Mandela’s
African National Congress (ANC) adopted a Soviet-inspired Freedom
Charter which promised that “All shall have the right to occupy land
wherever they choose,” which signaled open season on white farmers and
their land. Author Ilana Mercer writes of how the ANC attempts to tame
and rewrite South African history mimics the efforts by American elites
to “deconstruct American history and memory.” The new dispensation is
multiculturalism and “the denunciation of America’s Western foundation
and a glorification of non-Western cultures.” Mercer’s book is
well-worth reading. Bernhard Thuersam
Snapshot of Mandela’s South Africa
“[Former
Police Commissioner J.B.] Vorster resigned from the Prime Ministry in
1978 to make way for P.W. Botha . . . [and] Although Botha modified
apartheid legislation, sometimes softening it, the international
campaign against white rule – involving shrill demands for disinvestment
– intensified.
In 1984 Botha (made President under a new constitution)
declared a state of emergency; but the domestic situation grew worse
and worse, while the practice – particularly among the Xhosa – of
“necklacing” suspected police informers attained international ill
repute.
“With
our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this
country,” proclaimed Mandela’s increasingly deranged wife Winnie to the
New York Times of February 20, 1989.
A
severe stroke forced Botha from power in 1989. Nothing in the
background of his successor, President F.W. de Klerk, indicated the
revolutionary policies he would pursue. De Klerk scrapped the ban on the
ANC and other opposition parties; freed Mandela from incarceration;
acceded to Namibia’s independence; and junked the nuclear weapons.
[A]
1992 referendum, asking white voters if they favored de Klerk’s
reforms, resulted in sixty-eight percent of the respondents saying “yes”
. . . [as de Klerk promised negotiations with the opposition] “would
only be about power-sharing.” With Mandela, de Klerk shared the Nobel
Peace Prize [in 1993] . . . [and a general election in 1994] brought
Mandela to power with over sixty percent of the vote.
Even
the election report of the Library of Congress, hardly a hotbed of
Afrikaner sentiment, admitted that “in ANC-controlled area, some of the
party activists intimidated [opposition] party organizers and disrupted
their campaign rallies . . . The harsh truth is that “large scale
intimidation made it nearly impossible to for rival parties to campaign
in the African townships.”
So
much about South Africa is reminiscent of the famous line in The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the
legend.”
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