Free Republic

With the recent high profile dismissal of hosts Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir, you would think MSNBC executives would have warned their on air employees to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric. Apparently not, for on Now with Alex Wagner Friday, Chris Matthews actually said that South Africa's last apartheid era leader F.W. de Klerk was more of a patriot than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell CHRIS MATTHEWS: I haven’t heard anything as smart as what I heard Reverend Sharpton say a couple minutes ago in five years. That is the most perceptive thing I’ve seen. It just rocks me. The...

Fresh off his interview with President Barack Obama, MSNBC host Chris Matthews appeared on Now with Alex Wagner to review what the president said and to express his thoughts on the passing of former South African President Nelson Mandela. Matthews linked the GOP to South Africa’s white apartheid advocates and declared that those who facilitated the transition to Mandela’s presidency were more patriotic and had greater regard for their country than the Republicans in Congress. Matthews acknowledged a point that Rev. Al Sharpton had made earlier in this broadcast where he noted that the last apartheid president, F.W. de Klerk,...

At long last, the conservative movement is taking a long, hard look at itself. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his fellow ideologues barrel full steam ahead in their quest to “fundamentally transform” the country. The time is now to read to Ilana Mercer’s, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Mercer, the daughter of a rabbi and former anti-apartheid activist, was raised, first in Israel, and then South Africa. Though this classical liberal and self-professed “paleo-libertarian” has never been any sort of friend to either apartheid or any other racially-based institutional arrangement, Mercer is at great...

“Foreign reporters -- preferably American -- were much more valuable to us at that time (1957-59) than any military victory. Much more valuable than recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda." (Che Guevara 1959) “Reporters in Havana are either insensitive to the pain of the opposition “or in clear complicity” with the government.” (Cuban torture-victim Jorge Luis García Pérez known as Antunez in the Miami Herald 8/7/2013) Note the time span between the quotes above. Few propaganda recruitment drives and PR campaigns in modern history have been as phenomenally successful or as enduring as...

KLEINFONTEIN, South Africa — At the entrance to this rural settlement is a well-kept shrine to the primary architect of apartheid. Nearby rests an old wheelbarrow, a symbol of the white Afrikaners who once ruled the country. Inside the coffee shop, at the bank, everywhere, there are only white faces. A white security guard, wearing gray camouflage, checks cars at a gate on the main road. Race is a key factor for entry. No blacks are allowed to buy or rent houses here.

Doctors treating former South African President Nelson Mandela say the anti-apartheid leader is in a “permanent vegetative state,” according to documents obtained by Agence France-Presse. The documents, dated June 26, say Mandela’s breathing is being mechanically assisted and the Mandela family has “been advised by the medical practitioners that his life support machine should be switched off” due to the “perilous” state of his health. The person who organized the documents, D.A. Smith, wrote that the information came from “my instructing attorney” and not directly from the Mandela family. …

The elite mostly lead a reactionary existence of talking one way and living another. One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates. Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of...

Complete Headline: Obama: 'If Catholics Have Their Schools and Buildings and Protestants Have Theirs ... That Encourages Division' Likening religious schools to segregation--a racist system that forced blacks to attend different schools and use different facilities than whites in the American South--President Barack Obama told a town hall meeting for youth in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Monday that there should not be Catholic and Protestant schools because such schools cause division. "Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity--symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others--these are not...

'Welkom in Orania' proclaims a mural, painted in white, blue and orange. But this South African town, in the remote Northern Cape province, does not extend its welcome to everyone. The colour scheme on the wall - accompanied by the community emblem of a boy pulling up his sleeves - harks back to the old apartheid flag. Orania, one of the last outposts of racial segregation, is a whites-only enclave. Around 1,000 people live in the rural community, established in 1991 during the last years of apartheid.

CAPE TOWN — For countless foreign visitors, Cape Town is an indelible symbol of the beauty and promise of post-apartheid South Africa. Beyond its gorgeous scenery and great wines, its very logo — an outline of majestic Table Mountain superimposed over a rainbow — emphasizes its historic mix of races and cultures, and its most famous resident, Desmond Tutu, is revered as a symbol of tolerance, inclusiveness and forgiveness. But for many black South Africans, this city represents something very different: the last bastion of white rule.

Apartheid, as practiced in South Africa from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, was a body of law that ensured the supremacy of the white minority and deprived generations of black Africans of the most fundamental rights and government protections. Using this term to describe current practices in the United States and other Western nations is tantamount to applying the "Nazi" label to anyone with whom one disagrees on matters of policy. Deploying such a loaded term discredits the speaker. Consider the NAACP's New Haven branch discredited. The branch got a bit of news-media buzz last week upon releasing...

South African President Jacob Zuma has sought to reassure his country as Nelson Mandela receives treatment for the recurrence of a lung infection. In an interview with the BBC, Mr. Zuma said that people “must not panic” and that the former president was doing “very well” so far. …

When a 23-year-old woman was raped and tortured to death in Delhi, the case captured the attention of the world. Two months later, a 17-year-old girl was raped and tortured to death near Cape Town in an eerily similar case, but hardly anyone noticed. In both cases, the women were gang raped, mutilated and cut open. But the rape and murder of women has become horrifyingly common in South Africa. Nelson Mandela is still officially venerated as a saint, his smiling face appearing on countless posters, while the man himself, having solved all the problems of his native country, tours...

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Relatives sang hymns and songs from South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle Tuesday as forensic scientists exhumed bodies believed to belong to two young activists last seen 24 years ago at the home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. ... Madikizela-Mandela has denied all knowledge of the two. But her chief bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, told the commission that he and a colleague had killed the two on her orders. Nicodemus Sono, father of the missing man, told the commission that Madikizela-Mandela had come to his home with his son, face bruised from beatings, in November 1998. She had demanded photographs and documents,...

Graca Machel, the human rights activist and wife of Nelson Mandela, has warned that South Africa is an “angry nation” teetering on the brink of “something very dangerous” if extreme levels of violence in the country are not addressed. ... Mrs Machel was speaking at the memorial service on Wednesday of Mido Macia, a 27-year-old taxi driver who died in custody after he was tied to the back of a police van and dragged for 500 metres by officers, apparently for arguing over a traffic infringement. The death of Mr Macia came after other recent examples of police brutality, including...

Exclusive: Erik Rush sees chilling prescience in Ilana Mercer's 'Into the Cannibal's Pot' One of the most distressing things I encounter on a regular basis from Americans is the belief that it can’t happen here and that scenarios representing incomprehensibly radical, dystopian transformations of our society are not only preposterous, but the product of delusional minds. More often than not, when I speak of such things I am referencing the fundamental transformation of America President Obama and his Marxist co-conspirators are foisting upon us. To those for whom such things as the Holocaust and the Killing Fields are too far...

Dror Moreh, an Israeli who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Gatekeepers,” has suggested that Jews in the United States like Israel too much. “There is something that I felt while I am here in America, that most of the majority of the Jewish population here are cherishing Israel," Moreh told HuffPost Live. Their affection leads to the idea that “they have to support Israel no matter what,” he said. Moreh said their support boosts a trend of Israel “going towards an apartheid country.” “The Gatekeepers” interviews former Israeli heads of counter-terror departments who express concern over Israel’s presence in Judea...

For decades, it was one of the enduring disputes of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Was Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, really a secret Communist, as the white-only government of the time alleged? Or, as he claimed during the infamous 1963 trial that saw him jailed for life, was it simply a smear to discredit him in a world riven by Cold War tensions? Now, nearly half a century after the court case that made him the world’s best-known prisoner of conscience, a new book claims that whatever the wider injustice perpetrated, the apartheid-era prosecutors were indeed...

The Middle East's real apartheid - JPost - Opinion - Op-Eds 5 Mar 2012 – [...] If apartheid is indeed a crime against humanity, Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East – a state whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest. By contrast, apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its Arab and Muslim...

As we stand at the edge of complete economic, political, and social disaster as a nation, I can't help but wonder what the end of the United States will look like. Will it look like Weimar Germany, with its hyperinflation and street battles between socialists (Yes, the Nazis were socialists) and communists ? Will it look like Greece, a bankrupted social democracy with absolutely no chance of ever righting the ship ? Will it look like the mindless mass murders that were the hallmarks of the French and Russian Revoulutions ? An argument can be made for each of the...