{"id":39909,"date":"2013-12-06T13:53:47","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T20:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/06\/rip-nelson-mandela.html"},"modified":"2013-12-10T07:26:54","modified_gmt":"2013-12-10T14:26:54","slug":"rip-nelson-mandela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/06\/rip-nelson-mandela.html","title":{"rendered":"RIP Nelson Mandela"},"content":{"rendered":"
An interesting article below reacting to critiques of Mandela from the Right in the US.<\/p>\n

People want Heroes and Villains, and they want to fit people conveniently into one cubbyhole or another — bloodthirsty revolutionaries\u00a0or saintly reformers, dirty commies or oppressed freedom fighters. \u00a0Mandela was neither (or, in some ways, both).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the paeans to Mandela since his death (indeed, for the past few years while his health was failing) would have you think that he was a Ghandiesque protester whose imprisonment was over some act of civil disobedience against a uniformly cruel and tyrannical white regime — an analog to Martin Luther King, perhaps. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Mandela fought for a laudable cause, and did some laudable things, particularly after the end of apartheid, avoiding the excesses of thuggery and autocracy that so many revolutions suffer from (the writer below notes Robert Mugabe as a compare-and-contrast).<\/p>\n

But Mandela\u00a0was not a saint: he fought dirty in revolution (and in peace, though by different means), he was an effective politician (with all that implies), and if he didn't leave South Africa a devastated dictatorship there have certainly been plenty of cases of abuse of power by his family, friends, and his party.<\/p>\n

It will be difficult to accurately assess Mandela for another fifty years, when the hagiography and demonization have had a chance to subside. He was certainly one of the most important people to arise in\u00a0Africa in the last century, but how his cause will end up is still a work in progress.<\/p>\n

(h\/t +<\/span>Andreas Schou<\/a><\/span>)<\/p>\n

Reshared post from +Nicholas Weininger<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a meme going around in left-wing opinion circles that the mainstream encomia for Nelson Mandela "whitewash" him by focusing on his acts of forgiveness and reconciliation and not on his history as a revolutionary committed to armed struggle against apartheid.<\/p>\n

This is nonsense. The things people focus on about Mandela are precisely the things that made him so different<\/b> from most revolutionaries committed to armed struggle. Most such revolutionaries, even those who fight against real and great injustice, are murderous tyrants who ruin their countries if and when they get power. For a classic example one need only look just north of South Africa, at the regime of Robert Mugabe, another committed fighter against white supremacy. Plenty of leftists praised and supported him once too; not many will be so foolish as to laud him when the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe are granted the mercy of his death.<\/p>\n

Mandela is, in short, revered for the same reason the American Founders are revered: as a shining exception to the generally reliable rule that revolutions are horrible things and revolutionaries are horrible people. It's great to celebrate the exceptions, but let's not forget the rule.\ufeff<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

View this post on Google+<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting article below reacting to critiques of Mandela from the Right in the US. People want Heroes and Villains, and they want to fit people conveniently into one cubbyhole or another — bloodthirsty revolutionaries\u00a0or saintly reformers, dirty commies or oppressed freedom fighters. \u00a0Mandela was neither (or, in some ways, both).\u00a0 Many of the paeans … Continue reading “RIP Nelson Mandela”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[106,10,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plusposts","category-geopolitical-brouhaha","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11327,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/20\/however_much_vacation_hes.html","url_meta":{"origin":39909,"position":0},"title":"However much vacation he’s taking, it’s clearly not enough","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 20-Sep-07 10:54pm","format":false,"excerpt":"While Pres. Bush has been criticized for taking more \"vacation\" days than any other president, clearly he's not taken enough to, um, rest enough to be, er, coherent. For example...","rel":"","context":"In "Geopolitical Brouhaha"","block_context":{"text":"Geopolitical Brouhaha","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/geopolitical-brouhaha"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":40149,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/20\/art-imitates-life-or-maybe-the-other-way-around.html","url_meta":{"origin":39909,"position":1},"title":"Art Imitates Life. Or, maybe, the other way around","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 20-Dec-13 12:31pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Heh.\ufeff Billboard Honoring Nelson Mandela Honors Morgan Freeman Instead He may have played Nelson Mandela in a movie, but that probably doesn't justify mistaking Morgan Freeman for Madiba himself. 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