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Comment by Ihmahr | Hacker News Reader

Just until July 2008 Nelson Mandela was on the USA TERRORIST list (link).

Do you know who the Nelson Mandelas of our time are? Do you support them?

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_taken_off_US_ter...

The US was actively opposing apartheid at the same time as the ANC was added to the watch list, during the Reagan administration. Reagan has a weird relationship with apartheid; he vetoed the comprehensive anti-apartheid act, but his veto was overridden by his own party in the Senate.

It's worth knowing that the ANC was implicated in violence in South Africa --- or, rather, splinter groups of the ANC.

Having Nelson Mandela implicated in "terrorism" is obviously stupid, as was having the entire ANC listed as a "terrorist organization", but it would be misleading to suggest that the US Government was supporting apartheid based on this fact; it was a complicated time period during which the government was to greater and lesser extents working to oppose apartheid.

> Reagan has a weird relationship with apartheid

If by "weird relationship" you mean "supported it", then yes. Reagan was an out-and-out racist asshole, whose pro-apartheid policies were so extreme that his own party, despite itself being a party filled with racist fucks, nonetheless felt a need to override his veto to try to distance themselves from his over-the-top level of extremism.

If you're hoping I'm going to chime in defending Ronald Reagan, sorry. :)

That's a rather inaccurate way to describe it!

The US government was not at all opposing apartheid, but had to react to pressures. They could easily have imposed a boycott and collapsed the regime way before it did. Instead they send military support to the oppressors.

And sure Mandela was a terrorist, to some... He terrorized the dictators.

Now seriously, Who is a Nelson Mandela today and do you support him/her?

He was a great man, maybe the Greatest who ever lived in my lifetime, he prevented so much bloodshed and demonstrated a level of forgiveness I doubt we will witness again for a very long time.

I still find it hard to believe South Africa ended up the way it did, rather than going the Zimbabwe route of decades of revenge leading to economic stagnation, poverty and mob violence.

He was a terrorist. The ANC persecuted those who they believed cooperated with the white people. They "necklaced" them with burning tires. They bombed and assassinated.

The Taliban are terrorists, even if they believe the USA is a dictator/devil.

Believing that the ends justifies the means (as Mandela did) is very dangerous. Who gets to decide which innocent must be sacrificed to achieve the ends? Do the innocents get a say? History is littered dictators (and democracies) who are well meaning (from their/their culture's POV) who engaged in blood baths. Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe is an example of what might of happened in South Africa.

Edit: Its worth mentioning that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is another Nobel Peace Prize wining South African. He advocated the end of apartheid without violence. Another great man from that country.

Edit edit: I met a South African man in North Carolina. We had a long discussion about history and politics. He had (or at least claimed) to have participated in ANC guerrilla training in the Congo or Angola (can't remember which). I asked him why they did not want white blood in revenge, and why they were still not furious. I can't remember his reply, but I remember wondering if Mandela and Tutu had not preached forgiveness, would his attitude have been the same.

And that cuts both ways, right? The ends don't justify the means for the US either, correct?

Sorry, it amuses the hell out of me how we like to define terrorists, freedom fighters, and so on. And then place artificial constraints on those we decide are bad, and allow all sort of evil to be done by those we decide are good. So how a suicide bomber or an IED is cowardly, but a drone strike is a wonderful act of patriotism. Its makes me sick.

Frankly, violence is needed for change most of the time. Sometimes its good, sometimes its bad. Depends who gets to write the history after the event.

> Believing that the ends justifies the means (as Mandela did) is very dangerous.

The ends is the only thing that can justify any means taken.

Its only wrong to believe that a particular set of ends justifies a particular set of means when, well, it doesn't.

There's really no simple fortune-cookie answer to morality of difficult situations.

> Believing that the ends justifies the means (as Mandela did) is very dangerous.

Yes, yet disbelieving that is often worse.

I have no idea what it means for a representative democracy to "not oppose" something but rather "react to pressures". Whatever that pressure was, it caused the Republican-controlled Senate to override the veto of a Republican President. If it's helpful for you, here's the law, which not only opposed apartheid but also banned imports from the South African state and cut off aid; it also stated the sense of Congress that the US should meet with... wait for it... Nelson Mandela.

http://uscode.house.gov/statutes/1986/1986-099-0440.pdf

Here and elsewhere in this thread you are giving a misleading impression of the GOP's and Reagan's relationship to sanctions legislation. They fought it tooth and claw, and were eventually shamed into doing something, which turned out to be as little as possible, too late to matter.

That's what the parent comment is trying to get across. I have no idea why you're failing to see the distinction between legislators genuinely working on an issue vs. being dragged by public opinion.

The background is that most of the GOP leadership (political and think-tank) rejected sanctions against the apartheid government of SA during the 1980s. Similar to other muddles today, a cloud of confusion was thrown up to stop or delay passage of US sanctions. ("Sanctions would hurt the poorest most", etc.) It was all just a BS rationale to keep from implementing sanctions against a government considered a US ally (the ANC was associated with Communism), but it was all taken seriously at the time. Vintage Cold War logic.

A watered-down bill eventually passed the Democratic House, and went to the GOP-controlled Senate, where it was diluted and barely passed. Reagan had not anticipated this, and vetoed the bill. And it was then over-ridden. His administration never went along with the sanctions implementation.

By the time the GHW Bush administration took over and did somewhat better, the jig was up. The Berlin wall fell in 1989, removing the "bulwark against communism" rationale for US support of apartheid, and Mandela was released from jail in 1990.

I have some attachment to the issue because my roommates were involved in sit-ins, a tent city, and other political organizing at the time. It was a defining issue of the mid-1980s.

The idea that the USG put Mandela on a terrorist watchlist as a way of sabotaging efforts to end apartheid is false. That is the only argument I'm making.

If you're looking to me to stick up for the Republican Party, you're going to be disappointed.

"If you're looking to me to stick up for the Republican Party, you're going to be disappointed."

I'm aware of that, which is why your comments puzzled me.

I'm just trying to be honest about the Reagan record regarding apartheid South Africa.

The US had to support the South African regime during the Cold War, because South Africa was strategically important. After the Cold War, there was no further reason to support it, and the US stopped supporting it.

>Now seriously, Who is a Nelson Mandela today and do you support him/her?

it is great to have a Mandela like champion of your cause. Yet what about uncountable people (or animals) - victims of violence and injustice ( or they may be even not considered to have any rights for justice thus even "injustice" can't be claimed ). Sirian war is still going on. Women's rights in muslim world still an issue to say the least. Hungry and ill children around the world. Tibetans still set themselves on fire (latest one - 2 days ago). Gestation crates, dog fights, eutanasia of multi-millions annually and all the other things we do to animals.... A lot of causes needing their Mandela.

To many people, Osama Bin Laden was their Nelson Mandela.

Osama Bin Laden? Hugo Chavez? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

You don't need to look too far from home.

Margaret Thatcher too, called him a terrorist. They (Thatcher and her party) were on the wrong side of history then.

I'd say if you're an Irish person Thatcher could be seen as a terrorist.

Half of England agrees with you

Yes, she was so unpopular she won three elections on the bounce.

Yeah, yeah, popular vote blah blah blah.

I'm guessing you know how daft you sound. She frequently registered the lowest ratings in opinion polls of any PM. Ever. She was for much of her time despised by the majority, regarded as dangerously idiotic by the civil service and as an embarrassment by her own parliamentary party.

Do not fool yourself into thinking she won on her own volition. She won because of external influences, at least some of which were the fault of her opposition.

For example, the same political system, we here in Canada have Harper there is no way he is popular but he keeps winning elections.

She won, like any other politician, because she was the best choice for the people at the time.

I don't think what the civil service thinks of you is of particular relevance. She may have been despised by the majority of people in the North of England, but she was (and is) revered across most of the Sourth.

Terrorist is a loaded term.

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-editors/2007/06/13/when-doe...

Margaret Thatcher almost makes me wish Hell existed.

And here we have the left's equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church.

The left sounds exceedingly reasonable then, because the right's version of the Westboro Baptists is the Westboro Baptists.

They are only right wing if you subscribe to an extremely simplistic and binary view of politics.

Yeah, but the joke is responding to a post that is saying that davidgerard is the left wing equivalent of them, so to include more nuance would have made it less funny.

But he was involved in terrorist activities. He was a terrorist.

Were the American Revolutionaries also "terrorists"? Where do you draw the line between revolutionary armies and terrorism?

I don't know where the line is exactly, but I don't think Sam Adams blew up a school bus or dozens of passers by in downtown Pretoria with a car bomb.

I believe the car bombing you are referring to was the Church Street bombing, which took place in 1983 while Nelson Mandela was in jail and Oliver Tambo was leading the ANC. I'm not sure you can really say that he bore responsibility for that attack.

Before Mandela was jailed, when he was actively leading the ANC, he was careful to target only infrastructure and economic damage, not civilians. When Nelson Mandela was arrested, they were in the process of moving from that type of sabotage toward actual guerrilla action against the military, but were still not targeting civilians. Hmm. Escalating from boycotts and economic attacks to guerrilla warfare against the military; not too different than what Sam Adams did. What the ANC did after while he was jailed did escalate beyond that, but as far as I can tell, what he did and advocated never went much beyond what the American Revolutionaries did.

From the Truth and Reconciliation report http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%202.... volume 2 page 326-7:

  In the course of the armed struggle, a number of military
  actions took place which resulted in the death or injury of 
  civilians, and where gross violations of human rights can 
  be said to have been committed, despite ANC policy to avoid 
  unnecessary loss of life. Police statistics indicate that, 
  in the period 1976 to 1986, approximately 130 people were 
  killed by ‘terrorists’. Of these, about thirty were members
  of various security forces and one hundred were civilians. 
  Of the civilians, forty were white and sixty black.

A total of 130 civilian deaths is quite low for a violent conflict over that long of a period. That's far lower than the number of civilian casualties caused by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, per year the US has killed more civilians in Afghanistan than the ANC killed in that entire period.

I don't endorse attacks like the Church Street bombing at all; I find them quite abhorrent. But you need to keep some perspective on this. "Terrorist", in many cases, is just a convenient label for particular people who we want to judge more harshly than we judge ourselves.

Neither did Nelson Mandela, if that's what you're implying.

To wit, the Church Street bombing (which is presumably what you're referring to by the Pretoria car bomb) by the MK happened in 1983. That's 20 years after Mandela was imprisoned.

Unless you have some credible evidence that he was somehow the kingpin behind all the violent activities of the ANC and/or MK during the time that he was in prison, I think it's fair to say you're wrong.

Since school busses, cars, and downtown Pretoria didn't exist when Sam Adams was alive, that's probably a good bet.

Would you call the French Resistance terrorists?

They certainly performed acts that could justify the label, but would you call them terrorists?

I'm sure the Germans would have. Which is the point really; terrorism vs freedom fighter, war vs cou, revolution vs insurgency.

It all depends which side your on.

I get that, which makes me wonder about somebody who claims that Mandela was a terrorist. What does choosing that terminology say about them? What side they are on?

They called themselves terrorists. Terrorisme was the state terror and was not an accusation, but rather a boast by the Jacobins.

edit - oops, as splat points out, I got the wrong end of the stick there by a country mile.

I think Crito was referring to the French Resistance during WWII, not the French Revolution.

Doesn't terrorism have to be again the civilian population? If the French resistance were attacking the German Army or the Vichy Regimes troops, it wouldn't really be terrorism.

They derailed their fair share of trains. There was little shortage of civilian casualties, and if they were operating in Germany, where civilians were more likely to align with the opposition, you can bet your ass there would have been more.

The lesson is that the difference between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" is not as well defined as you might think. He was a great leader.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

To paraphrase James Bond: "Some Freedom Fighters are not interested in anyone's freedom"

I'm not sure where you're going with that. Nelson Mandela was the opposite of that; he cared deeply about everyone's freedom.

He may well have been seen as a terrorist by Our Great Leaders, however, he could also count on a lot of support from people all around the world that wanted an end to Apartheid. This support was wide ranging - words, weapons, money and organisational support.

Currently we are in a struggle against totalitarianism, the privatised war machine and the outsourced surveillance state. This enemy has global reach and the only countries that are not aligned with it are places like Cuba. What countries do we have outside our borders to go to for practical help from the system of oppression we find ourselves in? What external support can we get?

Nelson Mandela came out of retirement to tell the likes of Bush and Blair exactly what he thought of them. This was not the plan, he wanted to enjoy time with his grand children rather than have to continue working. He was not best pleased with general stewardship of life on planet earth. I doubt that he had a complete grasp of how insidious the current situation is but I am sure he had the general idea. It is sad that he should be departing from the world when things are going 'Dark Ages' rather than 'Enlightenment'.

They never taught me in school the FBI and the NSA wiretapped and had excessive surveillance on Martin Luther King Jr. to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#FBI_sur...

That is such a blatantly illogical statement I'm shocked to see it on board where the userbase deals in applying logic for living.

AM is an A. B is an A. Therefore B = AM.

Are you new here?

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