U.S. Flags Lowered For Mandela, A Rare Honor For Foreign Leaders

After the death of Nelson Mandela, President Obama ordered that U.S. flags on government buildings be flown at half-staff until Monday evening — a symbolic gesture of a nation in mourning.

It's a tradition observed by countries around the world, one that began as early as the 17^th century. Mental Floss reports:

Some scholars say this allows the "invisible flag of Death" to fly at the top of the pole.

In the U.S., President Dwight Eisenhower codified a set of rules in 1954 for when the flag must be flown at half-staff. (And yes, the U.S. calls it "half-staff," not "half-mast." You can use the term "half-mast" if you're in Canada or other locales or if you're in mourning on a boat.) They're largely formulaic: The death of a president merits 30 days; a vice-president, 10; a congressman, one to two.

The rules also allow the president to decide other periods of mourning when the half-staff is warranted. Most recently, Obama ordered the lowering of the flag to honor the victims of the Washington Navy Yard shooting and for the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

But it's uncommon for the U.S. flag to be lowered in honor of foreign leaders' deaths. Obama issued a statement of mourning earlier this year after the death of Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, but he didn't order the lowering of the American flag. In fact, the last foreign dignitary to be memorialized with the flag was Pope John Paul II in 2005.

Flags are also flying at half-mast in Mandela's honor in France, Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Bermuda, Kenya and, of course, South Africa.

“Nelson Mandela’s Trial has been properly conducted. The judge has been scrupulously fair.”

By Humberto Fontova, on December 5, 2013
BIO-MANDELA-COOK

From NPR:

His (Nelson Mandela’s) cell became a private home with a swimming pool, complete with white servants. In this picture Nelson Mandela chats with his former chef Jack Swart outside the house he spent the last years of imprisonment....Upon his release from the hospital Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison...where he had a secluded cottage with the pool. When he arrived, he was greeted by Coetsee, the justice minister, bearing a case of wine...”The cottage did in fact give me the illusion of freedom,” Mandela wrote. “I could go to sleep and wake up as I pleased, swim whenever I wanted, eat when I was hungry...It was altogether pleasant, but I never forgot that it was a gilded cage,” Mandela said of his final prison.”

This post’s title comes from Anthony Sampson, one of the dozens of international observers at Nelson Mandela’s trial for terrorism in 1964.

South Africa’s apartheid regime was no model of liberty. But even its most violent enemies enjoyed a bona fide day in court under a judge who was not beholden to a dictator for his job (or his life.) When Nelson Mandela was convicted of “193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963, including the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives, including 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate,” his trial had observers from around the free world. “The trial has been properly conducted,” wrote Anthony Sampson, correspondent for the liberal London Observer. “The judge, Mr Justice Quartus de Wet, has been scrupulously fair.” Sampson admitted this though his own sympathies veered strongly towards Mandela. (Indeed, Sampson went on to write Nelson Mandela’s authorized biography.)

In sharp contrast, when Ruby Hart Phillips, the Havana correspondent for the flamingly Castrophile New York Times, attended a mass-trial of accused Castro-regime enemies, she gaped in horror. “The defense attorney made absolutely no defense, instead he apologized to the court for defending the prisoners,” she wrote in February 1959. “The whole procedure was sickening.” The defendants were all murdered by firing squad the following dawn.

In 1961 a Castro regime prosecutor named Idelfonso Canales explained Cuba’s new system to a stupefied “defendant,” named Rivero Caro who was himself a practicing lawyer in pre-Castro Cuba. “Forget your lawyer mentality,” laughed Canales. “What you say doesn’t matter. What proof you provide doesn’t matter, even what the prosecuting attorney says doesn’t mater. The only thing that matters is what the G-2 (military police) says!”

A reminder:

According to Anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime, (all after trials similar to the one described above by Anthony Sampson.) Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million. Here’s what Mandela’s “jail cell” looked like towards the end of his sentence.

According to the Human Rights group, Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps (many after trails like the one described by R.H Phillips above, others with none whatsoever. ) At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses (in torture chambers and forced-labor camps designed by Stalin’s disciples, not like Mandela’s as seen above.) This was out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.

So who did the wold embargo for “injustice?” and “human-rights abuses?”

Mandela’s Castrophilia was simple loyalty to someone who had helped out his terrorist group when it most needed help. Actually, I can’t get too worked up over Mandela’s Castrophilia. Loyalty is (usually) a noble human quality, and he owed Castro big-time.

But how about the Castrophilia of the hundreds of other politicians and world “leaders” (many in the U.S.: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, etc., etc.)???

There’s something really perverse there.

MANDELA THE MYTH

www.sarahmaidofalbion.blogspot.com

http://www.spainvia.com/sarahmandela.htm

INTRODUCTION.

Sarah, the author of this factual article (written just before the 90th birthday party of this media celebrity), is an Englishwoman endowed with an incisive and razor-sharp understanding of South Africa ‘s recent history as I do having lived there for 24 years. Unlike so many millions of brain-washed lemmings in the UK, she sees right through the media-contrived smoke & mirrors, lies and myths as propounded by the MSM. (Mass Media.) Thanks to Sarah for the OK to reproduce this here. It says it all.

It is often said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, however, this usually means that the other man has been less than fastidious in his choice of hero, or that the ‘freedom fighter’ in question was on the crowd pleasing side. On the 27th of June, 2008 London’s Hyde Park played host to a concert in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday and it received wall to wall coverage by a star struck and worshipping media, who will continue to laud Mandela as one of the greatest, or indeed the greatest, heroes of our time.

The beaming old man will appeared on stage in one of his trademark multi-coloured shirts and cheerily acknowledge the cheers of the adoring crowd, most of whom have been taught to believe in his sainthood since their first days in primary school, which, for many of them, will have occurred around the same time their hero walked free from Robben Island.

The unquestioning belief in Mandela’s universally admired saintliness will again be displayed in the press and by the unending line of politicians and dignitaries who will queue up to genuflect before him and sing his praises. It is a brave politician or journalist who would dare to question the godliness of this legend and consummate showman, and hence no such questions will be raised, nor will his much vaunted ‘achievements’ be subjected to any objective scrutiny.

No matter how many speeches are given or how many news articles are written, it is safe to bet that the full truth about Mandela will not be told except by those who know and care about history being recorded factually.

In fact the truth about Mandela is so hidden in mythology and misinformation that most know nothing about him prior to Robben island, and those who do tend to exercise a form of self censorship, designed to bolster the myth whilst consigning uncomfortable facts into the mists of history.

For most people all they know about Mandela, prior to his release in 1990, was that he had spent 27 years in prison and was considered by many on the left at the time (and almost everyone now) to be a political prisoner. However, Mandela was no Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi, he was not an innocent, democratically elected leader, imprisoned by an authoritarian government.

Mandela was the terrorist leader of a violent terrorist organisation, the ANC (African National Congress) which was responsible for many thousands of, mostly black, deaths. The ANC’s blood spattered history is frequently ignored, but reminders occasionally pop up in the most embarrassing places, indeed as recently as this month the names of Nelson Mandela and most of the ANC remained on the US government’s terrorist watch list along with al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers. Of course the forces of political correctness are rushing to amend that embarrassing reminder from the past. However, Mandela’s name was not on that list by mistake, he was there because of his MURDEROUS PAST.

Before I am accused of calumny, it should be noted that Mandela does not seek to hide his past, in his autobiography ‘the long walk to Freedom’ he casually admits ‘signing off’ the 1983 Church Street bombing carried out by the ANC and killing 19 innocent people whilst injuring another 200.

It is true that Mandela approved that massacre and other ANC killings from his prison cell, and there is no evidence that he personally killed anyone but the same could be said about Stalin or Hitler, and the violent history of the ANC, the organisation he led is not in question.

According to the Human Rights Commission it is estimated that during the Apartheid period some 21,000 people were killed, however both the UN Crimes against Humanity commission and South Africa’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission are in agreement that in those 43 years the South African Security forces killed a total of 518 people.
The rest, (some 92%) were accounted for by Africans killing Africans, many by means of the notorious and gruesome practice of necklacing whereby a car tyre full of petrol is placed around a victim’s neck and set alight.

This particularly cruel form of execution was frequently carried out at the behest of the ANC with the enthusiastic support of Mandela’s demonic wife Winnie.

The brutal reappearance of the deadly necklace in recent weeks is something I shall reluctantly focus upon later.
Given that so much blood was on the hands of his party, and, as such, the newly appointed government, some may conclude that those who praised Mandela’s mercy and forgiveness, when the Truth and Reconciliation tribunal set up after he came to power, to look into the Apartheid years, did not include a provision for sanctions, were being deliberately naive.

Such naivety is not uncommon when it comes to the adoring reporting of Nelson Mandela, and neither is the great leader himself rarely shy of playing up his image of fatherly elder statesman and multi-purpose paragon.

However, in truth, the ANC’s conscious decision to reject a policy of non-violence, such as that chosen by Gandhi, in their struggle against the white government, had left them, and by extension, their leader, with at least as much blood on their hands as their one time oppressors, and this fact alone prevented them from enacting the revenge which might otherwise have been the case.

As the first post Apartheid president of South Africa it would, be unfair if not ludicrous to judge Mandela entirely on the basis of events before he came to power, and in any event there is many a respected world leader or influential statesman with a blood stained past so in the next part I shall examine Nelson Mandela’s achievements, and the events which have occurred in South Africa in the 14 short years since he took power in following the post Apartheid election in 1994.

MANDELA - THE LEGEND AND THE LEGACY PART 2, BY SARAH, MAID OF ALBION.

In the second of two articles examining the life of Nelson Mandela, in advance of Friday’s concert in Hyde Park celebrating the living legend’s 90th birthday, I shall look at his legacy and the new South Africa which he created after coming to power on a surge of worldwide optimism and hope in 1994, when, following the end of Apartheid, he and his followers promised a new dawn for what became termed the Rainbow Nation.

Today South Africa has the reputation of being one of the most dangerous and crime ridden nations on Earth which is not actively at War. In 2001, only seven years after the end of Apartheid, whilst the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with 5,6 murders per 100,000 population was declared the ‘murder capitol of Europe’, Johannesburg, with 61.2 murders per 100,00 population and remains the world’s top murder city.

In South Africa as a whole, the murder rate is seven times that of America, in terms of rape the rate is ten times as high and includes the ugly phenomenon of child rape, one of the few activities in which South Africa is now a world leader. If you don’t believe me, you can read what Oprah Winfrey has to say about it here.

All other forms of violent crime are out of control, and Johannesburg is among the top world cities for muggings and violent assault, a fact seldom mentioned in connection with the FIFA Soccer 2010 World Cup which is scheduled to be hosted in South Africa.

As always with black violence the primary victims are their fellow blacks, however, the rape, murder and violent assault of whites is a daily event, and there is more .....

As with the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean Matabeleland massacres, news of which the BBC, together with much of the world media suppressed for twenty years to protect their one time hero, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, another secret genocide is being ignored by the world media, the genocide of white Boer farmers, thousands of whom have been horribly tortured to death in their homes since the end of Apartheid. Anyone who clicks on this link should we warned that it includes some very gruesome images as the savagery of these attacks belie the authorities attempts to dismiss them as nothing more than a ‘crime wave’.

Given that it is now all but illegal in South Africa to report the race of either victim or the perpetrator of a crime (unless the perpetrator is white and the victim black) and as modern South Africa’s official crime statistics are notoriously massaged, it is impossible to know the exact numbers of farm murders that have taken place. Many reliable sources estimate the figure as close to 3,000, but even if we take the more conservative figure of 1,600 quoted in the politically correct South African press (but not quoted at all in ours) this is three times the numbers killed by the South African security forces over a period of 43 years, and which the UN calls a crime against humanity.

To put this in perspective, the population of South Africa is 47 million, (13 million less than Britain despite its far greater land mass) of which the 4.3 million whites account for 9.1%, about 1% less than the immigrant population of Britain. Can you imagine the outcry if 1,600 (let alone 3,000) members of a minority community in Britain were tortured to death by the native population?

Yet when the victims are white, there is hardly a peep in the South African press and silence from the international media. Compare this to when a white youth is the killer, such as in the case of white farmer Johan Nel, who shot three Africans who were trespassing on his farm, a story which became instant world-wide news with the predictable screams of racism and machete wielding mobs baying for his blood.

And they accuse us of hate?!! Don’t such people nauseate themselves with their hypocrisy?!)

Crime aside, Mandela and his ANC inherited the strongest economy in Africa, indeed, despite economic sanctions, South Africa was still one of the richest nations in the world, and indeed initially there was a brief post Apartheid boom, resulting from the lifting of sanctions and due to the fact that until affirmative action forced most of the whites out of their jobs to be replaced by under qualified blacks, those who had built South Africa were still in place.

However, any optimism was to be short lived. Now, after just 14 years of rule by Mandela and his grim successor Mbeki, corruption is rife, the country is beset with power cuts and the infrastructure is crumbling. The nation’s great cities like Durban and Johannesburg, which could once rival the likes of Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco, had descended in to decaying crime-ridden slums within a decade.

And in the last few weeks we have seen the so called Rainbow nations ultimate humiliation, as xenophobic anti immigration violence spreads across the country. “Xenophobic” is what the media call racism when blacks do it. As poverty and unemployment explodes and is exacerbated by the floods of immigrants flooding in to escape the even more advanced Africanisation of the rest of the continent, the mobs turn on those they blame for stealing their jobs, their homes, and their women.

Thus the cycle turns, and, like watching some barbaric version of ‘Back to the Future’, on the news we see exactly the same scenes we saw on our televisions twenty years ago, wrecked buildings, burning vehicles, mobs brandishing machetes, axes and knives hacking at everything and everyone which comes within their reach.

Most horrific of all, we see the return of that most savage symbol of African brutality, the necklace where, to the cheers of a blood thirsty crowd, some poor trembling soul, with a tyre around his neck, is dragged from his home and set alight, exactly as all those other poor souls were set alight throughout the Apartheid years, when we were told it was all the evil white man’s fault. But the white Africans never ever did such a terrible thing: only the terrorists now in power did that to scare the other black Africans into joining their cause.

As nothing else the return of the necklace exposes the failure of Mandela’s revolution, and those who fought for him should weep.

Under Apartheid, blacks and whites went to separate hospitals but they received world class health care, whatever their colour. Now the facilities are collapsing or non-existent.

Black children went to different schools than white children, but they received an education, something which is now a privileged luxury. When they grew up, their bosses may have been white, but they had jobs and a living wage, as the recent violence shows us, such security is but a memory for most South Africans.

Eighteen years after Nelson and Winnie made their historic walk towards the cameras, and 14 years, since Mandela assumed power on a tide of optimism, a once proud South Africa slides like a crumbling, crime-ridden, wreck towards a precipice created through greed, corruption and incompetence.

For all his gleaming smiles, grandfatherly hand gestures, and folksy sound bites, tomorrow night, when crowd cheers the retired terrorist in the gaudy shirt, they would do best not to focus too closely upon his much admired legacy, as they might just find that the Xhosan Emperor has no clothes. For Nelson Mandela’s lasting achievement is that, in the face of a world wishing him well, he, and the party he leads, have shown the world that, for all its flaws, Apartheid was a more benign system than what replaced it, and that the average South African was immeasurably better off under the hated white rule than they are under the alternative that black rule has since created.

That is quite an achievement, Mr. Mandela; Happy Birthday.
As an addition, if Nelson Mandela was treated so badly, why is he now 90 years of age? In a black governed country in Africa, he would have died within months if he had not been hanged the time.

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