Bulletins and News Discussion from May 6th to May 12th, 2024 - The Nagorno-Karabakh Nosedive - COTW: Armenia

A lot of climate radlibs also seem to think that Mandela mostly signed petitions too, very odd.

From Mandela's "I Am Prepared To Die" speech:

I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe, and that I played a prominent role in its affairs until I was arrested in August 1962.

In the statement which I am about to make I shall correct certain false impressions which have been created by State witnesses. Amongst other things, I will demonstrate that certain of the acts referred to in the evidence were not and could not have been committed by Umkhonto. I will also deal with the relationship between the African National Congress and Umkhonto, and with the part which I personally have played in the affairs of both organizations. I shall deal also with the part played by the Communist Party. In order to explain these matters properly, I will have to explain what Umkhonto set out to achieve; what methods it prescribed for the achievement of these objects, and why these methods were chosen. I will also have to explain how I became involved in the activities of these organizations.

I deny that Umkhonto was responsible for a number of acts which clearly fell outside the policy of the organisation, and which have been charged in the indictment against us. I do not know what justification there was for these acts, but to demonstrate that they could not have been authorized by Umkhonto, I want to refer briefly to the roots and policy of the organization.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

If anti-Zionism is made effectively illegal via anti-BDS and anti-protest laws, then the only way to protest Israel is, by definition, illegally, and thus it will be violently suppressed by police, prompting violence in return. If Labour politicians were serious about any of this (and very few of them are, of course) then they'd have to push back on totalitarian protest laws and allow criticism and protests against Israel without suppression. All of this is perfectly in line with Nelson Mandela's beliefs.

But I imagine they skip past that part of the speech, down to this:

I have great respect for British political institutions, and for the country's system of justice. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration.

The American Congress, that country's doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouses in me similar sentiments.

In the west there exists a sanitised version of figures like Mandela or Martin Luther King where they have been reduced to cuddly harmless nonviolent Disney characters.

If you ask a typical westerner, the last time anybody was justified in physically fighting back against the powerful was the resistance movements during WWII and even that acknowledgement only covers bourgeois resistance and explicitly excludes the communist resistance. Post 1945 you are only allowed to do non-violent resistance and the history of the successes won by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and America is rewritten to fit a fantasy world in which the powerful can be moved to change their wicked ways simply by being defeated in the marketplace of ideas.