Related: Mandela Is Dead
I'm not trying to be disrespectful to the man's suffering or memory; I just reflexively suspect and shy away from extensive print coverage that is nothing but selective agenda-pushing and hypocritical glad-handing.
"The country has much work to do; much of the black populace remains gripped in township poverty, to the unfocused attention of current leaders. Yet Mandela proved that progress was possible — and that generations-old divisions could end not in score-settling, but in an honest search for peaceful coexistence."
That eulogy coming from a lying, agenda-pushing, war-promoting newspaper. Just something odd to me about that.
Related: Mass. recalls Mandela, 1990 visit to Boston
Once again, New York tops Boston:
"New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg remembered how Mandela’s visit, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, gave the city strength and hope."
Too bad he can't run in next year's Marathon.
"Nelson Mandela, a lasting force for freedom, dies" by Mark Feeney | Globe Staff, December 05, 2013
Nelson Mandela, one of the heroic figures of the 20th century, whose struggle against apartheid led to his imprisonment for 27 years, selection as co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with South African President F. W. de Klerk, and subsequent election as de Klerk’s successor, died on Thursday, the government announced.
Mandela died in his Johannesburg home. He was 95.
“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” South African President Jacob Zuma said in a televised address on Thursday night.
Counting himself among the millions influenced by Mandela, President Barack Obama spoke on the icon’s death.
“He no longer belongs to us. He belongs to the ages,” Obama said from the White House shortly after Zuma’s announcement.
That is why I'm going to quickly move along.
“The world’s favorite fairy tale,” Mr. Mandela’s friend and biographer Anthony Sampson once called his story. “The prisoner released from the dark dungeon, the pauper who turns out to be a prince, the bogeyman who proves to be the wizard.”
Honestly, I'm tired of propaganda pre$$ fairy tales, illusions, imagery, and all the rest of the scripted and staged show that is presented as reality. Sorry.
It was a fairy tale of global import. Mr. Mandela’s release from prison on Feb. 11, 1990, marked the culmination of a worldwide upheaval that had begun the previous spring with the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square and continued with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. “It was as if God had taken a hand — a new turn in world history,” de Klerk confided to his brother.
Seems like we have one of those every few years or so, about the same time the U.S. invades another country.
Even more astonishing, perhaps, than the train of events that brought Mr. Mandela to lead the nation that had so long imprisoned him was how well he met the demands of his larger-than-life role. Hidden from the world for nearly three decades, he had been mythologized into a storybook figure.
Oh, yeah, I'm also tired of the conventional myths and mythologies of the mouthpiece media.
Yet Mr. Mandela somehow managed to make the storybook real. The flesh-and-blood man turned out to be even more impressive than the version the world had put on a pedestal. Blending principle and pragmatism, he forgave his jailers, shunned all talk of bitterness, and became a symbol of national reconciliation.
I guess he is a better man than me.
“If this man wasn’t there, the whole country would have gone up in flames,” observed Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and himself a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Unfortunately, that prize no longer means anything.
Mr. Mandela never sought retribution after his release from prison. But that did not mean he forgot his imprisonment. Asked once why he favored loosely cut shirts with a colorful pattern (they became a sartorial trademark), Mr. Mandela replied, “You must remember I was in jail for 27 years. I want to feel freedom.”
Mr. Mandela’s appearance contributed to his image as healer and father figure.
We have had enough of that, too.
His slight build, white hair, and crinkly-eyed, radiant smile made him the picture of warmth and avuncularity. That said, the firm set of his unsmiling mouth indicated how formidable an opponent Mr. Mandela could be.
The musicality of his speech further endeared Mr. Mandela to the world — and his ability to speak Afrikaans (albeit with a thick Xhosa accent, his native tongue) impressed even the most stalwart supporters of apartheid.
Nevertheless, Mr. Mandela was no saint.
What?
His political life took an appreciable toll on his domestic life. He was married three times. His second marriage, to Winnie Mandela, turned into a highly charged political melodrama through much of the ‘90s. Even before his imprisonment, he had been an inattentive parent, something his release did not change. As his daughter Zindziswa once complained, “From the day my father was free, we had to share him with the rest of the world.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Mandela objected to attempts by Zindziswa and another daughter, Makaziwe, over handling of the Mandela Trust.
No one was more aware of his personal shortcomings than Mr. Mandela.
“I’m no angel,” he liked to remind Sampson.
Few have ever put to better use not being an angel. Mr. Mandela’s regal bearing and serene disposition won the hearts of the world. His hard-headedness and guile won him power. “You never quite know whether he’s a saint or a Machiavelli,” a colleague once observed.
While never willing to bend on his fundamental aim of abolishing apartheid and making South Africa a multiracial society, Mr. Mandela demonstrated a mastery of compromise and tactical flexibility during the four years between his release from prison and election as president, as well as during his five-year term of office.
An advocate of forcible revolution prior to his imprisonment, Mr. Mandela turned against it only because he came to see violence as an ineffective means to end racial separation. As he once explained, “I saw non-violence on the Gandhian model not as an inviolable principle but as a tactic to be used as the situation demanded.”
More of a Malcom X philosophy then.
Gandhi never won a peace prize; what does that tell you?
Mr. Mandela’s pragmatism extended beyond South Africa. Much to the annoyance of the US State Department, he refused to disavow such anti-American leaders as Fidel Castro and Moammar Khadafy, who had supported the anti-apartheid cause during Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment.
All forgotten in light of the accolades.
Such alliances were a further demonstration of his genius for unifying contradictory elements. The same man who brought together black and white in South Africa also managed to remain faithful to his roots in the liberation struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s while thriving in the post-Cold War world of globalization.
Indeed, no less a captain of corporate capitalism than David Rockefeller said that Mr. Mandela was the most impressive person he’d ever met.
That about does it for me. Endorsed by the globalist David Rockefeller, 'eh? No wonder Mandela is getting so much press; he's part of the club.
*********************
In 1960, police killed 69 protesters at Sharpeville, and the government banned the ANC. Mr. Mandela disavowed his longstanding commitment to nonviolence and set about organizing the military arm of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
Which is why my war paper likes him better than Chief Luthuli.
He went underground, and his knack for eluding capture earned him the nickname “The Black Pimpernel.” He was finally arrested in August 1962 and charged with inciting strikes and having left the country illegally. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
What is left unsaid is it was the CIA (was Mandela an asset? Mockingbird media coverage sure makes me think so) that tipped of the apartheid authorities of South Africa as to his location.
A few months later, Mr. Mandela was charged with treason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole, in 1964.
**********************
Mr. Mandela was imprisoned at a maximum-security facility, Robben Island, near Cape Town. He spent 18 years there before being transferred to a less isolated prison on the mainland. “You have no idea of the cruelty of man against man,” he once remarked, “until you have been in a South African prison with white warders and black prisoners.”
The only nice prisons are for the rich and powerful and those with connections. Of course, those people mostly avoid prison unless their class turns on them.
Initially, Mr. Mandela could receive only two letters and two visitors a year. His cell was 7-feet square. Denied sunglasses while doing hard labor in midday light, he suffered permanent eye damage. Yet over time conditions did improve — somewhat — and Mr. Mandela later described those years as a period of intense reflection and personal growth.
“It was a tragedy to lose the best days of your life,” he said of his imprisonment, “but you learned a lot. You had time to think — to stand away from yourself, to look at yourself from a distance, to see the contradictions in yourself.”
You don't need prison for that.
The longer Mr. Mandela stayed behind bars the larger he loomed in the eyes of the world. The Times of London hailed him as “the colossus of African nationalism” on his 60th birthday. A Broadway musical, “Sarafina!,” centered on a South African girl who idolized him. A large bust of Mr. Mandela was unveiled in London, and a recording called “Free Nelson Mandela” went to the Top Ten of the English pop-music charts in 1985. A year later, a citywide referendum proposed that minority neighborhoods secede from Boston and be renamed Mandela.
The extent of Mr. Mandela’s global prominence became apparent after his release. In June 1990, he enjoyed a triumphal tour of seven US cities. He addressed a joint session of Congress and held a White House press conference with President George H. W. Bush. In Boston, he addressed a rally at Madison Park High School; joked at the Kennedy Library that “Right now, I consider myself an honorary Irishman from Soweto”; and spoke to 250,000 people at a celebratory concert at the Hatch Shell.
Also see: HYPOCRISY SHOWS ITS FACE IN THE WAKE OF MANDELA’S DEATH
Interesting point considering the prism of my media!
Related: Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons
You won't find that in the tribute, either.
Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment had an even greater impact at home. It had left him unmarked by struggles within the anti-apartheid movement and put him on a plane where his leadership was unquestioned. As Sampson wrote in “Mandela: The Authorized Biography,” “His unequaled period in jail had protected him from criticism and abuse and earned him credentials which no one dared question.”
This status would prove indispensable following his release. It vastly strengthened Mr. Mandela’s position as he dealt with de Klerk and Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party, the ANC’s chief rival among black South Africans, attempting to effect what was soon being called a “negotiated revolution.”
In South Africa’s first free elections, held in April 1994, the ANC took 62.6 of the vote. Mr. Mandela was inaugurated as president on May 10, with de Klerk as deputy president. For the next five years, he would strike an often-uneasy balance between transforming South African society while striving not to disaffect its Afrikaner population.
An example of this balancing act was the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to those who had committed politically motivated crimes but only on condition of a full disclosure of acts perpetrated. Although the lion’s share of those receiving amnesty had been part of the apartheid regime’s security forces, ANC members were also found to have committed atrocities. The commission’s dedication to both investigation and forgiveness epitomized Mr. Mandela’s presidency.
In 1998, on his 80th birthday, Mr. Mandela wed Graça Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, the former president of Mozambique. He concluded his term as president the next year.
Mr. Mandela liked to describe himself in retirement as an “unemployed pensioner.” He concentrated on raising money for the Mandela Children Fund and the Mandela Foundation. The Atlantic Monthly called him “unofficial President of the Third World.”
He had a retirement house built in the Transkei, near his birthplace. It was modeled on the warder’s house in the compound where he had spent his last year in prison.
In 2002, Mr. Mandela was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor....
From none other than the war criminal George W. Bush, and I will bet the ceremony was all smiles.
--more--"
UPDATES:
Mourning mixes with celebration of Mandela
‘Madiba’ helped bring peace to Northern Ireland
In jail with Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela’s 1990 visit left lasting impression
Globe is keeping him alive.
What I'm finding offensive is the fawning and spewing over the man's struggle by the very people that now indefinitely detain and torture"suspected Muslim terrorists" -- which are nothing more than fall guy cut-outs for false flag patsy plots -- and has done so for years already. Now I know they quietly released a couple the other day; however, how long before they are mentioned in some propaganda pre$$ $hop prop as having returned to terrorism? Did you notice there was no mention of any actual terrorism by those fellas in the announcement of release? And now it's gone.
