Tag: Muammar Gaddafi

In the age of television and instant mass communication, we ought perhaps to revise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip and insist that every hero becomes a bore not merely at last but very soon, maybe after only two or three television interviews.

To do so, however, would be to reckon without the phenomenon that is Nelson Mandela.

If one week is a long time in politics as a British statesman once remarked, the six months that have passed since Mandela was released from prison and has been the focus of media attention constitute nothing less than an eternity in the murky world of international politics.

And yet, his stature has continued to grow, and his admirers to multiply. Everywhere he speaks, his message gains in urgency. He has been winning friends for the African National Congress and the liberation struggle of which he is the foremost symbol.

After scores of television appearances, innumerable newspaper interviews and speeches, he is still displaying an intriguing knack for saying the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way.

At 72, Mandela maintains a schedule that would have fazed many a man half his age. But rarely has he shown the irritability that usually flows from weariness that not even a person of his singular energies and willpower can conceal. To admirers and opponents alike, he has shown uncommon civility and a graciousness that is all the more remarkable for being so totally natural.

In America, the land of the anti-hero, where the news interview is an inquisition by another name, it was widely expected that he would be cut down to human size at last. He had set out on a14-nation, six-week trip only four days after undergoing surgery. The calculation in some quarters was that by the time he reached the United States, signs of exhaustion would be so manifest in his conduct, his temperament would have become brittle, and he would not be able to stand up to the tough questioning for which the American news media are reputed.

Mandela’s well-known favourable disposition towards some of the bêtes noires of the American Establishment – Cuba’s president Fidel Castro, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and PLO leader Yasser Arafat – was sure to render him vulnerable to the sniping of the jingoistic right-wing press and the powerful Jewish interests, of which the United States policy-making is hostage.

But in America, Mandela was at his brilliant and most engaging best. More than one million people in New York lined his route to honour him in a ticker-tape parade. The city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, gave him the keys of the Big Apple. At the United Nations, accredited representatives of all nations of the world rose in a prolonged ovation even before he began to speak.

He told America that that its enemies were not necessarily the enemies of the ANC; he praised Castro and Gaddafi and Arafat for their contributions to the liberation struggle in South Africa. He spelled out without hatred or bitterness what apartheid means in human terms, insisted on the imperative of the armed struggle, and declared that nothing had happened in his country to warrant the lifting of sanctions.

In Washington, DC, he drew rapturous applause at various points in his address before the United States Congress, the first by a black foreign leader who holds no executive authority.

In television and newspaper interviews and speeches across the United States, he reiterated his position on various issues calmly and with the grave, measured dignity that is his hallmark.

Predictably, a few rumbles were heard here and there. The Jewish lobby was aghast that Mandela did not denounce Yasser Arafat as a terrorist chieftain and the PLO as a terrorist organisation. Under pressure from the large Cuban exile community, Miami scaled down the reception that had been planned for Mandela.

The New York Times in an editorial hailed him as an authentic hero, a manifestation of man’s unconquerable spirit, but remarked that if the United States were to employ Mandela’s standards and judge individuals and organisations by their attitudes toward it and not on the basis of other people’s prejudices, it would never have imposed economic sanctions against the South Africa.

A.M. Rosenthal, the rabidly pro-Jewish columnist for the paper, wrote approvingly of Mandela but deplored as “amoral” his standards in choosing friends. So did other Times columnist Flora Lewis, whose liberal credentials are unimpeachable on all matters except those that have any bearing on Israel, however tangentially.

All of them conveniently forget that the United States is only a recent convert to the view that economic sanctions can force Pretoria to reconsider its iniquitous policies’

Was it not the U.S. that invented the opportunistic and amoral policy of “constructive engagement”? Was it not former Secretary of State, George Schultz, who declared that the U.S. could not impose economic sanctions against South Africa because American women would by that measure be deprived of a source of diamonds? Had the U.S. not always stood in the way of UN draft resolutions condemning the barbarities of apartheid?

Mandela knows all this but is too gracious, too civil, to dwell on them. He had his own message to put across and was not going to be dragged into sterile controversy.

*Second installment of a three-part retrospective on Mandela. The article was first published in The African Guardian (September 23, 1990).

*

Twenty-three years later, well before Mandela’s lifeless body had turned cold, the right-wing media in the United States resumed its campaign of framing Mandela according to its soulless measure of goodness and greatness.

Yes, Mandela preached love and forgiveness and may even have practised same. But, you see, he was a Kha.mew.nist (read Communist). A Kha.mew.nist, you understand? He was the leader of a terrorist organisation that murdered thousands of innocent people in Africa and elsewhere, many of them women and children.

You doubt it?

Recently declassified material in the British archives, they said triumphantly, shows irrefutably that Mandela was not merely leader of an organisation of which the South African Communist Party was an ally, he was, horror of horrors, an actual, card-carrying, dues-paying member of that party.

Such labelling is a familiar weapon of the American Right, reserved especially for outstanding black men whose complaisance could not be taken for granted – Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name just a few.

Mandela had denied his alleged Communist affiliation again and again. But does it matter whether he was a Communist or not? If it is indeed proven that he was once an active, card-carrying, dues-paying member of the SACP, would that take anything away from his stature as one of the greatest men of our age and any age?

Apartheid, the pernicious ideology that undergirded the machinery of government in South Africa, was justly condemned by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. To some of the loudest elements of the American Right, however, Communism is a far greater evil apartheid.

Better a crime against humanity – especially black humanity — than a doctrine that challenges the foundations of market capitalism.