By
Peter Beinart
If
we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll
forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.
Now that he’s dead, and can cause no
more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not
long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the
United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed
Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of
“terrorist” groups.
In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney
voted against a resolution urging that he be
released from jail.
In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious
anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise,
given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As
late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old
Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit
the U.S.
From their perspective, Mandela’s
critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he
had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because
the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African
Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies.
More fundamentally, what Mandela’s
American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not
an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now.
Mandela’s
message to America’s leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t
pretend you are pure.
We must remember it because in
Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a
struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of
tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places—Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually
Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something
utterly different.
In South Africa, for decades, American
presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language
of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without
irony, called South Africa’s
monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”
In South Africa, it was the Soviet
bloc—the same communist governments that were brutally repressing their own
people—that helped the ANC fight apartheid. In the 1980s, they were joined by
an American and European anti-apartheid movement willing to overlook the ANC’s
communist ties because they refused to see South Africa’s freedom struggle
through a Cold War lens.
At a time when men like Reagan and
Cheney were insisting that the most important thing about Mandela was where he
stood in the standoff between Washington and Moscow, millions of citizens
across the West insisted that the ANC could be Soviet-backed,
communist-influenced, and still lead a movement for freedom.
They were right. When it came to other
countries, Mandela’s leftist ties did sometimes blind him to communism’s
crimes. In 1991, for instance, he called Fidel Castro “a source of inspiration
to all freedom-loving people.” But at home, where it mattered most, the ANC was
a genuine, multiracial movement for democracy. And so the Americans who best
championed South African freedom were the ones who didn’t view freedom as
synonymous with the geopolitical interests of the United States.
Therein lies Mandela’s real lesson for
Americans today. The Cold War is over, but mini-Cold Wars have followed. And
once again, American elites, especially on the right, have a bad habit of using
“freedom” as a euphemism for whatever serves American power.
Thus, American politicians frequently
suggest that by impoverishing the people of Iran with ever-harsher economic
sanctions, and threatening to bomb them, we are promoting their freedom, even
though the people risking their life for democracy in Iran—people like dissident
journalist Akbar Ganji and Nobel Prize winner Shirin
Ebadi—passionately
disagree.
Mandela challenged that. Like Martin
Luther King, who publicly repudiated Lyndon Johnson’s claim that Vietnam was a
war for democracy, Mandela rejected George W. Bush’s idealistic rationalizations
of the Iraq War. In 2003, when Bush was promising to
liberate Iraq’s people, Mandela said, “All that he wants is Iraqi oil.”
When Bush declared Iraq’s alleged
pursuit of nuclear weapons a threat to the planet, Mandela had the bad manners
to remind Bush that the only country to have actually
used nukes was the United States. Mandela’s message to America’s
leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t pretend you are pure.
As with King, it is this subversive
aspect of Mandela’s legacy that is most in danger of being erased as he enters
America’s pantheon of sanitized moral icons. But it is precisely the aspect
that Americans most badly need. American power and human freedom are two very
different things. Sometimes they intersect; sometimes they do not. Walking in
Nelson Mandela’s footsteps requires being able to tell the difference.
Source: The Daily Beast
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