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A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#121

Post by jdimov9 »

HoopleHead wrote: post #105
mrslave wrote: post #85

In the interest of some context: Mandela was a communist and a terrorist. While a "political prisoner" he was offered freedom as soon as he would publicly renounce violent protest (i.e. terrorism) and he persistently refused to do so. His second wife, Winnie, enjoyed the necklacing opponents. So nice people all round.

I'm presuming you're an American, seeing as you seem to equate being a Communist with being a terrorist. Communism, as a political ideal, is a perfectly acceptable proposition. The fact that many oppressive regimes have declared themselves to be Communist states should not detract from that —any more than the equally evil actions of states which claim to be Democratic, should tarnish the ideals underpinning Democracy…

In what twisted mind is communism an acceptable proposition???

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#122

Post by Synaesthesia »

_yosefk wrote: post #97
sangnoir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you talking in hypotheticals when Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994? Your false dichotomy is empirically false because apartheid was ended without creating a 'communist paradise'. Even if we were to accept your limited worldview/binary choices; it is not clear how a state with codified racism (apartheid) is superior to an egalitarian communist one.

An egalitarian communist state has never existed, it's always a state where the ruling party does as it pleases while the majority has no rights whatsoever. (Whether this is superior or inferior to an apartheid state is a tough question.)

That's not true, Cuba is egalitarian, to a far greater degree than the Soviet Union was. Revolutionary Spain was very egalitarian. The Soviet Union can't really be called socialist, it was more of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#123

Post by sehugg »

NYT reported this in 1990, we just didn't have confirmation and the name of the agent: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/10/world/cia-tie-reported-in-...

And it's still unclear whether anyone else was involved in the decision to tip off the police.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#124

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

digi_owl wrote: post #73
vidarh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing all over the place. Castro went on a PR tour of the US trying to gather support and was snubbed long before he went to talk to the Soviets. Few years later his party finally called itself Socialist. Another few years and they finally called themselves Communist. Ho Chi Mihn was a Comintern member, but the Viet Minh was a broader alliance that included nationalists and others as well alongside the communist…

All in all it seems like social-democracy was AOK as long as you were an established European nation. But try that with a colony or some place with a large US corporate presence (banana republic, anyone?) and you were begging for trouble. Frankly the cold war seems in hindsight to be just an extension of the so called great game.

It's only the appearance of social-democracy that matters in Europe. It doesn't matter which party is in power, as long as policy is broadly neo-liberal and not too aggressively anti-corporate.

When someone like Jeremy Corbyn appears and challenges or threatens that consensus, you immediately get a determined media campaign to smear and undermine him - while barking mad racist demagogues are treated as serious political representatives without being questioned or challenged in the same ways.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#125

Post by Zigurd »

nxzero wrote: post #11
cm3 wrote: post #5

The CIA is the reason for most of the unstable regions and it's hard to understand how after messing with other places and making it worse for everybody but weapons manufacturers, they're still doing the same thing over and over. Previously it was the fight against Communism, now Islam, I wonder what it will be in 2020. Middle-east, Asia, South America, all are right to be very angry with the CIA, but turn it into a…

Often wondered what the world would be like if there was an intelligence group that only did good.

It should be simpler, and easier, than having to do "good." The situation since the creation of the CIA is that it is the armed international branch of money politics. Just getting corporatism out of the CIA and getting its activities aligned with the national interest would be an enormous improvement.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#126

Post by yarou »

mrslave wrote: post #85

In the interest of some context: Mandela was a communist and a terrorist. While a "political prisoner" he was offered freedom as soon as he would publicly renounce violent protest (i.e. terrorism) and he persistently refused to do so. His second wife, Winnie, enjoyed the necklacing opponents. So nice people all round.

Were they as nice as their colonial oppressors?

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#127

Post by nxzero »

yosefk wrote: post #92
nxzero wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often wondered what the world would be like if there was an intelligence group that only did good.

Most of them do, according to their definition of "good."

I know, it's ironic.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#128

Post by snatchthebants »

dijit wrote: post #81

Given the serious effort CIA puts into destabilising regions (Lets not forget the large amounts of sources who said people were being ferried and paid to go to Kiev when the Ukrainian uprising was occuring) it would not surprise me very much if they were also behind the Britain "exit" from Europe, since that would cause an economic collapse of the EU and would remove a super-power from play. I feel like a conspiracy…

I agree with the brexit thing, also look at the eurovision result Ukraine highest number of points followed by Russia it's like rig-off by different agencies to send a message.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#129

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jdimov9 wrote: post #121
HoopleHead wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm presuming you're an American, seeing as you seem to equate being a Communist with being a terrorist. Communism, as a political ideal, is a perfectly acceptable proposition. The fact that many oppressive regimes have declared themselves to be Communist states should not detract from that —any more than the equally evil actions of states which claim to be Democratic, should tarnish the ideals underpinning Democracy…

In what twisted mind is communism an acceptable proposition???

There isn't anything intrinsically wrong with communism as an ideal. All of its implementations, however, have been seriously lacking, and perhaps it is unviable in practice; this does not mean the concept is unacceptable in theory.

Re: A former CIA spy has revealed his key role in the arrest of Nelson Mandela

#130

Post by HillRat »

newjersey wrote: post #69
gfgjmfgjmgh wrote: post #16

The CIA was also behind the assassination of Homi Bhabha (father of Indian atomic energy program) and Lala Bahadur Sastry (Prime Minister of India).

> Later, Gregory Douglas, a journalist who interviewed former CIA operative, Robert Crowley, over a period of 4 years, recorded their telephonic conversations and published its transcribe in a book titled, "Conversations with the Crow". In the book, Crowley claimed that CIA was responsible for eliminating Dr. Homi Bhabha, Indian nuclear scientist whose plane crashed into Alps, when he was going to attend a conference…

"Gregory Douglas" has written a number of conspiracy-theory books that encompass Holocaust revisionism and JFK assassination theories; he is widely believed to be the nom de plume of Peter Stahl, who is also believed to have forged wartime Nazi documents and disseminated them to historians. It's all a bit of a rabbit hole, but the upshot is that there's very little reason to believe anything he writes.
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