Nelson Mandela idolized? Am I the only one who didn’t do a spastic street dance over his arrival in America? Tell him to take “power” in the wrong African language?

California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said being with Mandela was like “being in the presence of God.” A worshiper along the parade route in New York called Mandela “our savior.” A man in Los Angeles said we should lay down “palms in his path.”

A few banana peels, maybe. Mandela is a Red. Worse, he is a Red out of a time machine, who seeks to impose wealth-destroying Marxism on the only country in Africa where everyone has enough to eat.

Mandela also endorses killing and torture by his African National Congress (ANC). When he was arrested in the 1960’s, he was carrying ANC explosives to commit sabotage. His eminence rouge is the bloodthirsty Lithuanian Communist Joe Slovo. And at his Harlem extravaganza, Mandela sought to honor the aging Puerto Rican Communists who shot up the U.S. Congress and tried to kill President Truman.

Mandela’s no hero; he’s the political equivalent of 2 Live Crew. Excuse me if I sit out this rap. Yes, he spent years in prison—or, rather, in a comfortable house on the prison grounds—although his criminal record justified a death sentence under South African law.

Yes, he was ideologically steadfast, just like the Bolsheviks jailed by the tsar. I guess this is admirable in some sense, although I can’t think of why right now. And yes, he’s dignified and wears thousand-dollar suits. But con men always put up a good front.

Also visiting was Mrs. Winnie Mandela, whose gang of thuggish paramours, the Mandela United Football Club, killed a fourteen-year-old black boy in the basement of her Soweto mansion. They thought he might have talked to the police.

Mrs. Mandela apparently ordered—and enjoyed—the murder. Certainly she has praised the murder of black men and women suspected of talking to the police. She wants them tied up with gasoline-filled automobile tires around their necks, and then set on fire. “With our sticks of matches and our necklaces,” she says, “we will liberate this country.”

Mandela calls Communist Cuba the “country that stands head and shoulders above the rest” in its “love for human rights and liberty.” Indeed, Cuba is his model. South Africa’s government is already bloated. If Mandela gets his way, it will look like the Reverend Al Sharpton after a barbecue.

We were supposed to return the clenched-fist Communist salute to Mandela because he’s the leader of all South African blacks. But that’s another lie. He’s chief of the Xhosa tribe, which the ANC represents, along with the smaller tribes traditionally dependent on the Xhosa.

Inkatha, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, chief of the Zulus, represents the Xhosas’ hereditary enemy. If the Xhosas come to power, the industrious Zulus know they will be oppressed, and perhaps even massacred, a pattern all too common in Africa. The fighting in Natal Province today represents the beginning skirmishes in what may be a war of extermination.

Apartheid was a socialist-inspired scheme to cartelize the labor market for white labor unions. Ironically, only real separateness will work now. The country must be partitioned, with each people—whites, Xhosas, and Zulus—allowed a homeland. A free market is also needed, not only for more prosperity, but to lessen group tensions.

Despite their sins—which pale, if you will pardon the expression, next to the institutionalized theft, witchcraft, and mass murder of the typical African government—the Boers have built a magnificent civilization. And not “on the backs of the blacks”; South Africa has by far the highest black standard of living on the continent.

Yet the whole country may go up in flames, as Mandela lights the Molotov cocktail. And there is virtually no American dissent—just media hype designed to Jesse-Jacksonize this country by strengthening black demands for race privilege.

When questioned about his endorsement of Castro, Mandela said “a country’s internal policies” were none of his business. That was an evasion, of course. Mandela loves Castro’s internal policies. But there is a lesson here.

America, wrote John Quincy Adams, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” lest she be entangled “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”

Mandela, a smarmy demagogue, has assumed the colors and usurped the standard of freedom, but we ought not to be fooled.

Although we should wish the Boers and the other great peoples of South Africa well, their internal policies are none of our government’s business. That means no aid to the terrorist ANC, and immediate repeal of the economic sanctions designed to lower black standards of living, and thus foment bloody revolution.

Nelson Mandela wants to impale his country on a Xhosa-Communist spear. We ought not to be sharpening the blade.