link, consider Israel's mediocre PISA performance. Its overall scores are percentage-wise comparable to U.S. numbers, for example, only about 9% score proficient on math and Israel is in 40th place in science and math. Since the U.S. is about 39 times the population of Israel, one might guess that Israel is struggling in a world where brainpower counts the most. The reality is, of course, quite different -- even in absolute terms Israel is a world leader (also here) as reflected in medicine, military technology, physics, irrigation, and computers plus multiple patents and cutting-edge startups. High-tech firms like Intel, Motorola, Sony, and Microsoft have major facilities in Israel to utilize local intellectual talent despite the lowly PISA scores. Clearly, quantity is not everything when it comes to brain power.

  Mediocre PISA results are not marching orders to spend yet more billions to create educated workforce 2.0. That call to arms blithely assumes that America's intellectually inadequate labor pool can be upgraded as if U.S. schools can extract blood from turnips. This is pure fantasy given the sorrowful past record of countless curriculum reforms, expensive techie gimmicks, teacher accountability schemes, school choice, and dozens more failed nostrums. Just ask anybody who has tried to teach today's youngster, particularly at community colleges that are often viewed as the solution to our workforce woes. Teachers will tell you that educating these youngsters is an uphill battle. Courses are often just remedial or rehash what was supposedly learned in high school while many students soon jump ship. Perhaps those who wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial (and similar fervent calls to action) have a secret guaranteed-to-succeed education 2.0 upgrade, but I seriously doubt it.

  The bottom line is simple: beware of the alarmists who insist that unless we spend billions more "investing in the children" and further expand Washington's overreach, the Chinese will rule the world. Actually, it's more likely that we must pour yet more money into uplifting blacks and Hispanics since these two groups pull down the national average. The PISA statistics are real enough but they cannot explain why the U.S. struggles economically. If test scores were all that mattered, Vermont would put Silicon Valley to shame. Valid reasons exist for our economic tribulations but obsessing over PISA is a Left-friendly subterfuge and not the pathway to progress. Attempting to raise scores will only make matters worse.

  

  • 6:03 PM
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• DECEMBER 2013 UPDATE

  

  Prayer Requests

  Sedgefield Community of Ashland, VA

  Constitution of the United States, Amendment I:
  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  [Related Article: Praying for Richmond, VA and the Greater Richmond Area]

   

  The Sedgefield community of Ashland, VA:

  Please pray for Mark B., that he would be convicted of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Pray that he would be delivered from spiritual blindness and self-deception. Please pray that God would heal and bless him and his family.

  Please pray for Cheryl R., that she would be convicted of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Pray that she would be delivered from spiritual self-deception and an antichrist spirit. Please pray for her daughter, Samantha, for conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment leading to repentance and genuine salvation.
  [Related Articles: Is It Really "All Grace"? / The 'Jesus' the World Loves / When Tolerance Is Sin!]

   

  Pray with me for my neighbor Wendy McCreary, and her brother Mike-pray that the conviction of the Holy Spirit would descend upon their hearts and penetrate the spiritual darkness...that they would be convicted of sin, righteousness, and the final judgment to come...that they would receive Jesus Christ and be saved; and that Wendy would be delivered from the antichrist spirit which is controlling and manipulating her...
  Pray that Wendy would be delivered from her arrogant lifestyle, profanity, and public drunkenness...
  Pray that her daughter would be delivered from the rebellion and ungodly worldviews which she has picked up from her mother...

  

  Please pray that Wendy's shouting of profanity and blasphemy would be silenced. Pray that Wendy would be removed from the community to a place more suited to her lifestyle.
  

  

  [Related Article: The Spirit of This Age]

  Please pray for the individuals who are encouraging her lifestyle and behavior:

  Please pray for Roger and Kelly: praying that they would be delivered from rebellion, arrogance, and self-deception. Pray that they would be set free from the powers of darkness, and that the Holy Spirit would penetrate their hardened hearts with a godly conviction of sin, righteousness, and the judgment to come. Pray that they would repent of their spiritually lawless lifestyles and surrender their lives to Jesus Christ.

  Pray for her friend employed with Glass Doctor. Please pray for his conviction of sin, judgment, and righteousness leading to surrender and salvation in Jesus Christ; praying also for the salvation of his entire family. Pray that they would be delivered from antichrist spirits of pride and rebellion.

  Pray for Brandon, that he would be convicted of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Pray that he would repent and receive Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

  Please pray for Michelle; pray for her repentance and salvation. Pray that there would be a complete surrender to Jesus Christ, and deliverance from false doctrines.

  Pray for Trent and Mary....pray that this couple would repent of their sinful nature and believe in Jesus Christ for their forgiveness and salvation.

  Please pray for Erick, Shirl....pray for their salvation; that they would be convicted of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Pray that they would be delivered from the spiritual blindness and deception of Satan.

  Pray for Greg B. and Kimberly. Please pray for their salvation and deliverance from the worldviews and lifestyle of this morally corrupt world.

  Please pray for Tiffany and Tina...

  [Related Article: Repentance...the Missing Message]

  

  
  RELATED ARTICLES:

  The Spirit of Antichrist (ONE WAY)

  Ten Lies of Feminism (Thoughts.com)

  What Is Freedom? (Thoughts.com)

  God's Wonderful Plan of Salvation (Thoughts.com)

  An Open Letter to Richmond, VA (Thoughts.com)

  • 1:31 PM
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• LIBERAL NEWSPEAK

  

  Liberal Newspeak

  Author: Daniel Greenfield
  Source: the Sultan Knish blog - 10.12.2013

  Orwell's mistake in 1984 was assuming that a totalitarian socialist state would maintain the rigid linguistic conventions of bureaucratic totalitarianism. That future commissars and fuhrers would insist on everyone talking like office clerks picking out words from a coded manual of procedures.

  It was an understandable mistake though. Orwell had seen 1948. But he hadn't seen 1984.

  

  Liberal Newspeak is the hybrid product of advertising, academia and bureaucracy. It takes ideas from creative leftists, rinses them in conformity, uses techniques from the ad world to make them as safe as possible and then shoves them down everyone's throat.

  Newspeak's objective was to enforce linguistic schizophrenia as a means of subdividing personalities, killing rational thought and making opposition into a form of madness. Liberal Newspeak's is less ambitious. It settles for muddling your brain. Like modern advertising, its goal is to make you feel comfortable without actually telling you anything.
  - Manufacturing Intolerance

  Liberal Newspeak is the chirpy announcer in a drug commercial soothingly telling you about all the fatal side effects while on screen couples have romantic picnics and go whitewater rafting. That is the job of most of the news media. Forget outliers like MSNBC which caters to a self-consciously progressive crowd. The media's real job is to be that announcer telling you that if you vote liberal, your taxes will go up, your job will go to China and you will die, without getting you upset about the terrible news.

  The dictionary of Liberal Newspeak is full of empty and meaningless words. Community, Care, Access, Sharing, Concern, Affordability, Options, Communication, Listening, Engage, Innovating and a thousand others like it are wedged into sentences. Entire pages can be written almost entirely in these words without a single note of meaning intruding on the proceedings.

  It's not that these words don't have meanings. It's that their meanings have been rendered meaningless. The techniques of advertising have been used to pluck up words that people once felt comfortable with and wrap them around the agendas of the liberal bureaucracy.
  - The Sovietized American Media

  Community is a perfect example. It was the perfect word to hijack because it once seemed to mean the dignified independence and interdependence of small town life. A community had structure. It had values. But in Liberal Newspeak, a "community" is a recognized identity group or concern group. It means a distinct population that has to be managed or rewarded or addressed in some way.

  But Community is also a mandate. We are all expected to be part of communities. Community has become the opposite of individualism. It has come to mean the conformity of identity groups and unelected activists who mandate the behavior of entire identity groups. The virtual community is not a legal entity. It holds no elections or referendums. Its leadership is chosen for it from outside.

  Liberal Newspeak is concerned with making people safe while telling them absolutely nothing. It's a new language that conveys reassurance rather than meaning. Its totem words are almost pre-verbal in that they mean nothing except "You are safe" and "We are taking care of you."

  That is what gibberish like, "We are improving access options for all community interest groups" or "We are striving to innovate while listening to everyone's concerns" means. Daily life has become filled with meaningless pats on the head like that, which dedicated liberal newspeakers spew up like newborns. This empty babble says nothing. It's the hum of the beehive. The signal that keeps all the drones headed in the same direction.

  Unlike Newspeak, Liberal Newspeak doesn't engage in any showy inversions of meaning. Those are the games that intellectuals play and above the ground level at which most Liberal Newspeak chatter takes place, there are mountains of academic jargon that work hard to invert meanings and ideas. But like the brilliant inventions of engineers, these rarely make it down to the ground level.

  Liberal Newspeak isn't the work of the engineers of the left, but its marketers. It doesn't bother with frontal attacks on language. Instead it reframes everything in comforting language while teaching you to use the appropriate terms that change the context completely. It owes less of its perversity to Marxism than it does to Madison Avenue. The language that was used to convince millions to buy junk that was bad for them or that they didn't need is used to convince them to buy liberalism.
  - Obama Greenlights Domestic Propaganda

  

  While the implications of Liberal Newspeak are ominous, its tones aren't. It deliberately embraces the feminine side of language. It strives to be comforting, nurturing and soothing. It never tells you anything directly. Instead it makes you read everything between the lines. It rarely answers questions. Instead its answers indirectly explain to you why you shouldn't even be asking the questions.

  Liberal Newspeak is a language of preemption. It preempts questions and ideas. Its terminology is so vague that specific questions require a convoluted assemblage of words. The more specific the question, the more convoluted the sentence, until asking even a simple question is like trying to make a wish with a genie. And then the sheer amount of words makes the meaning impermeable.

  You can't think in Liberal Newspeak. You can only feel good or bad, angry or self-satisfied. There is no room for thoughts, only feelings. You can feel guilty in Liberal Newspeak. You can be outraged, self-righteous or concerned. But you can't weigh one idea against another because it isn't a language of ideas. It's a vocabulary of emotional cues that could just as easily be taught to a smart animal.

  Liberal policies go awry so often in part because Liberal Newspeak makes propaganda easy, but practical planning very difficult. The language they use is designed to make people comfortable with uncomfortable things, but descends into meaningless waves of bureaucratese when discussing any specifics. That is the difference between marketing ObamaCare and making ObamaCare work.
  - Liberal Media Bans "Dirty" Word

  It's easy enough to put up a glowing website full of smiling people talking about affordability, access, sharing, concern and care. But it takes more practical communications skills to make that website work. Obama's CMS built a whole television studio to sell ObamaCare, but kept tinkering with the website specifications until the last minute and tried to manage integration with disastrous results.

  Liberal Newspeak excels at telling the uninformed that everything will be fine when the government takes care of them. But project communications in Liberal Newspeak that prattle endlessly about access and relevance and community and integrity may look like a plan to the newspeakers, but is a tremendous waste of everyone's time and resources.

  Newspeaker bureaucrats think that they're planning when they write memos about engagement and access, when what they are really doing is maintaining conformity in the same way that the Soviet and Red Chinese engineers constantly discussing Lenin and Mao as inspirations for their work.

  Communist Newspeak however wasn't a language, it was a series of formal statements of allegiance. Once those were gotten out of the way, it was possible to talk brass tacks. But there are no brass tacks or sharp corners allowed in Liberal Newspeak. No one ever gets to the point except when attacking Republicans. The point is an attack on the integrity of the group, its accessibility, engagement and innovative listening status. Once you get to the point, the hum of the drones no longer has a purpose.
  - Everything Is Fake Now

  Liberal Newspeak is full of terms about listening, engaging and sharing, but it's a closed loop.

  It's language as a command and control mechanism for establishing conformity. There is no room for debate in Liberal Newspeak. Arguments are settled with emotional resorts to the dominant political agendas of the day.

  

  There is no way to disprove anything in Liberal Newspeak. All you can do is denounce your opponent's lack of ideological conformity while claiming that your experience gives you special insight into the form of oppression that the political agenda is meant to solve.

  The empty words are signals like the noises that birds and animals in the forest make. They establish identity, rather than ideas. A Liberal Newspeak discussion is more likely to be about identities, racial, gender, sexual, than about anything tangible. Like two moose meeting in the north or two sparrows chirping on a power line, the only communication that really happens is an assertion of identity.

  The "security" of Liberal Newspeak comes from that sense of mutual identity through conformity. Everyone has access, community and shares their concerns which are all about conformity. It's an unbroken loop of reassuring gibberish punctuated by bursts of anger at outsiders who are not part of the hive and don't understand how important community access and engaged listening really are.

  Newspeak was concerned with the manipulation of meaning, while Liberal Newspeak is concerned only with emotional cues tied to identity. It doesn't replace meaning, it displaces it. It has emotions, but no ideas. It is the noise that takes the place of the signal and the hum that ends a conversation. Its purpose is to take an individualistic culture where ideas were proven through adversarial contests of the intellect and reduce it to a conformity that promises safety in exchange for never thinking again.
  - Lying Liberal Liars

  

  • 8:19 PM
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• He Was No Conservative

  Arapahoe High Gunman: Republicans Are the Party of 'Let 'em Die'

  Author: John Nolte
  Source: Breitbart.com - 12.14.2013

  

  Early news reports have identified the Arapahoe High School gunman as Karl Halverson Pierson, an 18-year-old student. Pierson is believed to be responsible for wounding one other student before shooting and killing himself with a shotgun. The Denver Post reports that Pierson had "very strong political beliefs" and that one Facebook post he authored tore into Republicans as the political party that wanted to let people die:

  "[Y]ou republicans are so cute" his post reads, with an image that says: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?"

  Pierson also described himself in a Facebook post as "Keynesian" when it came to economic thinking, and criticized free market thinkers:

  In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as "Keynesian."

  Pierson's classmates described the suspected gunman's political beliefs as "outside the mainstream," and Pierson as "an outspoken kid about what he believed and a good political thinker." Another classmate said Pierson held "very strong beliefs about gun laws."
  
  The Los Angeles Times quotes friends who described Pierson as an advocate for gun rights. In its lengthy report, The Los Angeles Times does not, however, include the information about the Facebook posts wherein Pierson describes himself as Keynesian or mocks Republicans as wanting people to die.

  Apparently, Pierson was picked on in school but also "had a multitude of friends." Right now it is believed the shooting was motivated by a confrontation with a teacher, a debate coach who kicked Pierson off the debate team. The Los Angeles Times says "Pierson was kicked off the team and suspended from school in September for a few weeks after threatening the coach."

  For an American mainstream media always eager to exploit tragedy for political gain, yesterday's horrific shooting will not give them much to work with. The gunman's politics have little in common with the Tea Party, and the state where the shooting took place, Colorado, passed almost all of the media's gun control wish-list about six months ago.

  More bad news for the media came in the gunman's weapon of choice: a shotgun, which is also Vice President Joe Biden's weapon of choice.

  

  As we have seen time and again, the length of the media's fascination with this kind of tragedy is directly connected to how much the media are able to exploit the event for political gain. As of right now, because there is nothing to mine for political gain, it looks as though the media will have forgotten all about this shooting by Tuesday or Wednesday.

  
  Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

  • 7:38 PM
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• When the Magic Died....

  

  When the Obama Magic Died

  Author: Fouad Ajami
  Source: realclearpolitics.com - 11.16.2013

  The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies -- and, more significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the charismatic moment lasts -- a year, an era -- the redeemer is above and beyond judgment. He glides through crises, he knits together groups of varied, often clashing, interests. Always there is that magical moment, and its beauty, as a reference point.

  Mr. Obama gave voice to this sentiment in a speech on Nov. 6 in Dallas: "Sometimes I worry because everybody had such a fun experience in '08, at least that's how it seemed in retrospect. And, 'yes we can,' and the slogans and the posters, et cetera, sometimes I worry that people forget change in this country has always been hard." It's a pity we can't stay in that moment, says the redeemer: The fault lies in the country itself -- everywhere, that is, except in the magician's performance.

  Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr. Obama's astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.

  In 2008, seeing the Obama crowds in Portland, Denver and St. Louis spurred memories of the spectacles that had attended the rise and fall of Arab political pretenders. I had lived through the era of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. He had emerged from a military cabal to become a demigod, immune to judgment. His followers clung to him even as he led the Arabs to a catastrophic military defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. He issued a kind of apology for his performance. But his reign was never about policies and performance. It was about political magic.

  In trying to grapple with, and write about, the Obama phenomenon, I found guidance in a book of breathtaking erudition, Crowds and Power (1962) by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. Born in Bulgaria in 1905 and educated in Vienna and Britain, Canetti was unmatched in his understanding of the passions, and the delusions, of crowds. The crowd is a "mysterious and universal phenomenon," he writes. It forms where there was nothing before. There comes a moment when "all who belong to the crowd get rid of their difference and feel equal." Density gives the illusion of equality, a blessed moment when "no one is greater or better than another." But the crowd also has a presentiment of its own disintegration, a time when those who belong to the crowd "creep back under their private burdens."

  Five years on, we can still recall how the Obama coalition was formed. There were the African-Americans justifiably proud of one of their own. There were upper-class white professionals who were drawn to the candidate's "cool." There were Latinos swayed by the promise of immigration reform. The white working class in the Rust Belt was the last bloc to embrace Mr. Obama -- he wasn't one of them, but they put their reservations aside during an economic storm and voted for the redistributive state and its protections. There were no economic or cultural bonds among this coalition. There was the new leader, all things to all people.

  

  A nemesis awaited the promise of this new presidency: Mr. Obama would turn out to be among the most polarizing of American leaders. No, it wasn't his race, as Harry Reid would contend, that stirred up the opposition to him. It was his exalted views of himself, and his mission. The sharp lines were sharp between those who raised his banners and those who objected to his policies.

  America holds presidential elections, we know. But Mr. Obama took his victory as a plebiscite on his reading of the American social contract. A president who constantly reminded his critics that he had won at the ballot box was bound to deepen the opposition of his critics.

  A leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country, a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things, not the culmination. With Air Force One and the other prerogatives of office come the need for compromise, and for the disputations of democracy. A president who sought consensus would have never left his agenda on Capitol Hill in the hands of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

  Mr. Obama has shown scant regard for precedent in American history. To him, and to the coterie around him, his presidency was a radical discontinuity in American politics. There is no evidence in the record that Mr. Obama read, with discernment and appreciation, of the ordeal and struggles of his predecessors. At best there was a willful reading of that history. Early on, he was Abraham Lincoln resurrected (the new president, who hailed from Illinois, took the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible). He had been sworn in during an economic crisis, and thus he was FDR restored to the White House. He was stylish with two young children, so the Kennedy precedent was on offer.

  In the oddest of twists, Mr. Obama claimed that his foreign policy was in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower's . But Eisenhower knew war and peace, and the foreign world held him in high regard.

  During his first campaign, Mr. Obama had paid tribute to Ronald Reagan as a "transformational" president and hinted that he aspired to a presidency of that kind. But the Reagan presidency was about America, and never about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was never a scold or a narcissist. He stood in awe of America, and of its capacity for renewal. There was forgiveness in Reagan, right alongside the belief in the things that mattered about America -- free people charting their own path.

  If Barack Obama seems like a man alone, with nervous Democrats up for re-election next year running for cover, and away from him, this was the world he made. No advisers of stature can question his policies; the price of access in the Obama court is quiescence before the leader's will. The imperial presidency is in full bloom.

  There are no stars in the Obama cabinet today, men and women of independent stature and outlook. It was after a walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that Mr. Obama called off the attacks on the Syrian regime that he had threatened. If he had taken that walk with Henry Kissinger or George Shultz, one of those skilled statesmen might have explained to him the consequences of so abject a retreat. But Mr. Obama needs no sage advice, he rules through political handlers.

  

  Valerie Jarrett, the president's most trusted, probably most powerful, aide, once said in admiration that Mr. Obama has been bored his whole life. The implication was that he is above things, a man alone, and anointed. Perhaps this moment -- a presidency coming apart, the incompetent social engineering of an entire health-care system -- will now claim Mr. Obama's attention.

  Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of The Syrian Rebellion.

  This article is reprinted from the Wall Street Journal with permisison from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

  • 12:05 PM
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• Stop Crying for Mandela

  

  “Saint” Mandela? Not So Fast!

  Author: William F. Jasper
  Source: The New American - 12.03.2013

  
  Related Articles:
  Communism and South Africa
  The Real Mandela

  President Barack Obama has compared him to George Washington. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews heralded him as “perhaps the world’s greatest hero.”

  The Las Vegas Guardian Express dispensed with the “perhaps,” declaring in headline: “Nelson Mandela World’s Greatest Hero.”

  Others have christened him “the greatest man of the 20th century.” Many revere him as “the savior” of South Africa. School children worldwide read books, write essays and sing songs about him, and watch movies extolling his virtues and heroic accomplishments.

  As we write, the 94-year-old Mandela has been hovering near death for days, the subject of hourly news updates and the beneficiary of tearful prayer vigils worldwide. With the announcement of his death, the eulogies will soon be sounding and in his honor innumerable streets, highways, schools, stadiums, parks, and public buildings will be renamed.

  For the past three decades, Nelson Mandela has been swathed in global media adulation unlike any other human being in history. No pope, president, king, war hero, movie star, or rock star can boast of having been the beneficiary of such undiluted, unalloyed, and unbroken acclaim. It is common for totalitarian dictators to employ their state-controlled media to create a worshipful cult of personality about themselves — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung — but outside of their countries there are usually journalists and media organs that will report their crimes, failings, and misdeeds. Mandela has not had to worry about dirty laundry; he is the first individual to achieve a near-universal cult of personality on the global level, thanks entirely to the unparalleled glorification campaign bestowed upon him by the major media in the United States and Europe.

  As we reported in 1990 regarding his world tour that year, following his release from prison, his media saturation coverage (and infatuation coverage) was unprecedented — and has not been matched by anyone since. He has received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union, and numerous other honors from countries, universities, and institutions.

  What is it about Nelson Mandela the man that justifies this global adoration? To be sure, his mien contributes; he is tall, dignified, and statesman-like in appearance, gracious in public speech, and grandfatherly in tone. He does not exude the radical, self-promotional hucksterism of, say, Al Sharpton, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or the ANC’s current head, Jacob Zuma. And, yes, he served many years in prison, but not merely for opposing injustice and racism, as his legions of hagiographers would have us believe. He was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC), an organization designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department and many governments and intelligence agencies. He was also a co-founder of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), a militant terrorist group within a terrorist group. He was tried and convicted for his terrorist and subversive activities within those organizations (more on which in a moment).

  Countless thousands of genuine prisoners of conscience, who have never done anything more “criminal” than praying, or speaking out against tyranny, are languishing in prisons all across the planet without so much as a peep of protest from the legions of Mandela worshipers and his chorus of media promoters. How many of those praising Mandela as the world’s moral compass have ever heard of Ignatius Cardinal Kung, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanghai, who was imprisoned in Communist China for 33 years, most of it overlapping the same period in which Mandela was in prison? Cardinal Kung’s heroic incarceration was in many ways more severe than that faced by Mandela, but no media love-fest awaited him when he was released in 1988. Ditto for Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a black Cuban physician who was released from Fidel Castro’s prison system in 2011 after brutal captivity for the “crime” of criticizing the island’s communist regime. But did Nelson Mandela chastise his comrades in Beijing and Havana when he visited there, or did he bring up the plight of the countless political and religious prisoners in their gulags? If so, there is no public record of it, though there is plenty on record of him praising those oppressive regimes.

  

  Mandela: Communist, Terrorist, Liar
  This leads us directly to one of the most important issues concerning Nelson Mandela: Was he a Communist with a capital “C,” meaning a disciplined member of the Communist Party, which, in this case means the South African Communist Party (SACP)? In the 1958 treason trial, Nelson Mandela denied being a member of the SACP, a denial he has repeated many times since, and has maintained to the end. His defenders fall into two general categories on this issue, those who believe his denial and those who say, in effect, “So what? What does it matter if he was/is a Communist?”

  Those who say they believe his denial must ignore an overwhelming mountain of evidence to the contrary, much of which has been available for decades and much which has only recently come to light from: previously unavailable SACP records; government archives of Communist countries; memoirs and biographies of, and interviews with, SACP and ANC members of the period.

  Those who say “So what?” to the question of Mandela’s membership in the SACP must ignore the well established facts that show:

  - The SACP was, and remains, a hardcore Marxist-Leninist organization in which all members must pledge unquestioned obedience to the will of the Party, as determined by its Central Committee;

  - The SACP took its direction from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and, as such, was an agent of a hostile foreign power;

  - SACP members, including Mandela, secretly took control of the ANC, pushing aside and sabotaging ANC leaders committed to reform and change through peaceful, political means;

  - ANC and its terrorist arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was also controlled by the SACP, were trained in Soviet Russia and Red China, or in Communist “Frontline States” — Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe — by Soviet, Chinese, East German, Cuban, Czech, and other Communist instructors;

  - The SACP-controlled ANC and MK exploited the conditions of apartheid, racism and colonialism not to help South African blacks, but to further the objectives of the Soviet Union and the world Communist conspiracy;

  - The SACP-controlled ANC and MK used the Communist-provided training and arms to direct their terror, torture, and murder against South Africa’s black majority even more often than against the white minority;

  - If Mandela was not only a Communist Party member, but also a top SACP leader — which the evidence irresistibly shows he was — then he is not only a colossal and persistent liar, but he is all the more culpable in the innumerable acts of terror, torture, and murder committed by ANC mobs and MK cadres over the past several decades;

  - Mandela has bequeathed South Africa a one-party state ruled by the increasingly tyrannical and kleptocratic ANC/SACP, which is leading the country down the path toward economic destruction, record-level violent crime, chaos, and genocide.

  

  
  The coming wave of terror and genocide
  The last point mentioned above is especially relevant, since the ostensible purpose of the ANC/SACP revolution was to ameliorate the plight of the disadvantaged black population. Instead, they are transforming what was by far the most prosperous state in Africa (and the one to which black Africans were fleeing to escape Red/black oppression, despite South Africa’s apartheid system then in place) into a corrupt despotism with: squashing of dissent; looting of the treasury by top government officials; sky-high unemployment; increasing poverty and homelessness; some of the world’s highest rates of murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, car-jacking; and the world’s highest HIV/AIDS infection rates.

  Resolving the issue of Mandela’s role in the SACP is all the more important when viewed in its proper historical context, which is in the context of the Cold War and the Soviet’s aggressive campaigns in the Third World through “wars of national liberation.” During that period the Communists were killing tens of millions of their own subjects in what Professor R. J. Rummel calls “democide,” or mass murder by government.

  Dr. Rummel, who has painstakingly catalogued the top 15 of the mega-murderer regimes, puts the number of their victims during the 20th century at a conservative estimate of more than 151 million — and that was only up to 1987. The vast majority of those were slaughtered by Communist regimes that claimed to be the forces of “liberation.” A significant portion of that slaughter took place in Africa by those same forces of liberation. And it hasn’t ended. In fact, as we have reported, the stark ominous signs, as cited by genocide experts, are that the ANC is preparing to unleash a Communist-style genocide campaign in the “Rainbow Nation” against the remaining white population (see here and here) that will surely also be directed against Indians, Chinese, and millions of blacks.

  The genocide campaign against white South Africans has already been underway for several years, but has not yet reached the all-out intensity of the slaughter stages witnessed in Rwanda, Burundi, or Sierra Leone. But that time may be coming soon, and if it does, Nelson Mandela will have helped to launch it. Chilling video footage of Mandela singing an ANC/MK genocide song about killing whites belies the sainted image.

  Similarly, in another stunning video, Mandela’s longtime comrade in the ANC and the SACP (and current president of South Africa) Jacob Zuma, sings “Kill the Boer,” meaning kill the white farmer. Even more chilling than the words of the murderous song is the near frenzied behavior it stirs up in many of the assembled mob members. This is clearly incitement to genocide by the top members of South Africa’s ANC ruling regime, the same individuals who incessantly pose as peace advocates. (See both of the videos imbedded at the bottom of this article.)

  Yet, the "hate speech" police in our media, who are quick to pounce on any real or fabricated racial or "homophobic" gaffe by politicians, celebrities, or common citizens, have hypocritically ignored the Mandela/Zuma genocide endorsements — or have attempted to exonerate them of any malice with lame excuses about the songs being mere cultural/political slogans.

  But with the fires, violence, and chaos already burning in South Africa, these actions by the ANC's most revered leaders are pouring gasoline on the fire. They are stoking a genocidal inferno. We have already seen what this will look like and it is horrible beyond the ability of words to convey. Videos of the ANC’s “necklacing” torture/executions have documented the kind of grotesque “justice” that is meted out by the comrades and minions of Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma. In this unutterably vicious method of terror/murder the victim is seized by a howling mob, beaten, stabbed, stoned, and then, while still alive, has a tire soaked in petrol placed around his/her neck and set ablaze. It can take agonizing minutes for the unfortunate victim to die. (See videos of necklacing here and here).

  Hundreds of victims, the vast majority of whom were black, were killed this way by ANC-led lynch mobs. Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Mandela, was caught on video infamously shouting to a huge mob: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country!" Despite this and the fact that she was convicted in court in the torture/murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and found by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be guilty in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of numerous men, women, and children, Winnie Mandela is free as a bird and still sits on the ANC’s Executive Committee. If Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma have any “moral authority,” it has not evidenced itself in the form of condemning and removing this murderess from the ANC’s highest body.

  Necklacing is one of the ANC’s enduring “gifts” to humanity; it has been exported to Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mexico, and many other countries. And, over the past couple of years, many news stories from South Africa report on its revival there.

  Overwhelming evidence: guilty beyond reasonable doubt
  The evidence that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party is so enormous that we will be able to detail only a tiny fraction of it. Dr. Henry R. Pike solidly established the record on this matter in 1985 with his 600-page monumental work, A History of Communism in South Africa, which is massively documented with many photographs and reproductions of official court records and SACP, ANC, and MK documents.

  Important new evidence has been made available since 2012, with the publication of historian Stephen Ellis’ extraordinary book, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990. Dr. Ellis, a professor based at the Free University of Amsterdam is no conservative and no apologist for apartheid; he is a former researcher for Amnesty International and was a researcher on the Mandela-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In fact, he seems to bend over backwards to put the best slant possible on Mandela’s SACP involvement. Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves — and they are damning. (For articles on and reviews of Dr. Ellis’ book see The New American here and The Telegraph (U.K.) here. A lengthy abstract of an article by Ellis surveying much of the material in External Mission is available here.

  In addition, we now have many admissions against interest from interviews and articles over the past decade in the official Communist Party press and in the books and articles of Vladimir Shubin, a Soviet official who was stationed in South Africa for many years and played a key role in the Kremlin’s policies vis a vis South Africa and, more specifically, its aid to and direction of the SACP and the ANC.

  In his book, ANC: A View from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye, 1999), although Shubin is careful to still put the Kremlin spin on his revelations, he nonetheless confirms much of what anti-communist critics had long claimed (and which the so-called intellectuals and media mavens had long scorned), as well as providing details not previously in the public domain.

  Here is a brief sampling of the mountainous record documenting Mandela’s long, conspiratorial role in the South African Communist Party:

  - Among the evidence uncovered recently by Prof. Ellis are the official minutes of a secret 1982 SACP meeting at which veteran Party leader John Pule Motshabi explains to the comrades that Mandela has been a (secret) SACP member for two decades;

  - Rowley Israel Arenstein, a lawyer and leading SACP member since the 1930s, said that Mandela was chosen by the SACP to create Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and Mandela was the SACP’s main instrument in “hijacking” the ANC and marginalizing its longtime leader and president Albert Lithuli, an opponent of the SACP’s program of “liberation” through armed struggle.

  - During the Rivonia Trial (October 1963-June 1964), Bruno Motolo, a black member of SACP, ANC and MK, provided devastating testimony of Mandela’s involvement in all three groups. Despite death threats, he later provided even more details in his memoir, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The Road to the Left;

  - Other prominent SACP members that have publicly identified Mandela as a fellow Communist include Paul Trewhela,3 Joe Matthews, Hilda Bernstein and Brian Bunting;

  - Paul Trewhela, an SACP member who was imprisoned (1964-1967) for his communist activities, and more recently assisted Prof. Ellis in his research in the archives of the Stasi (the KGB’s East German subsidiary), has said: “Mandela was indeed a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.”

  - During the Rivonia Trial, more than 10 documents in Mandela’s handwriting were introduced into evidence, totaling hundreds of pages. One, entitled, “How to be a good communist,” stated: “Under communist rule, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey… In our country the struggle of the oppressed masses is led by the South African Communist Party and inspired by its policies.” He also wrote: “The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.”

  - Mandela’s Rivonia documents also declared that “traitors and informers should be ruthlessly eliminated,” and he recommended “cutting off their noses” — among other barbarities — a tactic he had adopted from Algeria’s communist FLN terrorists and which he put into practice by MK;

  - Mandela did not deny writing the damning material, but merely attempted to explain it away by claiming they were notes he had taken down for study purposes;

  - A Rivonia trial surprise witness was Gerard Ludi, a top SACP member who was actually an infiltrator, Agent Q-018, for the Special Branch of the South African Police. Ludi provided detailed incriminatory evidence on the SACP’s leadership and illegal activities. He identified Mandela as “a top man in the central committee of the underground communist party.” Subsequent revelations have proven the reliability of Ludi’s testimony.
  

  

  - In the category of a picture being worth a thousand words, one of the most striking images of Mandela is of him standing beneath a giant Communist hammer and sickle symbol (photo at left), side-by-side with Joe Slovo, top leader of the SACP — with both men delivering the communist clenched fist salute. Mandela declared: “I salute the South African Communist Party for its sterling contribution to the struggle for democracy.” It is worthy of note that this occurred not once, but many times, as Mandela and Slovo toured South Africa;

  - Comrade Slovo, a Lithuanian-born Communist and a colonel in the Soviet KGB, was for decades one of Mandela’s closest associates in the SACP, ANC, and MK;

  - Slovo himself stated, in his 1986 propaganda article, "The Sabotage Campaign": “To constitute the High Command [of Umkhonto we Sizwe] the ANC appointed Mandela and the Party appointed me.” Since Mandela was himself a secret top member of the Party, this constitutes a admission that the SACP appointed and thereby controlled MK from the start.

  So, Nelson Mandela was not only a SACP member, but a top Communist at that, a member of the ruling Central Committee. And not only that, but he was selected by his fellow top Communists to be the key Red who would launch the Kremlin-approved, Soviet-backed terror war against the South African government.

  The ANC had begun as a non-communist organization, and, as a broad-based mass organization, always had many non-communist and anti-communist members. However, they were no match for the rigidly disciplined and conspiratorial SACP, which quickly infiltrated and took control. “The first real alliance between the ANC and the communists,” Dr. Pike wrote, “dates back to 1928, when E.J. Khalile, the ANC general-secretary, was elected to the SACP’s central committee. From this time onward, the alliance continued.” Albeit the alliance went through rocky periods when the non-communists tried to extricate themselves from the communist grip; but they never succeeded.

  The new colonial masters: Moscow, Beijing, Havana
  Here is a small sampling of the overwhelming evidence of the SACP’s ties to Moscow and Beijing and SACP’s decisive control over the ANC and MK:

  - In 1960, top members of the SACP went to Moscow and Beijing for aid. In Beijing they met personally with dictator Mao Zedong and Den Xiaoping, Mao’s assistant and eventual successor. It was only with the blessings of the Kremlin and Mao that the SACP-led ANC launched their armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The meetings with Mao and Deng had not been public knowledge until revealed by Dr. Ellis’ research;

  - Bartholomew Hlapane, a former member of the SACP Central Committee, testified in court: “All policy-making in the ANC was first discussed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.” He also stated: “Umkhonto we Sizwe’s policy was formulated by the communist party and the organization received its instructions from this party.” For this and other testimony Hlapane and his wife were brutally murdered and their daughter shot and left paralyzed;

  - In 1982, Jorge da Costa, a personal friend of Joe Slovo and the head of security for Communist Mozambique’s dictator Samora Machel, defected to South Africa, bringing irrefutable proof of the Soviet/SACP/ANC connection. Regarding the SACP’s Slovo, da Costa said: “There is no doubt in my mind that Slovo is behind every operation launched by the ANC against South Africa. He has a brilliant mind and is one of the best-informed people about this country.”;

  - SACP general secretary Joe Slovo, a KGB colonel, was in regular touch with fellow KGB agents, such as Vasily Solodovnikov, the Russian ambassador to Zambia, through which Moscow directives were channeled to the SACP/ANC/MK;

  - The World Peace Council, a KGB-directed international communist front organization, has been one of the ANC’s most durable allies and can claim much of the credit for organizing the decades-long “Free Mandela” media campaign that resulted in his release from prison;

  - In his 2003 memoir, Nothing But the Truth: Behind the ANC’s Struggle Politics, SACP leader Benjamin Turok recalled “how easy it was for a small group like ours to exert much influence in the mass movement without giving away our existence.”

  - In They Were Part of Us and We Were Part of Them: The ANC in Mozambique from 1976 to 1990, published in 2008, veteran ANC members reminisce on their experience. Among the many nuggets is an interview with Franny Rabkin and Ronnie Ntuli which contains this admission: Franny: “For us: We were Communists, and we were ANC.” Ronnie: “And so was everyone else.”

  - Soviet official Vladimir Shubin wrote: “The Russian press has calculated that from 1963-1991, 1,501 ANC activists were trained in Soviet military institutions.” Thousands more were trained in the Frontline States. Communist veteran Gerald Horne, stated in Political Affairs, the official journal of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA): “There can be no doubt that the direct involvement of Soviet officers helped to raise the level of combat readiness of ANC armed units and, especially, of the organizers of the armed underground.”

  - Mandela passed on control over the ANC and South Africa to Thabo Mbeki, his longtime comrade and a “former” SACP member. Mbeki subsequently lost out in a power struggle with another Mandela comrade and prison mate, Jacob Zuma, also a “former” SACP member, who is accelerating the ANC’s destructive policies as the current president of South Africa.

  - Zuma has continued the Tripartite Alliance, the formal agreement among the ANC, SACP and COSATU, which guarantees that the SACP and the Communist-dominated COSATU will back the ANC as the Communist-run front group that runs South Africa.

  - In 1998, at age 80, Mandela married for the third time, to Graca Machel, the widow of Mandela’s longtime ally, Samora Machel, the ruthless Communist dictator of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Graca was a longtime member of FRELIMO, the communist terrorist organization run by her husband that took control of Mozambique in 1975. For more than a decade, she was a partner in Samora Machel’s vicious reign of murder and torture of men, women, and children, including even many of his FRELIMO comrades whom he turned against.

  

  Media propagandists unfazed by the evidence
  Again, we have barely scratched the surface. But the enormity of the damning evidence notwithstanding, the doyens of the Establishment chattering classes continue to sing the same pro-ANC, pro-Mandela rhapsodies and offer the same lame excuses. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor and the Times’ former bureau chief in Johannesburg, attempts to dismiss the communist commitment of SACP members with the assertion that “Most [SACP] members weren’t all that Communist.” Yes, goes the argument, they were merely a bunch of African nationalists dressing up their rhetoric with some Marxist ideology for effect. That was the argument Keller, the Times and their ilk would drag out time after time during the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s whenever a startling new revelation threatened to make it obvious that the ANC were not freedom fighters but instead a bunch of Kremlin-backed, bloodthirsty, communist thugs. South African author Rian Malan takes Keller to task, pointing out that among the many SACP veterans refuting Keller’s claim is Hilda Bernstein, friend of Slovo and wife of SACP Central Committee member Rusty Bernstein. “Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists,” she said in a 2004 interview. “Anything the Soviets did was right. They were very, very pro-Soviet.”

  But Keller is unmoved. In a reply to letters to the editor from Malan and former SACP member Paul Trewhala, he dismisses their evidence and that of Prof. Ellis, saying he disagrees “that the alliance with the Communists damns the ANC as a Stalinist front. That is simply Red-baiting nonsense.”

  It is virtually axiomatic that no matter how iron-clad the evidence presented, MSM “journalists” such as Keller will see any charges of communist conspiracy as “Red-baiting” and “McCarthyism.” And, conversely, no matter how contrived, flimsy and false the charges by leftists and communists against conservatives, anti-communists, pro-lifers, Christians, Tea Partiers, Birchers, military veterans, etc., the Kellers of the Fourth Estate will rush to give these smears credence. (See here, here, here, and here.)

  Mayor Linda witnessed this dynamic in action in South Africa with a cruel vengeance during the 1960s-'90s, as the MSM joined the Communist press, not only in their glorification of the ANC, but also in viciously attacking (or completely ignoring) the moderate South African black leaders, many of whom had far larger constituencies and more legitimate claims to moral authority than Mandela and his ANC comrades. Those moderate leaders included: Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Bethelezi, who is also head of the Inkatha Freedom Party; Tomsanqa Linda, former mayor of Ibhayi township; Nelson Botile, former Mayor of Soweto; Bishop Lekganyane of the Zionist Christian Church; Bishop Isaac Mokoena, leader of the Reformed Independent Church Association, which claims a membership of four and one-half million members; Dr. Elijah Maswanganyi — and many others. Chances are good you never heard of any of them, or that you only heard nasty, negative things about them. But that wasn’t a matter of mere chance; it was according to a plan that was to insure that no serious challengers to Mandela and the ANC/SACP leadership would come to the fore. That same plan continues in place, guaranteeing that the thugs and thieves who are Mandela’s ANC heirs will remain in charge of South Africa.

  

  Unsung Hero, Genuine Freedom Fighter:
  Tomsanqa Linda pictured on U.S. Speaking tour. Despite serious dangers to himself and his family, Tomsanqa Linda, the mayor of Ibhayi Township (population 400,000) and president of the Eastern Province Council Association (representing 74 townships with a total population of nearly 14 million) came to America in 1990 for a national speaking and media tour to expose Nelson Mandela and the ANC. In city after city, he preceded by two or three days Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour. Although he was ignored by the national media, he reached millions of Americans with his powerful message through local television and radio news programs and talk shows. He was sponsored on this important national tour by The John Birch Society.

  Photos of Nelson Mandela in this article: AP Images

  Update:
  After Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, both the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress acknowledged in official statements that Mandela was a high-level member of the South African Communist Party. For an updated article about this admission after decades of denial, click here.

  • 10:03 PM
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• The Truth About Mandela

  In Death, as in Life, Truth About Mandela Overlooked

  Author: Alex Newman
  Source: The New American - 12.06.2013

  

  With the widely anticipated passing of South African revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela late Thursday, December 5, presidents and dictators from around the world, as well as everyday people, and especially the press, are in mourning. Lost amid the tsunami of praise and adoration, almost canonization even according to some of his supporters, however, is the truth about the man himself, who was, after all, still just a man.

  The announcement of Mandela’s death was made by current South African President Jacob Zuma, the fourth leader of the so-called “rainbow nation” ushered in after the fall of Apartheid rule some two decades ago. “Our beloved Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the founding President of our democratic nation has departed,” said Zuma, a polygamous tribal chief who, amid never-ending corruption scandals, regularly sings “struggle” songs about murdering European-descent Afrikaners.

  According to the current South African president, Mandela passed on “peacefully” in the company of his family late Thursday. “He is now resting. He is now at peace,” Zuma continued, adding that the deceased leader would receive a state funeral and flags would be flown at half-mast until then. “Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father. Although we knew that this day would come, nothing can diminish our sense of a profound and enduring loss.”

  Like heads of state and the media around the world, Zuma celebrated Mandela’s alleged “tireless struggle for freedom” and how he “brought us together” in common cause. “Our thoughts are with his friends, comrades and colleagues who fought alongside Madiba over the course of a lifetime of struggle,” South Africa’s current president continued, offering the briefest of glimpses into the reality about Mandela that has been largely expunged from the history books.

  President Obama, also heaping praises on Mandela, even ordered American flags flown at half-mast until Monday, especially shocking when considering that the late leader and his Soviet-backed armed movement spent decades on the official U.S. government terror list before being removed in 2008. “I am one of the countless millions who drew inspirations from Nelson Mandela’s life,” Obama said. “I cannot fully imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set. So long as I live, I will do what I can to learn from him.”
  - Obama's Past Is No Secret

  By contrast, even in the late 1980’s, shortly before the Apartheid regime surrendered to overwhelming global pressure to hand over power, Western leaders saw Mandela and his “African National Congress” in a very different light. “The ANC is a typical terrorist organization,” explained former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. U.S. President Ronald Reagan put Mandela and the ANC on the American terrorist list in the 1980s.

  Indeed, outside of open support from ruthless communist dictatorships (the tyrants ruling over Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, for example), Mandela’s ANC and its South African Communist Party partners were widely viewed as ruthless communist terrorists. Considering their murderous activities, which included the barbaric executions and torture of countless South African blacks who opposed them, it is easy to understand why.

  

  With help from elements of the Western establishment and the media, however, all of that gradually changed. Widely adored in South Africa and around the world, today Mandela is almost universally portrayed as a peaceful hero who struggled to bring down the white-led Apartheid regime that ruled the area for decades, all in the name of “democracy,” “equality,” and racial harmony.

  Lost amid the cacophony of praise and near-worship, though, is the truth about the late South African leader, which has been all but erased from the planet’s collective memory. Today, for example, endless amounts of news reports on Mandela’s death continue to falsely suggest that he was a political prisoner jailed merely for his “beliefs” and opposition to the system of Apartheid (meaning separate development, which despite its myriad flaws, was working to grant full independence and sovereignty to the various tribal and ethnic groups in South Africa).

  A mere handful of articles have offered even a hint of the truth. In reality, the Soviet-backed revolutionary was imprisoned for terrorism, sedition, and sabotage - an integral part of Mandela’s long communist history that his adoring fans tend to downplay, at best, or more often, ignore altogether. Almost none of the adoring eulogies pouring forth from around the world have noted, for example, that Mandela was offered the chance to walk out of prison a free man if he would just renounce violence. He refused.

  Instead of a man of peace, as his legions of fans would like to believe, and in many cases do believe, Mandela was actually the co-founder of the armed wing of the ANC known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Outside of communist dictatorships, virtually every government recognized the movement as a communist-backed terrorist outfit - it was, after all, famous for murder, torture, bombings, sabotage, and more. More recently, as The New American reported, conclusive evidence further confirming Mandela’s senior role in the Soviet-backed South African Communist Party has been widely published.

  Meanwhile, Mandela’s wife during much of that time, fellow ANC revolutionary Winnie, was a zealous and open advocate for one of the most brutal murder tactics ever conceived by man. Pioneered by the ANC, so-called “necklacing” involves filling a tire with gasoline before putting it around the victim’s neck, setting it ablaze, and watching the poor target slowly writhe in horrifying agony before eventual death. Most of the ANC’s “necklace” victims were fellow blacks.

  Unsurprisingly, Mandela’s history of violence, brutality, terror, and communist scheming has scarcely been mentioned in the thousands of obituaries currently on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Instead, one of the ex-guerilla’s key accomplishments, which earned him praise from around the world, was his supposed ability to prevent a “blood bath” and mass-slaughter in the transition to “democracy”, as if genocide were the obvious course that history would have inevitably taken absent a figure like Mandela.

  Almost incredibly, the few reports that have highlighted even the tiniest hint of controversy surrounding the life and works of Mandela suggest that the only criticism of his legacy comes from extremists who think the late leader did not do enough to turn South Africa into a full-blown Marxist dictatorship. An opinion piece in the New York Times, for example, describes the rage among some forces in South Africa over Mandela’s failure to completely disempower or even obliterate the Afrikaner people, a process that many respected analysts say is accelerating and could quickly spiral out of control.

  “It is ironic that in today’s South Africa, there is an increasingly vocal segment of black South Africans who feel that Mandela sold out the liberation struggle to white interests,” claimed Ohio University Professor Zakes Mda, who knew Mandela, in the Times column. “This will come as a surprise to the international community, which informally canonized him and thinks he enjoyed universal adoration in his country.” As the Times’ piece suggests, even more extreme anti-white racist and Marxist forces are gathering momentum.

  All of that, however, has been largely covered up amid news of Mandela’s death. “As we gather, wherever we are in the country and wherever we are in the world, let us recall the values for which Madiba fought,” said Zuma, referring to Mandela by his African tribal name. “Let us commit ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, to build a united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa.”

  Acquitted of rape charges in 2006 by claiming that his victim was wearing a “kanga” and so, clearly wanted to have sex with him, Zuma has been steadily following in the footsteps of his communist-affiliated predecessors. With the economy crumbling and violence exploding, Zuma and his allies continue to publicly sing “struggle” songs inciting genocide against the white population at virtually every political rally.

  Meanwhile, the ANC-Communist Party alliance that has ruled South Africa since the end of Apartheid is steadily working to foist tyranny and lawlessness on what was once among the most prosperous countries in the world. The planet’s top authority on genocide, a man who worked to help bring down Apartheid in South Africa, has even warned that the Afrikaners may be on the verge of literal extermination.

  While the largely bogus public image created of Mandela certainly has some praiseworthy elements - opposition to racism, violence, and support for human rights, for example - it is important that reality not be overlooked. Senior Editor William Jasper with The New American magazine wrote a detailed piece on the real Nelson Mandela under the headline “Saint” Mandela? Not So Fast! If the truth is worth anything, Americans should resist the temptation to worship a fake caricature of a leader who was, after all, still just a man.

  

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• The Tragic End of South Africa

  

  
  South African Communists’ Friends in High Places

  Author: Alex Newman
  Source: The New American - 05.11.2012

  Related Article: The Real Mandela

  The tragedy unfolding in South Africa as genocide and communism march onward should not be surprising. Such events may shock Americans who have relied on the establishment press for information, but that the once-prosperous nation would eventually sink to this point was easy to foresee even before the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP) alliance regime began to take over. The decades-old communist domination of the ANC was widely documented long before it came to power.

  ANC leader and new South Africa’s first president Nelson Mandela was not persecuted for his “political” beliefs, the widely accepted myths about Mandela notwithstanding. He was actually put in jail for admitting that he planned sabotage to violently bring down the government and crush South Africa under communist rule. It was hardly a secret, though the Western establishment did its best to conceal the facts from the world.

  “We communist party members are the most advanced revolutionaries in modern history,” Mandela proclaimed in a document later used when he was prosecuted for sabotage and treason. “The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.” In the 1980s, Mandela was repeatedly offered the opportunity to get out of prison if he would just renounce violence. He refused.

  Meanwhile, the communist revolutionary’s wife at the time, Winnie Mandela, became notorious for endorsing brutal mob executions where tires filled with gasoline were placed around the victims’ necks and set ablaze — a savage tactic used by the predominantly black ANC against pro-government blacks before the new regime took power. The ghastly spectacle, known as “necklacing,” was aimed at punishing ANC opponents and dissuading other blacks from standing against it. “Together, hand-in-hand with our sticks of matches, with our necklaces we shall liberate this country,” Winnie declared.

  The ANC, meanwhile, was listed as a terrorist group as late as 1988 by the U.S. Congress, which had previously documented its control by communist forces. “No major decision could be taken by the ANC without the concurrence and approval of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party,” former ANC and SACP leader Bartholomew Hlapane testified before the U.S. Congress. Less than a year later, he and his wife were executed by an assassin using a Soviet-made AK-47.

  

  Brought to Power
  Despite what was already known about the ANC and the SACP, the ruling regime in South Africa has had friends in high places for decades — since long before it came to power, actually. Among the communist powers supporting the alliance were the regimes ruling the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. Those forces and others, by helping to arm and train Marxist terrorist groups and front organizations, provided key “pressure from below” to force the South African government’s surrender.

  When he was in the South African military decades ago, Andre Vandenberg, who now lives in the United States, learned a lot about the communist subversion behind the scenes. “We would attack a base and we would get ANC members, but when you get past that line of defense, you get into the Russians, East Germans, and Cubans,” he told The New American. When probed further, Vandenberg walked away and returned with binoculars. “These are binoculars I took off an East German,” he explained, pointing to the German writing. They were made in the East German city of Jena.

  Communist powers alone, however, were not enough to bring the ANC and SACP to power. “All of the AK-47s, mortars, bombs, Soviet advisers, terrorist training camps, assassinations, demonstrations, and biased broadcasts of these revolutionists combined could not, of themselves, have brought about the transformation in South Africa of a vicious terrorist group and its titular head from the status of political outlaws to that of global cult heroes and de facto heads of state,” The New American’s William F. Jasper observed in a 1994 article entitled “Silk Tie Revolutionaries.”

  To gain support for their cause, the ANC-communist axis exploited the issue of “apartheid,” which South Africa had adopted in 1948. Essentially, the idea behind apartheid, or “separate development,” was to allow the various “nations” in South Africa — European-descent Afrikaners, for example, and the 10 major African tribal groups such as the Zulu and the Venda — to develop their own institutions and eventually become sovereign nations. By the early 1980s, four African tribal groups had already achieved full sovereignty, with the others making progress.

  Despite flaws and difficulties, apartheid was supported by many of South Africa’s ethnic and tribal groups, including, obviously, the Afrikaners (whites of mainly Dutch descent who lived in South Africa), who, after a devastating war against the British Empire, had a terrible but well-founded fear of total annihilation if they ever surrendered control over their own destiny. However, under the guise of fighting against “racist” apartheid, the bad elements of which were already being reformed, virtually the whole world joined forces against the South African government and the African tribes that supported it.

  Aside from the openly communist powers, key to the ANC takeover were the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, the NAACP, and the Congressional Black Caucus. The international media and Hollywood, of course, helped immensely as well. Even more important, though, was the support provided by the highest echelons of the Western establishment — think David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. Both men played a key role in bringing the South African government to its knees in the face of Marxist terror so the communist takeover could proceed.

  In 1993, for example, banker and Council on Foreign Relations boss David Rockefeller hosted a dinner to honor Nelson Mandela and raise money for the ANC’s election. Then-ANC “Foreign Secretary” Thabo Mbeki, another communist who would later become president of South Africa, celebrated Rockefeller as a longtime friend who had “backed the ANC financially for more than a decade.”

  Just before the elections that brought the ANC-SACP alliance to power, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a team of “mediators” arrived in South Africa to “confer the Insiders’ benediction on Mandela and the ANC,” Jasper noted in his article. Prior to helping crush South Africa, Kissinger, one of the most fervent advocates of a “New World Order,” also helped destroy the anti-communist Rhodesian government by, among other tactics, isolating it from allies like the South African government. His work in Rhodesia paved the way for Marxist despot Robert Mugabe to enslave what became known as Zimbabwe. The nation is now starving to death.

  From at least the 1950s onward, the U.S. government and other Western powers were frantically shoveling taxpayer money into communist groups in South Africa to install the ANC — again, applying pressure from below by fomenting unrest and empowering Marxist terrorists. The violent ANC offshoot known as the Pan-Africanist Congress, for example, was actually organ­ized at the Johannesburg office of the U.S. Information Service in 1959.

  According to a study by the Rand Afrikaans University’s Institute for American Studies, the Reagan State Department alone showered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on pro-Soviet and pro-ANC groups in South Africa. The U.S. government directly contributed millions to specific Marxist terrorist groups in the region, many of which, like the ANC, had been formally designated as terror organizations. The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), for example, received about $4 million from American taxpayers between 1975 and 1978, according to a report by the South African Foreign Ministry. Western governments together provided some $80 million during that period.

  The “pressure from above,” meanwhile, came from the international banking and corporate elite in the West, as well as its political front groups and governments. Among other sources, the Council on Foreign Relations and its international affiliates helped lead the charge, with the CFR proudly publicizing its 1990 visit by Mandela. Numerous other top figures in the ANC and the SACP were similarly honored and promoted by the CFR and its allies around the world.

  Among the CFR operatives who put the cabal’s agenda for South Africa into effect were, of course, Kissinger, as well as numerous other top U.S. government officials. Multiple administrations from Carter to Clinton were also involved. President Reagan, despite vetoing a sanctions bill over disagreement with the “means,” declared a “national emergency” to “deal with” the alleged “extraordinary threat” posed by the pro-U.S. South African government.

  At the same time, other Western governments were piling on the pressure as well, imposing brutal sanctions and painting the South African government — which likely had the best human-rights record on the continent despite oppressive race-based laws that were being reformed — as a demon to be eliminated. Communist regimes were doing the same thing. The time-tested “pincers” strategy ultimately prevailed.

  In the face of a full-fledged assault by both the “Free World” and the world’s communist tyrants, the South African government capitulated. The ANC and the communists — virtually inseparable from each other, as even top ANC leaders admit — took power. Just as unbiased analysts warned, South Africa — once one of the most prosperous nations in the world for people of all colors — began marching full-speed down the bloody road to slavery and genocide.

  

  Still Supported
  Today, the ruling cabal in South Africa still has overwhelming support from what remains of the “Free World” and the totalitarian regimes enslaving the rest of it. Despite the genocide and growing unrest, socialist and communist-minded political parties from around the world gathered in Cape Town for the 24th Congress of the Socialist International in late August, openly associating with and celebrating a regime that is under fire for facilitating and encouraging genocide.

  The immensely powerful coalition consists of numerous ruling political parties, including many from the developed world. In Cape Town, they concluded by adopting resolutions demanding more money from Western taxpayers, bigger and more powerful government at all levels, and, unsurprisingly, more socialism in the world. It should all be administered by a planetary socialist regime, the cabal declared.

  “The Socialist International is now stronger than ever before,” the group boasted after the congress, sometimes referring to members as “comrades.” The gathering featured representatives from over 100 socialist and communist-minded political parties all over the world, ranging from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) to European social democrats and Latin American statist extremists.

  South African President Jacob Zuma, the communist ANC chief who hosted the Congress and now sings songs calling for genocide against whites, was elected as “vice president” on the “Presidium” of the socialist alliance. His deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, told delegates there was a “global crisis of capitalism and imperialism.”

  Zuma, meanwhile, blasted the alleged “fundamental contradictions in the capitalist system,” which he said needed to be addressed with “radical” so-called solutions. “We should emerge with radical positions and a radical agenda,” added the controversial leader, who in addition to being an admitted member of the Communist Party has in the past been officially charged with corruption and even rape. Zuma’s defense in the rape trial was that the victim was “clearly aroused,” as evidenced by her “quite short” kanga. “In the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready,” Zuma said.

  During a speech at the socialist confab, Zuma said it was an honor to host the summit “bringing together progressive forces from around the world,” Socialist International reported. The polygamist ruler said the socialist alliance should respond to “inequality” and other problems — many, of course, caused by socialistic policies — with a “New Internationalism” and a “New Culture of Solidarity,” two main themes of the 24th Congress. He almost certainly did not sing about killing the Boers (the white farmers), as he does at ANC gatherings, but the communist message came through loud and clear.

  The Socialist Congress also heaped adoration on the scandal-plagued United Nations. Former South African foreign minister and newly elected chairperson of the African Union Commission, Zuma’s ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, for example, referred to the UN as “the greatest collective achievement of human kind” during her keynote speech. She spoke of the “importance of multilateralism,” claiming that “humanity” could find “solutions to common problems” if only the world’s largely totalitarian regimes would just “cooperate more.”

  Also featured at the summit were speeches by representatives of the brutal communist dictatorship ruling mainland China and an assortment of other totalitarian regimes. “Vice-Minister of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee” Liu Jieyi, for example, lectured assembled attendees on the “social democratic response to the financial crisis.” The communist regime ruling China has become increasingly influential throughout the whole continent, but especially in the new South Africa.

  Delegates, meanwhile, celebrated the barbaric Chinese dictatorship’s growing influence on the world stage as part of the socialist-minded BRICS alliance — the socialist and communist rulers of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The alliance has repeatedly blasted the United States while calling for global governance and a new world currency.

  Even while the ANC regime was celebrating world socialism with some of the most oppressive dictatorships on the planet, the U.S. government was propping it all up. The government of South Africa is now one of the top 10 recipients of American foreign aid worldwide, with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing to the ANC-SACP regime since 1994. Well over $500 million in foreign assistance was handed out in 2009 just through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

  Despite the fact that the South African government has been caught selling military equipment to the brutal Marxist despot ruling Zimbabwe, Secretary of State Hil­lary Clinton hoped to increase the amount of American taxpayer dollars buying arms for the ANC regime. The U.S. government has been training its military officers, too.

  “America will stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way,” Clinton said during an official visit to South Africa in August, seemingly oblivious to the twisted irony. Between dancing and lavishing praises on the ANC, the Secretary of State also found time to pledge billions more U.S. tax dollars to prop up the regime.

  But the U.S. government is not alone in the West when it comes to celebrating South Africa’s ruling cabal amid genocide. In September, the European Union held a “summit” with the South African regime to celebrate the increasingly close bonds between the two entities — and to continue pushing for “global governance” while showering European taxpayers’ money on the ANC.

  “This 5th EU-South Africa Summit will be a new milestone in our relationship with a key EU partner in Africa and on the global stage,” said European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, a former Maoist revolutionary who is now pushing to create what he called a “federation” in Europe. “Our bilateral cooperation is increasing in breadth and depth.”

  

  Friends to the End
  Considering the key role played by Western governments and elites in creating South Africa’s current problems — not to mention perpetuating them with never-ending foreign aid and support — it is hardly surprising that most of the world remains unaware of the nation’s plight. What occurred in Zimbabwe, or at least a general outline of it, is now well known. Mugabe’s brutality and mass murder have become impossible to conceal.

  Fears that the same fate awaits South Africa, a nation rich with key minerals, are growing fast — but largely in the shadows. Activists and exiles say they are worried that if the world does not wake up soon, the looming genocide and total communist takeover of the nation may remain largely hidden, too.

  With Western governments and the establishment continuing to aid and abet the ANC-SACP regime and its crimes, the final destruction of South Africa and the Afrikaner people may come sooner than anyone realizes. Whether the West will speak out before or even after catastrophe strikes, however, remains to be seen.

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• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

  

  Patrick Henry’s Speech
  to the Virginia House of Burgess

  Richmond, Virginia - March 23, 1775

  
  No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope that it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen, if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.

  This is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

  Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?

  For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth—to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House?

  Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with these warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation—the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motives for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies?

  No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer on the subject? Nothing.

  We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer.

  Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament.

  Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope.

  If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!

  They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?

  Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

  The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

  It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, “Peace! Peace!”—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
  
  Patrick Henry – March 23, 1775

  

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