By Stanley Collymore
Dear Mr President,
This is a personal plea to you both in your capacity as President of the Republic of South Africa and as an unrelenting fighter against apartheid.
Let me first give you some detailed background information of myself before venturing into why I am writing this letter to you. I’m British and was from the outset a member and active supporter of the Anti-apartheid Movement in the UK. A student at the time it was a very uphill battle for those of us who pinned our colours firmly to the mast of highlighting, attacking and doing everything legal in our power that we could think of to bring about democratic change and the dismantling of Apartheid in your country.
A formidable task we had no illusions about what we were undertaking knowing full well the vast range of political, civic, diplomatic, economic and military forces that were reined against us and which were quite extensive, redoubtable and at time extremely brutal in the process; but we’d psychologically prepared ourselves for this and were even prepared to risk and sacrifice our lives for the cause we’d undertaken, knew was a right and just one, and were in it for the long haul.
In Britain many of our members were constantly harassed by the civic forces organized against us including those of the police who regularly beat us up with impunity causing some of us to be hospitalized, arrested our members on spurious whims of their but never charged us of anything, preferring instead to keep us locked up in police cells overnight, humiliate us while there and release us after 24 hours detention. Meanwhile, the media routinely ridiculed us, made us out at best to be losers but more frequently branded us as fifth columnists and enemies of the state; some of them even accused us as agents who were working for foreign powers, notably Russia. None of them ever bothered to interview us, listen to anything we had to say, find out what we really stood for or objectively deal with the subject of apartheid, preferring instead to deal with abstracts and stick to their well rehearsed and intractable script that South Africa was an ally of Britain and the west, Blacks were incapable of ever looking after themselves let alone capable of running a state; that it was the whites who made South Africa the prosperous country it was and furthermore whites, as in what was then Southern Rhodesia, were our kith and kin.
Margaret Thatcher set the tone when she publicly declared and I quote her words: “Those who believe that the African National Congress (ANC) will become the government of South Africa are living in cloud cuckoo land.” What she conveniently failed to tell the world was that she and her husband Dennis were making enormous profits from business ventures they had in South Africa, getting the kind of financial returns on these that they would never have been able to receive in any so-called western state including the United Kingdom, as with having a small white minority forcibly and illegally in charge of South Africa, no democracy or adult suffrage in the country, the black population forcibly fragmented, told where it could and could not live, forced to carry passes to travel about its own land, literally treated as itinerant migrants within its own country, routinely split up as families by the state that fostered family breakups to intentionally break down cohesion among black people, and additionally paid starvation wages, the resultant massive financial profits that were made off their labour, exploitation, repression and misery were, in such circumstances, ideally suited from a white perspective to guarantee a much greater distribution of South Africa’s wealth to its white minority population, regardless of their lack of skills what little contribution that they actually made to the country’s economy and prosperity as they were all guaranteed jobs and supervisory roles for life vis-à-vis the Blacks who were the ones that did the work, and, of course, foreign carpetbaggers and exploiters of whom there were many such western participants like Maggie Thatcher and her husband.
Well aware that we would be on the receiving end of rightwing racist attacks both verbally and physically we had resolved from the start of our campaign to adopt the Gandhian approach of passive resistance combined with non-violence knowing full well that even though this approach wouldn’t be an effective deterrent to these thugs among the public or in any way stop the police attacks against us as well as those orchestrated in the media , we were none the less determined that our campaign would be based on civilized and mature standards of behaviour and high moral principles; and that none of our detractors and abusers would ever get us to descend from these benchmarks, which we’d voluntarily set ourselves, into the foul sewers of racism, intolerance and injustice where they were most comfortably at home and in their element.
Yes, we were hurt at times; but the physical pain from the unprovoked beating we received at the hands of the police viciously breaking up our peaceful demonstrations apart there was also the psychological pain derived from the share callousness of these inhuman purveyors and supporters of apartheid. Steve Biko’s murder, widely and dishonestly reported in the British media, both print and electronic, as a self-inflicted accident when purportedly in a customary black tirade (why is it that Blacks always get into tirades but whites somehow never do?) he slipped on a bar of soap and conveniently fell through the window of a room where he was being housed several stories up in that building. Remarkably the British media never for a moment questioned the veracity of these so-called facts from the apartheid regime in South Africa any more than they deem it necessary to question the lies of the Zionist authorities in Israel nowadays. No one asked what this building was or why Steve Biko was there in the first place.
The reality was that it served as the torture centre of BOSS: the Bureau of State Security – how appropriately crass a name that fitted well into the white, racist, master race mindset vis-à-vis these savage Blacks as the majority population of South Africa were widely regarded not only in South Africa itself but among many whites in the west. Similarly there was no condemnation in the British media when the interior minister in the apartheid regime publicly stated and I quote: “Steve Biko’s death leaves me cold.” In fact the British media celebrated effusively the murder of another black man who they effortlessly labelled as a terrorist. Thanks to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the entire world now knows the truth and the full facts surround this case but the British and western media have never apologized for their craven subservience to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the lies which they willingly published or their deliberate defamation of Steve Biko.
Fast forward to April 2011 and we see boy Hague, the current British Foreign Secretary, talking about the denial by Colonel Gaddafi of human rights in Libya and his fellow British and so-called EU foreign counterpart, Catherine Ashton, demanding that Iraq recognizes the human rights of the MKO a well-documented terrorist organisation even in the west but is now being conveniently employed to carry out terrorist attacks in Iran at the west’s behest – while both these persons quite expediently overlook worse atrocities in Bahrain and Yemen. And who among the anti-apartheid movement in the United Kingdom can forget William Hague then a member of the British Young Conservatives along with many more of his ilk at the time happily parading themselves in counter pro-apartheid and police unmolested demonstrations, on university campuses and at Conservative Party conferences proudly wearing T-shirts banner headlined with the slogans: “Hang Nelson Mandela” and bomb the ANC, and like their leader Maggie Thatcher and the US President Ronald Reagan readily and regularly vilifying Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and the ANC as a terrorists organization; a classic case of openly rewording the vile apartheid abusers while selectively and unwarrantedly punishing their hapless victims.
South Africa has quite remarkably out of its trauma made great strides since Nelson Mandela was released and adult suffrage permitted to all South Africans; nevertheless there’s still much to do and a long way still to go, as the long nightmare years of apartheid and the ANC’s opposition to it that predates the Russian Revolution has left its dark and debilitating legacy and it will take time to undo all the harm that the critics of a democratically black led South Africa and those hankering after the good old days point to as black incompetence and inability to run a modern, progressive, democratic state; although their interpretation of the word progressive – namely white controlled and white dominated – differs vastly from my own and all those who opposed apartheid. Anyway, I have no time for such people who when it suited their purposes ridiculed the ANC for being older than the Russian revolution yet made no significant progress as a resistance movement because of the non-violent stance it had taken but when it was forced to take up arms as it ultimately did in the wake of the increased barbarism of the apartheid state and its western collaborators perversely condemned it as a terrorist organization.
The treatment of Winnie Mandela too showed how sick these people were and still are. Vilified relentlessly in the British and western media as everything from a serial adulteress to someone advocating neckklacing black traitors it’s amazing how these people could have managed to keep straight faces while indulging in their nefarious pursuits of theirs against Winnie. Treating this remarkable and dignified lady with the contempt they have in the wake of her well-documented mistreatment at the hands of the apartheid regime is mindboggling. To call her a serial adulteress when genuine serial adulterers and adulteresses like Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne, Mark Phillips her ex husband, other prominent members of the British Royal Family, Paddy Ashdown of Bosnia infamy, Nancy Reagan, Bill Clinton, 99.9% of senior and well-known BBC staff members and those in the British media generally, as well as countless others who didn’t or would they ever have had to put up with the travails that Winnie Mandela was subjected to: arbitrary house arrest; not allowed to have more than one visitors at a time; her husband locked away for 27 years and her visits to see him very much at the personal whims of the authorities and could be terminated at any time without rhyme or reason; the list goes on, is utterly risible as it is wholly repugnant.
What are Prince Charles’ excuses for treating Diana the way he did; or those of Paddy Ashton re his wife; or any of Winnie’s detractors who’ve been regularly having it off with their respective lovers unknowingly behind the backs of their wives, husbands or partners? I wasn’t aware that their spouses or partners were locked up for 27 years in the circumstances that Nelson Mandela was and all the rest of it, and that these poor, devils compelled to live in utter privation as Winnie Mandela was had to find some ways to relieve their sexual boredom or psychological pain. In fact the contrary is very much the case; as all of those mentioned above live and continue to do so in complete opulence; are highly privileged members of society and hold down very high-powered hereditary, political or otherwise influential media positions. So I ask once again; what are their rational excuses for putting it about as they’ve done and some of them still carry on doing while hypocritically asserting that it was wrong for Winnie Mandela to similarly and more realistically relieve her sexual tensions placed in the intolerable situation that she was in; single-handedly at first keeping her husband’s name in the spotlight when others didn’t want to know, and not even sure if she would ever see him again when those criticizing her wanted her husband dead? What rank hypocrisy and utter stupidity. Aren’t these buffoons aware of the old maxim that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?
On the issue of necklacing, what’s wrong with the sentiment Winnie Mandela expressed? Why is it perfectly okay for westerners to seek revenge for real or imagined wrongs they perceive have been done against them but wholly wrong for others to contemplate let alone do the same? Lord Haw Haw, real name William Joyce, the Irish/American, pro-German radio propagandist broadcasting out of Berlin during World War II was captured, arrested, subjected to a brief sham trial and summarily hanged by the British at the conclusion of the war on transparently trumped up charges of treason, which was illegal as one can only lawfully be charged with treason if he or she is or was a citizen of the country trying that person on treason charges, and Lord Haw Haw was never a British citizen. What the British did was to indulge themselves in pure spiteful revenge since this man was not a military combatant but was simply one of Goebel’s propagandists who was very effective at his job of undermining British armed forces morale, and now the British authorities were getting their own back at him for this, which after all this time gives me hope that one day soon we’ll see some country or countries do the same with the plethora of British and particularly BBC reporters, those of the US, notably Fox News; CNN; NBC: and ABC and for good measure other western propagandists as well; and I hope the west daren’t complain having set a precedent with Lord Haw Haw.
So I wholeheartedly then and still do now endorse what the bold Winnie Mandela said at the time. These were black traitors who knew and could see the physical and mental effects of apartheid on the majority black, suppressed people of South Africa yet they were prepared to sell out their own people; and I don’t know of any country or people in the entire world who if they were ever put in similar circumstances to those that Winnie Mandela was barbarously subjected to and continuously so for more than three decades wouldn’t have wanted these traitors equally and brutally eliminated from the face of the earth.
A measure of the civilized nature of black South Africans was that when they eventually won their epic struggle for freedom in the face of everything that was thrown at them and the murderous and inhuman treatment they were subjected to on a daily basis: forced removals of longstanding black communities to make way for white settlements; bantustanization, the pass laws; job reservations with Blacks told what jobs they could and could not have and such work as they got always being of a menial nature; the immorality laws which banned mixed race marriages or transracial sexual relationships to protect the alleged virtue of white women that they more often than not were less concerned about protecting themselves, although these laws were never designed to prevent white male rape of black domestics and other black females; the Sharpeville and Soweto Massacres and the iconic image of that brave black student carrying in his arms the dead body of his classmate in the systematic gunning down of unarmed, peaceful black students demonstrating to have a decent education for themselves and other blacks and not forced to be taught in their own country with its own languages in the hybrid dialect of their oppressors, they didn’t resort to the kind of violent and cold-blooded vindictiveness characteristic of whites but instead set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to bring about reconciliation in their country. Can you seriously imagine the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia or any other white ruled country even in 2011 doing the same in similar circumstances? Don’t hold your breath on that one else you might choke for lack of air. It simply won’t happen!
Which brings me to the nub of why I’m writing to you Mr President. Richard Goldstone was one of those comfortable, white judges who presided over the pernicious practices of apartheid; no matter what the revisionists of South African history might say, all of whom are like their fellow Nazis in post war Germany that suddenly and conveniently became afflicted with mass amnesia, pretending that they didn’t know what was going on right under their noses, and let’s face facts South Africa’s Jews are no different from the rest of them. Yes, some Jews inside South Africa did courageously fight against apartheid and paid the ultimate price for doing so; Ruth First was one such person murdered by BOSS in neighbouring Mozambique where she’d gone to help black refugees there. Her husband Jo Slovo was also relentlessly targeted and was nearly killed by the apartheid regime but thankfully survived to see a democratic South Africa emerge in his life time and was made a minister in the post apartheid government of South Africa. Sadly he has passed away of cancer but the entire nation of South Africa led by its black majority which considers all South Africans as equals gave him a hero’s farewell which he richly deserved and along with people like myself mourn his passing. Where was Zionist Richard Goldstein? To use a military term he was AWOL; and very much defending the apartheid status quo. Nothing has changed with this man.
But we remember all too well those like Percy Yutar who the Boers cynically used as a Jew to prosecute Nelson Mandela and the enthusiasm with which he carried out his task. The Boers and their British counterparts had no love for the Jews all of whom were essentially refugees or the descendants of refugees fleeing over 200 years of pogroms against them right across Europe and including Russia where it all started and up to World War II, but recognizing that as whites they were very much in the minority in South Africa and hadn’t been able to do what their kith and kin had managed to do in Australia against the hapless Aborigines, or in the United States and Canada against the Native Americans and consequently there would always be a black majority in South Africa – hence the gerrymandering process of Bantustans pretending that the Blacks in South Africa were one people but several nations, no such Bantustans for the different cultural and linguistic Europeans though that had found their way to South Africa - the Boers and their complicit British colonialists were quite keen to have as many white men, women and children emigrate there to boost their numbers and although deep in their hearts they would have preferred they weren’t Jews, at least these Jews were white, so they held their noses, swallowed hard and allowed them in.
Nevertheless the Jews in South Africa despite their ordeal in Europe at the hands of their fellow whites who were Christians still by and large empathized with them in a manner that they weren’t prepared to or would they ever have allowed themselves to with their host country’s majority and indigenous black population and even more ironical they self-servingly and avariciously supported apartheid, a move that quickly benefited them enormously financially, making South African Jews even in 2011 the richest Jews anywhere on earth; as many of them got involved in South Africa’s diamond industry and with their expertise in this field came to dominate that industry whose HQ after the fall of apartheid in South Africa they moved to Israel which tells its own racist story, as Israel has no diamond mines.
Like many of his white, Jewish South African compatriots several of whom moved to Israel after the collapse of apartheid Richard Goldstone is an ardent Zionist and no different from all the others that infest Palestine now largely renamed Israel. Goldstone’s own daughter and other close family members have moved from South Africa to Israel where they currently live and are Israeli citizens, and for the UN to have so crassly given him the task of investigating Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity by this racist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid and Zionist entity which has been implanted against the wishes of the indigenous Palestinians in their midst would have been similar to asking well known Nazis to preside over the Nuremburg Trials. Richard Goldstone was a United States and UK backed plant with complicit support for this move rendered by the EU; so what he’s done and the inconceivable shenanigans which are going on in the US Congress to have the report that carries his name rescinded comes as no surprise to me. It was planned that way.
But that’s not my worry. What concerns me is that this racist, Zionist Jew is being widely reported as a South African judge even though his sympathies obviously lie elsewhere and accordingly that deeply offends me and other anti-apartheid activists as well tarnishes with its attendant great harm to the positive image of post apartheid South Africa, and for a diversity of obvious reasons, among it true friends. South Africa which has been charitable, humane, magnanimous and civilized in victory in a way that no white country is capable of must consequently act and act decisively by severing all links with its reprehensible past; and that means among other things stripping Richard Goldstone of his South African citizenship even though he values his Israeli one much more, and additionally rescinding his residential rights to live and work in South Africa, making it abundantly and unequivocally clear to the whole world why this is being done.
You and the South African parliament must also be courageous enough to insist and immediately legislate to this effect that the operations connected with South Africa’s diamond industry and the companies involved in these stay in South Africa and it won’t be business as usual; and if such companies don’t care to conform with the new regime then let them know in no uncertain terms that they’ll be summarily thrown out of the country. I don’t know and neither do you of a single major industry in the so-called developed world whose headquarters isn’t there. Would Mercedes Benz move its HQ to India; British Aerospace to Barbados, or Boeing or Airbus to South Africa? I don’t think so; besides there’s national legislation in all of these countries to prevent key industries relocating elsewhere or foreigners, particularly non-whites, from gaining control of key, strategic companies and services in these countries.
South Africa as indeed all other African countries must do the same and stop being the copious supplier of raw materials from cocoa to diamonds which are shipped abroad, turned into valuable commodities there that these African countries can produce but the west would then prohibit them entering their markets, yet have no scruples whatever of converting these commodities which they buy for a pittance from these African countries, including yours, and then adding insult to injury sell them back to you at exorbitant prices. This must stop immediately, and you must do what the west does with its own products; have your own productions done at home in Africa, create your own markets and determine your own price for your goods, not leave that too to places like Tel Aviv as is the case with your diamond industry or the stock markets of Europe and the USA as is the case with all African products. You are a sovereign independent country; please act that way!
Finally Sir, I’d like to see a full public recognition and state rehabilitation of Winnie Mandela and a statue erected to honour and show our collective gratitude to this extraordinary Lady, everything she’s stood for, represents, and has done to help free South Africa from the bondage of apartheid and servitude; and you Mr President are more than most ideally equipped to do this. Stop letting the west and whites determine who Blacks should venerate and who they shouldn’t. Amandla; and God bless South Africa!
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