Mandela's Thoughts Overpublicized
By Alexander Marriott UNLV Rebel Yell: February 3, 2003 - Capitalism Magazine: February 28, 2003

Former South African President Nelson Mandela claims the United States wants a holocaust and that President Bush covets Iraqi oil. But what does Mandela want, and has he used any evidence or human reason to justify his claims?

The standard line is that he was in jail for 20-plus years for fighting against the unjust apartheid policies of the South African government and in doing so, is a hero. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Russian gulag because he criticized Stalin in a private letter, an experience he used to write an incredible book, The Gulag Archipelago, which won him the Noble Prize for literature. No one asks him what he thinks of getting rid of dictators, or if he thinks the United States wants a holocaust. Armando Valladares spent 22 years is one of Castro's gulags, which he wrote a book about, Against All Hope, yet he isn't consulted about international affairs. Why is it that Nelson Mandela is asked about his particular views on issues, which he may know nothing about, such as Iraq? Not to say I'm an expert on the matter, but I've never coddled up with dictators like Fidel Castro and Moammar Gadhafi, people who are on par with Saddam.

Mandela, in his speech to an International Women's Forum, said that the reason the US wants war with Iraq is "because Iraq produces 64 percent of the oil in the world. What Bush wants is to get hold of that oil." First of all, as CNN pointed out, Iraq produces five percent of the world's oil and second of all, we have a large force in Kuwait right now, if we wanted oil so badly we could just push the Kuwaiti royal family out of the way and take theirs. Or we could support the capitalists in Venezuela and get rid of the communist ruffian who is redistributing their property, which would make them amiable towards us and sell more oil, not to mention Western countries have a legal claim on all the oil in the Middle East as the Arab countries stole it all from Britain and France to begin with.

Mandela then said, "If there is a country in the world that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America." But of course he didn't elaborate further, perhaps trying to show just how unspeakable these "atrocities" are. His supporters then said afterwards he was referring to things like globalization and the fact that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II.

What!!!??? Japan started a war with us; we clearly beat them in a conventional war and then demanded their unconditional surrender to end the war. When they refused, we were faced with invading the Japanese home islands which could have caused hundreds of thousands of American casualties, not to mention hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Japanese deaths. Or, using atomic weapons, which would cause terrible and swift destruction to show the obstinate rulers of Japan our willingness to destroy their country entirely to end the war, unless they surrendered unconditionally. But even after the first bomb was dropped, they still refused to surrender. The Japanese government caused the deaths of their people and soldiers by causelessly attacking a free country and then not giving up when they were clearly going to lose, and then again when they saw that we could easily wipe them off of the planet and were quite willing to do so.

But back to Mandela, he went on to insinuate that the United States and Great Britain were ignoring the United Nations because the Secretary General of that organization is black. Apparently Mandela doesn't know how the UN works, the Secretary Generalship of the UN doesn't matter, all he can do, whether he is black or white or an albino pygmy, is give advice to the UN and go around trying to solve world disputes. As far as the UN doing anything, it requires a vote by the Security Council which contains a brutal communist dictatorship, a socialist country, Russia, along with the United States and Great Britain, as well as a rotating group of temporary members. We're ignoring them because we already have a UN resolution, not to mention numerous others from the past decade; more of them are not going to solve anything. For even if they did pass a resolution to authorize force, who do you think would do all the fighting? (Answer: the same people who will do all the fighting without a new resolution, the United States.)

Yet even with his blatant misstatement of simple facts (i.e. the amount of oil Iraq produces) and his irrational and unsupported assertions of an American desire for holocaust and our penchant for atrocities, he isn't written off as a loon, but taken seriously.

Some on the left are even baffled by his comments, but for Mandela, these comments are par for the course in terms of his ideology and actions as president of South Africa. He's always been a socialist, his recent comments merely reaffirm this point, but his wholesale destruction as leader of South Africa have been out there for near a decade now, not to mention the African National Congress' (Mandela's political party) clearly socialist policies and statements for all to read. Apartheid was horrid and unjust, but so was Mandela's socialism, and his atrocious comments on Thursday merely show us why South Africa is the mess that it is today.