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Media Blackout on Mandela’s Criticism of the US, Praises of Cuba and Libya
By Jay Janson
Global Research, December 16, 2013
OpEdNews 15 December 2013
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/media-blackout-on-mandelas-criticism-of-the-us-praises-of-cuba-and-libya/5361725

In the same way that the war investing industry owned corporate conglomerate media cartel has for forty-four years blacked out all mention of Martin Luther King Jr.’ condemnation of US atrocity wars and covert genocide on three continents in maintenance of unjust predatory investments, does this criminal media black out Nelson Mandela’s denunciation of US genocidal atrocities and his love and appreciation of Fidel Castro for sending Cubans to successfully fight against murderous racist military in southern Africa and for Gadaffi’s aid and support of the ANC fighting Apartheid.

There was a crack in the ten year suppression of Mandela’s strong words for the US back in 2003:

“Mandela In Furious Warning Over Iraq War” By Mark Ellis, Foreign Editor Daily Mirror UK, 1-31-2003
http://rense.com/general34/mandelacondemnsUS.htm

“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America……they don’t care for human beings.” Nelson Mandela said, speaking at the International Women’s Forum.

“What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. Why does the US behave so arrogantly? Their friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction. But because it’s their ally they won’t ask the UN to get rid of them.”

FURIOUS. Nelson Mandela yesterday charged President Bush with risking a holocaust for the sake of Iraqi oil.

Mr Mandela declared: “It is a tragedy what Bush is doing in Iraq. All he wants is Iraqi oil. We must expose this as much as possible. He is making the greatest mistake of his life by trying to cause carnage.”

He was equally damning about Tony Blair, sneering: “He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer Prime Minister of Britain.”

The Nobel prize winner and former South African president also said Bush “cannot think properly”, accused the US and Britain of undermining the UN and suggested they were racist.

He told a conference in Johannesburg: “What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.

Mr Mandela suggested the two leaders would not be treating the UN with such contempt if the organization had a white leader.

He said: ”Both Bush and Tony Blair are undermining an idea (the UN) sponsored by their predecessors.

“Is this because the Secretary General (Kofi Annan, from Ghana) is now a black man? They never did that when Secretary Generals were white…

The world statesman went on to launch a withering attack on America’s human rights record.

Referring to the US wartime atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagaski, he said: “Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are they now to pretend they’re the policeman of the world?

Mandela said U.S. President George W. Bush covets the oil in Iraq.  “What Bush wants is to get hold of that oil.”

He went on to appeal to the American people to vote Mr Bush out of office and protest at his policies.

Receiving applause for his comments, Mandela said Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are “undermining” past work of the United Nations.

“They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man?” said Mandela, referring to Kofi Annan, who is from Ghana.

Nobel Peace Laureate Mandela, 84, has spoken out many times against Bush’s stance, and South Africa’s close ties with Libya and Cuba irked Washington during Mandela’s presidency.”

After being released from prison in 1990, one of the first things Nelson Mandela did was visit Cuba to express his admiration and respect for Cuban leader Fidel Castro. “You trained our people, gave us resources, helped so many of our soldiers, our doctors, said Mandela, embracing Fidel in Havana.
[click here

Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela developed such a close relationship that it’s impossible to forget when speaking about the African leader in Latin America. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 inspired a young Mandela. Later in life, Mandela credited Cuba’s military support to Angola in the 1970s and 1980s with playing a role in debilitating South Africa’s government enough to result in the legalization of his party, the African National Congress, in 1990.

Libya provided funding and support to South African liberation movements as well as military training to ANC combatants. After the unbanning of the ANC, then ANC leader Nelson Mandela visited Gaddafi in Libya in May 1990 to thank him for Libya’s assistance.

This relationship was highlighted by official visits to Libya by former President Mandela. In 1994 shortly after being elected president and again in October 1997. In June 2002 then President Mbeki led a South African delegation to Libya to discuss issues ranging from closer economic integration and bilateral trade to the launch of the African Union in Durban later that year.

In 1994 Gaddafi was invited to attend then President Nelson Mandela’s swearing in ceremony. Responding to Western criticism of the new ANC government’s close relationship with the Gaddafi regime Mandela stated, “Those who feel irritated by our friendship with President Gaddafi can go jump in the pool.” [“Huff and puff”. The Economist. Sep 3 2011]   South Africa bestowed the Order of Good Hope, one of its highest honors, on Gaddafi in 1997.

The war investment industry seeks to keep Americans in childlike ignorance, as the dumbest misinformed population majority of any nation on earth. The entire media with greatest fanfare and pronouncements of the same adulation Nelson Mandela is held within majority mankind, which remains the target of plunder by the same US government that once made sure that Mandela stayed in prison.

In 1986, Nelson Mandela –Mandela was serving the 23rd year of what would ultimately be a 27-year prison sentence, but
“Dick Cheney Didn’t Regret His Vote Against Freeing Nelson Mandela, Maintained He Was A ‘Terrorist'”
[The Huffington Post, 12/05/2013

All the above quoted Nelson Mandela severe denunciations of the United States have surfaced plentifully on Internet magazines and newsletters since Mandela’s passing. But so far the Internet’s publishing Mandela’s anti-US remarks probably has made but a small dent in the blackout of corporate media, which blankets the nation and to an increasing degree the planet.

Mandela’s “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.. they don’t care for human beings.” will reach relatively few Americans just as the outcry of Martin Luther King Jr.’ “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government…  for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent; “see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.”  remain relatively unknown on Main Street USA.

However, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Nothing is permanent except change.”

With information sharing technology racing forward, cell phone personal instantaneous contact with nearly anywhere in the world and computers providing at a touch documentation on past events, there is going to be a hard awakening for masses of Americans made simple minded about the wars King and Mandela condemned. A hard rain is going to fall when the many millions of survivors of US military’s police actions in dozens of poor nations sue for compensation for wrongful death, injury, destruction of property and theft of natural resources.

At Nuremberg US Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson thought to point out that the laws concerning genocide and crimes against peace were not written as applying only to Nazi Germany, but to all nations. As one example of what can be expected in time, in the fall of 1966, General Telford Taylor, who was Counsel for the Prosecution at Nuremberg,  stunned a CBS interviewer with his stating that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution. [Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 recently wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008]

With every charge of ‘crimes against humanity’ the US and its European allies level at uncooperative leaders of African nations in special courts put together by these industrialized former colonial powers (presently neo-colonial powers), eye brows are raised in incredulity, and more and more wonder when the logical will happen once there be a shift in power toward the majority mankind that has been attacked, robbed and exploited for so long.

When this belated prosecution happens, important personages of Western media will most probably not escape the same scrutiny that brought indictments, trial, sentencing and punishment of five Nazi media personalities.

Take action — click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:

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http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer. He has lived and worked on all continents and his articles were published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US. He now resides in NYC.
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