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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.