South African Communists’ Friends in High Places
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

The tragedy unfolding in South Africa as genocide and communism march onward should not be surprising. Such events may shock Americans who have relied on the establishment press for information, but that the once-prosperous nation would eventually sink to this point was easy to foresee even before the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP) alliance regime began to take over. The decades-old communist domination of the ANC was widely documented long before it came to power.

ANC leader and new South Africa’s first president Nelson Mandela was not persecuted for his “political” beliefs, the widely accepted myths about Mandela notwithstanding. He was actually put in jail for admitting that he planned sabotage to violently bring down the government and crush South Africa under communist rule. It was hardly a secret, though the Western establishment did its best to conceal the facts from the world.

“We communist party members are the most advanced revolutionaries in modern history,” Mandela proclaimed in a document later used when he was prosecuted for sabotage and treason. “The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.” In the 1980s, Mandela was repeatedly offered the opportunity to get out of prison if he would just renounce violence. He refused.

Meanwhile, the communist revolutionary’s wife at the time, Winnie Mandela, became notorious for endorsing brutal mob executions where tires filled with gasoline were placed around the victims’ necks and set ablaze — a savage tactic used by the predominantly black ANC against pro-government blacks before the new regime took power. The ghastly spectacle, known as “necklacing,” was aimed at punishing ANC opponents and dissuading other blacks from standing against it. “Together, hand-in-hand with our sticks of matches, with our necklaces we shall liberate this country,” Winnie declared.

The ANC, meanwhile, was listed as a terrorist group as late as 1988 by the U.S. Congress, which had previously documented its control by communist forces. “No major decision could be taken by the ANC without the concurrence and approval of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party,” former ANC and SACP leader Bartholomew Hlapane testified before the U.S. Congress. Less than a year later, he and his wife were executed by an assassin using a Soviet-made AK-47.

Brought to Power

Despite what was already known about the ANC and the SACP, the ruling regime in South Africa has had friends in high places for decades — since long before it came to power, actually. Among the communist powers supporting the alliance were the regimes ruling the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. Those forces and others, by helping to arm and train Marxist terrorist groups and front organizations, provided key “pressure from below” to force the South African government’s surrender.

When he was in the South African military decades ago, Andre Vandenberg, who now lives in the United States, learned a lot about the communist subversion behind the scenes. “We would attack a base and we would get ANC members, but when you get past that line of defense, you get into the Russians, East Germans, and Cubans,” he told The New American. When probed further, Vandenberg walked away and returned with binoculars. “These are binoculars I took off an East German,” he explained, pointing to the German writing. They were made in the East German city of Jena.

Communist powers alone, however, were not enough to bring the ANC and SACP to power. “All of the AK-47s, mortars, bombs, Soviet advisers, terrorist training camps, assassinations, demonstrations, and biased broadcasts of these revolutionists combined could not, of themselves, have brought about the transformation in South Africa of a vicious terrorist group and its titular head from the status of political outlaws to that of global cult heroes and de facto heads of state,” The New American’s William F. Jasper observed in a 1994 article entitled “Silk Tie Revolutionaries.”

To gain support for their cause, the ANC-communist axis exploited the issue of “apartheid,” which South Africa had adopted in 1948. Essentially, the idea behind apartheid, or “separate development,” was to allow the various “nations” in South Africa — European-descent Afrikaners, for example, and the 10 major African tribal groups such as the Zulu and the Venda — to develop their own institutions and eventually become sovereign nations. By the early 1980s, four African tribal groups had already achieved full sovereignty, with the others making progress.

Despite flaws and difficulties, apartheid was supported by many of South Africa’s ethnic and tribal groups, including, obviously, the Afrikaners (whites of mainly Dutch descent who lived in South Africa), who, after a devastating war against the British Empire, had a terrible but well-founded fear of total annihilation if they ever surrendered control over their own destiny. However, under the guise of fighting against “racist” apartheid, the bad elements of which were already being reformed, virtually the whole world joined forces against the South African government and the African tribes that supported it.

Aside from the openly communist powers, key to the ANC takeover were the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, the NAACP, and the Congressional Black Caucus. The international media and Hollywood, of course, helped immensely as well. Even more important, though, was the support provided by the highest echelons of the Western establishment — think David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. Both men played a key role in bringing the South African government to its knees in the face of Marxist terror so the communist takeover could proceed.

In 1993, for example, banker and Council on Foreign Relations boss David Rockefeller hosted a dinner to honor Nelson Mandela and raise money for the ANC’s election. Then-ANC “Foreign Secretary” Thabo Mbeki, another communist who would later become president of South Africa, celebrated Rockefeller as a longtime friend who had “backed the ANC financially for more than a decade.”

Just before the elections that brought the ANC-SACP alliance to power, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a team of “mediators” arrived in South Africa to “confer the Insiders’ benediction on Mandela and the ANC,” Jasper noted in his article. Prior to helping crush South Africa, Kissinger, one of the most fervent advocates of a “New World Order,” also helped destroy the anti-communist Rhodesian government by, among other tactics, isolating it from allies like the South African government. His work in Rhodesia paved the way for Marxist despot Robert Mugabe to enslave what became known as Zimbabwe. The nation is now starving to death.

From at least the 1950s onward, the U.S. government and other Western powers were frantically shoveling taxpayer money into communist groups in South Africa to install the ANC — again, applying pressure from below by fomenting unrest and empowering Marxist terrorists. The violent ANC offshoot known as the Pan Africanist Congress, for example, was actually organ­ized at the Johannesburg office of the U.S. Information Service in 1959.

According to a study by the Rand Afrikaans University’s Institute for American Studies, the Reagan State Department alone showered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on pro-Soviet and pro-ANC groups in South Africa. The U.S. government directly contributed millions to specific Marxist terrorist groups in the region, many of which, like the ANC, had been formally designated as terror organizations. The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), for example, received about $4 million from American taxpayers between 1975 and 1978, according to a report by the South African Foreign Ministry. Western governments together provided some $80 million during that period.

The “pressure from above,” meanwhile, came from the international banking and corporate elite in the West, as well as its political front groups and governments. Among other sources, the Council on Foreign Relations and its international affiliates helped lead the charge, with the CFR proudly publicizing its 1990 visit by Mandela. Numerous other top figures in the ANC and the SACP were similarly honored and promoted by the CFR and its allies around the world.

Among the CFR operatives who put the cabal’s agenda for South Africa into effect were, of course, Kissinger, as well as numerous other top U.S. government officials. Multiple administrations from Carter to Clinton were also involved. President Reagan, despite vetoing a sanctions bill over disagreement with the “means,” declared a “national emergency” to “deal with” the alleged “extraordinary threat” posed by the pro-U.S. South African government.

At the same time, other Western governments were piling on the pressure as well, imposing brutal sanctions and painting the South African government — which likely had the best human-rights record on the continent despite oppressive race-based laws that were being reformed — as a demon to be eliminated. Communist regimes were doing the same thing. The time-tested “pincers” strategy ultimately prevailed.

In the face of a full-fledged assault by both the “Free World” and the world’s communist tyrants, the South African government capitulated. The ANC and the communists — virtually inseparable from each other, as even top ANC leaders admit — took power. Just as unbiased analysts warned, South Africa — once one of the most prosperous nations in the world for people of all colors — began marching full-speed down the bloody road to slavery and genocide.

Still Supported

Today, the ruling cabal in South Africa still has overwhelming support from what remains of the “Free World” and the totalitarian regimes enslaving the rest of it. Despite the genocide and growing unrest, socialist and communist-minded political parties from around the world gathered in Cape Town for the 24th Congress of the Socialist International in late August, openly associating with and celebrating a regime that is under fire for facilitating and encouraging genocide.

The immensely powerful coalition consists of numerous ruling political parties, including many from the developed world. In Cape Town, they concluded by adopting resolutions demanding more money from Western taxpayers, bigger and more powerful government at all levels, and, unsurprisingly, more socialism in the world. It should all be administered by a planetary socialist regime, the cabal declared.

“The Socialist International is now stronger than ever before,” the group boasted after the congress, sometimes referring to members as “comrades.” The gathering featured representatives from over 100 socialist and communist-minded political parties all over the world, ranging from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) to European social democrats and Latin American statist extremists.

South African President Jacob Zuma, the communist ANC chief who hosted the Congress and now sings songs calling for genocide against whites, was elected as “vice president” on the “Presidium” of the socialist alliance. His deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, told delegates there was a “global crisis of capitalism and imperialism.”

Zuma, meanwhile, blasted the alleged “fundamental contradictions in the capitalist system,” which he said needed to be addressed with “radical” so-called solutions. “We should emerge with radical positions and a radical agenda,” added the controversial leader, who in addition to being an admitted member of the Communist Party has in the past been officially charged with corruption and even rape. Zuma’s defense in the rape trial was that the victim was “clearly aroused,” as evidenced by her “quite short” kanga. “In the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready,” Zuma said.

During a speech at the socialist confab, Zuma said it was an honor to host the summit “bringing together progressive forces from around the world,” Socialist International reported. The polygamist ruler said the socialist alliance should respond to “inequality” and other problems — many, of course, caused by socialistic policies — with a “New Internationalism” and a “New Culture of Solidarity,” two main themes of the 24th Congress. He almost certainly did not sing about killing the Boers (the white farmers), as he does at ANC gatherings, but the communist message came through loud and clear.

The Socialist Congress also heaped adoration on the scandal-plagued United Nations. Former South African foreign minister and newly elected chairperson of the African Union Commission, Zuma’s ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, for example, referred to the UN as “the greatest collective achievement of human kind” during her keynote speech. She spoke of the “importance of multilateralism,” claiming that “humanity” could find “solutions to common problems” if only the world’s largely totalitarian regimes would just “cooperate more.”

Also featured at the summit were speeches by representatives of the brutal communist dictatorship ruling mainland China and an assortment of other totalitarian regimes. “Vice-Minister of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee” Liu Jieyi, for example, lectured assembled attendees on the “social democratic response to the financial crisis.” The communist regime ruling China has become increasingly influential throughout the whole continent, but especially in the new South Africa.

Delegates, meanwhile, celebrated the barbaric Chinese dictatorship’s growing influence on the world stage as part of the socialist-minded BRICS alliance — the socialist and communist rulers of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The alliance has repeatedly blasted the United States while calling for global governance and a new world currency.

Even while the ANC regime was celebrating world socialism with some of the most oppressive dictatorships on the planet, the U.S. government was propping it all up. The government of South Africa is now one of the top 10 recipients of American foreign aid worldwide, with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing to the ANC-SACP regime since 1994. Well over $500 million in foreign assistance was handed out in 2009 just through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Despite the fact that the South African government has been caught selling military equipment to the brutal Marxist despot ruling Zimbabwe, Secretary of State Hil­lary Clinton hoped to increase the amount of American taxpayer dollars buying arms for the ANC regime. The U.S. government has been training its military officers, too.

“America will stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way,” Clinton said during an official visit to South Africa in August, seemingly oblivious to the twisted irony. Between dancing and lavishing praises on the ANC, the Secretary of State also found time to pledge billions more U.S. tax dollars to prop up the regime.

But the U.S. government is not alone in the West when it comes to celebrating South Africa’s ruling cabal amid genocide. In September, the European Union held a “summit” with the South African regime to celebrate the increasingly close bonds between the two entities — and to continue pushing for “global governance” while showering European taxpayers’ money on the ANC.

“This 5th EU-South Africa Summit will be a new milestone in our relationship with a key EU partner in Africa and on the global stage,” said European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, a former Maoist revolutionary who is now pushing to create what he called a “federation” in Europe. “Our bilateral cooperation is increasing in breadth and depth.”

Friends to the End

Considering the key role played by Western governments and elites in creating South Africa’s current problems — not to mention perpetuating them with never-ending foreign aid and support — it is hardly surprising that most of the world remains unaware of the nation’s plight. What occurred in Zimbabwe, or at least a general outline of it, is now well known. Mugabe’s brutality and mass murder have become impossible to conceal.

Fears that the same fate awaits South Africa, a nation rich with key minerals, are growing fast — but largely in the shadows. Activists and exiles say they are worried that if the world does not wake up soon, the looming genocide and total communist takeover of the nation may remain largely hidden, too.

With Western governments and the establishment continuing to aid and abet the ANC-SACP regime and its crimes, the final destruction of South Africa and the Afrikaner people may come sooner than anyone realizes. Whether the West will speak out before or even after catastrophe strikes, however, remains to be seen.

— Photo of Nelson Mandela with South African Communist Party head Joe Slovo: AP Images