The Truth About Nelson Mandela [Remastered]

Stefan Molyneux

Nelson Mandela is portrayed in the mainstream media as a peace-loving anti-apartheid revolutionary and philanthropist. But what is the truth about Nelson Mandela?  Correction - For decades, Mandela supported nationalization, but abandoned his plans after being informed of the negative effects they would likely engender.  Originally published December 9, 2013.  0:00:00 Mandela’s True Story 0:01:11 Terrorist Roots Exposed 0:04:39 Communist Leadership and Arms 0:05:35 Communism’s Deadly Record 0:07:45 South Africa Under ANC 0:10:53 Winnie and the Legacy 0:12:59 Apartheid Versus ANC Rule 0:15:33 Crime and Collapse 0:18:28 The Danger of Veneration  Support philosophy! https://freedomain.com/donate/  GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026

Transcript

00:00Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.

00:02So here are some thoughts on the recent passing of Nelson Mandela, who died a few days ago at the

00:09age of 95.

00:13Now, the general story, of course, is that he was a freedom fighter who conscientiously resisted the racist apartheid regime

00:19of South Africa,

00:22was sentenced to prison for 27 years for resistance to state tyranny,

00:31and then was freed and loved his enemies and was the president of South Africa,

00:36and then retired to travel the world and smile beatifically at a wide variety of people and meet his favorite

00:43band, the Spice Girls, I kid you not.

00:46Well, like most things that are talked about in the media, there's not an overabundance of truth in the story.

00:54So let's look at some of the facts about this.

00:56I have actually spent some time in South Africa.

00:59My father worked there and has since retired from his job as a geologist.

01:04I know a little bit about it.

01:05I'm certainly no expert, but I will provide sources for everything in the description bar.

01:13So Nelson Mandela got his start as the head of Mkonto Wysizwe, which is the terrorist wing of the African

01:22National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

01:26He claimed for many years to have not been a member of the South African Communist Party,

01:30but since his death, documents and the Communist Party themselves have revealed that he was.

01:35He was the head of this terrorist wing and ordered massive numbers, amounts of public bombings,

01:43156 acts of public violence he pled guilty to, including mobilizing terrorist bombing campaigns,

01:50which planted bombs in public places.

01:52And he was head of this for two years before he was arrested in 1962.

01:57The terrorist wing then went on to put bombs in churches, in shopping centers, particularly around Christmas,

02:05and resulted in the deaths of many children, women, men, and of course, whatever beefs you have with your political

02:12regime,

02:13you can scarcely hold children responsible, though many of them were murdered by this group that he was the head

02:20of.

02:20Again, after he left.

02:21Now, I have tried my best to try and find any sources for death counts that may have occurred on

02:26the bombings that he actually ordered,

02:29but that information does not seem to be available.

02:32Again, if you know any, I'd be happy to do a follow-up.

02:35So his Mk terrorists did murder a lot of innocent people,

02:43and he did not renounce the violence.

02:46He's never condemned them.

02:48And so he was put in jail for ordering lots of bombings,

02:54you know, similar to what happened in Boston and what happened in Oklahoma City and so on.

03:00Every government in the world would have locked this guy up.

03:03He was found with over 50,000 landmines,

03:06which had been sent to him by the communist government in Russia

03:09and a wide variety of other anti-personnel weaponries and so on.

03:12So he was the head of a terrorist army.

03:15This, of course, does not justify the evils of apartheid and so on,

03:18but we'll get to that in a little bit.

03:21He refused to renounce violence.

03:23In fact, President Bota visited him and offered to release him

03:28if he would say, stop bombing people or authorizing or approving the bombing of people.

03:34And he said, no, he would not.

03:36But even when he was bombing what he called strategic targets,

03:41which were power lines and generating stations and sewage stations and so on,

03:48he said that he aimed to not take human life.

03:51But if this didn't work, he would be more than willing to escalate to what happened later,

03:56which was the targeting of innocent people.

04:00And so if you've set off a lot of bombs, you're sitting on a lot of weaponry,

04:05and you refuse to renounce violence, in fact, you approve of the murders that occur

04:09in the terrorist group that you founded and were in charge of,

04:12then it's really not very common for people like that to get released from prison.

04:18So I just wanted to point this out.

04:22Amnesty never took his case.

04:23Amnesty International was not a prisoner of conscience because the movement recorded that

04:31it could not give the name prisoner of conscience to anyone associated with violence,

04:34even though, as in conventional warfare, a degree of restraint may be exercised.

04:39Now, when he became the president of South Africa,

04:45he purchased 25 to 38 billion rands worth of weaponry, maritime helicopters, new submarines,

04:54advanced fighter aircraft, battle tanks, and so on.

04:58He was very friendly with dictators around the world, in particular,

05:04Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, President Suharto of Indonesia,

05:07and who was a massive fan of Fidel Castro, the dictator in Cuba, of course.

05:16And this is pretty essential and pretty important to understand.

05:21This doesn't mean that the South African government was moral or good or anything like that,

05:26but it is important to have an accurate history of the man.

05:29He was a devoted and dedicated communist.

05:31He wrote an entire treatise on how to be a good communist.

05:35Now, you may feel differently, but I think, certainly for myself,

05:40with some pretty strong historical evidence,

05:42if I said he'd written a treatise on how to be a good Nazi,

05:46you'd be pretty shocked and appalled.

05:47But statistically, historically, factually,

05:51communism has a far higher death count and murder rate and genocide rate

05:55than Nazism ever did.

05:57We could account for Nazism causing the death of 40-odd million people.

06:01The death count for 20th century communism was in the hundreds of millions.

06:06It was 70 million murdered alone in Russia under the communists,

06:09and there were starvations in the Ukraine.

06:12There were mass starvation with the collectivized foreign policies of Mao

06:15and Stalin in the Ukraine, and in China, of course.

06:19There were the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

06:21The list sort of goes on and on.

06:22On the democide or the murder of citizens by their own governments,

06:25which largely fuelled by communism.

06:28Now, of course, people on the left are very prevalent in the media.

06:31They tend to be socialists slash communists,

06:34and so they tend to cover up these crimes.

06:36And this is why you see, you know,

06:38guys with pictures of Karl Marx and Che Guevara,

06:41where they wouldn't have a picture of Hitler and so on.

06:43Hitler is, of course, rightly denigrated as evil.

06:45But you can't even use the correct name of the Nazi party in Germany.

06:50Nazism is a short form of national socialism,

06:54and you have to use Nazism so that the word socialism is not clouded with the accurate.

06:58You pretend that communism is on the left and fascism is on the right and so on.

07:03There's only one pole to totalitarianism versus economic and political freedom.

07:07And so there's this supposed opposite pole polarity between communism and fascism,

07:16but it's not really the case.

07:17The Nazis were national socialists and the communists were communist socialists.

07:21And so anybody who follows the communist ideology is wrapped up in an ideology

07:27that was one of the most savage mental viruses to ever steal the life of hundreds of millions of people

07:32around the world.

07:33And you can find YouTube videos of Nelson Mandela singing songs about the endless murders of white people

07:39that he thought was a great thing to happen.

07:44So I think this is all really important stuff to understand.

07:48Now, as a committed communist, when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994 in South Africa,

07:55he instituted the usual grab bag of suicidal socialist economic policies.

08:00He nationalized the banks.

08:01He nationalized corporations.

08:03He nationalized the excavation of natural resources and so on, thus causing a massive and catastrophic collapse in the economy.

08:13And everybody who was chanting, you know, end apartheid and so on.

08:17I mean, if you really care about blacks in Africa,

08:20then you stick around after your supposed glorious revolution and find out what actually happened

08:25when the evil whites were driven out of power.

08:28And now there is a growing nostalgia for apartheid, which basically ran from 1948 until the early 90s.

08:37And 60% of South Africans now feel that the country was better run under apartheid,

08:42with both blacks and whites rated the current government less trustworthy, more corrupt,

08:46less able to enforce the law, and less able to deliver government services than its white predecessor.

08:52Transparency International released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer Report,

08:56finding South Africa to be among the most corrupt countries in the world.

08:59According to its findings, an astounding 83% of South Africans believe that the police force is corrupt.

09:0536% of respondents admitted to paying at least one bribe to the police.

09:12Every day in South Africa, there are 59 murders, 145 rapes, and 752 serious assaults.

09:19This is all that is reported.

09:22A 2010 Medical Research Foundation survey found that more than 37% of men in South Africa

09:28admitted to raping at least one woman.

09:297% said they had participated in gang rape.

09:34This is, of course, absolutely appalling.

09:37There's a new common crime, the witch doctors say, because, of course, there's many people infected with AIDS.

09:44It's the rape of babies.

09:45Belief that having sex with a virgin is a cure for AIDS.

09:49And, of course, 12% of South Africa's population is HIV positive.

09:53President Mbeki says that HIV cannot cause AIDS,

09:57and that the cure is perceived among lots of people to be sex with a virgin,

10:03which creates enormous drivers towards the sexual rape or the rape of children.

10:09In response to growing violence, South Africa's Minister of Safety and Security, Steve Chetwede,

10:14says,

10:15We can't police this.

10:16There's nothing more we can do.

10:17South Africa's currency, the rand, has fallen about 70% since the ANC came to power in 1994.

10:24Emigration from South Africa, mainly of skilled people, is now at its highest level ever.

10:30And, according to some black writers, the fact of business that is tragic,

10:34ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism.

10:37Colonial masters never committed anything near the murder and genocide seen under black rule in Rwanda,

10:43Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, and other countries.

10:46Millions of blacks have been slaughtered in unspeakable ways,

10:49including hacking to death, boiling an oil setting, being set on fire and dismembered.

10:55And Mandela's been married three times, most recently when he was 80.

10:58His second wife, Winnie Mandela, was about as evil a human being as you can imagine.

11:03She was convicted of the torture and murder of a 14-year-old boy,

11:08who she considered or called an informant.

11:11She was a big fan of what is called necklacing,

11:13which is a revolting practice wherein somebody you think is negative to the cause of black liberation,

11:20you wrap them in barbed wire, you jam a tire over their shoulders so they can't move,

11:26you pour gasoline into the rim of the tire and you set fire to it,

11:30melting their face off, causing their eyeballs to explode,

11:32and having them die in unbelievably agonizing ways.

11:40Mandela's wife was a big fan of this, repeated it many times,

11:43and was convicted at one point.

11:45And this is who he married.

11:47I believe that a man, to some degree, is known by the company that he keeps.

11:52The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average income of all races in South Africa

11:57dropped 40% between 1995 and 2000.

12:03You need to hear that again.

12:04The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average income of all races in South Africa

12:09dropped 40% between 1995 and 2000.

12:13This was under President Nelson Mandela,

12:18when he nationalized and when he socialized and so on.

12:22The UN 2006 Human Development Report found that over the last three decades,

12:26Africa has had a virtual reversal of human development.

12:28South Africa has dropped 38 places on the Human Development Index since 1994.

12:36The country of the first, of the world's first heart transplant,

12:41the Union of South Africa, is now the rape and murder capital of the world.

12:47One in three women will be raped before she reaches the age of 18.

12:52One in two women, 50% of the female population, is raped at some point in her lifetime.

12:56It is the rape and murder capital of the world.

12:59Now, given that most people prefer to be alive and dead,

13:03let's look at some of the history of colonialism.

13:04At the start of the year 1900, the African South Africans, the black South Africans,

13:09there were about 3.5 million of them, according to the British colonial government census.

13:13By 1954, which was six years after apartheid had started,

13:17African population soared to 8.5 million by 1990.

13:21Right before the end of apartheid, 35 million blacks.

13:24So, a tenfold increase under colonialism and under the apartheid regime,

13:29a tenfold increase in the number of blacks.

13:32In the decades prior to apartheid, which started in 1948,

13:36the average life expectancy of African South Africans was 38 years of age.

13:41During the last decade of the apartheid era,

13:44the average life expectancy for South African blacks had risen to 64 years,

13:48which was on par with Europe's.

13:53And, unfortunately, since the end of colonialism,

13:55and don't get me wrong, I'm no big fan of colonialism,

13:58I'm no big fan of statism at all,

13:59I consider it a generally immoral institution,

14:01but still, we must look at the facts of better and worse.

14:06One of the things that's true about Africa, even under apartheid,

14:09is that the number of blacks who were struggling and striving

14:13and risking life and limb to get into South Africa

14:16from other of the crap-pop dictatorships,

14:19black-run dictatorships in Africa was huge.

14:21All the blacks in Africa pretty much wanted to get into South Africa.

14:24It was by far the safest place to be

14:25for a black person in the whole continent,

14:28which, again, is not huge praise for South Africa,

14:31but rather endless condemnation for the other dictatorships.

14:35A UN report said that Africa is the only continent,

14:37it's the only continent where poverty had increased

14:39over the past 20 years.

14:41If you look at places like China and India,

14:45millions and millions and millions of people

14:46are climbing out of poverty.

14:48If you just look at Nigeria alone,

14:51I'm sorry, if you just look at Nigeria alone,

14:56sorry, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people

14:58below the poverty line.

15:00So the Human Development Index figure

15:02is a conglomeration of things

15:04that are good for people as a whole, of course.

15:06South Africa's Human Development Index numbers

15:08were far higher in 1995

15:10after almost 50 years of apartheid rule

15:12than it was in 2010 after 16 years of ANC rule.

15:15And the trend continues to be downward.

15:18If we look at Zimbabwe,

15:19post-colonial life expectancy

15:20tumbled from about 60 years in 1990

15:23to about 36 to 44,

15:26depending on which statistics you find acceptable.

15:28Nonetheless, between a third and a half decline.

15:33Last year, South Africa had a murder rate

15:35of almost 32 per 100,000 people,

15:3820 times the murder rate of Canada,

15:3927 times the rate of the UK,

15:41more than 30 times the rate in Australia and New Zealand.

15:45South Africa's murder rate

15:46is almost twice as high as Rwanda,

15:48Chad, Sierra, Sierra alone, and Zimbabwe.

15:51Now, for white farmers in South Africa,

15:53the murder rate is 99 per 100,000.

15:56This makes being a white farmer in South Africa

15:58the most dangerous occupation in the world.

16:02Naturally, of course,

16:03the government is taking guns from people,

16:05requiring them to be registered,

16:06and then taking half the guns

16:07by not registering people,

16:09which means that they don't have defense.

16:11And if you ever want some truly grim reading,

16:13you can read about the thousands and thousands

16:15of white farmers that have been murdered by blacks

16:17in South Africa and other places in Africa.

16:20It's truly horrendous and, of course,

16:22is completely ignored because they're not, say, rhinos,

16:26where if they were murdered in that rate,

16:28the left would be all over it.

16:29The official unemployment rate in South Africa is 26%.

16:32Of course, it's actually a lot higher.

16:35Public institutions are almost irredeemably corrupt.

16:37Law and order is failing.

16:3974% of people think all public officials

16:42and civil servants are corrupt or extremely corrupt.

16:4470% believe the whole political system is corrupt.

16:47In other words, South Africa,

16:52which Nelson Mandela fought for independence

16:55from white rule and then was the first president

16:58of South Africa,

17:00has become a complete economic crap hole,

17:03a complete economic disaster,

17:05which is inevitable when you put,

17:07I mean, even Vladimir Putin says

17:09that whenever people implement socialism,

17:11it fails and destroys the economies of every country

17:14it's ever tried in,

17:15which is why he's sort of pointing out

17:16that Barack Obama is sort of pursuing the same course.

17:20So, I mean, yes, he's a photogenic guy.

17:22He's got a nice smile.

17:24I don't know if I'd been involved in bombing

17:26and if I'd started an organization

17:27that ended up slaughtering a whole bunch of kids,

17:29I'm not sure that having smiley photo ops

17:32with the Spice Girls would be number one on my list

17:35if I had been addicted to violence as a solution.

17:39And, of course, if I had placed myself

17:43at the head of a country

17:43that was now the number one murder and rape

17:46and sexual abuse capital of the world,

17:49I am not sure that I would be grinning

17:51like a sociopathic idiot all around the world

17:55and taking everybody's applause and praise

17:58when I had used a lot of violence in my youth,

18:01I had refused to renounce violence in my middle age,

18:04and I had engendered a system

18:06which had destroyed the remaining economy

18:08and freedoms of South Africa

18:10and resulted in a crime-based society

18:14that is only limited by...

18:15The statistics of crime in South Africa

18:17is only limited by the fact

18:19that very few people even bother

18:20going to the police anymore.

18:21The reality is that it is a murder pit

18:25and a rape pit the entire country, pretty much.

18:28Now, I think it's enormously dangerous

18:31to venerate this.

18:32Let's sort of make this last point

18:33that when you live in a profoundly sick society,

18:37and we do, frankly, live in a profoundly sick society,

18:39you have to be very wary of people venerated

18:44by sick societies.

18:48Sick, evil, immoral, wretched societies

18:51tend not to worship really moral,

18:55virtuous, stand-up kind of people.

18:56So when you see a lot of praise

18:58coming out of the media for Nelson Mandela,

19:01you have to be very careful.

19:02It's like the praise that was given to Gandhi,

19:04which perhaps we can do another show on,

19:06another charlatan and extremely dangerous human being.

19:10So you really do have to be quite skeptical.

19:13I think it's very dangerous

19:16to venerate somebody who was so committed to violence

19:18and who used such violence in the seizure

19:21of private property as the president of South Africa

19:26in pursuit of his socialist,

19:29which is basically a theft-based political agenda.

19:32You really do have to be careful

19:34when he did not renounce violence,

19:36when he enthusiastically sang songs about murdering whites.

19:40This is a very dangerous person to hold up

19:42because I'm telling you, people,

19:43there are young people the world over

19:45who are constantly scanning for the values of society.

19:48And if you praise somebody committed to violence

19:50who had a violent regime,

19:52whose regime has resulted in more violence

19:55than was ever imaginable under the apartheid system,

19:58well, whoever you praise,

20:01the youth will emulate.

20:04Whoever you venerate,

20:06the youth will become.

20:07Please take care in who you praise.

20:18Please take care in who you are.

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