GOSPEL DEFENCE LEAGUE

By D. Scarborough

P 0 Box 587, SEA POINT, 8060 RSA

TEL/FAX (021) 510–6854

Email: dscarborough@telkomsa.net

July/August/September 2013

Dear Friends,

Since 8 June, Old President Nelson Mandela has been in hospital, where he is being treated for a recurring lung infection. The sympathy of the whole country is with him, and the hospital has become a place of pilgrimage, resounding with hymns and prayers, and featuring a shrine of flowers, candles, gifts and messages. The 18th of July, his birthday, is a UN-ordained “Nelson Mandela International Day.”  It was his 95th- a day of utter veneration. He was lauded as the “founding  father of South Africa, ” the creator of “a culture of peace and freedom. ” Schoolchildren had to write him birthday cards, and adults were urged to spend “67 minute ” acts of goodwill in his honour. Not since the days of the Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even Lenin and Stalin has such religious enthusiasm been focussed on one man. Dr Peter Hammond, leader of Frontline Fellowship , comments:  “The extravagant  praise and idolising of Nelson Mandela as a hero/martyr and ideal example has exceeded all bounds. The mythology and idolatry surround­ ing the Mandela cult  is startling.”  And Rev Shaun Willcock of Bible Based Ministries reflects: “In a secular humanist world men hunger for a saviour.  They long to fill the spiritual void in their lives.  But they have no desire to turn to Christ … So they set up a substitute saviour, and for millions this substitute saviour is Nelson Mandela.” (1)

South Africa in the late 20th Century

The “Madiba Magic”  has indeed had a great effect not only on South Africa, but on the world. However, Mandela was not a lways a man of peace.  In 1960, when the African National Congress (ANC) had come under communist control, he set up its “military  wing,” Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), to commit sabotage in the land. He was also involved in “Operation  Mayibuye, “- “a comprehensive  plan, worked out in the most minute detail, for seizing control of the country by means of sabotage and destruction, coupled with guerilla warfare waged by the masses, who would be supplied with sufficient arms and ammunition to sow terror thoughout the length and breadth of the land.”  Operation Mayibuye (= “return”) read: “Our target is that on arrival the external forces should find at least 7000 men in the four main areas ready to join the guerilla army in the initial onslaught. These will be allocated as follows: Eastern Cape – Transkei 2000;  Natal – Zululand 2000;  North Western Transvaal 2000;  North Western Cape I 000 ....  The preparation for equipping the initial force will take place in three stages, thus: By importation of military supply at two levels: l. build up of fire arms, ammunition and explosives by maintaining  a regular flow over a period of time; 2. by landing additional supplies simultaneously  with the arrival of our external forces ... ” (2)

The revolutionaries’ hide-out at the farm Lilliesleaf, Rivonia was, however, raided and 13 men were indicted. Nelson Mandela was the chief accused, together with Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, and others. A confiscated paper written in Mandela ‘s own hand indicates his thinking at the time: “Under  communist rule,” he had written,  “South Africa will become a land of milk and honey ... The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.   The transition from capitalism to socialism and the liberation of the working class … cannot be effected by slow changes or by reforms … but by revolution. One therefore must be a revolutionary  and not a reformist. ” (3) –  The Rivonia trial was the most famous in the history of South Africa.  In the end, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. World wide this was regarded as a fair ruling and an act of mercy. For the Rivonia trial was not a political trial. Mandela was not a political prisoner. He was convicted of violence and treason, which at that time might have merited execution.

Nelson Mandela likened to Jesus

South Africa became the chief target in the Cold War between the superpowers USA and USSR. The Soviets declared that they wanted “to capture the strategically important mineral wealth of South Africa as well as the strategically dominant position of the Cape as a choke point for military purposes. ” They wanted to “cut  the Western imperialists off from their crucial sources of raw material which would lead to their final breakdown.” 4) These atheist forces, however, encountered in South Africa a strong Christian bulwark.  In order to neutralise this powerful spiritual force, they introduced into the Churches the marxist “liberation  theology,”  which distorts the teaching of the Bible and presents Jesus as a liberator/terrorist. With the help of the national and international Ecumenical Movements  (notably the World and South African Councils  of Churches) they made much of the Church into a “site of struggle. ” (5)  Bishop Tutu declared Mandela to be his leader, and Mandela was increasingly compared with and pictured as a suffering saving Jesus. The ANC set up its own Department of Religious Affairs which kept contact with the Churches.. Though they pledged to “liberate  the oppressed,”  they actually liberated South Africa from Biblical Christianity and God ‘s moral law.

While still in prison, Nelson Mandela had been offered his freedom again and again, but he refused to forswear violence and commit himself to peace.  When he was finally released in 1990, the rate of crime and violence rose steeply.  One of the most outrageous crimes during the transitional  period was the attack on the St James Church of England in Kenilworth, Cape Town, on Sunday, 25 July 1993.  Terrorists entered the evening Service with grenades and machine guns, killing 11 people and wounding 50.  Had it not been for a courageous young worshipper  who fired back, who knows how many more persons would have lost their lives.

Nelson Mandela was released on 1 February 1990.  He expressed his thanks to the SA Communist Party and pledged to intensify the armed struggle and the demands for sanctions.  Though he appears to be mild, to this day he has not repudiated violence, nor spoken out against the genocide of food-producing farmers, or against the threats associated with his death.  Though he was called “a gift of God,”  a “Christ–like  person who had come to power through suffering, “w hose “stone  had been rolled away, ” and whose “return ” had taken place, he did not publicly discourage such accolades. (6)  During his time of office from 1994-1999 God ‘s sovereignty  over the nation was abolished. Submission to the Almighty was ended.  Prayer in Parliament and in schools was terminated, and the Bible was declared irrelevant.   Anti-Christian  laws were passed.  Gambling, abortion, pornography,  prostitution, perversion all became acceptable.   Blasphemy  is now tolerated, and the Sabbath has become a shopping day.  Archbishop emeritus, Desmond Tutu, a liberation theologian greatly honoured throughout the world, openly defends sin and questions the Bible.  He declares: “Just because something is in the Bible, it is not necessarily true!  Gays are precious to God.  I cannot serve a homophobic  God, and I refuse to go to a homophobic  heaven.  I would rather go to the other place.” (7)

South  Africa  brings  the Soviet Empire to Fall

But by 1990 the communist danger had passed.  The USSR colossus had fallen, the Berlin Wall broken down.  A recent book, “How the Soviets and Cubans Lost the War in Southern Africa,” describes how the South African Defence Force (fighting against overpowering  numbers of Cubans, Russians and East Germans) saved not only South Africa, but the whole world, from Soviet dominance.   This war was fought so skilfully, and the defeat of the communists was so thorough, that the Russians had to leave Angola in haste.  Because of his losses, Cuba’s Fidel Castro executed by firing squad his decorated General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez.  In fact, the Soviet General in charge in Angola wrote: “The SADF was the primary cause of the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. ” An East German analyst added:  This “led to the neutralisation of communism as a viable ideology, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the liberation of the Eastern Bloc countries…  The fact is that the SADF bled the Cubans and Soviets dry, to the point that they could no longer afford to continue with their efforts.  Their global strategy of controlling Africa, and specifically South Africa, had been a total failure … South Africa saved the world from global Soviet dominance.” (8)

Though many South Africans might have thought that the war was entirely about the “liberation of the oppressed,”  it was, in fact, a much greater “liberation  struggle.”   Alexander Solzhenitsyn  said:   “The world has never before known a godlessness as organised, militarised and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism.   Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental  than all their political and economic pretensions.  Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to communist  policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.  To achieve its diabolical ends, communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice. ” (9)  Thus the war was a life and death struggle between atheism and Christianity,  Satan and Christ.  –  For the second time in a century, South Africa had to fight against superpowers, first against the British (in the Anglo-Boer War) and then against the Russians (in the Angolan War). And both times the superpowers  could not prevail.

Though Nelson Mandela today is raised up like a demi-god, it was not Mandela who won South Africa her freedom. It was the unsung heroes, the service men and soldiers, who were the true defenders of liberty.  No one venerates or calls them “Christ”-like, but the Lord, through them, held His mighty hand over this country.  The war, however, continues in another form.  Let us then gladly pledge allegiance to the God of our Fathers, the Lord of Hosts, and hold on to Him to serve Him alone.

May God bless you richly,

D. Scarborough.

Footnotes:

1.Shaun Willcock, Lest we Forget: The Truth about Nelson Mandela, July 2013.

2.  Henry R Pike, A History of Communism in South Africa, pp.392 &  393..

3.  Ibid .

4. J Geldenhuys, How the Soviets and Cubans lost the War in Southern Africa, a compendium to We Were There.

5.   The Kairos Document, issued by the SA Council  of Churches, and disseminated by the World and South African Councils of Churches.

6.  Vox Africana no. 38, July 1990

7. Die Burger 27.7.2013, Gays kosbaar vir God – Tutu. – Ironically it is the enemy of yore who now defends Christianity.  The Russians whose atheism blighted the world, today condemn President Obama’s  pro-homosexual policies and denounce gay marriage as an ‘apocalyptic  symptom. ‘ (President Putin and Kirill , Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia)

8.  Op. cit. “We were There – Winning the War for Southern Africa.

9.  Op. cit. HR Pike . ..