Nelson Mandela is dead, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Now we need to save his memory from the fate suffered by the leaders of our own freedom movements. We have to keep the loud and the powerful from turning him into a posthumous Santa Claus, as they have attempted to do, with some success, in the case of Martin King, Rosa Parks, and others. King has been reduced to “I have a dream…”, that terminal ellipsis containing practically all that he was – a brilliantly thoughtful man at the front of a mass movement made up of very brave, very thoughtful people, many of whose names we will never know, who brought America back from its own version of apartheid.
The same process has already begun with Mandela. The movement he led is practically invisible to the American public mind. We have a tendency to focus on individuals, and in so doing, we make even those individuals seem two-dimensional, statue-like in their inscrutable virtue. The long walk to freedom begins to take on the character of a leisurely stroll; it becomes the journey of one man, not an entire nation. It is a far easier story to tell, and so our storytellers find it hard to resist. That simpler story conceals a thousand evils, some of which hit close to home.
Evils like our own CIA’s practice of turning over the names of dissidents to the police state commissars who oppress, jail, torture and kill them. They ratted on Mandela after Sharpeville. They did the same to leftists in Indonesia at the start of the Suharto-led massacre of the 1960s. You will find little in the way of regret if you look at the statements of our leaders throughout that period. So simplifying the story definitely plays an important role in preserving the myth we sell ourselves about our being a force for good in the world. The world knows better, frankly. So should we.
Duncan’s solution. Duncan Hunter, congressman from California (though he sounds like a brand of window treatments), has advocated using “tactical nuclear” weapons on Iran if they resist our will. Hard to comment on how crazy this is, but I’ll just put this out there: Hunter should opt for the Twinkie defense; it worked for Dan White.
