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Freedom fighter / terrorist has always been objective .
He never denied or said he would stop the armed struggle until South Africa became a democracy .
The regime he fought against was disgusting and I don't have a problem with armed resistance against such evil.
Murder is a strong term , were the French resistance fighters murderers ?Or a conflict closer to your home against an oppressive colonial power murderers ? Over egging it sure but you get the point .
I think he was both a man of violence and of peace and reconciliation , but isn't that what makes him special .
Though I do take on board that South Africa isn't the wonderful dewy eyed oasis of a peaceful democracy and the people who followed Mandela do not have his political fortitude to continue to move the country forward .fuck your fucking framingComment
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Plus got to call Donniep soft cock in a serious forum so it's not all bad
fuck your fucking framingComment
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You're falling into something bad. Don't use the ends justify the means line or you end up saying is that he was no different than the folks who committed genocide.
So maybe that's true. And by saying that you would also agree with fact that Winny Mandela took a political opponent and put a car tire around him that was full of gasoline and set him on fire and burnt him alive. She was the leader of his political party while he was in jail.
Again, He just wasn't the venerable man the world media has made him out to be.A NATION OF COWARDS - Jeffrey R. SnyderComment
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Ted Cruz Commenters Hate Mandela
By Jamelle Bouie
December 6th 20131:31 pm
Rising party stars like Ted Cruz might be trying to pay tribute to the South African leader, but their conservative elders hated him as a dangerous ideologue—and their base still does.
As we mourn Nelson Mandela and honor his memory, it’s important to remember that—for most of his life—he was a polarizing and divisive figure. As my colleague Peter Beinart notes, American conservatives disdained Mandela. Ronald Reagan placed the African National Congress on America’s official list of terrorist organizations, Dick Cheney (along with 144 other Republicans) opposed a resolution urging Mandela’s release from jail, and a stream of conservative intellectuals offered their condemnation of him and support for the regime he opposed.
In 1985, William F. Buckley Jr. voiced his support for South African President P.W. Botha, writing, “The entire continent of Africa is near a state of decomposition, anyone who maintains that such countries as Ethiopia and Uganda…are better off than they were in colonial days is an ideologue.” In the same column, he declared, “Where Mandela belongs, in his current frame of mind, is precisely where he is: in jail.” As recently as 2003, National Review condemned Mandela for “vicious anti-Americanism” and attacked his wife as a “murderous thug.”
You can find George Will writing in opposition to sanctions and Jerry Falwell leading a “reinvestment” drive to counter the push to divest assets from South Africa. The conservative movement was so invested in opposition to Mandela that decades later it has become a problem for the latest GOP generation, which represents a constituency that still hates Mandela as a dangerous ideologue.
Yes, today’s conservatives might extend praise to Mandela, but many of the people they represent aren’t so willing to show the same courtesy.
To wit, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) paid tribute to Mandela on his Facebook page, he was met with a stream of angry condemnations. His statement was straightforward and uncontroversial:
“Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe. He stood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself, declaring in his autobiography, ‘Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.’ Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free. We mourn his loss and offer our condolences to his family and the people of South Africa.”
The reaction was swift and contemptuous. “Let’s not forget that Mandela called Castro’s Communist revolution ‘a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people,’” wrote one commenter. “Mandela was a communist trained by the KGB who sings racial hate songs…and now, the South Africa is a worst country for both whites and blacks,” wrote another. One man, who presumably is older than Cruz, chalked up the praise to the senator’s youthful ignorance, “Ted, long before you were born, his reputation was the complete opposite. He was, in fact, a terrorist and a criminal, he persecuted and killed Zulus. All the apartheid BS you hear in today’s media is all lies.”
You hear that? All that nonsense about apartheid was the media deception.
But not every response was so vitriolic. Some supporters were just worried that Cruz was misguided. “Ted, I love ya, but you might want to do some research and delete your post on this one,” said one commenter. Others were disappointed. “Um, yeah, Mandella was a communist and was involved in torture, terror, and murder. Just lost a lot of respect, Senator Cruz. A whole lot,” said one. At least one response was a little whimsical: “I am sure there are some dyed-in-the-wool Marxists that love cute little puppies as well. I’m not gonna celebrate them either.”
By and large, the comments echoed the rhetoric of Buckley and other conservatives who opposed Mandela in the 1970s and ’80s. For Cruz’s followers, Mandela was a “communist,” “socialist, and “murderer” whose life was a net negative for the world.
Yes, today’s conservatives might extend praise to Mandela—though, even now, it’s backhanded and ugly—but many of the people they represent aren’t so willing to show the same courtesy.
But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Remember, the same Buckley who trashed Mandela in the 1980s defended American segregation in the 1960s and supported politicians who turned a blind eye to racial inequality. It’s only fitting that the members of the movement he built are still more concerned with the opponents of South Africa’s white supremacist regime than they are with its supporters.Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
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Oliver tambo was ANC leader while Mandela was in jail .fuck your fucking framingComment
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Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then
By Peter Beinart
December 5th 20137:40 pm
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.
Mandela’s message to America’s leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t pretend you are pure.
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 Ganji and 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.Eternally Under the Authority of Satan
Originally posted by SockfuckerComment
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lowered his pole
Another one of those classic genius posts, sure to generate responses. You log on the next day to see what your witty gem has produced to find no one gets it and 2 knotheads want to stick their dicks in it... Well played, sir!!Comment
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Mandela will soon be forgotten. John Lennon, Elvis, and Jimi Hendrix have bigger legacy's than him. If you want a black icon, choose Jimi. He gave the world more enjoyment than Mandela ever did.No! You can't have the keys to the wine cellar!Comment
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