Churchill and Thatcher vs communist terrorist

Does anyone need any more proof that our dumbed-down populace can’t be trusted to elect good leaders?

Or that years of sustained propaganda can sell any evil nonsense to the masses?

Do you? Well, in that case look no further than the new TV series Icons, in which viewers were asked to choose the greatest political leader of the twentieth century.

The shortlist included Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela.

In other words, the choice was among the two men who led the victorious anti-Nazi coalition, Britain’s arguably greatest post-war PM who restored the country to some semblance of sanity, and – well, the winner.

These days it’s impossible to talk about Mandela in any other than hagiographic terms. Beatified even before his 1963 imprisonment and canonised to secular sainthood after his 1990 release, Mandela still hasn’t lost his ability to lobotomise people.

At a party some 15 years ago, I took polite exception when a wealthy middle-class woman opined that Mandela was the greatest modern politician.

I even tried to offer a few facts, but didn’t really get the chance. The woman turned puce and told me that she took my insinuations as a personal insult. Though she was an Anglican Englishwoman, her response was as febrile as a Muslim’s would be if someone mentioned casually that Mohammed was a paedophile.

Yet at least Mohammed is the cult worshipped in one of the world’s largest religions. What religion is Mandela the cult of?

Just as a Muslim wouldn’t listen to any smirking references to Fatima’s age, so would Mandela’s worshippers ignore any facts of the secular saint’s life. However, exponents of other religions would find them rather damning.

Apart from the 27-year hiatus mentioned above, Mandela led the African National Congress, a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to replacing the hell of the apartheid government with the paradise of Marxist dictatorship.

Its activities heavily relied on the arms, financing, training and logistic support it received from established Marxist dictatorships, mainly those of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba.

For example, East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. Anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered there, to the silent acquiescence of so-called liberals worldwide.

Even merely aspiring Marxist dictatorships lent a helping hand. For example, in a deal allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train ANC murderers.

The ANC also added some indigenous touches, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

However, any evidence of the ANC’s communist nature was routinely hushed up in the West’s predominantly liberal press and denied by Mandela.

This though as far back as the early ‘60s the Special Branch uncovered Mandela’s essay How to Be a Good Communist, in which the saint-to-be promised that “South Africa will be a land of milk and honey under a Communist government.” That too was kept under wraps.

As a true Leninist, Mandela knew that revolution can succeed not only by violence but also by what Lenin called ‘legalism’, using democratic institutions the better to destroy them. Hence, when he emerged from prison, he forswore used tyres and cast himself as the prophet of peace.

As an intelligent man, Mandela sensed that appealing to the world’s illiberal liberals would work much better than necklacing a few more recalcitrant individuals. He was proved right, and that’s how he became the object of hysterical adulation and the ‘father of his country’.

Alas, the child of this father inherited not so much his intelligence and charisma as some of his less commendable traits.

The ANC rule has turned a safe, prosperous country into a corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The UN ranks South Africa second in the world for murder and assault, while she comfortably leads the world in rape.

Around 50 people are murdered there each day, which is more by an order of magnitude than 40 years ago. And over 25 per cent of South African men admit to rape, with half of them having raped more than once.

As far as I know, Mandela never shot, tortured, raped or necklaced anyone personally. Yet Lenin never castrated a single priest either, nor did Hitler ever gas a single Jew.

However, by applying criteria universally accepted since the beginning of time, we correctly hold them responsible for the monstrosities committed by their regimes on their watch.

What makes Mandela exempt from such judgement? How did he become a secular saint?

These questions are impossible to answer outside the broad political context, which raises another question. Why did the Soviet Union and its satellites, along with their useful idiots in the West, support the ANC and wage a worldwide campaign against apartheid?

The white South African government was indeed rather unpleasant, but nothing it did was even remotely comparable to the mass murder of millions perpetrated by black Africans in Burundi, Angola and Rwanda at the same time.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that perhaps the present state of South Africa vindicates the apartheid government’s view that the ANC wasn’t quite ready to govern the country.

A sense of proportion was missing then, and it still is now. But then no left-wing campaign against anything Western is ever conducted in measured tones. The purpose isn’t to enlighten brains but to wash them.

Thus racism, however loosely defined, has got to be seen as a vice to trump all others.

Never mind that South African blacks lived better, freer and longer than blacks did in any other African country. Likewise, never mind that Israeli Arabs enjoy greater freedom and prosperity than, say, Egyptian ones.

Once the stigma of racism is attached to a regime, it’s no longer judged according to rational criteria – and neither are its opponents, especially if they’re seen as third-world.

Hence African terrorists led by Mandela and, say, Palestinian terrorists led by Abbas receive much better press than the generally civilised states they see in their sights.

That’s how Mandela thrashed his opponents in the Icons poll, much to the delight of the show’s presenter Sir Trevor McDonald: “In a time of division, I am thrilled that British audiences have voted for Nelson Mandela, a man who brought together a deeply divided nation and changed history.”

Sir Trevor clearly thinks that, no matter how a divided nation is brought together or history changed, a man who performed those heroic deeds is worthy of secular canonisation.

Enter Messrs Stalin, Hitler and Mao, who too ought to qualify on those bases.