I'd like to see what evidence you have personally connecting Mandela with the crimes of which you're accusing him, as well as his personal involvement in the activities of the wife he divorced. I wouldn't personally pretend the man was perfect, and it doesn't seem many people really do, but at some point you can either take up arms to defend yourself or consign yourself and your people to disappear from history. Much of my family having originated from South Africa, I'm quite confident that the fascist pro-Nazi Apartheid regime had no intention whatsoever of bowing to nonviolent resistance and international silence. Would you say the American Civil War was an unjust means of accomplishing the ends it achieved, that the Yankees had the option of negotiating human rights and territorial sovereignty with rational nonviolent Confederates?
I didn't say Mandela was
perfect anything - I said he was not a '
Great Statesman'. Was he a deep thinker? Where are his Historic treaties? He seems to have been suckered into the Communist propaganda of his time and if he had his way back in the 1960s, then South Africa would have become another Communist crap-hole with him at the helm as Dear Leader.
Nelson Mandela was a member of our CC at the time of his arrest - SACP
On the day of Nelson Mandela’s death the South African Communist Party chose to reveal a fact that it had long denied: that he was a party member. Indeed, at the time of his arrest he was on the Central Committee. The statement read: "At his arrest in August 1962, Nelson Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party's Central Committee... After his release from prison in 1990, Cde Madiba became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days."
Given he was more than happy to use violence against innocent women and children to achieve his goals - just how do you think South Africa would have turned out had his Communist Party taken over with him as Dear Leader?
And then when he did get into power, his administration was plagued with corruption, his ex-wife was a total sociopath, and he wasted billions building up the military on the back of graft and nepotism instead of pouring what little resources there were into rectifying apartheid. Did he turn the economy around? Nope. Was he more than happy to rub shoulders with African Dictators? Yup. He openly supported Fidel Castros, Robert Mugabes, admired communist China, the Gadhaffis in Libya and Saddam Hussein. Is THIS a "Great Statesman"?
Come on!
The African National Congress he led, purposely chose to use violence against innocent people - knowing that innocent children would be some of the targets. This isn't the actions of a "Great Statesman". Did Abraham Lincoln indiscriminately target women and children? I don't recall that being part of Civil War (not that I see Lincoln in any shining light either - given the war wasn't about 'ending Slavery').
There were plenty of white South Africans who joined Mandela's struggle and did far more than merely shout slogans, vote for left-wing politicians or boycott goods. At times these people even resorted to violence, I have relatives who were personally involved in at least one famous incident, but Mandela and his ANC are the ones who get blamed for everything. You want to paint this battle as communism vs democracy when that simply wasn't the reality of the time, it was egalitarians vs fascists. Don't get me wrong, South Africa has loads of serious problems, and from the looks of it the current generation of ANC leaders is almost as corrupt and incompetent as the regimes in neighbouring countries. That's why Prime Minister Jacob Zuma got booed by the very people who once supported him, at Mandela's own funeral, for trying to hijack a great man's struggle and use it to justify his own embezzlement, nepotism and general mismanagement. Mandela had a huge impact on the world but he's only one guy, couldn't have achieved much even with 10 good men to support him let alone millions, so let's be very careful about the things of which we might accuse his person.
I understand this. I'm not painting this as Communist -vs- Democracy other than to say Communist fits his MO. He was a Communist and it's evident that had he managed to somehow takeover as Dear Leader in the 1960s - he'd have went down in History as another African despot. A look at the mess SA is in now shows the legacy of violence. So, my point is he was not a Great Statesman and if anything he was another small minded little individual, no different than Bush Jr., Obama, and all the other pea-brains who think War is Peace. It's not. And we can see the fruits of that ideology today in the nepotistic crap-hole SA is as it's being run into the ground by another despotic legacy demagogue.
These people are
PEOPLE. They are not idols for Christ's sake. They are not Gods. Get over the alpha-monkey worship.
When a person is willing to place bombs where they full-well know children are going to be murdered - they should be scorned, not praised. That is the mentality of a sociopath.
Someone to be despised. Not a Great person. A Great Person goes out of his way NOT to harm innocent people - namely children. Children who have no say in their environment, they have no say in why things are the way they are.
The history rewrite and fawning is enough to a make a person puke. Of course, given our own sociopathic "Leaders"/'Civil Servants' and the way the general public fawn all over them whenever there's a killing field (even through they themselves are many hundreds or thousands of miles away safely choking on a pretzel).
- Amnesty International certainly didn't consider him a "Statesman" - they even
refused to take Nelson Mandela's case stating: “
[the] movement recorded that it could not give the name of ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ to anyone associated with violence, even though as in ‘conventional warfare’ a degree of restraint may be exercised.”
- Nelson Mandela plead guilty to 156 acts of public violent bombing campaigns which planted bombs in public places; including the Johannesburg railway station killing many women and children.
- He also refused to renounce violence.
- The fact he picked a sociopath for a wife is simply more evidence of his lack of personal insight and ability - or he just didn't mind marrying a sociopath. Either way, it shows poor judgement.
History would have and did see apartheid was ended. He didn't end it - We did. We who think race is a defunct term. We who find apartheid sickening. We ended it - good people, people who abhor violence, who were and are sickened by apartheid mentality. The current of history finally turned against South Africa and apartheid ended. Let's hope it continues to sweep away the violence.