I am sorry to have to inform you, but the world is a complex
place, full of contradiction and nuance, populated by human beings who
are the corporeal embodiment of that complexity
Those vilifying Nelson Mandela in these days following his death – and there are plenty of
them – ignore certain essential facts about his later life, of which I will
mention only a salient two: He more or less singlehandedly averted a national
convulsion of bloodletting and racial war by embracing the notion that even
those who participated in decades of brutal oppression ought to have a place
and a voice in South Africa, and that even those who opposed that oppression
ought to answer in truth for their own crimes. And – in the public act for which
he ought to be most highly praised – having attained more or less complete
power, and being positioned to keep and wield it so long as ever he wished, Mandela
instead relinquished it – soon, peaceably and willingly. Compare that to nearly
any other post-colonial revolutionary leader on that continent.
Those lionizing Mandela – and there are many more of them –
do no better. He was in younger years a proponent of systemic violence, and
when he was arrested his house was filled with tens of thousands of weapons
designed to wield that violence in the most indiscriminate fashion. To ignore
that is to ignore conduct that he himself later repudiated, not only in others,
but in himself. And while he may not have chosen himself to become a dictator,
he supported and embraced brutal dictators – quite literally so – along with
leftist policies that almost no American of any political stripe would endorse
upon close examination.
This duality – plurality, really – in a single man is the
furthest thing from being unique. It is our essential nature. Whitman said it best: “Do I
contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain
multitudes.”
