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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Mandela never renounced violence. In 1985, Mandela was offered a conditional release if he were to renounce violence; he refused.

Rick Stengel on Mandela, via FAIR:

> One of most interesting things he ever said to me was this idea of nonviolence. Remember, we compare him to Gandhi, we compare him to Martin Luther King. He said: “I was not like them. For them, nonviolence was a principle. For me, it was a tactic. And when the tactic wasn’t working, I reversed it and started” –that’s a very important difference.

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Of note is also that one of the reasons Mandela gave for supporting Castro until the end was Cuba's extensive military support in Angola, that Mandela credited as a substantial source of hope for the ANC and a demoralising event for the South African military, and as a major contributing cause in the independence of Namibia.

After his release in '90, he visited Castro and heaped praise on him for that among other things. There's no indication that he regretted that support for Cuba's direct military involvement in open warfare later, as far as I know.

Here's an excerpt (with links to the full speech) of Mandela's speech on the subject at a commemoration of the start of the Cuban revolution in 1991:

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/11/nelson_mandela_on_ho...

(I have plenty of issues with Castro, but it's worth understanding why he was seen as we seen by African leaders, and how we was seen by people like Mandela also elucidates those leaders own views)

Mandela was asked why he didn't share the West's view on Castro and Gadaffi in a Q&A, fortunately that was captured on video[1] so we can make our own judgements.

1. https://youtu.be/RwwxcVTjt3Q

> Mandela never renounced violence. In 1985, Mandela was offered a conditional release if he were to renounce violence; he refused.

Renouncing violence against a nuclear-bomb-equiped adversary is beyond foolish, strategically speaking. At the micro end, the same regime was not beyond shooting dead (unarmed) protesting high-schoolers less than a decade before the offer. Renouncing violence wasn't a viable option, but perhaps they hoped 2 decades imprisonment with labor had softened Mandela.

Given South Africa's geography, why do you think the apartheid government had (prior to the offer) developed its nuclear program? Hint: there was no parallel program for long-distance nuclear-payload delivery.

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