How to catch a chameleon.
— This post is not about chameleons, it is about an international political persona, but here’s the thing people need to know about chameleons: when the sun goes down and they are safe in the dark, they no longer disguise their colors. And that is the best time to catch them. If one has a flashlight, and a discerning eye and mind, one can find them sitting generally higher up in the bushes, brightly reflecting a clear green color. So, with a flashlight and a focused mind one can very easily catch a chameleon. Unfortunately, if you really believe the daytime colors of a chameleon you’ll never recognize it, even at night. People will see what they believe they SHOULD see. They see what they have been TOLD to see. It is particularly the more educated people who have this difficulty, because they cannot accept that they might just be wrong. They are too arrogant for the truth. And that brings us to our story:
Once Upon a Time.
Once upon a time, among undulating green hills in a faraway country there lived a young man. He was one of the ‘Red’ people, so called because they dyed their clothes with red ochre. They did not use furniture and slept on mats on the ground. They had always done it that way since time immemorial. His father was not a king, but he was a kingmaker. He was an animist. He had four wives and thirteen children. Our young man was the only son of the third wife. He was the most junior of all the sons. Nevertheless, he was the great-grandson of a king of his people, though descended via a lesser branch. Our young hero would one day commit to paper his belief that, if one dishonored an ancestor, one had to consult a traditional healer or tribal elder who would communicate with the departed ancestors and tender apologies.
The nation of our young hero was one of several who spoke the same language. They all lived in beautiful undulating green countryside and saw themselves as a family of nations. Their country was among the most spectacularly beautiful in all of the continent.
To the west, in their own much different and much drier country, lived the most odd-looking people. Our young man had seen some of them now and then around the nearest town. Many years later he would write that they were to him “curious and remote”. He would later learn that there were two groups of the odd-looking people and they spoke different languages, but it was difficult for him to understand the difference. Since the people who looked like his father were also of many different nations and languages, this was not strange in the least.
In our young man’s district there were some people who had in earlier times been slaves of our young man’s family of nations, but they were now free. Because those people had originally fled a despotic king some hundreds of miles to the northeast and had begged our young man’s people for a new life, they were still called the “the Beggar People”. Now they wore Western clothes and were generally the more educated in the community. In fact the “Beggar People” had been rescued from their slavery by a military leader of the odd-looking people some 85 years before. There was always some level of competition between the Beggar People and the others.
In the Glitter City – The great Ism
Several years later, our not-so-young hero decided to run off to the Glitter City to avoid an arranged marriage. But there was a small problem: the city was in the country of the Odd-looking people. However, our hero had made nominal friends with some Odd-looking people by now, and was helped by some of them. He had done some study toward a Law degree and got a job at a Law firm run by some very specific Odd-looking people. They were very different from the vast majority of the Odd-looking people, because they were all Followers of the Great Ism. Practically all their families were of immigrant stock from Eastern Europe, and none had a bloodline in the country of the Odd-looking people that went back to the beginning of that country. Most other Odd-looking people, in fact, did.
Resistance
There was at this time a War in the whole of the world and it was in flames. However, matters were peaceful in the countries of the Red People and the Odd-Looking people. By the time this great war was over, the government changed in the country of the Odd-Looking people. This new government felt that their country was being overwhelmed and taken away from them by the sheer numbers of Red People and other similar nations. So, they made laws that limited the ability of such nations to take over their country. Several of these laws were quite hurtful.
Our hero had already decided that he would become a Follower of the Great Ism. He had also joined a National Socialist organization that sought to build out the rights of the Red people and others like them in the country of the Odd-looking people. By now he was a regional executive of the organization. Before long, this effort turned extremely violent. Our hero changed colors, and decided to send a friend of his to a faraway place called China for weapons, but the Chinese refused.
A preference for violence
Meanwhile, matters turned very violent and the government of the Odd-looking people passed laws to ban the Following of the Great Ism and and also the National Socialist organization. So the two parties went underground. Our hero had meanwhile convinced the executive of the National Socialist organization that they needed a military wing, so they gave him the go-ahead and he formed it with the help of a senior Follower of the Great Ism. He called it “Assegai“. They set up shop in a house in a rich leafy semi-suburban part of the Glitter City, where the rich Followers of Ism secretly met. They tended to be Media people and Lawyers. By now our hero was a senior Follower of Ism.
Caught and convicted
Our hero’s Military wing carried out more than 150 bombings in the country of the Odd-looking people and he personally went to a faraway country for military training. Many years later people would call it an Al Qaeda-like camp. Upon his return, he was caught by the Police of the Odd-looking people and jailed. In a raid on the house in the Glitter City, the rest of the team was caught. In their possession was a complete plan for an invasion of the country of the Odd-looking people, along with an assessment of arms and munitions that would be needed.
When the seriousness of the situation dawned on the group, they decided that our hero WOULD NOT TESTIFY, because then they would all surely die. But the very gracious law of the Odd-looking people allows even a non-testifying accused to address the court. For an American, this is something akin to “Taking the Fifth and still speaking in your own defense”. Our hero delivered an impressive 4-hour speech. His life was spared and he was sentenced to life in jail. This was unlikely to have happened in any other country at the time, certainly including the United States.
While he was in jail, his Assegai people turned to open terrorism on Odd-looking People and the United States very correctly listed them a Terrorist Organization. Even Amnesty International refused to take our hero’s case, because he had promoted violence. They did not deem him a Prisoner of Conscience. They thought that making an exception for him would compromise the cases of more meritorious prisoners elsewhere.
Perish the truth in the way of a good story
After our hero was let out of jail many years later, an American ghostwriter wrote his autobiography for him, and carefully removed every mention of being a Follower of Ism, let alone being a senior leader in the group. The book presented our man as an international hero and Great Man of Peace. The Media in the United States lapped up the story and promptly ignored the fact that our hero had created Assegai. They made sure no one heard about the bombs or the invasion plans. They never questioned his sudden and miraculous innocence. They misrepresented his great speech at his trial, completely forgetting that to save his own life he never testified.
To the shock and dismay of the Odd-looking people, the man who had bombed them, threatened to invade them, and had been caught and convicted and who actually confessed his role in his own autobiography was now miraculously hailed in the United States as a Great Moral Leader of the World. The judge who had jailed him had said that he was not quite convinced of the seriousness of the invasion plan, but some of our hero’s fellow prisoners later described openly how they had nearly come to blows in jail because some had not taken it seriously enough. And YET the US Media promoted our man as a hero.
Somehow, all these incredibly highly educated people in the United States simply could not “see the chameleon”. Apparently they had no flashlight. And, even if one shone a light on the chameleon for them and pointed it out, they still failed to spot it. Perhaps it glowed so brightly in the light that they thought it a god. In fact, many treated the chameleon like a god. The shameful self-inflicted blindness was astounding to watch. After all, much as with the parable of the horse and water, it seems one can point out a chameleon but one cannot force people to see it.
When the Chimera Triumphs
Eventually our hero led a Chimera of the Followers of the Great Ism, The National Socialist organization, and a control body of all the Trade Unions to a political victory in the country of the Odd-looking people. The latter lost all say in their own country and they were kicked out of their jobs. They are forced to sell their business to Red-people in order to qualify for government tenders. The farmers among them were murdered until only half of them remained on their farms. The Chimera has done all it can to take the farms of those that remain and is doing its best to stamp out their language and their culture by every means at its disposal.
Its threats towards Odd-looking people have become more and more strident and uncontrolled. It has revealed itself to be akin to an ostrich in the breeding season. It seems to be incapable of rational thought, has great instincts regarding power; the use and abuse thereof, the exploitation thereof, and it will attack anything that moves. Much like the male ostrich in its scarlet-shinned breeding hubris, the organization, in its out of control political hubris, tends to say on record things that would crush the standing of any other nation on the surface of the planet. But the Chimera appears to be itself a chameleon, and intelligent people cannot spot it—particularly in the United States.
When our hero died, the Followers of the Great Ism rushed to the microphones to finally and at last confess that our hero had been one of their leaders, but, somehow, those who cannot spot a chameleon in the dark with a flashlight can still see absolutely nothing. Therefore, it follows in their minds that he could not have been a Follower of the Great Ism. And the more intelligent and highly trained these people are, the blinder they are.
So, it is impossible to spot a chameleon in the dark, is it? Can I shine you a flashlight and point one out to you? Or are you too intelligent and educated to see it?
Decode:
Faraway country: Transkei in the Eastern Cape of South Africa
Red people: amaThembu, Thembu, Tamboekies, (an isiXhosa-speaking people)
Family of nations: the amaXhosa
Odd-looking people: Caucasians; two groups: Afrikaners, English
Beggar People: amaFengu, amaMfengu, Fingos.
Military leader: Sir George Henry Wakelyn Smith – Harry Smith
Country of the Odd-looking people: Western South Africa and the Highveld Prairie
Hurtful laws: Apartheid laws
National Socialist organization: African National Congress; present government
Followers of Ism: Communists
Assegai: Umkhonto we Sizwe, “military” wing of the ANC
Chimera: A mythological creature composed of different animals
Hero: Nelson Mandela, the “Chameleon”
SOURCES:
Pretty much all of the above comes out of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which was suitably sanitized of all involvement with the Communist Party of South Africa by his ghostwriter, Richard Stengel, now Deputy Secretary 
of State in the Obama Administration. The truth has more recently been revealed. Amnesty International never took up Mandela’s case because he was not a Prisoner of Conscience; he was a man of violence correctly convicted in open court in a Justice System procedurally more lenient than the US one. The decoded version of this whole story may be read in AmaBhulu.
As to Mandela and the Communist Party, it apparently did not make a single person in the Western Media think why he would be holding his balled fist in the air in solidarity in 1990 when Umkhonto we Sizwe stopped its supposed “Military” campaign. Yes, you are hearing correctly there. They are singing “Kill the white man”/ Bulala amaBhulu! And the Caucasian man standing next to the balled fisted Mandela is Ronnie Kasrils, very senior Communist Party man of recent Baltic immigrant extraction. By contrast, nearly all Afrikaners have had twelve generations in Africa.
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AmaBhulu 