Mandela, the Pretender

(Note: This post is critical of Mandela and his policies. However, this should not be taken to mean that I'm justifying apartheid in any way. Apartheid was a horrible policy enforced by a bunch of white supremacist assholes and I would never support any such stupidity...now that that's out of the way...)

Here's a little story. I grew up in a culture where the "white man", Jew and Christian were all supposed to be horrible people.

Even when I converted, and had no hate for white people, Jews and Christians, I still believed in the BS that whites started slavery and racism and all that crap that's popular opinion. I wasn't a liberal but Muslims' views on white people are well known (that white women are whores, and white people are all evil, etc). Although I didn't believe in this anymore, the part about slavery and racism took a little while to get rid of.

It was under such conditions I first found out about South Africa and apartheid. I, like most everyone else, believed Mandela was a hero and that he saved South Africa for blacks and whites alike.

Then I became a flight attendant and went to South Africa soon after. That's when everything changed.

It was there that I came upon the realization that blacks could be racist too. That blacks hated white people and judged white people based on race too. Call me ignorant or an idiot, but it really did take me a while to understand that the story that only white people should be blamed for racism was in fact bullshit.

The story sold by the media of "South Africa now is so much better" is bullshit. The story sold that "now all are equal" is bullshit. South Africa is the perfect example of a world set upside down. Now whites are second class citizens. Now whites are mercilessly murdered and there is no justice. Now whites are discriminated against. It's apartheid all over again, the only difference being that no one gives a shit about whites like they did about blacks.

The situation now is worse than it was under the apartheid regime. It's not for nothing that even some blacks are starting to ask whether apartheid was all that bad compared to right now. Although I think it's stupid to want to go back to something that horrible just because what you have now is more horrible.

Now the point of all that is that I despise what Mandela achieved. I despise Mandela as much as I despise the white supremacists who ran the apartheid regime. Mandela took apartheid and flipped it on its head. He had the opportunity to fix the problem but instead he f*cked it all up. "South Africa for blacks only", "kill a boer (white farmer), kill a farmer today", etc were the slogans used by mandela's terrorists. I don't see any difference between Mandela and the white supremacists. They are both supremacists.

I don't know what conservatives are saying about Mandela. My point in criticizing him is not that he should not have used violence, my point is that he used violence against the wrong people. He took the easy road. He targeted the unarmed, the innocent (we can argue about definitions but I think we've done plenty of that already lol), even those whites that were on his side and against apartheid and even those blacks who were against apartheid but didn't support the ANC.

Anyway, what is the good that Mandela achieved? I fail to see it. Mandela fought a dirty war against the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons. And now South Africa has what he fought for: a country run by blacks where whites are constantly persecuted and for what? For being white.

We are all in agreement that apartheid was bad. If Mandela did something good, where is that something good? Or do we buy mandela's words of utopia and don't much care for what he actually achieved or set in place? Che Guevara sold a utopia too, so did Castro, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. But judging by what they put in place, I don't think anyone sane would want to argue for the "good" they wanted to do.

I am not a pacifist and I don't believe there is any such thing as Christian warfare (what does that even mean?).

I accept that innocent people die in a war. I've never criticized drone use even though it ends up killing children. I'm not a fool, I would much rather have that collateral damage than have American soldiers dying trying to protect the children over there in Pakistan.

But the difference is that the children are not the target. And in that lies the crux of my argument. Mandela and his people targeted children and women. Those deaths were not collateral damage. They were the target (no, not in every attack but later on).

Just to make my point more clear, I think using the nukes was a good strategy. Many innocent people died in both cities but the actual targets were the military industries that needed destroyed, and the nukes helped send a message to the Japanese that their emperor's and empire's days were numbered. If not for the nukes, many more people would have died. Same reason I have no problems with the leveling of dusseldorf.

Intent matters to me and that's where Mandela fails in his terrorist tactics.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding as well as to what the situation was during the latter years of apartheid. Here's a series of videos that, more or less, seems to accurately describe it.

PS: Gandhi was an asshole! :-P