The establishment media this week has engaged in a grotesque spectacle surrounding the death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (shown) on Monday at age 81. Instead of being honest, much of the press has been idolizing as a hero the mass-murdering communist terrorist infamous for, among other crimes, ordering the murder and savage torture of numerous victims, including innocent children. Most of her victims were blacks who opposed or were believed to oppose her totalitarian agenda. Ruthless and unrepentant until the end, she refused to even apologize.
One of her more prominent victims, 14-year-old Stompie Sepei, was brutally tortured for days and finally slaughtered by having his throat slit with gardening tools, all on Winnie’s orders. South African Communist Party leader Nelson Mandela‘s ex-wife also was an enthusiastic supporter of “necklacing,” which involves putting a tire soaked in gasoline around a victim’s neck, and then lighting it on fire. The slow, agonizing torture is one of the most horrendous ways to murder people known to man.
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But the disgraceful Western media seemed not to notice or care. Instead, much of the press lionized her as the “Mother of the Nation” (a term her PR team apparently invented and popularized), an “anti-Apartheid activist,” and a “hero” who waged a “heroic struggle” against injustice. When her crimes were mentioned at all, they were often downplayed as justified, youthful indiscretions that were simply a logical response to crimes by the apartheid (which means separate development) government. Her well-documented adultery and fraud against poor people were hardly mentioned.
Very little was written in the eulogies and obituaries for Winnie about her fervent support for barbaric forms of torture, either. But it was not for lack of documentation. In fact, she was infamous for endorsing “necklacing” of those who opposed the Soviet-controlled African National Congress and its efforts to impose communist tyranny on South Africa. “Together, hand-in-hand with our sticks of matches, with our necklaces we shall liberate this country,” Winnie declared in comments that were caught on tape.
Instead of focusing on her crimes, much of the Western media focused on her alleged saintliness. “She kept the memory of her imprisoned husband Nelson Mandela alive during his years on Robben Island and helped give the struggle for justice in South Africa one its most recognizable faces,” the family said in a statement quoted by major media outlets all over the world. “She dedicated most of her adult life to the cause of the people and for this was known far and wide as the Mother Of The Nation.”
The truth, though, is far less benign. In fact, even the far-left New York Times, an establishment mouthpiece with a well-deserved reputation for hiding communist crimes stretching back to Walter Duranty’s cover-up of the barbarous Soviet genocide of Ukrainians, has documented the savagery of Winnie Mandela. In a 1997 article that has largely gone down the memory hole, the Times reported on her role in the kidnapping, beating, torture, and eventual murder of a young child — one of many victims abducted, tortured, and murdered on Winnie’s direct orders.
Her chief bodyguard in the late 1980s, Jerry Richardson, admitted to some of the horrors he was ordered to participate in by his boss. “My hands are full of blood today because I would be instructed to kill and I would do like I was told,” Richardson explained to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up after whites voted to surrender political power, referring to Winnie as “mommy.” Some of the victims’ families had to step out, with tears filling their eyes.
Especially horrific was Richardson’s description of the 1989 torture and murder he perpetrated against 14-year-old Stompie Sepei (shown). The young boy was an anti-government activist associated with Winnie and the communist-controlled African National Congress, at least until he came under suspicion of being a “spy” for police. Then, according to testimony by Richardson and others, Winnie ordered that he be abducted, brutally beaten, tortured, and eventually, executed like livestock.
“I slaughtered him like a goat,” testified Richardson, who was also the “coach” of Winnie’s “soccer team.” According to Richardson, described as one of Winnie’s “closest confidantes,” Winnie personally participated in the barbaric torture of the young boy, which involved beatings, whippings, and other horrors. She reportedly sang joyfully as the boy writhed in horrifying pain. The actual killing, performed by slitting the boy’s throat with pruning shears, took place in Noordgesig in Soweto, near a railway and Winnie’s home.
Richardson remembered well how it happened. “I put the shears through Stompie’s neck. They went to the back,” he testified. “It was a stabbing motion, not a cutting motion.” Other members of Winnie’s gang corroborated the testimony, and Winnie herself was eventually convicted for her role in the kidnapping — though she escaped the murder charges thanks to friends in high places and the need to preserve her ex-husband’s image.
Among her many crimes, Winnie controlled a gang of mass-murdering terrorists euphemistically disguised as the “Mandela United Football Club.” This fake “football” team would drive around Soweto kidnapping ANC opponents and alleged collaborators with the government. The victims would be shoved into Winnie’s van and taken to her luxurious mansion, where they were beaten, tortured, and oftentimes slaughtered as her associates sang songs, drank brandy, and danced. Numerous eye witnesses have testified to her cruel savagery.
Winnie also refused to apologize to the victims of her murders, her fraud, her torture — or to the families of her victims. “I am not sorry. I will never be sorry,” she declared, defiantly. “I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything.” Presumably that includes torturing and ordering the murder of young Stompie and other black children.
And yet, much of the Western press celebrated the mass-murdering butcher as a hero. The far-left U.K. Guardian, for example, which specializes in deceiving readers and promoting everything from globalism to climate alarmism, helped lead the pack in downplaying Winnie’s savagery. In a grotesque screed by Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch, the argument was essentially that brutally murdering women and children is simply the price that had to be payed to dismantle a “system of racial supremacy.”
Basically, she argued that some British heroes also waged war — no mention of the fact that these battles were generally fought against other armies and did not involve slaughtering or torturing innocent children — and so Winnie’s barbarism should be overlooked. Anyone who disagrees with her that torture and murder of children are necessary to overthrow a government is a white supremacist, she argued. Incredibly, it seems Hirsch and the Guardian actually expect supposedly civilized people to believe that.
Even American race hustlers celebrated the brutal revolutionary. “She was the face and voice of the movement,” Jesse Jackson, a far-left race profiteer, was quoted as saying by USA Today, America’s largest newspaper by circulation. “It was her voice and her courage and her risk that kept them alive for those years.” USA Today also claimed Winnie was “tortured,” and yet the only example cited in any media report was an instance where she allegedly was not given a sanitary pad while in prison for a short time for her involvement in communist terrorism.
Some especially dishonest media reports, such as a eulogy published by the far-left Washington Post, did not even mention that Stompie was brutally murdered. Instead, the writer merely dismisses critics and casually says that she was “convicted of kidnapping and assaulting a young activist named Stompie Seipei.” The testimony implicating her in ordering his savage murder was not even alluded to, much less confronted honestly. The Post also falsely claimed she was a “hero to black South Africans.” That is simply untrue — even some of her murderous “comrades” in the “struggle” have distanced themselves publicly from her evil.
More than a few media outlets that at least acknowledged the “controversies” sounded a lot like apologists for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other mass-murderers — “at least Hitler built great highways,” as some Nazi apologists still claim today. While the pro-Winnie reports sometimes made reference to the murders and the torture of children, they typically tried to find some allegedly redeeming qualities and justifications to provide “balance.”
Some media outlets did at least offer some real balance to the pathetic fawning masquerading as journalism that appeared in so many publications. “She was a mother and a monster, a martyr and a tyrant, a rampaging megalomaniac posing as a selfless defender of the poor and the helpless,” wrote Andrew Kenny on the U.K. Spectator, adding that the “endless panegyrics to her saintliness and self-sacrifice are difficult to stomach.”
A number of other British outlets were far more honest in their assessment than most of the U.S. press. The U.K. Daily Mail, which sometimes leans conservative, published one of the few honest reviews of Winnie’s life. “Winnie Mandela was an odious, toxic individual who continued to preach hatred rather than reconciliation right up to the end of her life,” wrote Andrew Malone, adding that she supported stealing the property of white people. “In truth, she was a bitter woman consumed by hate who increasingly was turning to violence and murder, living off her husband’s name and ruthlessly protecting her own interests financially.”
Malone, who was on the ground in South Africa during much of the chaos, also recounted the story of Lolo, another child kidnapped and “disappeared” by Winnie and her goons. “‘Winnie Mandela appeared outside my home in a vehicle with Lolo,’ Sono [the boy’s father, told me [Malone, in an interview]. ‘Lolo was bleeding and badly bruised. She accused him of being a police informer, just because he had been taken in for questioning. I begged, I pleaded, for Lolo’s life. She said the movement would decide what to do with him and that he was a dog. They drove off. I have never seen my son again.’”
Unfortunately, Nelson Mandela, who lied all his life about his membership and even leadership role in the Soviet-controlled South African Communist Party, was similarly glorified by the dishonest Western media both before and after his death. Virtually nothing has been said in the establishment press about the real Mandela. But even his own words, in a manuscript of his auto-biography before it was sanitized and published, exposed him as a violent communist willing to use murder and terror to enslave his fellow human beings under a Soviet-backed dictatorship of the proletariat.
Among other crimes, Nelson Mandela founded and led the brutal terrorist wing of the ANC known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which slaughtered thousands of innocent people — mostly black people, but also many white women and children in bombings of restaurants, farm roads, shopping malls, and more. The so-called Spear of the Nation, as it was known, became infamous for mass murder, torture, bombings, sabotage, terrorism, and more. It was almost universally recognized as a terrorist group outside of mass-murdering communist regimes, landing Mandela on the official U.S. terrorist list until he was formally removed in 2008.
Today, the fruits of the revolution aided and abetted by the Mandelas are becoming impossible to ignore. The so-called rainbow nation — really an unnatural amalgamation of myriad nations with different cultures, beliefs, languages, and histories — is literally imploding in on itself. Violence, poverty, disease, and terror are out of control. Lifespans have plummeted by more than a decade since the ANC and the communists took over. The threat of genocide is now very real, too. Indeed, top South African leaders, including the recently departed president, openly sing songs advocating the extermination of minorities amid a wave of unfathomably barbaric slaughters targeting Christian Afrikaner farmers. Multiple polls of South Africans have found that most people, including blacks, believe their lives were better even under the loathed apartheid regime.
Now, as the “Second Phase” of the communist revolution gets underway, the Communist-controlled ANC regime is plotting to steal land from farmers, threatening to turn the once-prosperous first world nation into another Zimbabwe-style basket case. Hatred is exploding. Starvation and mass killings may well follow. It is definitely going to get worse. And the dishonest Western media, along with the globalist establishment behind it, will deserve much of the blame.
Photos of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Stompie Sepei: AP Images
Foreign Correspondent Alex Newman moved to South Africa on his 18th birthday and developed a deep love and respect for its peoples while living there in 2004-2005. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].
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