A rchive Date
[ 10-02-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ South Africa ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
Mandela worship overdone
By Herman Goodden - London Free Press
February 10, 2003
A letter to the editor last week regretted there was no Free Press coverage of Nelson Mandela's speech late last month to the International Women's Forum in Johannesburg.
The writer wondered if no report was published "because you didn't hear about it (unlikely), or because you didn't think it important (bad judgment), or because he was critical of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair."
The writer suggested because Mandela's speech ran counter to pro-American opinions expressed here by a handful of regular and occasional columnists (including myself), The Free Press decided to suppress all news of his talk. As this paper also frequently runs columns by such pointedly non-Bush enthusiasts as Eric Margolis, Gwynne Dyer and, previously, Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, this seemed a pretty far-fetched charge to me.
Generally speaking, as media coverage goes, Mandela is a darling of the first order. He is a greatly revered man routinely treated with kid gloves, whose every utterance is received with the utmost respect.
A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mandela is rightly esteemed for selflessly forgiving his captors after almost three decades' incarceration for his defiance against the South African government and its racist policies.
Mandela's forgiveness of his oppressors greatly defused tensions and resentments, easing South Africa's transition away from a system of apartheid and toward equality and democracy. It is often overlooked that Mandela shared his Nobel Prize with South African president Fredrik Willem de Klerk.
On those occasions when Mandela utters vile hooey - as was the case with the Johannesburg speech - his words are quietly set aside without being refuted with the vigour they would receive if spoken by a less beloved figure. The same principle of respectful discretion applies when some rattled old war vet goes on a bender and embarrasses himself in the public square.
Mandela is, after all, 84 years old now. He has endured the kind of hell that would have broken a weaker man, and taken all in all, has unquestionably been a force for good in our world. So the media usually cut him some slack.
If there is any sort of conspiracy to suppress anything here, it is a conspiracy to preserve the noble outline of a great moral hero. Instead of just disagreeing with the American government's aim to depose Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Mandela descended into smear tactics, cheap slurs and distortions of historical fact.
Alluding to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the Second World War to a close far earlier than would otherwise have been the case (and saving untold millions of lives on both sides of the conflict), Mandela recklessly opined, "If there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings."
Mandela asked, "Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations (Ghanaian Kofi Annan) is now a black man" that the U.S. is prepared to ignore the UN? "They never did that when secretary-generals were white."
This is a pretty hard assertion to lay at the feet of a president whose secretary of state and national security adviser are both blacks and who, the very same week as Mandela's speech, generously committed billions of American dollars to combat the spread of HIV-Aids in Africa.
"All Bush wants is Iraqi oil because Iraq produces 64 per cent of oil and he wants to get hold of it," Mandela claimed. Then, in addition to playing the "race card," he stooped to playing the "moron card": "What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer took the high road in his response. While acknowledging that Bush and Mandela "do not see eye to eye," Fleischer insisted that Mandela "was a great leader" and "remains a great man."
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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