By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Bill Keller of The New York Times admits Nelson Mandela was a communist, but suggests it doesn’t really matter because communism collapsed. But communism never died in South Africa. Mandela lied about his party membership, for the obvious purpose of confusing and deceiving people about what is really going on in South Africa. This deception makes it easier to force U.S. taxpayers to contribute approximately $500 million a year to help the communists in South Africa consolidate and expand their power.

South Africa is called a multiparty democracy, but the ruling African National Congress, which won 65.9% of the vote in the 2009 elections, is a front for the South African Communist Party (SACP). South Africa today is effectively a one-party state run by communists.

Officially, the SACP describes itself as a “partner” in the Tripartite Alliance consisting of the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

This formulation masks the fact that the current president, Comrade Jacob Zuma, is a “former” SACP high-ranking member who continues to work openly with communists. He is the figure who announced Mandela’s death.

Zuma’s “missing years” have received some attention. Journalist David Beresford noted that although Zuma has been a life-long communist, he “seems to have been anxious not to have this detail widely known,” since his SACP membership was omitted from his government and ANC biographies.

Zuma spoke to a 2010 meeting of the Young Communist League National Congress after he had returned from communist Cuba, where he received the top honor, the Order of Jose Marti. “Our relations with Cuba were cemented by the blood of heroic Cuban soldiers who died in combat in Africa, especially in Angola, who paid the supreme sacrifice for their belief in freedom, justice and anti-imperialism,” he said. This was a reference to the support given by the Soviet Union and its client, Cuba, to communist takeovers in Africa.

But none dare call this “imperialism.”

Interestingly, this speech appears on the website of the ANC, but not on the website of Zuma’s presidential office.

In the speech, he told the young communists that “the lessons we have learnt in Cuba confirm the correctness of our policy positions in making education and health some of our key priorities as government, the ruling party and the ruling alliance.” He also praised the “Cuban Five,” Castro’s spies imprisoned in the U.S.

Lauding the Cuban Communist Party dictatorship and one-party state, he told the young communists: “One of the major lessons we must glean from Cuba is the depth of their internationalism and patriotism, and how they successfully balanced these two to produce good citizens for their country and the world. The Cuban value system is based on patriotism, national pride and a very deep sense of national history, culture and is based on an ethic of hard work. As Young Communist League members you must engage with these issues and devise ways and means of how you can instill the same kind of values, and a deep sense of patriotism in our country.”

“Work begins today in earnest to improve the quality of life of all our people and to build Cuban-style patriotism and internationalism within our ranks,” he concluded.

Is communism dead in South Africa? It doesn’t appear so.

Zuma told them, “You need to have a clear understanding of dialectical and historical materialism. You need to be armed with a theory of the working class Marxism Leninism. You need to understand this theory as a guide to action.”

The deputy president of South Africa, Kgalema Motlanthe, spoke at the South African Communist Party`s 91st Celebratory Gala Dinner in 2012 and described the relationship between the ANC and SACP. He said, “Because the relationship between the SACP and the ANC is and has always been familial, it can best be described as that of siblings; brothers—with the ANC being the elder brother while the SACP is the younger brother.” He went on, “…in the course of time it turned out that the SACP would become the responsible younger brother who gives back by becoming a teacher to the older brother. This equipped those of us in the ANC with the necessary tools of analysis and education needed for us to develop ourselves and successfully prosecute the struggle.”

Incredibly, Bill Keller of The New York Times maintains that “Mandela’s brief membership in the South African Communist Party, and his long-term alliance with more devout Communists, say less about his ideology than about his pragmatism.” The claim is ridiculous on its face. And paying tribute to Muammar Gaddafi after the Libyan leader bombed Pan Am 103 out of the sky, killing 189 Americans, is more evidence of this pragmatism? How can The New York Times publish this nonsense?

The South African Communist Party has now admitted that Mandela was not only a member, but a member of its important Central Committee. Keller seems unaware of this fact. If Mandela’s membership was “brief” and of no consequence, why did Mandela lie about it? And why did the SACP cover it up until after Mandela died?

Regarding the relationship between the ANC and the SACP, there is no better authority than Mandela himself. He served as president of the ANC (1991-1997) during some of the time he served as president of South Africa (1994-1999). “It is not given to a leader of one political organization in a country to sing praises to the virtues of another,” Mandela said, speaking as ANC president in 1995. “But that is what I intend to do today. If anything, this signifies the unique relationship between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. It is a relationship that has detractors in abundance; a relationship that has its prolific obituary scribes. But it is a relationship that always disappoints these experts. Because it was tempered in struggle. It is written in the blood of many martyrs. And, today, it is reinforced by hard-won victory.”

The fact needs to be repeated: the ruling ANC is a front for the South African Communist Party. Mandela’s leadership of both groups helps demonstrate this fact.

While dismissing the idea that Soviet-style communism is alive in South Africa, Bill Keller of The New York Times mentions the work of Stephen Ellis, who discovered notes of an SACP meeting confirming Mandela’s party membership. Ellis disclosed these notes in 2011 and wrote about them in his 2012 book, External Mission. Keller, perhaps somewhat troubled by this information, goes on to add the following: “Professor Ellis is no apologist for white rule—he occupies a university chair in Amsterdam named for another hero of the South African resistance, Archbishop Desmond Tutu—but he contends that the affiliation with the Communists shaped the A.N.C.’s ideology in ways that endure, ominously, to this day.”

Ellis told Keller in an email exchange: “Today, the A.N.C. officially claims still to be at the first stage … of a two-phase revolution. This is a theory obtained directly from Soviet thinking.”

In other words, these communists are true believers. Communism has not collapsed as far as they are concerned. That would include Mandela, and helps explain his cordial relations with Arafat, Castro, Gaddafi, and so on over the years.

The erroneous assumption being made by the media and various politicians and commentators is that the immediate failure to wipe out South Africa’s white minority demonstrated the moderation of the new South African regime.

The ruling communists in South Africa are practicing what is called the “two-phase revolution.” The first phase is the success of the “national liberation movement” in Soviet revolutionary theory. In the case of South Africa, it’s called the “national democratic revolution.” This is the phase in which non-communists are used as dupes. The second phase, under SACP leadership, is the “socialist revolution” and the introduction of a “workers’ state” (also known as a people’s democracy). In this phase, the so-called “vanguard element” comes forward and eliminates its former democratic and liberal allies.

The amazing thing about all of this is that it’s out in the open on the SACP website in the document, “The South African Road to Socialism.” The document covers the period from 2012 to 2017. It warns about a “one-sided emphasis on democracy as regular multi-party elections…”

It would be nice if our reporters, as well as those giving honor and tribute to Mandela, would spend a few minutes trying to understand the “fundamental transformation” of South Africa. Another part of this process, according to the document, is the “mobilization of private capital into an NDR [National Democratic Revolution] struggle” (page 48). The “struggle” also entails “rolling back” and “transforming” the capitalist market (page 51).

It sounds something like the “fundamental transformation” of the United States.

By admitting Mandela was a high-ranking member, the SACP may be signaling that the second phase of the “socialist revolution” is about to get underway in South Africa. “For the SACP the passing away of Madiba [Mandela] must give all those South Africans who had not fully embraced a democratic South Africa, and who still in one way or the other hanker to the era of white domination, a second chance to come to terms with a democratic South Africa founded on the principle of majority rule,” the communist organization says.

The phrase “coming to terms” brings to mind the new anti-white party in South Africa called the “Economic Freedom Fighters” (EFF), which displayed a banner reading “Honeymoon is over for whites.”

Ominously, the Google search engine ran a tribute to Mandela on its home page directing the world to the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory website and a poster featuring a quotation of Mandela under an image of communist murderer and Castro henchman Che Guevara.

Mandela’s backers are apparently hoping for short memories or none at all. To even mention the facts, which are out in the open, might open up journalists to the charge that Keller mentions in the Times—that of “red-baiting.”

Keller writes that Mandela’s “Communist affiliation” doesn’t “justify the gleeful red baiting, and it certainly does not diminish a heroic legacy…”

The U.S. media’s treatment of Mandela will go down in history on a par with the Times’ Walter Duranty praising Joseph Stalin and covering up his murder of millions of Ukrainians. The difference is that most of the bodies have not yet piled up in South Africa. And, after all, the victims will be mostly white.

As a footnote to this terrible tragedy, protesters have just knocked down a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine’s capital and attacked it with hammers. They want their country to turn away from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

On Tuesday, three American presidents, in addition to Raul Castro and others of his ilk, will pay homage to communist terrorist Nelson Mandela, whose government became a “strategic partner” with the Russian regime.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.