For me personally, the most lasting take-away from Nelson Mandela's belief-set is "... the denial of the rights of one diminish the freedom of others" ~ the world has lost a giant with his death ~ rest in peace, Mr. Mandela ~ ~ Sooz

What Nelson Mandela Taught Us About Human Rights
By Zack Beauchamp on December 5, 2013 at 7:18 pm

Nelson Mandela took the impossible and made it flesh. He took down an entrenched system of white supremacy and, against all odds, shepherded a scarred country into democracy. Mandela recruited the international community, once a staunch ally of apartheid South Africa, to be an auxiliary in this extraordinary fight.

Mandela’s ability to build a global movement against racial oppression — and to win — should remind us that the brutal realities of the world we live in are not set in stone. Though today’s crises — civil wars in Syria and Central African Republic, grinding global poverty and disease — may seem like things over which the world has no power, Mandela’s life says otherwise. The moral rules of the world politics, the ones that say suffering abroad are “not my problem,” can be changed by people of great moral vision and activists convinced of the rightness of their cause.

It’s easy to forget that apartheid was once a contentious issue in global politics. The anti-apartheid movement’s first big victory, a 1962 U.N. General Assembly resolution establishing a Special Committee Against Apartheid, was not followed by any action in the vastly more powerful Security Council. The State Department is admirably frank about the reasoning: “Defenders of the Apartheid regime” in the West “had promoted it as a bulwark against communism.” The United States, Britain, and other capitalist states saw South Africa as a useful ally, apartheid be damned.

By 1986, the international scene had changed entirely. Every one of South Africa’s most significant trading partners had placed onerous sanctions on the South African government, and the pressure was immense.

The global anti-apartheid movement, which took “Free Mandela!” as one of its most famous slogans, is of course responsible for this sea change. This loose network of Third World governments, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens, organized boycotts, pushed sanctions, and lobbied legislators to turn the Afrikaner government into a global pariah.

These activists succeeded, political scientist Audie Klotz writes, despite the fact that “the interests of great powers did not substantially change.” The world began moving against apartheid well before the end of the Cold War. Rather, Klotz’s research suggests, it was a “consensus around racial equality” as a defining moral norm of global politics, which began taking hold in the late 60s, that eventually turned the West against South Africa. The victory Mandela and the activists he inspired fought for was won by changing people’s beliefs about what was right.

When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he told the world that “the sanctions that have been imposed by the United Nations and by individual governments should remain in place.” The reason, he suggested, was to avoid ”any situation in which those who are opposed to change in our country find encouragement to resist change.” The sanctions, for Mandela, were power he could wield: they demonstrated that, when he spoke to Afrikaner leaders, he spoke with the weight of the world behind him.

That the global community could, by deciding that racism was no longer acceptable in its ranks, provide freedom fighters like Mandela with such a weapon demonstrates the power of people to organize in the face of grave injustice, even to help people very much unlike themselves. It shows that it’s not hopeless naiveté to believe that people of great moral vision like Mandela can inspire the rest of us to practical action that to improve people’s lives.

The world could not fight black South Africans’ battles for them, and the “white savior” narrative in which the world, rather than Mandela and the ANC, principally ended apartheid is both false and terribly narcissistic. But recognizing the power of the world to develop a moral expansive consciousness, and the ability of that consciousness to allow people to help each other, is not the same thing. “We’re all moved,” Mandela said in that post-prison address, “by the fact that freedom is indivisible, convinced that the denial of the rights of one diminish the freedom of others.” His life, and the great global good it inspired, is proof that these words are not empty.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/05/3029161/nelson-mandela-taught-human-rights/

All parties have been united in paying tribute to the late South African leader, but in the past things were more complicated
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

Friday 6 December 2013

The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... on-mandela

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Nelson's Mandela death has brought together politicians from across the political spectrum in shared tribute, obscuring a far less harmonious history in which attitudes towards the South African leader during the apartheid years divided along bitter ideological lines.

The shift is most apparent in the Conservative party. The union flag hung at half mast over Downing Street morning and David Cameron issued a lavish tribute, describing Mandela as "a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death – a true global hero".

The praise was in stark contrast to the view taken by Cameron's predecessor and another of his heroes, Margaret Thatcher, who described the African National Congress as "a typical terrorist organisation" and fiercely opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime. Her South Africa policy was in part personal: her husband, Denis, had extensive business interests in the country. But her outrage at sanctions also sprang from her anti-communist convictions, which put the promotion of the free market above most, if not all, other political concerns.

As the apartheid apparatus began to crumble, Thatcher's instinctive support went to the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who led the Inkatha Freedom party, the ANC's only serious rival, rather than to Mandela.

At the 1987 Commonwealth summit, her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, derisively rejected the suggestion that the ANC could achieve power. "It is cloud cuckoo land for anyone to believe that could be done," Ingham said, seven years before the watershed election that made Mandela president.

While Thatcher herself always claimed to oppose apartheid on principle and was eventually persuaded to take the ANC seriously as an opposition movement, some of her keenest supporters were far less restrained.

An arch-Thatcherite MP, Teddy Taylor, declared that Mandela "should be shot". One of her biggest fans in the press, the News of the World's "Voice of Reason", Woodrow Wyatt, accused Mandela and the ANC of trying to establish "a communist-style black dictatorship".

Sir Larry Lamb, a personal friend of Thatcher and then Daily Express editor, declared in 1985 that Mandela's unconditional release would be "a crass error".

During Thatcher's time in office, members of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) went as far as wearing stickers declaring: "Hang Nelson Mandela" until the group was banned in 1986 by an embarrassed Tory leadership. The head of the FCS at the time, John Bercow, is now the Speaker of the Commons, but he has insisted he did not take part in the Mandela-baiting.

Nor is there any evidence that the young David Cameron was involved. However, he did visit apartheid South Africa in 1989, when he was 23, on an all-expenses-paid "fact-finding mission" funded by Strategy Network International, a lobbying group seeking to lift sanctions.

The demonisation of the then political prisoner had its roots in racial attitudes but also in the black-and-white cold-war world of ideological struggle, in which Mandela's ties with the South African Communist party mattered far more than their common opposition to a deeply unjust system.

Cameron broke with previous Conservative policy on South Africa while he was opposition leader. Returning in 2006 from South Africa, where he met Mandela for the first time, he wrote in the Observer: "The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now."

The attempt to bury Tory ghosts drew accusations of betrayal from Thatcher aides such as Ingham, who remarked: "I wonder whether David Cameron is a Conservative."

The party chairman during the Thatcher era, Lord Tebbit, was also unrepentant. Challenged over the Tories' demonisation of Mandela as a terrorist in the 1980s, Tebbit told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "He was the leader of a political movement which had begun to resort to terrorism. You have to act within the constraints of the time and I get very irritated by people who judge the past by the present."

However, such sentiments have been rare across the political landscape in the reaction to Mandela's death. Perhaps uniquely among the world's political leaders, he has long been an icon of freedom, justice and tolerance with whom all politicians strive to identify.

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In my view whatever "ism" Mandela allegedly adhered to is completely irrelevant.

I agree, oskar. Martin Luther King was fixed with the "communist" label here by some. It means nothing. Anyone daring to say equality can and often is stuck with that. Also, the question is, so what if they are communist?

Nelson Mandela was one of the true leaders in the fight for human rights. He was willing to and did make the sacrifices that often go along with that. It amazes me that he could be in prison for 27 years and come out the man he did. He was a very rare individual and the world is a much better place because he was here.

the West would only go along with reform in SA kicking and screaming. it was pathetic and embarrassing to anyone that feels such things.

Mandela was an imperfect human being just like the rest of us. The difference is that he was able to overcome more of those imperfections than the rest of us. That, IMO, is what makes him an outstanding individual.