The Idolatry of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi

If it's true, it's true.

One of the things that goes wrong when one presents information like this is, the people who have been inculcated in the Liberal Celebrity Cult find themselves unable to reconcile the facts they are reading with the image that has been built in their mind and emotions.

Emotions win. Facts lose.

But, facts are facts. There's nothing you can say to refute them, because their truth is immanent and spin means nothing in the face of the truth of history.

If Nelson Mandela was a Communist, AND HE WAS, then he was a Communist. There is not a context by which one can explain away the fact. It is true or not, and in this case, it is true.

From Front Page:

“Nelson Mandela is a life-long Communist. He even cobbled together a little book called “How To Be A Good Communist”. He co-founded and directed a terrorist organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). He never stopped admiring tyrannies and red dictatorships. 

The Mahatma Gandhi was a rather cruel man. He deliberately kept the fifty or so poor Indian workers who labored on his South African farm – which he called “Tolstoy Farm” – on starvation rations, in pursuit of a theory that the body could learn to survive on virtually no food. He also paid them no wages, so it would not be wrong to call them slaves.  

He abandoned the wife and child he acquired during his years in South Africa, left them with no means of subsistence when he returned to India.  

In 1946 he commented on the Holocaust, “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife.”  

 By his own confession he was a lecher before he conceived the theory that the body could learn to live without sex. Then to prove his ability to resist temptation, he would, as an old man, have nubile young girls sleep beside him without ever taking advantage of them. What the girls felt about the experiment has not been recorded. He was also a poseur.  

The image he liked to project of a man who needed nothing but a loin-cloth and a spinning wheel was belied by the colossal expense the British Foreign Office was put to in 1931 in order to meet his demand to “live among the poor” in the East End of London. They had to buy houses, repair them, guard them, furnish them comfortably while leaving the Mahatma a bare room in which to meet diplomats and the press.  

Had he demanded a whole floor of the Ritz Hotel it would have cost his hosts less.  

Gandhi is long dead, and now it seems Nelson Mandela is dying. There will be obituaries and elegies extravagantly praising him – if also some criticism of him for being too soft or too hard, depending on whether it comes from the left or the right. But Mandela, like Gandhi, will be made as immortal as a mortal can be made.  

The human race needs its heroic saviors. It needs its Mandela, its Gandhi, as it has needed its Moses, its Jesus Christ, its Muhammad, its Buddha. Mandela must be the hero-martyr who bought black freedom from white oppression with his own long incarceration; who set an example of forgiveness; who remained peaceable despite intense provocation to resort to violence. He must be a model of patient virtue under racist oppression; the perfect unvengeful victim who rose to be the gentle leader of a new democratic South Africa.  

That picture is false, like the one of Gandhi as a good and simple man. And Gandhi no more liberated India from the British Raj with his passive resistance movement than Mandela overthrew apartheid with his revolutionary leadership exercised from a prison cell.  

But the truth about Mandela and Gandhi will not matter. It will not make any difference to what they must stand for in order to satisfy a human need. 

A commenter named Daniel Greenfield left the following message for us (Daniel Greenfield is the writer of the piece above, but I don't know that the commenter is the same Daniel Greenfield - still the comment is important):

During his visit to South Africa, Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington. 

George Washington, unlike Nelson Mandela, was not a member of the Communist Party. Martha Washington had not been involved in murdering a 14-year-old boy or in urging the colonists to burn men, women and children alive by placing rubber tires around them, pouring gasoline on them and setting them on fire. 

The American Revolution did not unleash a state of permanent lawlessness in which the quality of life declined drastically for everyone in the country and people went to sleep every night expecting to be murdered in their beds. 

If both Washington and Mandela are to be considered the fathers of their respective countries, Washington’s children are figuring out how to go into space while Mandela’s children are raping children because they believe it will magically give them immunity to contracting AIDS.

Here's what he's talking about: Virgin Cure for AIDS.