Hacker News Reader

Comment by afriend4lyfe | Hacker News Reader

He has come to represent forgiveness and peace over time by learning from his past mistakes. No one is saying he never fought fire with fire. It is untrue to say his life "was a symbol of non-peaceful resistance and the progress that it can bring." Especially because his greater achievements were made through peace and reconciliations.

No one's perfect but it's unreasonable to only focus on the negative.

View on HN

I do not believe that mathieuh considers Mandela's "not always nonviolent" stance to be a negative.

I think the idea is more along the lines of "violence had its place in that conflict, it was for a good cause, and it worked."

Injecting my own opinion here: I think that if we forget the usefulness of violence then we may risk failing to repeat Mandela's success, should the need ever arise. Nonviolence is great, but only when it works. When it doesn't, violence should be embraced. We should embrace whatever is necessary to get the job done, nonviolence should be seen as a (typically very effective) means to an end, not an end in itself.

Except it is you who is projecting his value system over who you are responding to. Nobody implied 'violence' was wrong in this context, violence is at many times necessary and was so in mandela's case, he had to do what he had to do to achieve progress, and when it wasn't necessary he did, but when it was he did as well.

We cannot allow people to only paint him as peaceful completely simply because non-violent struggle is not what brought about long-term peace. Both did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com