Media Trash Trump for Putin Summit, Praise Obama at Violent Communist's Bday Party
Narratives are powerful things. They can influence how people view a person or event … including skewing the impression completely away from reality.
How a story is told — the narrative — can also say a lot about the group telling the story. When it comes to how the mainstream media reported on a president and an ex-president at two recent incidents, the stark contrast confirms what conservatives have known for a while: There’s a double standard in reporting today.
The two men are President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama. The incidents are Trump’s summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Obama’s address Tuesday in Johannesburg, South Africa, marking the late South African leader Nelson Mandela’s birthday.
While there was plenty of media hand-wringing over Trump’s diplomatic meeting with Putin — whom they not entirely inaccurately paint as a ruthless would-be dictator with Soviet leanings — they tripped over themselves to praise Obama for his pro-Mandela speech.
Here’s the problem: Far from being the messianic figure liberals pretend he was, Nelson Mandela actually had a shockingly violent and communist past.
In other words, liberal journalists had no problem with the 44th president putting a known pro-Soviet radical on a pedestal. Yet they flew into a tizzy the moment the 45th president tried to build a diplomatic bridge with one of the most powerful nations on earth, one with a huge nuclear arsenal at its disposal.
It seems honoring violent radicals is fine, but working to prevent violence with a nuclear-armed rival is just too much.
“Obama was cheered by thousands in Johannesburg’s Wanderers Stadium as he marked the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth by urging respect for human rights, the free press and other values he said were under threat,” The Associated Press reported.
“(E)ach day’s news cycle is bringing more head-spinning and disturbing headlines,” Obama declared from South Africa, in what many pundits saw as a veiled reference to Trump’s controversial meeting with Putin.
“We see much of the world threatening to return to a more dangerous, more brutal, way of doing business,” the former president continued.
Left out of the speech was a side of Nelson Mandela that the left would like buried: He knew a few things about danger and brutality, because he advocated it.
As documented by The New American four years ago, a radical and even violent side of Mandela was carefully scrubbed out of the history books in recent years. The first draft of the South African leader’s autobiography painted a dark picture of the now-famous man.
“(T)he recently released original manuscript of South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela’s autobiography exposed the widely celebrated figure as a violent enemy of ‘democracy,'” wrote journalist Alex Newman in 2014.
“The first ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ manuscript also reveals Mandela’s little-known support of violence and terror to advance communism,” he continued.
While the media is busy pretending that Trump is in bed with Russia, it was actually Mandela who was literally a Communist and Soviet Union sympathizer.
“Mandela was not only a Communist, he was a member of the Soviet-backed party’s decision-making Central Committee,” Newman reported, citing an official statement from the Workers World Party, an openly communist group, on Mandela’s death in December 2013.
Mandela himself admitted his communist and pro-Soviet leanings.
“Unquestionably, my sympathies lay with Cuba (during the 1962 missile crisis),” Mandela wrote in his original autobiography, a journalist wrote in the U.K.-based Spectator in 2014. Castro’s Cuba was, of course, not only a communist dictatorship, but infamously allied with the USSR.
There is strong evidence that Mandela, far from being a peace-loving dove, was something much more sinister: A radical terrorist, or at least a sympathizer.
“Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart upon Mandela’s death.
“In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups,” Beinart continued.
There was good reason for that designation.
“They called him a ‘terrorist’ because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid,” The Daily Beast article continued. “They called him a ‘communist’ because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies.”
Mandela was a leader of the African National Congress, a group with a violent branch known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that committed blatant terrorism and killed thousands. In English, the group’s name means “Spear of the Nation,” and Mandela was one of its founders.
“The MK led a terrorist insurgency that included bombings of public places,” wrote National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy in 2013. “It killed many, many more civilians than it did members of the regime’s security forces — copiously including women and children.”
The supposed “hero” of blacks and savior of South Africa has a far more twisted backstory than Obama and others on the left are willing to admit.
“The ANC systematically killed rivals for power and suspected regime informants — most notoriously, by the savage method of ‘necklacing,’ in which a tire filled with gasoline was hung around the terrified victim’s neck and then set on fire,” McCarthy wrote.
Post-apartheid horrors occurring in South Africa can be directly linked to the rise of Mandela’s ANC and his presidency there.
“Most of the crime is black-on-black, but it is open season on whites — especially white land owners,” McCarthy wrote in 2013. “A million white South Africans have fled the country.
“It may not be a civil war. But it is surely the slide into dystopia that is Communism’s inevitable end.”
These facts are available for anyone who is willing to look, while the mainstream media — and Barack Obama — continue to talk about Mandela in reverent tones.
Reality is not as it is being reported. The narrative is a lie, even if it is being frequently repeated.
While Obama was busy lauding his questionable role model and the left was pretending that Trump is a traitor, it was Nelson Mandela who would be right at home in now-defunct, murderous Soviet Russia.
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