Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About
BY AVIVA SHEN AND JUDD LEGUM
ON DECEMBER 6,
2013
CREDIT: AP
In
the desire to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s life — an iconic figure who triumphed
over South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime — it’s tempting to homogenize his
views into something everyone can support. This is not, however, an accurate
representation of the man.
Mandela
was a political activist and agitator. He did not shy away from controversy and
he did not seek — or obtain — universal approval. Before and after his release
from prison, he embraced an unabashedly progressive and provocative platform. As
one commentator put it shortly
after the announcement of the freedom fighter’s death, “Mandela will never, ever
be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him
something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to
sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try to hide his anger from
view.”
As
the world remembers Mandela, here are some of the things he believed that many
will gloss over.
1.
Mandela blasted the Iraq War and American imperialism.Mandela called Bush “a
president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly,” and accused him of
“wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust” by going to war in Iraq. “All
that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil,” he said. Mandela even speculated that
then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan was being undermined in the process because he
was black. “They never did that when secretary-generals were white,” he said. He
saw the Iraq War as a greater problem of American imperialism around the world.
“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world,
it is the United States of America. They don’t care,” he said.
2.
Mandela called freedom from poverty a “fundamental human right.” Mandela considered poverty one of the
greatest evils in the world, and spoke out against inequality everywhere.
“Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times
— times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology,
industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and
apartheid as social evils,” hesaid. He considered ending poverty a basic human duty:
“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is
the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent
life,” he said. “While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.”
3.
Mandela criticized the “War on Terror” and the labeling of individuals as
terrorists without due process. On the U.S. terrorist watch list until
2008 himself, Mandela was an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush’s war
on terror. He warned against rushing to label terrorists without due process.
While forcefully calling for Osama bin Laden to be brought to justice,
Mandela remarked, “The labeling of Osama bin Laden as the terrorist
responsible for those acts before he had been tried and convicted could also be
seen as undermining some of the basic tenets of the rule of law.”
4.
Mandela called out racism in America. On a trip to New York City in 1990,
Mandela made a point of visiting Harlem and praising African Americans’ struggles against “the injustices of racist
discrimination and economic equality.” He reminded a larger crowd at Yankee
Stadium that racism was not exclusively a South African phenomenon. “As we enter
the last decade of the 20th century, it is intolerable, unacceptable, that the
cancer of racism is still eating away at the fabric of societies in different
parts of our planet,” he said. “All of us, black and white, should spare no
effort in our struggle against all forms and manifestations of racism, wherever
and whenever it rears its ugly head.”
5.
Mandela embraced some of America’s biggest political enemies. Mandela incited shock and anger in many American communities for refusing to denounce Cuban dictator
Fidel Castro or Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had lent their support to
Mandela against South African apartheid. “One of the mistakes the Western world
makes is to think that their enemies should be our enemies,” he explained to an
American TV audience. “We have our own struggle.” He added that those leaders
“are placing resources at our disposal to win the struggle.” He also called the
controversial Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat “a
comrade in arms.”
6.
Mandela was a die-hard supporter of labor unions. Mandelavisited the
Detroit auto workers union when touring the U.S., immediately claiming kinship
with them. “Sisters and brothers, friends and comrades, the man who is speaking
is not a stranger here,” he said. “The man who is speaking is a member of the
UAW. I am your flesh and blood.”
===============================================================================
The Right Wing’s Campaign To Discredit And Undermine Mandela, In One Timeline
BY IGOR VOLSKY AND ZACK BEAUCHAMP
ON DECEMBER 6,
2013
The
world is celebrating Nelson Mandela as a selfless visionary who led his country
out of the grips of apartheid into democracy and freedom. But some of the very
people lavishing praise on South Africa’s first black president worked
tirelessly to undermine his cause and portray the African National Congress he
lead as pawns of the Soviet Union.
In
fact, American conservatives have long been willing to overlook South Africa’s
racist apartheid government in service of fighting communism abroad. Below is a
short history, and some explanation, of how conservatives approached Mandela
with the hostility they did:
1960s
National
Review predicts end of white rule would result in “the collapse of
civilization.”
After
Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, the magazineobserved that “The South African courts have
sentenced a batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you
would think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls
from the Liberal press.” By March of the following year, conservative Russell
Kirk argued in the pages of the magazine that democracy in South Africa “would
bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization” and the government “would be
domination by witch doctors (still numerous and powerful) and reckless
demagogues.”
1980s
Reagan
described apartheid South Africa as a “good country.”
After
President Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on South Africa Reagan reversed course,
labeling the African National Congress a terrorist organization. As he explained
to CBS’ Walter Cronkite in 1981, the United States should support the South
Africa regime because it is “a country that has stood by us in every war we’ve
ever fought, a country that, strategically, is essential to the free world in
its production of minerals.” In 1985, he told an interviewer: “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our
own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of
entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.” He
later walked back the comment. As late as 1988, Reagan called apartheid “a
tribal policy more than…a
racial policy.”
Jerry
Falwell urges supporters to oppose sanctions.
The
late Jerry Falwell urged “supporters to write their congressmen
and senators to tell them to oppose sanctions against the apartheid regime.”
“The liberal media has for too long suppressed the other side of the story in
South Africa,” he said. “It is very important that we stay close enough to South
Africa so that it does not fall prey to the clutches of Communism.”
180
House members opposed free Mandela resolution.
In
1986, 145 Republicans and 45 Democrats voted down a non-binding
House resolution urging the
Government of South Africa to indicate its willingness to negotiate with the
black majority by granting unconditional freedom to Nelson Mandela, recognizing
the African National Congress; and establishing a framework for political talks.
This included Dick Cheney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Dan Coats, Pat Roberts,
Joe Barton. Asked in 2000 if he regretted the vote, Cheney said he did not
adding, “The ANC was then viewed
as a terrorist organization.”
20
Senators and 83 House members oppose sanctions.
The
1986 bill cut virtually “all
U.S. economic ties with South
Africa, requiring American companies to cease operating there within 180 days.”
Lawmakers had to override Reagan’s veto.
Sens. Thad Conrad, Orrin Hatch and Reps. Hal Rogers, Joe Barton, and Howard
Coble all voted against imposing sanctions on the regime.
Jack
Abramoff leads think tank dedicated to tearing down Mandela.
In
1986, the South African government helped fund and
establishThe International Freedom Foundation (IFF), a conservative think
tank designed to “reverse the apartheid regime’s pariah status in Western
political circles” and “portray the ANC as a tool of Soviet communism, thus
undercutting the movement’s growing international acceptance as the
government-in-waiting of a future multiracial South Africa.” The Washington
branch of the IFF listed, among others, Senator Jesse Helms, James Inhofe as
advisers. The lobbyist Jack Abramoff led the organization.
U.S.
Senator testified in support of the apartheid government.
“In
the late 1980s and early ’90s, after returning from his Mormon mission to South
Africa,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) lobbied for South African interests and in
1987, “testified before the Utah State Senate in support of a resolution
expressing support for the government of South Africa while racial segregation
laws were enforced — largely to support U.S. mining interests in the
region.”
Now,
it would be unfair to say conservatism spoke univocally in condemnation of
Mandela. A group of upstart Republicans in the mid-80s, led by Reps. Vin Weber,
Robert Walker, and Newt Gingrich pushed
hard for the United States to
take a more critical stance on apartheid.
But
this group was bucking the conservative mainstream at the time. “South Africa
has been able to depend on conservatives in the United States . . . to treat
them with benign neglect,” Weber said. That has a lot to do with the enduring
conservative hostility towards rapid change. Conservatives see broad challenges,
even to oppressive systems, as dangerous “revolutionary” change, whereas slower
“evolutionary” tweaks in a better direction would be preferable.
Reagan’s
South Africa point man, Chester A. Crocker, made this revolutionary/evolutionary
binary into one of his three main principles for thinking about South Africa
policy. “The circumstances in South Africa do not justify giving up on the hopes
for evolutionary change (as distinguished from a revolutionary cataclysm),” he
wrote in a famous Foreign
Affairs essay. Many in the
West, Crocker believed, held “a mistaken assumption that American and South
African clocks are synchronized-that our impatience signifies the imminence of
the revolution.”
It
was Crocker, of course, who was mistaken, writing only about a decade before
Mandela was freed from prison. But this skepticism about the possibility and
desirability of radical change (Crocker seemed to think any dissolution of the
apartheid government would necessarily be in part a violent one), together with
the obvious cultural affinity that mainstream conservatives felt with
Westernized Afrikaner elites, made conservatives distinctly inclined to view
Mandela’s calls for political transformation with jaded eyes.
1990s
Heritage
Foundation says Mandela is no “freedom fighter.”“Americans nevertheless
have reasons to be skeptical of Mandela,” the foundation warned as he planned to
visit the United States in 1990. “First, Nelson Mandela is
not a freedom fighter. He repeatedly has supported terrorism. Since
Mandela’s release from prison and his subsequent refusal to renounce violence,
the Marxist-dominated ANC has launched terrorism and violence against civilians,
claiming several hundred lives.”
Conservative
think tank links Mandela to communists. “When Mandela made his first visit to
the United States in 1990, following his release from prison, the IFF placed
advertisements in local papers
designed to dampen public enthusiasm for Mandela,” Newsday reported. “One ad in
the Miami Herald portrayed Mandela as an ally and defender of Cuba’s Fidel
Castro. The city’s large Cuban community was so agitated that a ceremony to
present Mandela with keys to the city was scrapped.
2000s
National
Review labels Mandela a “communist” for opposing the Iraq war.
“[Mandela's]
vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no
surprise, given his long-standing dedication to Communism and praise
for terrorists. The world finally saw that his wife Winnie, rather than
being a saintly freedom-fighter, was a murderous thug.”
This
positioning of Mandela as being on the wrong side of a divide between “friends”
and “enemies” — once communism, in the 2000s Saddam and terrorism — is the most
important ideological lesson to learn from this history of hostility to Mandela.
Conservatives have a deep tendency to judge foreign conflicts principally by the
proximity of each side to the enemy du jour.
The
treatment of South Africa in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous “Dictatorships
and Double Standards” essay, where she argued that authoritarian
anti-Communist states were more amenable to transition to democracy than
revolutionary socialist governments, exemplifies this point nicely. She listed
Jimmy Carter’s more confrontational South Africa policy as an example of the
Carter Administration taking “at face value the claim of revolutionary groups to
represent ‘popular’ aspirations and ‘progressive’ forces–regardless of the ties
of these revolutionaries to the Soviet Union.”
Modern
conservatives explaining the movement’s Mandela position in the past 12 hours
have repeatedly employed Kirkpatrick-style to argue that conservative positions
were, at the time, reasonable. “In retrospect, it’s easy to think of Mandela as
the grandfatherly statesman,” Matt Lewis writes,
“but the Soviet Union posed an existential threat; it’s not like nuclear weapons
weren’t aimed at us. Such a thing has a way of focusing your priorities. In that
milieu, one can understand why the U.S. would have been very cautious about
anyone who had even ‘dabbled’ in Communism.” Deroy Murdock describes the view at the time as “Nelson Mandela
was just another Fidel Castro or a Pol Pot, itching to slip from behind bars,
savage his country, and surf atop the bones of his victims.”
Now,
both Lewis and Murdock readily admit that this view was in hindsight mistaken.
But the overemphasis on the friend/enemy distinction that blinded conservative’s
to the justness of the ANC’s cause has hardly gone away.
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