From: Codebreaker@bigsecret.com   
      
   On Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 12:56:19 AM UTC-4, Steve Hayes wrote:   
   > Winnie Mandela was a hero. If she’d been white, there would be no   
   > debate   
   >    
   > Afua Hirsch   
   >    
   > Tue 3 Apr 2018 15.00 BST   
   > Last modified on Tue 3 Apr 2018 22.00 BST   
   >    
   > Heroes are curious things. Ours have roots in the ancient Graeco-Roman   
   > sense of the concept, which places a premium on military victory.   
   > What’s problematic is how many of our heroes embody an inherent level   
   > of violence, as is unsurprisingly the case with people whose main   
   > accomplishments arise from war. We are tolerant about people who   
   > regarded the working classes as an abomination (Wellington), the   
   > transatlantic slave trade as a good idea (Nelson) or Indians as   
   > repulsive (Churchill), because we think the ends – defeating Napoleon   
   > or Hitler – justified the means.   
   >    
   > Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as the press coverage of her death this   
   > week shows, is not entitled to the same rose-tinted eulogy as our   
   > white British men. She is “controversial” and a “bully”. One   
   newspaper   
   > columnist was boldly willing to abandon his usual restraint in not   
   > writing ill of the dead specially for this “odious, toxic individual”.   
   >    
   > The media reports have raised the horrific murder of 14-year-old   
   > Stompie Moeketsi, though few have been unduly troubled by the fact   
   > that this was a crime she always denied any involvement in, or by the   
   > ample evidence of the lengths to which the apartheid regime went to   
   > infiltrate and smear her and her followers.   
   > South Africa's 'Mother of the Nation', Winnie Madikizela-Mandela dies   
   > - video   
   >    
   > Sadly, I suspect much of the newly discovered outrage sparked by   
   > Madikizela-Mandela’s death has little to do with any recent conversion   
   > to the cause of Black Lives Matter, or accompanying grief for the fate   
   > of little Stompie – one of so many black children who lost their lives   
   > during the brutality of apartheid and the struggle against it. What   
   > it’s really about is a reluctance to admit that apartheid was so   
   > wrong, and so entrenched; and that without the resilience and vision   
   > of Madikizela-Mandela, and those of her ilk, it would not have been   
   > brought down.   
   >    
   > Britain’s heroes are allowed to have waged war. The warriors against   
   > white supremacist oppression, on the other hand, are not. When, for   
   > instance, I questioned Piers Morgan over the appropriateness of having   
   > a 50-metre column in Trafalgar Square to commemorate Admiral Nelson,   
   > he spat that Nelson Mandela has a statue despite being a “terrorist”.   
   > When I debated with a renowned naval historian over his adulation of   
   > the admiral, the argument wound its way to Haiti – the only example in   
   > history of slaves successfully overthrowing their masters and   
   > establishing their own republic – and whether this was a victory for   
   > the enslaved over their oppressors (my view) or a tragedy for the   
   > plantation owners who were killed in the process (his).   
   >    
   > There is no end to the contortions in our psyche. Who now – outside   
   > South Africa, where I have heard its demise lamented more than once –   
   > would defend the apartheid regime? It’s easy to condemn in hindsight.   
   > Yet we have forgotten what it actually takes to overthrow such tyranny   
   > when the legal and moral force of a sovereign state was on the side of   
   > white supremacy. Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have   
   > done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books,   
   > badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure   
   > and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.   
   >    
   >     Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room    
   >    
   > It took women such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She was, as the   
   > world’s media have had to be repeatedly reminded this week, not an   
   > “activist”: she was a leader in a liberation struggle. She survived –   
   > during more than 35 years of apartheid – surveillance, threats,   
   > harassment, arrest and imprisonment, 491 days in solitary confinement   
   > and eight years in exile. The methods of torture used against her   
   > included, according to one account, denying her sanitary products so   
   > that she was found, in detention, covered in her own menstrual blood.   
   >    
   > I doubt the Daily Mail, recalling Madikizela-Mandela’s life this week   
   > as “blood-soaked”, appreciated the irony of this choice of phrase, nor   
   > that of judging her – rather than the apartheid regime she helped   
   > overthrow – the “bully”.   
   >    
   > Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room. As a   
   > nation, one of our techniques for glossing over this uncomfortable   
   > fact has been overly beatifying Nelson Mandela, whose posthumous glory   
   > has always struck me as coming at the cost of forgetting the others.   
   > Who now remembers the names of Robert Sobukwe – the profound   
   > pan-Africanist whose medical treatment for fatal lung cancer was   
   > obstructed by the apartheid government, or Elias Motsoaledi, convicted   
   > at Rivonia alongside Mandela and not released from Robben Island until   
   > 26 years later.   
   > Winnie Mandela was loved and loathed, but she earned her place in   
   > history | Ralph Mathekga   
   > Read more   
   >    
   > We consider Nelson Mandela to be safe because of his message of   
   > forgiveness, because of truth and reconciliation, because he accepted   
   > the Nobel peace prize with apartheid-regime president FW de Klerk –   
   > decisions to which Madikizela-Mandela was fundamentally opposed. She   
   > was a radical until the end. Each rejection of that radicalism is an   
   > endorsement of the tyranny she fought against.   
   >    
   > But is it surprising that we endorse it? An endless litany of heroes   
   > were either architects of, or happy to take part in, the very   
   > apartheid Madikizela-Mandela sacrificed so much to help end. Among   
   > them are those at the centre of our current statue wars – Cecil   
   > Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, Jan Smuts – all immortalised on prominent   
   > plinths. It’s hard to resist the conclusion – comparing the fact that   
   > it’s these people whom we immortalise, and those such as   
   > Madikizela-Mandela whom we demonise – that we are still undecided   
   > about which side of history we, as a nation, are on.   
   >    
   > It doesn’t have to be this way. Denmark this week unveiled its first   
   > statue of a black woman. It does not commemorate someone who fed   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)