Is this true about the capture and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela?
Asked by
JLeslie (
65722
)
December 7th, 2013
I just saw a status update on my facebook that said, ”...the reason Nelson Mandela was captured and spent 27 years in jail, was because our CIA told the racist South African government where to find him. Yet another sad chapter in American history.”
Is that true? I know I can google the history, but I’d like to hear what the collective has to say about it. Please feel free to expand on the events leading up to his capture.
Thanks.
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
8 Answers
When I was a kid Nelson Mandela was a murderer and clips of him screaming were used to scare children. Now he is a hero, he must have learned peace in prison.
I didn’t know this, but it doesn’t surprise me. The US has always had a hard time telling the good guys from the bad guys.
I would be more surprised to hear the CIA helped Mandela.
South Africa’s apartheid government was supported by the US government into the late 1980s.
This article from The New York Times says it’s true. It was in 1962, before Civil Rights moved center stage in the US.
Considering its own history, one would have thought that the United States would be in the forefront of those championing the end of the colonial era world wide. This sadly was not the case. And the truth is that it would be difficult to imagine a government so consistently on the wrong side of history as the United States. The average American has no idea of the lengths to which his government has gone in consistently supporting the most brutal and repressive dictators the modern world has seen. The rogues gallery of murderous strong men and repressive governments endorsed, trained, put in place and supported by the United States is absolutely staggering. On every continent, in every theater there has been no more reliable enemy of freedom and democracy than the United States of America, and those who mistook our nation’s founding documents for an accurate depiction of American regard for struggling people ALWAYS paid dearly for the mistake.
@stanleybmanly has not overstated the case notwithstanding the purple prose. Reports, like this one, coming out of Guyana point to considerable US and UK interference in the affairs of the West Indies. Do not be upset, all governments behave like that.
Purple or not, thank you!
“Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought, a country that strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have and so forth?” – Ronald MacDonald Reagan, conservative God, on the South African Apartheid regime, 1981
A racist, oppressive tyrant state, essential to “the free world”. That anyone could even conceive this sentence in a non-sarcastic way is mind-boggling.
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
