Nelson Mandela was a Communist.  Although most people think that is not important, it is the very essence of who he was.  He never denounced Communism.  He never apologized for embracing Communism.  He never exposed the soul-destroying nature of Communism.  In this Mandela was like Mugabe, the horrific Marxist leader of Zimbabwe, though he was not grossly evil like Mugabe.

Was Mandela a Communist because he needed Communism to end the Afrikaner white rule of South Africa?  No.  Communism was not needed to fight the very real racist legacy of European colonialism.

In the former British colony of Rhodesia, Bishop Muzorewa in 1979 was elected prime minister of Zimbabwe, and this black Methodist clergyman was accepted by whites and blacks.  In 1980, the Communist Mugabe, using extreme violence and intimidation, forced new elections, which he won, and Mugabe, the butcher, has been in power for the last thirty-three years.

Bishop Muzorewa represented all that we could have wanted in a black political leader.  He visited Israel in 1983 and urged Zimbabwe to establish diplomatic relations with that nation.  Muzorewa went on a hunger strike when Mugabe began driving out all political opposition.  

Communism is also one of the worst things to ever happen to Africa, and as Muzorewa showed, it was utterly unnecessary to black liberation.  Indeed, the vast majority of the victims of black African Communist thugs have been their black non-Communist opponents, as tormented nations like Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique have shown.  

What is even more perverse about the Communism of Mandela is that the National Party of the Dutch Afrikaners, the champion of racism and bigotry against the English white minority and their Union Party, were enthusiastic Bolsheviks.  As I relate in my book, Sinisterism, which ties all the "nasty little isms," as Orwell so well put it, into the same clear group, the white supremacist Afrikaners supported Bolshevism from the beginning.   

General James B.M. Hertzog, the leader of the Nationalist Party, said in a November 1919 Pretoria address that he "warmly commended Bolshevism to the public.  I say that Bolshevism is the will of the people to be free.  Why do people want to oppress and kill Bolshevism?  Because national freedom means death to capitalism and imperialism.  Do not let us be afraid of Bolshevism.  The idea itself is excellent." 

His deputy, Dr. Daniel F. Malan, on January 23, 1920, at Vryburg, said: "The Bolsheviks stand for freedom, just like the Nationalist Party."  In 1922, the Nationalist Party formed a "United Front" with the Communist Party and the Labour Party.  At the Nationalist Party Congress in 1923, which confirmed a pact between the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party, Malan again proclaimed the two to be "squarely opposed to capitalistic and monopolistic domination and exploitation of the people."

Dr. Walter Williams wrote an excellent book in 1989, South Africa's War Against Capitalism, which amply demonstrates that the white Afrikaner rulers of that nation had largely accepted the principles of radical socialism.  Communism, which Mandela embraced, was compatible with the hateful white supremacy of the Afrikaners -- and, although little noted, Communism has always found racial bigotry appealing as well.

Marx himself was anti-Semitic and anti-black, as Max Eastman, once a leading American Communist who left that monstrous secular religion, related: "He [Marx] could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro; describing his fellow socialist Lassalle, Marx wrote:  it is perfectly obvious from the shape of his head and the way his hair grows that he is descended from the Negroes who joined Moses on the journey out of Egypt, unless perhaps his mother or grandmother had relations with a n-----."

The Great Russian majority which dominated the Soviet Union exterminated millions of minorities, turned Kazakhstan into a vast radioactive landfill, and instituted anti-Semitism that left a whole class of Jews, "Refusniks," demanding the right to leave and settle in Israel.  Communist China is just as bad, as Tibetans and Uyghurs can relate.

Communism is the worst faith ever to seize the hearts of men.  The failure of de-Communization after the fall of the Soviet Empire, the crushing of the student uprising at Tiananmen Square, and the overwhelming weight of evidence about the millions murdered by Communists -- 100 million is a conservative estimate these days, much worse than even the Holocaust -- are the salient moral crimes of our times.

Nelson Mandela may well be thought of as a "Good Communist," and perhaps he is, but that is no better than calling Albert Speer a "Good Nazi."  Both terms are truly oxymorons.