These quotes will help you to really know the man ….
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12 Mandela Quotes That Won’t Be In the Corporate Media Obituaries
On “sanitizing” the legacy of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday at age 95, was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who served as President of South Africa from 1994-1999.
During the 1950′s, while working as an anti-apartheid lawyer, Mandela was repeatedly arrested for ‘seditious activities’ and ‘treason.’ In 1963 he was convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela served 27 years in prison before an international lobbying campaign finally won his release in 1990.
In 1994, Mandela was elected President and formed a Government of National Unity in an attempt to defuse ethnic tensions. As President, he established a new constitution and initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses and to uncover the truth about crimes of the South African government, using amnesty as a mechanism.
Nelson Mandela was a powerful and inspirational leader who eloquently and forcefully spoke truth to power. As tributes are published over the coming days, the corporate media will paint a sanitized portrait of Mandela that leaves out much of who he was. We expect to see ‘safe’ Mandela quotes such as “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” or “after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”
We wanted to share some Nelson Mandela quotes which we don’t expect to read in the corporate media’s obituaries:
- “A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy. The press must be free from state interference. It must have the economic strength to stand up to the blandishments of government officials. It must have sufficient independence from vested interests to be bold and inquiring without fear or favor. It must enjoy the protection of the constitution, so that it can protect our rights as citizens.”
- “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.”
- “The current world financial crisis also starkly reminds us that many of the concepts that guided our sense of how the world and its affairs are best ordered, have suddenly been shown to be wanting.”
- “Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.”
- “There is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like.”
- “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
- “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
- “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
- “No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”
- “If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don’t ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers.”
- “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
- On Gandhi: “From his understanding of wealth and poverty came his understanding of labor and capital, which led him to the solution of trusteeship based on the belief that there is no private ownership of capital; it is given in trust for redistribution and equalization. Similarly, while recognizing differential aptitudes and talents, he holds that these are gifts from God to be used for the collective good.”
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Nelson Mandela, 1918 – 2013
Nima Shirazi
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As countless obituaries, eulogies, elegies, panegyrics, and encomia pour in following the death of Nelson Mandela, who died Thursday December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, the sanitization and mythologizing of his principles and legacy is already in full swing across the political spectrum.
We will hear little of the fact that in his courageous and unfaltering stand for freedom and justice, he routinely refused to rhetorically renounce armed resistance to vicious, racist and violent oppression. We will read even less about his outspoken condemnation of the “injustice and gross human rights violations…being perpetrated in Palestine” and how he declared that, even with the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Endless comparisons between Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. will be made in the mainstream; yet few will note that both men were tireless critics and opponents of American aggression and imperialism and reviled by many in the U.S. establishment as threats to the existing power structure. Both consistently linked their own struggles for freedom and equality with global movements for social change, for human rights, for universal dignity. King was relentlessly spied on by the FBI. Mandela languished on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist watch list until 2008. He was almost 90 years old.
While in 1967 King named the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and spoke out on behalf of the “hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,” Mandela too castigated the American policies as often dangerous and destructive.
In September 2002, with the drive toward invading Iraq ramping up, Mandela told Newsweek,
The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken. Unqualified support of the Shah of Iran led directly to the Islamic revolution of 1979. Then the United States chose to arm and finance the [Islamic] mujahedin in Afghanistan instead of supporting and encouraging the moderate wing of the government of Afghanistan. That is what led to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mandela continued, “If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace,” and called the looming war crimes in Iraq “clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America.”
In the same interview, Mandela pointed out that, while there was “no evidence whatsoever” that Iraq had or was developing WMD, “what we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. Nobody talks about that. Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white.” In all the pieces written about Mandela today and in the future, one must wonder how often we will read these words.
Months later, in early 2003, Mandela told the International Women’s Forum, ”It’s a tragedy what’s happening, what Bush is doing. All Bush wants is Iraqi oil. There is no doubt that the US is behaving badly. Why are they not seeking to confiscate weapons of mass destruction from their ally Israel? This is just an excuse to get Iraq’s oil.”
“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America,” he added.
Musa Okwongo wrote this morning, “Dear revisionists, Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try to hide his anger from view.” Nevertheless, Okwongo insists:
Nelson Mandela was not a god, floating elegantly above us and saving us. He was utterly, thoroughly human, and he did all he did in spite of people like you. There is no need to name you because you know who you are, we know who you are, and you know we know that too. You didn’t break him in life, and you won’t shape him in death. You will try, wherever you are, and you will fail.
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