Nelson Mandela is dead, at age 95.  I’m not bothering to cite any sources, as this dominated most news the last half of Wednesday, both US and UK.  As part of this, Liberty-tree.CA had the following quotes this morning:

“I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his kin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than the opposite.”
— Nelson Mandela

“I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”

— Nelson Mandela
“Once a person is determined to help themselves, there is nothing that can stop them.”
— Nelson Mandela

Liberty-Tree.CA’s quote blog described Mandela as:  (1918-2013) South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, imprisoned for 27 years, President of South Africa (1994-1999).  You can find these and more at:  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Nelson.Mandela.Quote.AFA9

These are some good quotes.  They are like so many quotes we can see from “great men” like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and even the likes of Bill Clinton and Woodrow Wilson.  They do NOT accurately reflect the attitudes, opinions, and actions of the men who spoke them.  Indeed, they are often a sharp contrast to the real people.  They are often the words of hypocrites.  They are used to elevate those men to immortality, to make them MORE than human.  It has happened not just with Americans, but with men of many lands:  Cyrus of Media, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar of Rome, Augustus (Octavian) of Rome, Alfred the Great of England, Mao Tse Tong of China, Adolf Hitler of Germany, and many many more.  They are or were made demigods.

Mandela was born about the same time my grandfather was reporting for duty with the US Army to go to France to fight in what we now call the First World War.  He was an adult during the Second World War, and a terrorist when my father was on duty during the Korean War. He is NOT ancient history. But he has been and is being treated like those ancient “great men.”

The demigod worship is well underway, but on hearing of Mandela’s death, my wife and my first response was “finally.”  May his evil die with him.

Despite the way he has been idolized and glorified, even by self-governors and libertarians, Nelson Mandela was an evil man.  He was a Communist (in both name and fact), he was a murderer,  involved in killing not just his political opponents and enemy soldiers, but even supposed comrades-in-arms, and especially innocent people: civilians, many of his own race.  He was a terrorist in the 1950s, and helped found a terrorist organization back in the 1960s (before the magnificent “Global War on Terrorism”).  He didn’t serve 27 years in prison as a political prisoner, but because he confessed to more than 100 acts of terrorism: bombings and killings, including targets like sports venues and theatres and parks.  The attacks and killing were for political purposes, but they were still murders: killing of innocent people.  He was also a racist, as proven by recordings of him singing songs about killing white people and other documentation.

I am not saying that he did not change, but I question whether he really repented of all these things:  rather than admitting his actions and saying that he renounced and rejected them, that they were wrong, he seems to have simply tried to sweep them under the rug. This is not repentance, this is the typical behavior of a politician.  And his term as president of South Africa and his support of the evil actions of his wife certainly do not demonstrate (at that time) any change in heart, any repentance, any regret for what was done in the past.  The legacy of corruption and authoritarianism and crony government and capitalism left in South Africa since 1999 are NOT the legacy of “another Gandhi,” or “an international icon of peace and reconciliation” though he shares many of the characteristics of another Communist, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The point is, once more the Tranzis – the progressives, the left, the socialists and their kind – are twisting and rewriting history.  We are told he really wasn’t racist, because among other things one of his close allies in his terrorist days was a white man.  How many white racists have still been condemned even when they have pointed out that they have black friends?  He was not a terrorist, we are told, because he condemned violence – yet he was an ally of both the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Stasi!  He was not a Communist, it is said, because he said that the ANC was not a Communist organization; but there is documentation that he was, indeed, a card-carrying Communist for many years, and on very good terms with many more Communists than just a few Stasi agents.

Mandela was a “great man,” but so was Stalin and Lenin and Hitler and Churchill and Giap and all the rest:  as were Augustus and Alexander and Xerxes and Ramses II.  But great men are generally NOT good men, and until we recognize and teach that, there will always be another man on a white horse (or not) coming and enslaving and stealing and killing (directly or indirectly) and fighting AGAINST liberty (even while proclaiming loudly how much he loves liberty).

I do wish that we could honor Mandela (and others) as lovers of liberty who had been and done evil things in their youth and then repented and became good men, fighting for liberty as well as freedom, working to treat everyone as they themselves wanted to be treated.  But that is not the case.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.  Finally.  Let the dead bury the dead; the rest of us want real liberty, not the Mandela-Tranzi kind.  Mandela, at last, is answering to God.