Simon Hooper has worked as a journalist covering international news, politics and sports for websites and publications including CNN, Al Jazeera, the New Statesman, Sports Illustrated, FourFourTwo and The Blizzard.
In an Al Jazeera article dated 6 December 2013, Hooper addressed the matter of the discrepancy between the Western Media’s ridiculously idealistic concept of Nelson Mandela, and the actual reality. It would be difficult indeed to find an article as innately direct in any of the regular Western Media.
The day Mandela died, I well recall the total shock of a well-known CNN host when she was told by a hastily invited talking head that Mandela’s ANC had been formally registered as a Terrorist Organization by the US State Department. The brainwashing by the Western Media in this particular domain is, and has always been, so intensely extreme that the poor lady had absolutely no clue of the reality. Her shock was total; it veritably oozed over her face and she stumbled over her words for quite a few sentences—completely blown out of the water.
The talking head never appeared again. He had committed the ultimate unforgivable sin of actually speaking the truth. Das ist verboten in Western Media culture. One has to speak the Politically Correct line; the story has been decided and the truth be damned.
In the Al Jazeera article, under the title Mandela—The Radical, Hooper quotes Stephen Ellis, professor at VU University, who has researched Mandela:
—“If you talk to many American liberals, they think Mandela was Martin Luther King,” Ellis said. “If you say, ‘No, Mandela started a guerrilla army, he was a Communist, he did this, he did that’, they just don’t get it. They don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ellis is 100% correct. Americans are wholly clueless on the subject of Mandela. It was largely Desmond Tutu who introduced him to the US community in the 1984-1986 period and, with his brother in arms Randall Robinson, worked up the US Congress to a frothing frenzy; a frenzy so intense that they overruled Ronald Reagan’s presidential veto in order to apply Comprehensive Sanctions to South Africa. It was the first time in the 20th century that a US President was overruled by Congress in a matter of Foreign Policy. Reagan bravely defended the reality of South Africa, but reality did not matter anymore.
The point is that another reality also perished in that mindless frenzy, which I suffered first hand. And that reality was the Real Mandela. It was in that process that he ceased to be a leader of the terrorist ANC and creator of its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. He HAD TO be an “angel of peace” who was “wrongly imprisoned”. Somehow, he had never gone to Ethiopia to be trained in demolitions and mortar firing, as he himself explains in his autobiography. His own explanation in the same book of how he convinced the leadership of the ANC to turn to violence has been expunged from the record. And thus was born the illusion that 99.99% of Americans swallow unquestioningly as gospel. To hear it from the mouth of one of the deluded, read Rick Ungar in Forbes.
The Al Jazeera article goes on to discuss Mandela’s admiration of the Cuban revolution, his railing against the United states as having “committed unspeakable atrocities in the world“, and his political hugging of some of the most vile political monsters on the surface of the planet, his belief in Communism, and the fact that he was completely out of touch with the world he was released into. The fact is that all these Hooper and Ellis observations are 100% correct. But perish the thought that one might read this in a regular Western newspaper.
Mandela went into jail as a Black African man who wanted to be treated as a white man in a white man’s country. He returned to a world where his followers were burning alive those blacks who disagreed with them and were forging a Black African man’s country where white men were not welcome; nor Black African men aspiring to be treated as white. He did not fit at all, and never really ever did … unto his death. He was never really more than a useful figurehead for the ANC—a means to end; and the West fell for it hook, line and sinker.
What a shame for the West that Al Jazeera should have to point this out. The West has apparently lost its discretion.
AmaBhulu 