I am not terribly familiar with the details here, so a poster who isn’t suspended for gratuitous Hitler comparisons will have to help me out.
Mandela’s famous trials were for treason, found not guilty, and then conspiring for revolution and sabotage. Searching finds mention of the killings by MK and Winnie, but nothing like a guilty plea to murders by Nelson. Does this refer to anything more particular than his cell?
No! It’s not just our responsibility to “honor those that remain while we still can”, but to become giants ourselves if possible, and if not, to become the parents of giants.
If you treat greatness as something that only exists in the near past, that’s the future you’re guaranteeing yourself.
You could just as easily, perhaps more easily, say that the folks who set up apartheid were “violent terrorists.” Are the Mexicans who are right now fighting back against the cartels right now “violent terrorists” or are they just defending themselves. That seems like a reasonable parallel. I guarantee you that there hasn’t been a US president in our entire history who wasn’t responsible for more violence and terrorism than this guy, but he’s black, and was fighting against the status quo, and the winners write the histories, and idiots take them at face value, and authoritarian cowards instinctively take the side of the status quo, no matter how vile, and so it goes, round and round.
So what’s the ETA on the BoingBoing / Die Antwoord crossover commemorative music video with special guest appearances by Jack Parow and Van Coke Kartel? 
(In all seriousness, though, is it weird that I’m kind of happy that aside from this story, the most internationally noteworthy thing about present-day South Africa is its bizarre music scene? It’s as if merely by existing, zef culture speaks to the fact that darker times have been left in the past - that the present is so [relatively at least] placid and peaceful that the biggest news coming out of what was once one of the most tumultuous places in the world is the international response to a handful of bizarre and surreal musicians just being weird and creative.)
What kind of choice are you proposing here? He was a flawed human being, as are we all. He survived all those years in prison, with his spirit and ideals intact. The guy was a true hero. There is nothing in the record (AFAIK), to make any kind of controversy about it.
Sure. Just like George Washington.
On the better radio stations, some songs are played to commemorate this passing. The most powerful and moving IMO has to be Peter Gabriel’s “Biko”, here’s the “Plays Live” version because it is my favorite, in fact the whole album speaks massive volumes of truth to me, even a quarter of a century after I first discovered it.
Really? I mean, not that I’m surprised. I heard the PM eulogising Mandela on the radio. He described how the deceased brimmed with compassion.
“You must have hated him, Dave,” I thought.
He was in the leadership of a student org called the Federation of Conservative Students which produced the posters. He also went on a pro-apartheid fact-finding mission in 1989. I actually found out about this from a friend, but here’s a source.
ETA: The poster, for context.
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare a great civil rights leader like Mandela to a guy who owned slaves.
Like most things, it’s not black and white. (no pun intended) Some one who does bad things can go on to do good things, and vice versa.
He was in prison when I was born. He got out the year I graduated high school. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that.
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