Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then
By Peter Beinart December 5th 2013 7:40 PM
If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, well forget a key lesson from his life: America isnt always a force for freedom.
Now that hes dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washingtons highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we wont truly honor his legacy.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandelas African National Congress on Americas 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 Americas 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, Mandelas 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 ANCs chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandelas American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And thats exactly what Mandelas American admirers must remember now.
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 placesGermany, Eastern Europe, eventually Koreathat 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 Africas monstrous regime essential to the free world.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/don-t-sanitize-nelson-mandela-he-s-honored-now-but-was-hated-then.html