The Legacy of Nelson Mandela

While I appreciate your sober perspective on Mandela, Lane, I believe your criticisms are unfairly overreaching. His legacy is having left 27 years of imprisonment with an absence of revenge or rancor, but rather a commitment to a colorblind, democratic process. His fight was for the very same freedoms that we Americans won in the War of Independence from Britain. That, in and of itself, is accomplishment enough to warrant the accolades he now receives in death.

That said, his post-apartheid ambitions failed to materialize in part due to the enormity of the historical, cultural, and educational divide between the newly enfranchised black population and the minority white South Africans. Our founding fathers had no such impedimenta, what with the colonists being very well educated in relative comparison to the Kingdom of Britain and Europe for that matter. But as you reasonably argue, he was far less successful as a president than he was 'founding father' of South Africa. Does that diminish his earlier accomplishments?

Consider George Washington: A great military leader and 'freedom fighter' and yet his subsequent presidency was marked by scandal, allegations of corruption, and a frequently authoritarian attitude. Examples include his gross mishandling of the Whiskey Rebellion (Washington sent an army of 14,000 men to put asunder a handful of frontier rioters in a brutal show of force) and later "Jay's Treaty" (This was Washington's infamous political sellout to Great Britain. He not only refused to support the new republican forces in France, but he also allowed American foreign policy to revert back to being pro-British. Regarding France, our ally during the War of Independence, he showed a complete lack of sympathy for the sa...

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... the British, but also assassinations in England) and later the Gahadar Party, among others inclined towards violent change.

As I have written earlier, I have little doubt that many of those most critical of Mandela's tactics would be among the first to adopt them were they to be subjected by their government to what black South African's faced: disenfranchisement, seizure of property, prohibition against political representation, and lack of equal redress in the courts. But the truth is that so long as the people who are suffering from a denial of basic human rights are ethnically or racially different, many will turn their backs and apply standards quite different from what they expect for themselves and their kind.

In any but a just society, non-violence as a tool for change is often little more than a palliative encouraged by those for whom change is anathema.