RIP Nelson Mandela

[Dolan50]

WTF.
So it doesn't matter how you clawed your way to the reigns of leadership. All that really matters is how you are perceived after you attain your goals.

I'm sure the innocent lives that were snuffed out in the process are all the more relieved for that understanding.
So I guess the ends do justify the means in your world.

Me I could care less about Africa and its problems.It's run by a bunch of thugs ,mercenaries,butchers and international cartels..
So the media was able to find one leader in that shit hole that wasn't as horrible as the rest.
That hardly makes him a great man in my eyes.

[Smuckatelli]

South Africa could have had a Milosevic type of leader. Mandela was more like Tito: a resistance fighter that turned civil once he reached power.

South Africa could have had a Martin Luther King or Vaclav Havel type leader where innocents weren't the target to a political end.

[Smuckatelli]

I have to say I am surprised about the high morale ground here. i hope we all mourn as much about all innocent killed kids and women in every conflict. i hope we despise all the collateral damage done and all innocents that died miles away from any battlefield by drone attacks or cruise missiles. i remember completely different stances when it came to killed kids taped on video and published by some traitors.

Kenny, I'm not sure if this is high morale ground or lessons learned. I for one do mourn innocents killed via war or childhood diseases. You have a good point about collateral damage from drones & cruise missiles. Those are not excusable, this is exactly why I do not mourn the death of Mandela.

Terrorist acts directly lead to drone/cruise/military operations. Take 9/11 out of the picture and the world would be completely different right now and many innocent people would not have lost their lives in numerous places all of the world.

Mandela and other terrorist do not get a pass from me. There are too many instances throughout history of peaceful change. By honoring Mandela I would be spitting on the grave of all those that pushed social change without violence.

Keep in mind Kenny....I love you... :-*  ???

[Gusington]

I have been educated by this thread.

[GDS_Starfury]

thats more gooder for ya.

[bob48]

I have been educated by this thread.

Me too. I really had never looked at his background, so it gave me pause for thought after reading some of the above stuff.

[GDS_Starfury]

Mandela's passing has be raising quite the shitstorm on fb.   ;D

[Keunert]

Smuckatelli you seem to have a very consistent view on this, i can agree with this. we all know that we accept such losses each time we agree on military action. a dead kid is an inexcusable tragedy. but how many times did we lightheartedly agree on military intervention with half obscure arguments exactly knowing that we also accept the killing of many innocents? and how many of us will call Blair or Bush a terrorist?

there are letigimate cases for armed resistance. Apartheid or late 30ties Germany would be such cases in my view. But not Iraq and i am pretty sure that more innocents died in Iraq directly or indirectly by an unnecessary conflict. If Mandela is in your view foremost a terrorist, what will Blair be? He agreed on Iraq against better knowledge causing civilian deaths and the totally unnecessary loss of his own servicemen.

[GDS_Starfury]

the big difference that your so lightly ignoring is the fact that what Blair or Bush or obama have done theyve done as legal leaders of nations states and that their actions were agreed upon by those countries governing bodies.
what people like Mandela and obl have done was not.

[Keunert]

i'd say what i was ignoring was that nobody treats Bush or Blair like a saint. But if you are oppressed by an apartheim regime i wouldn't give a fluck if this was legal in the eyes of those in power that made a constitution securing their provileges. Slave trade was a legal and honourable trade too for some centuries.

[Staggerwing]

Old Timey revolutionaries used to talk about Propaganda of the Word and Propaganda of the Deed. Maybe, for the latter, there needs to be a distinction made between those who attack military and security elements of a regime that causes it's people harm and those who attack civilians in that same situation.

[GDS_Starfury]

you might be surprised how similar the US south was to South Africa concerning apartied.  post Civil War rights for blacks was horrible and it all came to a head in the 50s and 60s.  yet somehow Dr King managed to get his point across without blowing things up.  in fact it was the established whites that resorted to violence.

[Staggerwing]

If you're responding to my post I'm not trying defending Mandela.

I'm actually responding to the idea that when peaceful means fail there could ever be circumstances of oppression so extraordinary they require premeditated civilian targets to overcome.

[GDS_Starfury]

I was talking to Kenny.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Mandela's record once he took power isn't exactly worthy of the beatification the media has bestowed upon him.  They seem to be trying to portray him as a saint for bringing racial equality to South Africa but they refuse to even look at the suicidal economic policies he willingly signed into place that destroyed the middle class, gutted the resource and manufacturing sectors, drove crime through the roof, and brought about labour conditions for the lower classes that make the Apartheid regime seem benign in comparison.


WARNING:  LOOOOONG quote coming up from Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

DEMOCRACY BORN IN CHAINS:
SOUTH AFRICA'S CONSTRICTED FREEDOM
Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 20011

Before transferring power, the Nationalist Party wants to emasculate it. It is trying to negotiate a kind of swap where it will give up the right to run the country its way in exchange for the right to stop blacks from running it their own way.
—Allister Sparks, South African journalist2

In January 1990, Nelson Mandela, age seventy-one, sat down in his prison compound to write a note to his supporters outside. It was meant to settle a debate over whether twenty-seven years behind bars, most of it spent on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, had weakened the leader's commitment to the economic transformation of South Africa's apartheid state. The note was only two sentences long, and it decisively put the matter to rest: "The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable."3

History, it turned out, was not over just yet, as Fukuyama had claimed. In South Africa, the largest economy on the African continent, it seemed that some people still believed that freedom included the right to reclaim and redistribute their oppressors' ill-gotten gains.

That belief had formed the basis of the policy of the African National Congress for thirty-five years, ever since it was spelled out in its statement of core principles, the Freedom Charter. The story of the charter's drafting is the stuff of folklore in South Africa, and for good reason. The process began in 1955, when the party dispatched fifty thousand volunteers into the townships and countryside. The task of the volunteers was to collect "freedom demands" from the people—their vision of a post-apartheid world in which all South Africans had equal rights. The demands were handwritten on scraps of paper: "Land to be given to all landless people," "Living wages and shorter hours of work," "Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality," "The right to reside and move about freely" and many more.4 When the demands came back, leaders of the African National Congress synthesized them into a final document, which was officially adopted on June 26, 1955, at the Congress of the People, held in Kliptown, a "buffer zone" township built to protect the white residents of Johannesburg from the teeming masses of Soweto. Roughly three thousand delegates— black, Indian, "coloured" and a few white—sat together in an empty field to vote on the contents of the document. According to Nelson Mandela's account of the historic Kliptown gathering, "the charter was read aloud, section by section, to the people in English, Sesotho and Xhosa. After each section, the crowd shouted its approval with cries of 'Afrika!' and 'Mayibuye!'"5 The first defiant demand of the Freedom Charter reads, "The People Shall Govern!"

In the mid-fifties, that dream was decades away from fulfillment. On the Congress's second day, the gathering was violently broken up by police, who claimed the delegates were plotting treason.

For three decades, South Africa's government, dominated by white Afrikaners and British, banned the ANC and the other political parties that were intent on ending apartheid. Throughout this period of intense repression, the Freedom Charter continued to circulate, passed from hand to hand in the revolutionary underground, its power to inspire hope and resistance undiminished. In the 1980s, it was picked up by a new generation of young militants who emerged in the townships. Fed up with patience and good behaviour and braced to do whatever it took to topple white domination, the young radicals stunned their parents with their fearlessness. They took to the streets without illusion, chanting, "Neither bullets nor tear gas will stop us." They faced massacre after massacre, buried friends, kept singing and kept coming. When the militants were asked what they were fighting against, they answered, "Apartheid" or "Racism"; asked what they were fighting for, many replied "Freedom" and, often, "The Freedom Charter."

The charter enshrines the right to work, to decent housing, to freedom of thought, and, most radically, to a share in the wealth of the richest country in Africa, containing, among other treasures, the largest goldfield in the world. "The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people," the charter states.6

At the time of its drafting, the charter was viewed by some in the liberation movement as positively centrist, by others as unforgivably weak. The Pan-Africanists castigated the ANC for conceding too much to white colonizers (why did South Africa belong to "everyone, black and white?" they asked; the manifesto should have demanded, as the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had, "Africa for the Africans.") The staunch Marxists dismissed the demands as "petty bourgeois:" it wasn't revolutionary to divide the ownership of the land among all people; Lenin said that private property itself must be abolished.