Nelson Mandela has died

[hudson bay rules]

So many disappear from the public well before they pass. I thought he was already gone. RIP.

[thema]

I say he's up there with Ghandi. Not a perfect man ( nobody is) but a truly great one. South Africa's George Washington.

[nucklehead]

When I look at this man and his life I am truly humbled. I do not feel that I am even 1% the man that he was. At the same time I am challenged to become more. I am sincerely reevaluating my life and how I live it because of him. He was truly a gift to all of us.

[elvis15]

Is anyone speculating if his death was caused by street racing yet?

But seriously, with the post about people commenting Mandela was a terrorist, there was very real concern from world leaders like Margaret Thatcher that the African National Congress - of which Mandela was a part of - was a typical terrorist organization. The ANC was very much a protest organization, against many things but not necessarily promoting positivity and peaceful change. It wasn't until Mandela moved past the ANC that he transitioned from a terrorist in prison to a positive black leader looking to change the wrongs of apartheid.

[Buddhas Hand]

I say he's up there with Ghandi. Not a perfect man ( nobody is) but a truly great one. South Africa's George Washington.

George Washington was a slave owner all of his life , in 1793 Washington signed the fugitive slave law, the first to provide the right for slave owners to recapture slave even in free states that had abolished slavery, please do not compare one of the worlds most inspirational freedom fighters to a slave owner.

[Blackberries]

Funny how people call him a terrorist for fighting for freedom and equality but when Americas founding fathers do it they are considered heroes.

[nuckin_futz]

You should read the crap in sun news facebook comments.

called him a terrorist.

By 1961 Mandela and the ANC were unhappy with the results non violence was yielding and viewed it as a failing method. Mandela co-founded an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, "Spear of the Nation". It's impossible to argue this was not a terrorist organization. Especially when their constitution called for violence. An example of their work is highlighted by more than 50 bombings in a single day in Dec 1961.

I say he's up there with Ghandi. Not a perfect man ( nobody is) but a truly great one. South Africa's George Washington.

Though there are many similarities including both being quasi human rights campaigners in South Africa. Gandhi's path was always one of non violence. The same can not be said of Mandela. The beauty in Mandela is that he saw the error of his ways and reversed course. In the process becoming an advocate for reconciliation and peace.

As someone else already pointed out Washington is not in the same ballpark.

But seriously, with the post about people commenting Mandela was a terrorist, there was very real concern from world leaders like Margaret Thatcher that the African National Congress - of which Mandela was a part of - was a typical terrorist organization. The ANC was very much a protest organization, against many things but not necessarily promoting positivity and peaceful change. It wasn't until Mandela moved past the ANC that he transitioned from a terrorist in prison to a positive black leader looking to change the wrongs of apartheid.

At least you get it.

[drummer4now]

Sun news has a poll now asking people if the media coverage of Mandela's death is overblown or not. These are the same people who label Arafat a terrorist, and seems are trying to do so with Mandela.

[Örwell]

My favourite meme of all time.

[Örwell]

Food for thought:

What Nelson Mandela's life tells us about the legitimacy of "democratic nations"

This morning, as I listened to the BBC World Service on Mandela, I found myself pondering what it meant that he was South Africa's "first democratically elected leader."

This is undoubtedly true. The apartheid regime held elections regularly, but only white people were given the vote. The systematic, arbitrary denial of the franchise to a large fraction of the population makes those elections "undemocratic" and their leaders illegitimate. I think that this is indisputable.

But what about US elections prior to the 19th Amendment? Was Warren Harding the first "democratically elected leader of the United States?"

And what about the UK prior to 1918 (or 1928)? Women's suffrage came late the the UK, and if Nelson Mandela was the first democratically elected leader of South Africa, I think that makes Ramsay MacDonald the UK's first democratically elected leader.

Or if there's something special about gender that disqualifies it from being a prerequisite for democratic legitimacy, let's have the apples-to-apples comparison: enfranchisement for people of color.

Black people got the right to vote in the USA in 1870, making Ulysses S Grant the first "democratically elected" leader in US history (albeit that black people were systematically disenfranchised by law, norm, and deed throughout the land, a practice that continues today, especially in states with Tea Party legislatures).

Canada didn't give First Nations people the right to vote until 1960, making John Diefenbaker the first "democratically elected" leader in Canadian history.

It's not like the idea of women as full-fledged people, entitled to the vote, was obscure and unpopular before 1928. It's not like the idea of black people as human beings capable of reason was unheard of before 1870. It's not like First Nations people were universally considered incapable of self-determination before 1960. The systems that denied the vote to these people were violent, savage, and brutal in their repression of efforts to enfranchise all adults (and there's whole other post to be written about children and voting).

There was no democratic legitimacy in the apartheid era. None of the leaders of South Africa before Mandela were "democratically elected." But if we are going to retrospectively deny legitimacy to the men who called themselves democratic leaders because history has moved on, why not point out that every US President from Washington to Grant (or Harding) also had no legitimate claim to democratic leadership?

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. -The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

[-DLC-]

We should all aspire to be 1/1,000,000 of what this man was. Strong and unwavering in his convictions. Kind, warm and gentle with a message of hope for us all.

May you truly Rest In Peace.

[The Bookie]

Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then

http://www.thedailyb...hated-then.html

If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now.

We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places—Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”.

In South Africa, it was the Soviet bloc—the same communist governments that were brutally repressing their own people—that helped the ANC fight apartheid. In the 1980s, they were joined by an American and European anti-apartheid movement willing to overlook the ANC’s communist ties because they refused to see South Africa’s freedom struggle through a Cold War lens. At a time when men like Reagan and Cheney were insisting that the most important thing about Mandela was where he stood in the standoff between Washington and Moscow, millions of citizens across the West insisted that the ANC could be Soviet-backed, communist-influenced, and still lead a movement for freedom.

They were right. When it came to other countries, Mandela’s leftist ties did sometimes blind him to communism’s crimes. In 1991, for instance, he called Fidel Castro “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.” But at home, where it mattered most, the ANC was a genuine, multiracial movement for democracy. And so the Americans who best championed South African freedom were the ones who didn’t view freedom as synonymous with the geopolitical interests of the United States.

Therein lies Mandela’s real lesson for Americans today. The Cold War is over, but mini-Cold Wars have followed. And once again, American elites, especially on the right, have a bad habit of using “freedom” as a euphemism for whatever serves American power. Thus, American politicians frequently suggest that by impoverishing the people of Iran with ever-harsher economic sanctions, and threatening to bomb them, we are promoting their freedom, even though the people risking their life for democracy in Iran—people like dissident journalist Akbar Ganjiand Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi—passionately disagree.

Mandela challenged that. Like Martin Luther King, who publicly repudiated Lyndon Johnson’s claim that Vietnam was a war for democracy, Mandela rejected George W. Bush’s idealistic rationalizations of the Iraq War. In 2003, when Bush was promising to liberate Iraq’s people, Mandela said, “All that he wants is Iraqi oil.” When Bush declared Iraq’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons a threat to the planet, Mandela had the bad manners to remind Bush that the only country to have actually used nukes was the United States. Mandela’s message to America’s leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t pretend you are pure.

As with King, it is this subversive aspect of Mandela’s legacy that is most in danger of being erased as he enters America’s pantheon of sanitized moral icons. But it is precisely the aspect that Americans most badly need. American power and human freedom are two very different things. Sometimes they intersect; sometimes they do not. Walking in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps requires being able to tell the difference.