Originally Posted by Peter Hitchens, MoS
A hero we shamefully ignored
A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced. I am sure Mandela himself would have been embarrassed by it. One of the many good things about him was his modesty. Another was his genuine forgiveness of those who had wronged him.
May he rest in peace. It is those who overpraise him who are my targets here. He simply was not the perfect being they claim.
He chose to adopt the path of violence. He did not have to. Apartheid South Africa was a political and moral slum, but many fought it without resorting to gun or bomb.
And it is not just nasty, reactionary me making this point. Amnesty International, that great campaign for silenced and imprisoned voices of liberty, took up a then-peaceful Mandela’s case in 1962. But after his turn to violent tactics, the British group reluctantly decided that he could no longer be called a prisoner of conscience.
For years the African National Congress has used Mandela as window-dressing. It’s not a nice organisation. Its armed wing, Spear of the Nation, is notorious for its brutality.
The ANC was dominated at every level by the South African Communist Party, the most rigidly Stalinist movement outside North Korea, and grovelling supporters of Kremlin repression.
This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in ‘Right-wing’ repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified.
That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela – and, in my view, greater.
He never wielded anything more deadly than a typewriter, yet he brought down an Evil Empire, with all its concentration camps, tanks, guns and bombs. But when he died in August 2008, I don’t recall hours of eulogies on the BBC, or his face on every front page. Ask yourselves why.
