What kind of world are we living in, when the man responsible for freeing millions of people from an oppressed system, is denounced and dismissed as if ending such a horrible system as apartheid is a common, everyday routine.
When Nelson Mandela died at the age of ninety five, people from around the world recognized the importance of the man and the life he lived. But here in America, a certain group couldn’t get pass the fact that Mandela, at a certain point in his life and in the struggle for freedom from apartheid, took a considerably unpopular path along the way. That small path in all his 95 years was enough to labeled him a terrorist. And it is this small path the naysayers focus on.
These naysayers, mostly in the Republican party, expressed their views when Ted Cruz and Newt Gingrich spoke positively about Mandela on Facebook. Some of their views got so unbearable, Newt felt the need to respond.
Mandela was faced with a vicious apartheid regime that eliminated all rights for blacks and gave them no hope for the future. This was a regime which used secret police, prisons and military force to crush all efforts at seeking freedom by blacks.
What would you have done faced with that crushing government?
What would you do here in America if you had that kind of oppression?
Some of the people who are most opposed to oppression from Washington attack Mandela when he was opposed to oppression in his own country.
After years of preaching non-violence, using the political system, making his case as a defendant in court, Mandela resorted to violence against a government that was ruthless and violent in its suppression of free speech.
As Americans we celebrate the farmers at Lexington and Concord who used force to oppose British tyranny. We praise George Washington for spending eight years in the field fighting the British Army’s dictatorial assault on our freedom.
Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote and the Continental Congress adopted that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Doesn’t this apply to Nelson Mandela and his people?
Some conservatives say, ah, but he was a communist.
Actually Mandela was raised in a Methodist school, was a devout Christian, turned to communism in desperation only after South Africa was taken over by an extraordinarily racist government determined to eliminate all rights for blacks.
I would ask of his critics: where were some of these conservatives as allies against tyranny? Where were the masses of conservatives opposing Apartheid? In a desperate struggle against an overpowering government, you accept the allies you have just as Washington was grateful for a French monarchy helping him defeat the British.
Finally, if you had been imprisoned for 27 years, 18 of them in a cell eight foot by seven foot, how do you think you would have emerged? Would you have been angry? Would you have been bitter?
