We have now had a week of unrelenting beatification of Nelson Mandela by exactly the kind of people who stood behind his jailers under apartheid. Mandela was without question a towering historical figure and an outstanding hero of South Africa's liberation struggle. So it would be tempting to imagine they had been won over by the scale of his achievement, courage and endurance.
For some, that may be true. For many others, in the western world in particular, it reeks of the rankest hypocrisy. It is after all Mandela's global moral authority, and the manifest depravity of the system he and the African National Congress brought to an end, that now makes the hostility of an earlier time impossible to defend.
So history has had to be comprehensively rewritten, Mandela and the ANC appropriated and sanitised, and inconvenient facts minimised or ignored. The whitewashed narrative has been such a success that the former ANC leader has been reinvented and embraced as an all-purpose Kumbaya figure by politicians across the spectrum and ageing celebrities alike.
But it's a fiction that turns the world on its head and obscures the reality of global power then and now. In this fantasy, the racist apartheid tyranny was a weird aberration that came from nowhere, unconnected to the colonial system it grew out of or the world powers that kept it in place for decades. Full story...
Related posts:
For some, that may be true. For many others, in the western world in particular, it reeks of the rankest hypocrisy. It is after all Mandela's global moral authority, and the manifest depravity of the system he and the African National Congress brought to an end, that now makes the hostility of an earlier time impossible to defend.
So history has had to be comprehensively rewritten, Mandela and the ANC appropriated and sanitised, and inconvenient facts minimised or ignored. The whitewashed narrative has been such a success that the former ANC leader has been reinvented and embraced as an all-purpose Kumbaya figure by politicians across the spectrum and ageing celebrities alike.
But it's a fiction that turns the world on its head and obscures the reality of global power then and now. In this fantasy, the racist apartheid tyranny was a weird aberration that came from nowhere, unconnected to the colonial system it grew out of or the world powers that kept it in place for decades. Full story...
Related posts:
- Nelson Mandela, the myth and the reality...
- Mandela eulogies: Reinventing his disturbing legacy...
- Nelson Mandela's phony fanclub...
- Mandela: Obama, Clinton, Cameron, Blair – tributes of shameful hypocrisy...
- Obama’s Mandela eulogy — moving, and hypocritical, ignores Israel apartheid...
- Mandela’s sharp statements rarely cited in mainstream media...
- Hypocrisy of pro-apartheid Israel Obama visiting post-apartheid South Africa
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