The thing that gets me is the utter lack of respect. Here we have, a dude whose resolve ended apartheid in South Africa. Let's bring up totally irrelevant shit because I don't know. The guy just died, was an impactful and influential man the world over, so let's kick shit on his barely cold 95 year old body. I don't even care what they thought of him. The lack of respect is what gets me. Reddit was unreadable yesterday because a bunch of teenagers who googled Nelson Mandela's Wikipedia page contains things that happened during the height of 60's social action. How dare he.
There's also a pretty big dollop of cutesy contrarianism here. Folks, especially people who argue about shit on the internet, love the idea that they're part of a select few that's educated themselves on the real truth. You get a surprising amount of people saying the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, even when they have no cultural affinity for the Confederacy, just cause they'd hate to believe the simplistic morality tale they were taught in high school actually wasn't complete BS.
I think there's a lot of value in this kind of thing to an extent, of course then I'm a fan of revisionist history for revisionist histories sake, but in many cases it's seeking out confirmation bias. Mandela's "relevance" is within living memory far more than a JFK or MLK where people who were kids then, or Lincoln or whoever farther back, get to pretend they always were going to be on that winning, moral, side so there's probably far more lasting and recent politico-cultural hangover from the fights in the 1980s. And Mandela's Presidency was even sooner and like all administrations there's stuff to criticize there which offers more "cover."
The problem with picking and choosing revisionist history is that you're not going to find an answer you don't want and you're not going to accept circumstances of the era to adjust the evaluation because you live after them and can judge backwards especially in criticizing the allies made and other circumstantial decisions like that. Ghandi is often a good example of this, he was by plenty of accounts kinda a big asshole playing up a persona, his motives and "spirituality" weren't pure benevolence and piety, and he even he admitted that he would have taken up arms in revolution had it not been for the tolerance of the ruling British, but this doesn't diminish decolonizing India or the value of nonviolent resistance as a principle or strategy.
I personally think for Mandela the more important thing to stress, is not the ending of apartheid because his role as a symbol for the effort in the simple narrative has created some god-figure like notions about him that then encourages the counter narrative of him being an adulterous darkie Marxist terrorist (which does a lot to ignore that Soviet and therefore Marxist support was nearly essential to almost all national resistance movements of the era simply out of circumstance) and removes a lot of the nuance as to why the ruling powers gave it up finally, but how he didn't seize power and most importantly that he willingly gave it up. Mandela easily could have become like most every other ruler in the region, though not necessarily through violence initially but like George Washington through sheer popularity, and effectively been ruling until this week. But like Washington he turned that massive potential power down. And that's something that illustrates him personally outside the "grand events" of ending apartheid.
Maybe Boerseun and his friends will be right that South Africa is descending into disaster, but you can't really place that, if it comes to pass, at Mandela's feet. I mean sure you can say if not for him these other jerks like Zuma wouldn't have gained power! But who's to say they aren't currently seizing power through violent means after more years of apartheid and establishing an even worse regime that will descend faster in that alternative universe?
remember boys and girls, the only just revolution was the American one.
Besides, the Loyalists had it coming strutting around town wearing their crown-protected property.
