Mandela's Passing, Puzzling Tribute

[Yokohammer]

Is it just me who finds this a tad hypocritical?

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that Mandela, who died Thursday at age 95, “fought (with) a strong will to eliminate apartheid and achieved a great deal by putting national reconciliation at the center of his nation-building.”

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Japan offers tributes to human rights giant

[matsuki]

In the following year, Mandela was invited to an international conference on the news media in Kyoto, where he delivered the keynote speech on media freedom.

[Mike Oxlong]

Perhaps Mandela was more of a kindred spirit to Abe and his LDP that is generally recognized...

Nelson Mandela, The Che Guevara Of Africa

To some extent, Mandela’s legend has been nourished—even created—by sentimental Westerners. The measure of the man whom Oprah Winfrey and supermodel Naomi Campbell have taken to calling “Madiba”—Mandela’s African honorific; Winfrey and Campbell’s African affectation—has been determined by the soggy sentimentality of our MTV-coated culture. “Madiba’s” TV smile has won out over his political philosophy, founded as it is on energetic income redistribution in the neo-Marxist tradition, on “land reform” in the same tradition, and on ethnic animosity toward the Afrikaner.

Guru and gadfly, sage and showman, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is not the focus of this monograph. Boatloads of biographical stuffing can be found in the odes penned to the man. Concentrating on Mandela, moreover, in a narrative about South Africa today would be like focusing on Jimmy Carter in an account of America of 2010. Going against the trend of hagiography as we are, it must be conceded that, notwithstanding Mandela’s agreement with the “racial socialism” currently contributing to the destruction of South Africa, his present role in his country’s Zimbabwefication is more symbolic—symbolic such as his belated, tokenistic condemnation of Mugabe to an intellectually meaty crowd of “moody models, desperate divas and priapic ex-Presidents,” who convened to celebrate Nelson’s ninetieth. The focus of our attention is, then, not the aging leader but his legacy, the ANC. Or “The Scourge of the ANC,” to quote the title of the polemical essay by Dan Roodt.

The patrician Mandela certainly deserves the sobriquets heaped on him by the distinguished liberal historian Hermann Giliomee: “He had an imposing bearing and a physical presence, together with gravitas and charisma. He also had that rare, intangible quality best described by Seamus Heaney as ‘great transmission of grace.’” Undeniably and uniquely, Mandela combined “the style of a tribal chief and that of an instinctive democratic leader, accompanied by old-world courtesy.” But there’s more to Mandela than meets the proverbial eye.

Cut to the year 1992. The occasion was immortalized on YouTube in 2006. Mandela’s fist is clenched in a black power salute. Flanking him are members of the South African Communist Party, African National Congress leaders, and the ANC’s terrorist arm, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which Mandela led...

http://personalliberty.com/2013/12/09/n ... of-africa/