HOW TO BE A GOOD COMMUNIST..

Here's a Friday quiz for you!

Can you guess who wrote...

"Under a Communist Party Government this land will become a land of milk and honey. Political, economic and social rights will cease to be enjoyed by Whites only. They will be shared equally by Whites and Non-Whites. There will be enough land and houses for all. There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease.

Workers will earn decent wages; transport will be cheap and education free. There will be no pass laws, no influx control, no Police raids for passes and poll tax, and Africans, Europeans, Coloureds and Indians will live in racial peace and perfect equality.

The victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., in the Peoples Republic of China, in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Rumania, where the living conditions of the people were in many respects similar and even worse than ours, proves that we too can achieve this important goal."

Why, yes - that's right - it was patron saint of the Left Nelson Mandela, in this touching article "How to be a good communist."

Comments

[Peter]

David, a simple question:

Would you have preferred the apartheid regime to still be in power in South Africa in 2006 rather than the ANC?

[David Vance]

I believe in human dignity and liberty. I therefore reject the Apartheid regime and I also reject the corrupt ANC.

[Mardy Bum]

I don't see the relevance of this thread but it brings to mind a review of one of the more critical biographies of Mandela (rather than the hagiography of Sampson). The review in The Times concluded:

"South Africans were not at all sure what sort of man was going to walk out of the prison doors after 28 years: it could have been a Banda or a Mugabe. They were unbelievably lucky in what they got, and the years have not dimmed that judgement."

What on earth is wrong with striving for:"enough land and houses for all. There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease. Workers will earn decent wages; transport will be cheap and education free. There will be no pass laws, no influx control, no Police raids for passes and poll tax, and Africans, Europeans, Coloureds and Indians will live in racial peace and perfect equality."

Sure, it's a naive statement but God help us if leaders don't have a dream of a just society.

David- Yes, the ANC was corrupt and Mandela could and should have done something about it but this was a 70-odd year old man who had no experience of governing and whose only priority was to reconcile that which only a few years earlier had seemed irreconcilable. The transition of South Africa from a blight on civilisation to a state struggling to move forward in peace is the only standard by which he should be judged.

[Peter]

But in an either / or situation, such as South Africa in 1990, what would have been your choice?

[daytripper]

south africa has shown the world how truth and reconciliation should be done. in a conflict much worse than northern irelands both sides have come together to reveal the truths of a terrible period in world history.
and the fact that david equivocates between ANC corruption and apartheid exposes that non-racism so prevalent on the right. how easily SA may have slid into ethnic slaughter and yet the ANC maintained a pragmatic and forward looking vision of SAs future.

there is a history of violence on both sides in South Africa and it is being revealed through a transparent truth and reconciliation process. but the right only like to ham up failures, never successes when it comes to human rights processes.

[David Vance]

Yes, all that neck-lacing so endorsed by the former Mrs Mandela showed the way forward Tripper.

[daytripper]

its ok david you have exposed yourself as pro apartheid, we dont need to hear anymore equivocation.

[jaun]

its with us or against time here in daytripper land
seig heil !

[daytripper]

not at all juan, merely extrapolating the notion that im an anti semite for critisising israel.

[smug]works both ways. :)[/smug]

[dangerouslysubversivedad]

No daytripper, you're an anti-Semite because you support the people who would like to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

[daytripper]

so youre pro-apartheid too. ive never heard you deny it so it must be true.

grow up.

[mahons]

He doesn't possess a firm grasp on history, and his comment about the Socialist "victory" in the USSR reminds one of the looney fringe parrots from the 1950's. I think it stems more from his identification with the Communist Party in South Africa which was anti-apartheid. One of the problems that a pro-Soviet person had (has) is that one can not embrace a part of communism without embracing the whole. Therefore, the idea of equality and shared wealth must also be embraced with a willful blindness to the gulags, the repression and the horror of that system. I think Mandela's greatest achievement was the eventual peaceful dismantling of the apartheid system. His support of communism and the regimes that inflicted it upon their people, reduces his legacy.

[daytripper]

i imagine to the average black south african who lived under apartheid, communism seemed the logical alternative to a white dominated capitalist pseudo-democracy.

opps, there i go using perspective again.

[mahons]

Daytripper:
I am sure it did (although the religious among them probably would have been concerned about repression on their faith). The squalor many of them lived in would be fertile grounds for such ideology.

[Cunningham]

It's hard to see how he came up that bit about how the living conditions of the people in, say, Czechoslovakia were "in many respects .. even worse" than those of the blacks in South Africa, and still more difficult to see how he thinks Communism improved them.
Before WWII Czechoslovakia had a very large middle class and some of the most industrialised areas in Europe.

[Mike Cunningham]

Knowing South Africa by living there for many years, I can state that the confiscatory 'Black Empowerment Law is as typical of the 'Non-Communist' A.N.C. Government's attitude to personal property as anything else they have proposed over the past ten years.

The prevailing philosophy of the A.N.C. government has always leant towards the Communist model because that's the only one it understands. The corruption endemic within the top circles of the South African Government has long been apparent, but now it seems they aren't even trying to hide it anymore!

[Umbongo]

DV

How could you be so insensitive about Saint Mandela just as Dave Cameron (the well known non Conservative) has hugged him and received his blessing? And, you know, we have Dave's assurance that the ANC was not a terrorist organisation, so that's OK then.

The apartheid regime in SA was disgusting and deserved to fall but that doesn't mean that the ANC is or was as pure as driven snow nor that Mandela is a living Gandhi. At the risk of being accused of not being a 100% fan of the ANC, this blog http://southafricaiscrap.blogspot.com/ might interest you.

[Allan@Aberdeen]

When I worked in South Africa, I argued with an Afrikaner colleague that whites should abandon the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal, and simply establish a white/coloured republic in and around the original Cape colony for otherwise Afrikanerdom would lose all the wealth and power that it created. He disagreed: I was right.
South Africa will go the same way as the rest of black Africa.