Sassing America: Nelson Mandela, Out of Place.
by Shelton Hull
Recent comments by Nelson Mandela on matters related to the “coming” war in Iraq have generated tremendous heat in American media, to the point where the country’s 20-year love affair with Mandela may now be terminated. Surely it will if he dares to speak so again. To hear the polished pabulum-pushers of various cable news channels using phrases like “out of line” to describe a man with more balls than the entire TV news establishment is to hear arrogance on a level utterly new, even within the sordid history of the 21st century.
Speaking at the International Women’s Forum on January 29, Mandela was quoted as saying things that, while certainly not complimentary to America, are hardly shocking to anyone who’s not at least mildly delusional in their reading of recent history: “if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.” Only fools will bother to deny this, or stoop to criticize Mandela for saying it. Most Americans are proud of their country’s history, while realizing that “mistakes were made” at certain points. Mandela never said that unspeakable atrocities were not sometimes the only option when dealing with enemies, nor even that righteous people were not justified in pursuing their interests by any means necessary. He couldn’t say that, because he was a “terrorist” before anyone had heard of Arafat, Saddam, Bin Laden. He was a troublemaker on the scale of King, Gandhi and Malcolm X, and I’m sure he had his reasons.
I find it highly troubling that in 2003, in the midst of what will surely be another epoch-defining outburst of sustained violence (which could easily spiral out of anyone’s control, into total madness), some people still, to this day, think it was a good idea to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan. Mandela’s critique of that decision, while blunt and bereft of nuance, is hardly an affront to truly patriotic Americans; indeed, one could argue that the present crisis has its roots in an ever-more proliferate arms race that began with Truman’s itchy trigger-finger in 1945. Now, for all the sane world’s best efforts, it is simply impossible to ever again put a lid on the nuclear kettle, and the best any of our leaders can hope for in a worst-case scenario is to counter-attack with ICBMs that we wouldn’t live to see hit their targets. So far in 58 years.
Mandela suggested racism as possibly the root of the Administration’s disdain for the UN, which is led by Ghanaian Kofi Annan. The fact is, though, that both Colin Powell and Condi Rice outrank Annan (and, for that matter, Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and IAEA’s Mohammed El-Baradei) because the UN’s only real value to this Administration vis-à-vis Iraq is in the distribution of humanitarian aid after the area has been cleared of Ba’athists by Special Forces. This would be true under any UN whose secretary-general wasn’t an American, and I can’t really blame Bush for that. If the UN were twice as trustworthy on important matters as the US Congress, then they should be ignored. I’m not convinced that any of our so-called “allies” are indeed that. Al-Qaeda, for example, could be a proxy for the European Union, just waiting for America to over-extend ourselves at war before jacking our wealth for pennies on the dollar like they did to the African continent, and there’d be no way to know until it was too late. After all, the chairmanship of the UN’s special disarmament committee has just reached its next stop along the alphabetical order: Iraq, with Iran as co-chair. Assuming that to be totally random, any President would take that as a bad omen.
Mandela’s most controversial remarks regarded President Bush and his brain. Bush, he said, had “no foresight” and “cannot think properly.” If those charges were meant to be general, and not specific to the Iraq question, then indeed he should be ashamed of speaking so at this delicate juncture. His use of the word “holocaust” to describe what all agree will be the incineration of Iraqi combatants and perhaps a civilian or two, is a mistake common to old people. He may have forgotten (or not been informed after leaving prison) that there is only one definition of “holocaust,” which only applies to the victims of Hitler, and that the word has been retired from all other uses.
Ironically, the flak from Mandela’s remarks has exposed what a tool he’s been for the white supremacist cause, like those southern American folks who sang and prayed while Dobermans mutilated their children. In a February 3 piece for National Review Online, titled “Monumental Failure,” the neo-con icon Michael Ledeen makes a show of removing his hand from the top of Mandela’s head. Mandela’s best position, it would appear, is submissive to the tender mercies of God and the Western backers of Botha and de Klerk, none of whom have ever taken a beating they didn’t pay for. But now, having too late and too clumsily sought to neutralize his own flaws as a historical figure, “He’s become yet another African loudmouth,” concludes Ledeen, whose own mouth is a sort of running joke in the media. For example:
“Many of us [many of who, exactly? Where was he in 1989?] marveled at Nelson Mandela’s humanity, tolerance, and patience towards those who had imprisoned him in what is now a national monument on a small island off Cape Town. He cautioned against acts of revenge, he embraced his lifelong enemies from the apartheid regime, and he called for South Africa to show the world that a multiracial society could flourish, even after years of civil strife.” These are the very virtues that crippled his ability to lead a newly Democratic South Africa. “Instead of insisting on the creation of a first-class educational system for all South Africans, he simply presided over the installation of a quota program that gave most of the slots in the best schools to the majority black population.” The idea that the majority is not, for lack of a better word, entitled to most of the slots in a public venture is a fundamental value of apartheid.
The marks in the media have focused on Mandela’s insinuations about the President’s mental capacity and ignored the fact that Mandela supports doing what the UN favors, which means he’ll ultimately side with Bush. Like a good boy should. I would have figured that if he was going to start airing the dirty laundry of America and Britain, especially as it regards his homeland, he would have done so sometime in the recent past. The war, however, has made such things largely irrelevant: the Al Qaedas of this world have no interest in any area that isn’t receptive to shari’a law, certainly not a drought-starved blight of anarchy and infectious disease. The West, meanwhile, waits patiently for AIDS to finish the job started with slavery and continued with apartheid.
I must admit that I’ve always been suspicious about how exactly Mr. Mandela came to occupy the exalted position he now holds among lovers of peace and freedom, etc. The very actions for which he is now allegedly beloved in the West got him branded a terrorist and tossed into prison for 27 years before being released in 1989. It’s easy to assume now that he was liberated then by the weight of American influence. But the cause we now all agree was just was then insurrection against a well-entrenched offshoot of British colonial power, backed by a diamond industry with extensive ties to the US. Just as “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” so apartheid was the diamond consumer’s best friend. Millions of American and European relationships were sealed with rings whose gemstones were mined from the blood of Africans, and this is not a fact that anyone bothers to dispute. Not in court, anyway.
It’s my belief that Mandela only emerged after he had ceased to be a threat himself, in part because so many others working toward the same ends (like Steve Biko) had been neutralized, and also because the larger structure of apartheid had reached the end of its utility, as it had in America 35 years earlier. What distinguishes Mandela from most of the other revolutionary leaders of history, with whom he’s been rhetorically linked, is that he lived to see the end of what he opposed. I refrain from saying that he “won,” because clearly that victory as been, in a word, pyrrhic. His assumption of South Africa’s first post-apartheid presidency seemed more of a valediction than the start of a “new era” it was hyped as being. The transition was a little meek and cordial to me, from my outsider’s perspective, like at the end of a game when the third-stringers get some action. Mandela’s first job after prison was essentially to catalogue what remained of his country after it had been strip-mined by an enemy that was given blanket immunity for its crimes.
Mandela’s old, and surely he knows that his dream of a truly free and vibrant South Africa will not be realized in his lifetime, and that the rot which has set in across the entire continent is so well-entrenched that it may never be any better for his people than it is right now, which is to say hardly at all. He has reason to be bitter, having been pimped out as icon for a movement that only became fashionable after it had been destroyed by a regime that was, from start to finish, armed and backed by the United States and Great Britain, two countries whose joint offensive against terrorism will probably scatter even more of them into the African mix, which makes that area of the world even more dangerous than it is already. He is right to be bitter– and smart, too.
(Still, though, “holocaust”? What in the blue hell was he thinking?)
