Tyranny and Terror

I’ve been going through the online course offered by Hillsdale College called Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint. Last week was week six. The lecture, given by Will Morrisey, professor emeritus of politics at Hillsdale, was on “Terrorism and Foreign Policy.”

Professor Will Morrisey
screen shot

What caught my attention was how he defined terrorism, using the concepts of tyranny and civilization. There are three interrelated ideas: political freedom versus tyranny, economic freedom versus coerced or controlled economy, and civilization versus savagery. That sounds like we’re describing the Spherical Model. 

The half-hour lecture is coherent, so it’s hard to pull out quotes without missing some of the flow of the argument (which is why I spent the day transcribing the whole thing, as a starting point, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything). So I recommend the entirety. [It may require signing up for the class in order to view, but there is no fee.] 

Here’s a key: as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” and “they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Morrisey uses the word regime to mean, “the most authoritative form of ruling in a political community.” He calls the type of regime we have in America a democratic republic—democratic because it is not based on any right by birth to rule, but all citizens are equal; republic because, rather than directly ruling ourselves, we elect representatives. He also calls us a commercial republic, a term I hadn’t heard before:

In addition to being a Democratic Republic, we’re also a Commercial Republic. And on the same natural rights foundation. Commerce, or trade, is the practice of self-government in the realm of economic life. Commerce and trade operate by persuasion, not command and coercion. In both our political life and our political economy, Americans rule themselves by consent.

Consent isn’t mere assent, or acquiescence. Consent means reasoned assent. Whether it comes to selecting a congressman or buying a house, either way we’re comparing and contrasting; we’re thinking about the choice we’re about to make.

A regime consisting of a tyrant or of an oligarchy, commanding a military and a secret police, enforcing edicts on who is to rule us and on what we buy and sell, with most of the profits going to the tyrant or the oligarchs, would leave a people with very different habits of mind and heart than a people that had established a democratic and commercial Republic.

To live in a tyranny or an oligarchy is to have a different mental and moral environment. And the founders of tyrannical and oligarchical regimes know that.

Both political and economic freedom require consent, as opposed to coercion. This is background to the “what is terrorism” question. Here’s the simple definition:

Terrorism is savagery deployed as a technique by rulers or would-be rulers.

He adds more detail later, in describing the definition that has been with us since the Declaration of Independence.

Terrorism, a form of warfare and of ruling that refuses to distinguish ages, sexes, and conditions, aims at ruling not by reason, but by fear. Terrorists attack civilians. This is true of terrorist organizations that don’t control territory—the old Irish Republican Army, Al-Qaeda, for example—and those that do control territory, and indeed control sovereign states—the Nazis in Germany, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, the Maoists in China. 

But more than that, terrorism is anti-civilian in a much deeper sense; terrorism attacks civility itself, the habits of self-government by reasons persuasion. It seeks command with no backtalk. And it does so because, whether it’s deployed against civilians and against civility, by the Nazis and Communists of yesterday, or the jihadis of today, it denies the principle of the American founding that “all men are created equal.”

Alternatively, it may deny that all those we call men are really men, really human at all.

His definition is broader than I would have used. I would have called the Nazi and Soviet regimes unjust wars, but their attempt at gaining territory was mostly military. However, where they purposely targeted civilians, including people living in their own countries, Morrisey and I agree on definition.

So, terrorism, committed by either a state or a group, is a war crime; it attacks all ages, sexes, and conditions. It is savage, not civilized. It intends to rule, not according to the will of the people, but by coercion. It intends to impose and enforce tyranny, both political and economic tyranny.

He notes that those who claim “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” are usually Americans—and they are Americans who fail to remember what their regime is: a way of protecting life, liberty, and property. More than that, terrorists who claim to be freedom fighters or soldiers of God are nevertheless terrorists if they fail to value life—and fail, even to view all humans as human.

He tells this story from shortly after 9/11.

An Arab television station aired a film in which a three-year-old girl was asked, “What are the Jews?” “The Jews,” she answered dutifully, “are apes and pigs.”

Such a catechism of contempt flows from the rejection of natural right. It forms habits of mind and heart consistent with the regime of tyranny. Tyranny enshrines not the natural rights to life, but the right to kill.

The Islamic version of terrorism is new, but tyranny—and its refusal to value all lives as equally human—has been around all along.

Either you value all lives equally, or you don’t. In America we do. One example Morrisey shares is about the natives of the continent:

When fighting the American Indian nations during and after the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the other founders distinguished between what they understood as the savage nations and the civilized ones. For example, they referred to the Cherokee Nation, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creek, and Seminole Nations as the five civilized tribes. Civilized Indian nations that were not allied with the British Empire against us were not the enemy. Some of them even fought on our side.

The early Americans settled land for these civilized tribes, gave them farming implements, and intended to live peaceably together. Morrisey acknowledged, later in the lecture, that there were unfortunately times the nation failed to follow its own policies, as in the Trail of Tears. It isn’t, of course, a matter of race the determines who is savage, but the behavior.

Early on, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he faced, not terrorism, but piracy, sponsored by the Muslim states of Morroco, Algiers, and Tripoli. Jefferson was no isolationist when it came to keeping our trade lanes clear.

But Jefferson fought, not all Muslims, but those whose savage behavior was intended to ruin the democratic and commercial republic that was the fledgling United States of America.

While there were very few Muslims in America early on, we can see how the founders treated various religions in general.

There were few if any Muslims in the United States in the 1790s when he was president. But we do know the way Washington thought about religious congregations generally. Among his first acts as president were his letters to the major American religious congregations, his own Episcopalians, but also Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Quakers, and perhaps most importantly Jewish congregations in Newport, Rhode Island.

Although European regimes had reestablished one or several types of Christianity as politically privileged, Washington’s America was having none of that. The government of the United States, he told all of them, “welcomes members of any religious confession insofar as they conduct themselves as good citizens of the United States.” [from “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation,” August 18, 1790]

Although many American protestants had looked with asperity at Catholics, and peoples around the world had persecuted Jews, Washington and the other founders cared only that citizens act like citizens, obeying the laws respecting the civil and natural rights of their fellow citizens. “No set of religious practices consistent with American constitutional law will be grounds for denial of civil rights by the American federal government.”

The simple way was the best way—don’t judge the religious people on their beliefs, but look at whether they live as good citizens. They need to support our laws, and value and respect the natural rights of their fellow citizens.

The lecture was, on the whole, about developing policy, so it ends with this:

Any American foreign policy must first understand what America is, what we stand for. Confusion on that basic point can only yield confused policy.

After clarifying who we are, the next priority for American citizens who think about our foreign policy must be to identify the primary enemies of our regime and rank them in order of danger…. In dealing with the terrorists we must take care not to exhaust ourselves, leaving our country vulnerable to more formidable powers.

The third and last priority is the strategic one. Setting a strategy, choosing allies, calibrating diplomatic, economic, and military actions to weaken and eventually defeat the terrorists. No simple rule can guide us in that strategy, because it’s a matter of practical judgment on the spot.

In such judgments we should take care to guard our sovereignty, our self-government, by recurring to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which can and should both animate our actions and restrain.

So, to summarize, we need to have confidence in who we are: the people who believe in freedom, free enterprise, and civilization—because we have God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. We live in peace with those who believe those same things. Those who want to impose some other regime on us must be resisted to the fullest extent.

Defining Terrorism

The other day I came across a little video supposedly about Islam being a peaceful religion. That isn’t actually what it was; it was pro-terrorist propaganda. Normally I would just ignore such a thing, but what bothered me is that it was linked by a friend, passing it along as useful for us to think about, to be more open minded.

So I thought I’d spend a post going over how to recognize propaganda and define terms—rather than letting the enemy redefine perfectly useful words.

Definition of Terrorist

Terrorists are persons or groups who use mass murder aimed at innocent civilians in an attempt to coerce submission to the terrorist’s control, particularly control over beliefs.

In the internationally agreed upon rules for war, terrorism is outside any acceptable form of engagement. Terrorists are typically without uniform, dressed or disguised to look unlike recognizable combatants. While terrorists can come from a variety of ideological views, in today's world virtually all are Islamist (radical Muslims who see anyone outside their beliefs, including moderate Muslims, as the subhuman enemy).

Is it possible for a state to commit terrorism? Yes. If the state purposely attacks innocent civilians rather than military installations or infrastructure—particularly for the purpose of coercing submission to belief change.

During the rules of war, collateral damage can include significant numbers of civilian casualties. When Britain carpet bombed Berlin, that was not terrorism. When the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was not terrorism. Both were defensive actions carried out militarily, with the intent to cease invasion by the aggressive enemy, and were both proven to have saved lives in the long run.

Were these bombs terrifying? Yes. But they were not terrorist attacks carried out by terrorists. They were defensive military attacks carried out by uniformed military.

When Hamas attacks Israeli citizens, purposely targeting civilians, that is terrorism. Hamas is a known terrorist organization. It does not follow rules of war. It doesn’t have any legitimate state purpose. It doesn’t have uniformed military. It has an ideology it intends to impose through coercion by mass murdering innocents.

Israel’s response to Hamas attacks is not terrorism. Israel’s military responds, legally, in self-preservation of the state. It goes way out of its way to avoid civilian casualties. But Hamas tries to force attacks on civilians by attacking from schools and hospitals, and then pressuring people to stay and face possible death so that they can use the civilian casualties in a propaganda war against their civilized enemies.

Here’s another thing that is not equivalent to terrorism: having a military base in a foreign country, by agreement with that country, for the purpose of benefitting that country as well as our own interests in the region.

It would not even be terrorism if we occupied bases in those countries against their will (Guantanamo in Cuba, for example). We would simply be seen as exerting our power. When Russia exerts power, as it is doing in Ukraine, that is an act of aggression, for the imperialist purpose of increasing power—bad, but not terrorism. When the US military exerts power, helping nations become independent and self-sufficient, that is not only within the rules of war, it is defensive, not offensive or imperialistic.

The US does not coerce ideology, nor does it subject nations and peoples to its imperialist rule. Our military assistance to allies should not be construed as imperialist—let alone as terrorism. Anyone who calls what the US has done in Afghanistan or Iraq as terrorism is misusing the word.

In the Spherical Model, while war is a terrible thing, people living in the northern hemisphere of freedom, prosperity, and civilization CAN engage in war justifiably—in order to preserve their way of life from those who would threaten to take it.

Terrorism—using mass murder to coerce belief change—is savage. Always. It is down near the south pole of the miserable southern hemisphere. Down that far south, it is a short distance from the chaos of terrorism to the control of coercive tyranny. It is engaged in by savage tyrannists. There is NO path connecting terrorism to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Spotting Propaganda

Some time back I wrote a piece about identifying propaganda. Here are the questions to ask:

·         What is the point of view of the information source?

·         Do the themes coincide with known principles?

·         Is there documented and verifiable evidence following a line of logic, rather than implication and accusation?

So, looking at the video in question, I can see that it is developed by a Muslim. And because it supports the idea that terrorism is just, it is not from a peaceful, moderate Muslim, but from an Islamist. Is it from an actual terrorist? I can’t tell that without knowing more, but its script indeed does support the possibility that terrorism is justifiable--which it is not. I do not recognize names, and I hesitate to do too much searching, or mentioning of names, for the sake of privacy and safety.  I hope I am safe in linking the video below.*

The other questions are answerable by looking at the script. So below is the transcript, with my comments in brackets.

The video takes place in a classroom setting. The teacher, Mr. Kahn, is talking about the comparison between the number of times (41) jihad is mentioned in the Koran [their spelling, so I’ll go with it], and how many times (355) mercy, peace, and compassion are mentioned.

Girl Student: If Islam truly is a religion that preaches peace, then how come the world’s most troubled spots—the West Bank, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq—they’re all plagued with Islamic terrorism? [She asks a reasonable question, which he dismisses.]

Mr. Kahn: That depends on your definition of terrorism. [No it doesn’t. Regardless of your definition, her question is valid. A lot of unrest, outside of military conflict, involving mass murder of civilians by non-uniform-wearing attackers is happening in those places.] Some might argue that the US invasions of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are also acts of terrorism. [Some might argue that, but it isn’t a valid argument. Military attacks are not terrorism, whether justified or not. And he is erasing that difference and implying lack of valid reasons in one stroke—without any evidence to justify his assertion.]

Girl Student: No. Those were acts of war to get rid of despotic regimes. [They were acts of war. Whether they were solely to get rid of despotic regimes is debatable. Also implied by placing these words in the mouth of the naïve student is the validity of getting rid of so-called despotic regimes as justification for war. This is an attempt to delegitimize anything the US may have done.]

Mr. Kahn: Or means of getting other countries’ oil. [This implies that the US had ulterior, self-serving motives for war in Iraq. But there is the historical fact that the US never took Iraqi oil—or anyone else’s. The US helped Iraq build infrastructure so it could sell its own oil for its own benefit.]

Boy Student: Conspiracy theories.

The teacher allows an answer from Riyaz, a young man who joined the class a minute late.

Riyaz: Mr. Khan is right. I mean, if we’re talking about terrorists, the world’s biggest terrorists are the white superpowers. [Notice that he has equated military action, for any reason whatever, with terrorism—which it is not, by definition. This is a lie. He adds the racial component—probably to imply racism on the part of the US and Britain, but in reality revealing the racism of the propagandist. The US and Britain do not choose which Iraqis to support based on the amount of melanin in their skin—but based on their belief in freedom and human rights.]

Another Boy Student: Come on, now.

Riyaz: Really. Stop and think about it. [Implying that he is the thinker, and the others are not.]

Girl Student: Explain 9/11.

Riyaz: Okay. Do you know how many people died in the twin towers strike?

Girl Student: Around 3,000.

Riyaz: And do you have any idea how many people died in the bombings of Afghanistan? Take a wild guess. More than 15,000 people died. And that’s just conservative figures. About 50,000 tons of explosives were dropped on innocent civilians. Men, women, children. [He has just done a bait and switch. 9/11 was a terrorist attack on innocents, to create chaos with the purpose of terrorizing and eventually coercing submission to the terrorists’ rule. Afghanistan losses occurred over a decade of battle, in which military people attacked specific terrorist groups—the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda—and not only attempted to avoid civilian casualties, but attempted to free and help those previously subjected to the Taliban to have freedom and self rule. He is equating using bombs designed to infiltrate mountain caves hiding terrorists with using airplanes to fly into skyscrapers. They are not equal. The US was never limited to a certain number of Taliban deaths or tons of explosives for the purpose of taking out those who were guilty of attacking American citizens on American soil. The US military had every right to go to any lengths necessary to wipe out that enemy. Were some innocents killed in the process? No doubt. But the US always attempted to minimize such casualties; it did not seek them.]

Girl Student: Yes, but that was because of the Taliban.

Riyaz: Now that you brought it up, did you know that the Taliban was a creation of the CIA, to fight the Russians? [But this is a lie. The Taliban dates back to around 1992, with its first major military action in 1994, and ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, ending when NATO forces defeated them. This is entirely after the fall of the Soviet Union and the official end of the Cold War. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s, the US joined with Saudi Arabia to offer financial support to the local Afghani resistors to Soviet invasion. The US never created nor supported the Taliban, nor did it seek to support any tribal entities that sought to enforce Islamist Sharia law.]

Another Boy Student: Whatever. They were still harboring terrorists.

Riyaz: Yeah, right. Terrorists that were never found. [This is another lie. Osama Bin Laden and dozens of his higher and lower minions were taken out. Al-Qaeda trained between 10-20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan  before 9/11. These were the enemy NATO forces were fighting in Afghanistan. He’s pretending these enemies never existed, and that the US and NATO forces simply attacked innocent Afghani citizens. Re-read Lone Survivor.] Just like the weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq. [Another twist of the facts. The weapons of mass destruction in question in Iraq were those listed as known to be in the possession of Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War—which had not been shown to be destroyed. All intelligence sources agreed then, and still do, that Saddam Hussein had not destroyed those listed weapons, and that he was seeking ways to use them. He was in violation of the Gulf War peace treaty; whether they were found or not was always irrelevant to whether the US and NATO forces should hold Hussein accountable. The fact that they were not found means there is still the possibility that he transferred them elsewhere, possibly Syria. Or, less likely, that he destroyed them but refused to show evidence that he had done so.] Do you want to get into the death toll in Iraq? 500,000 civilians and counting. [He’s implying here that the US attacked the peaceful Iraqis, which is exactly opposite of the facts. Hussein attacked his own people if they sought freedom. Remember that his sons used a wood chipper to dispose of dissidents? The US did not seek to destroy Iraqi civilians, but to help them free themselves and develop a free government.] And what do Britain and America say when they don’t find these weapons? It’s simple. They just say, “sorry.” And still refuse to relinquish control of these countries. [US facilitated self-rule. To claim the US refused to relinquish control is a lie. It is certainly, now, arguable that the US has removed help prematurely, and the resurgence of Islamists there is a predicted result.]

Yet Another Boy Student: What are you trying to say?

Riyaz: What I’m trying to say is that, just because you’re American, wear a fancy suit and call yourself the president doesn’t make you any less of a terrorist. I’m saying that if you don’t stop meddling in other people’s countries, you will face a backlash. [What he’s doing is threatening. Using the term “terrorist” to refer to civilized national leaders is simply a ploy. Terrorism is savage and never justifiable. He isn’t redefining terrorism to include us to make us see how bad it is; he is redefining it to distract us from noticing that he advocates and justifies terrorism.]

Girl: If Muslims like you feel that way, then why don’t you get out of our country?

Riyaz: We will. As soon as you promise to leave ours. [This is another lie. They don’t call us The Great Satan because we have legal, invited military bases in some Muslim countries. They call us The Great Satan because they hate us and want to destroy us—along with everyone else in the world who doesn’t share their beliefs. Our show of weakness would not lead to peace; it would encourage more bold attacks.]

One advantage to using the Spherical Model is that you can see where things fall. Terrorism falls in the savage tyranny zone, near the southern pole. The US Constitution resides in the upper northern hemisphere where people thrive with freedom, prosperity, and civilization. They’re not close.  

___________________________
*Post by Chik Fakhrul Azzam, found here:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=427180640761529&set=vb.100004087890982&type=2&theater

 

 

Lying Liars That Lie

Some additional information came out this week about Benghazi. What we thought we knew, there is now evidence to show, with some more who and why questions still unanswered.

The new piece of information was a memo, received through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch. The memo shows talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice for five days after the Benghazi attack. And we now know the White House was the source for the suggestion that she emphasize that the attack was in response to a specific anti-Muslim video.

This is from the memo (emphasis mine):

Goals:

To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad.

To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not in a broader policy failure.

To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice and standing steadfast through these protests.

To reinforce the Presidents and Administration’s strength and steadfastness in dealing with difficult challenges.

We’ve talked about that piece of information, about the video, since right after the event—how puzzling it was, because everyone knew it wasn’t true. It was clearly known in real time, during the attack, that it was a terrorist attack, probably from Al-Qaeda-related sources. Military and Intelligence sources knew it was a terrorist attack, and said so. Nothing in any of their correspondence brought up the possibility of this obscure video being involved at all.

There was no spontaneous uprising to begin with. That had to be made up. And somebody who thought it was necessary to make that up also saw the need for an impetus for such a fictional spontaneous uprising—which was the service this video served.

We know the White House mentioned the video the first time the day before the September 11 attack, when there was a demonstration in Egypt, which had been announced ahead of time, declared as an attempt to get the release of the Blind Sheik. Up to that point, this video had been viewed only 17 times; actors in the video hadn’t all bothered to see it. That video would still be obscure without the White House’s advertisement. Had anyone at that Egyptian protest seen the video? With so few views online up to that point, certainly not enough to cause an uprising.

An additional detail in the timeline to come out this week is that, sometime after a 10:00 PM phonecall between Secretary of State Clinton and the president, Clinton began mentioning the video as a cause—even though the State Department had, again, real time information to the contrary. We don’t know where Hillary was the rest of that night. And we don’t know where the president was the rest of that night—although we do now know for certain he was not in the situation room carefully following events as they unfolded.

The president mentioned the video in his first speech after the attack, the Rose Garden speech. Susan Rice mentioned it the following Sunday, September 16, in no less than five talk shows. Hillary Clinton referred to the video as the reason for the Benghazi protest uprising on September 13 and 14, 2012. Jay Carney made the claim in a press briefing September 14. Some two weeks later, at a memorial service for the Marines who were killed in Benghazi, separately the president, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice “consoled” the parents by saying they were sorry about that video that caused all the trouble, and they were seeing to it that the perpetrator was put to justice.

One might think that, during the 24 hours surrounding the attack, there might be some wild speculation about other possible causes. But by 48 hours after, it stretches credulity to believe anyone involved had any reason to believe the attack was other than the terrorist attack that it was. To repeat the video lie can only be purposeful. But to what purpose?

We know placement of the idea of the video as cause was a lie invented by someone. We now know, as a result of the memo, the source of that someone was a White House source. We don’t know yet the individual—but we do know that one of the White House employees involved in the constructing of the talking points for Susan Rice was Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser. He also happens to be the brother of David Rhodes, President of CBS News, which news source has been notably silent on this rather large piece of news. Coincidence?

Anyway, we don’t know whether Ben Rhodes was the original source of the video lie, but we do know that he knew it was purposely emphasized in the talking points to Susan Rice, and that emphasis came from nowhere but the White House.

Additional questions continue to swirl around the reasons for 1) failure to respond ahead to requests for additional security, 2) failure during the attack to provide rescue, and 3) failure afterward to state clearly what was known—that it was a terrorist attack by Al Qaeda-related sources.

Jay Carney is an interesting piece of work. It’s hard to wrap my head around someone wishing to take on the job of being the official liar for the White House. Carney simply lies in the face of all evidence to the contrary—and he does it with condescension, just like the president would if he were doing it himself. There was an eight-minute exchange the other day, with Carney trying to claim that the reason the memo wasn’t released a year ago, with 140 other pages, was that it didn’t seem relevant, since it was about—not Benghazi—but about general unrest in the Middle East.

White House Press Spokesperson Jay Carney
image from here

Guy Benson of Townhall takes relish in dissecting the slimy lies Carney was forced to tell in his briefing, under questioning by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl. The memo, which came out of a FOIA request specifically for Benghazi related talking points, wasn’t handed over last year, according to Carney, because the memo wasn’t related to Benghazi. It was talking points for Susan Rice to use in response to questions she would be asked five days after the Benghazi attacks, and a portion of the memo was subheaded Benghazi, in bold type. Carney clearly has his job because lying is his preferred form of communication.

We still don’t know who, specifically, invented the video lie. As for the reasons for that lie and others, and the failures to respond, the best source this week was from The Blaze TV news program For the Record, 4-30-2014. It requires subscription, but you can use your free two-week trial to see it. I hope more details come out in the future, but there is evidence (as was speculated that first month in 2012) that it was about arming Al-Qaeda-related rebels, and Ambassador Stevens was used in those negotiations. There’s a name, now, for the operation: “Zero Footprint.”

One more question: what would our country, and the world, look like today if truth had been known prior to the November 2012 election?

Southern Hemisphere Hero

Human beings can be a complex combination of good and bad. With that in mind, I want to take a brief look at the life of Nelson Mandela, following his death December , 2013.

He is known as the father of post-apartheid South Africa. This must mean that he was a great influence for good.

My real time memories of him are sketchy.  The 27 years he spent in prison ended when I was an adult, and his time as president of South Africa was something I certainly remember; that election was 1994. But I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to what was happening on the other side of the world. I was aware that many people refused to do business with South Africa during the last years of Apartheid, in an effort to pressure for change, which eventually worked.

Mandela’s tribal Xhosa name was “Madiba,” which he was often called with affection. He was born in 1918, about a month after my own father, so that gives me a view of his lifespan. Some of what I know of him is through media. I especially liked the movie Invictus, a rugby movie that was really about bringing people together. Morgan Freeman played President Mandela, and the photo on the cover of Friday’s Houston Chronicle looked surprisingly like the actor. I love the smile. It’s understandable why many people would have affectionate memories for that face and the apartheid-ending legacy.

I do recall bad media of his second wife, Winnie Mandela, during the latter years of his imprisonment, I think. She was known to beat and berate her personal servants. Looking at media now, I’m uncertain what to believe. But there are some other details about Mandela that are historic and worth considering. (The Wikipedia article, already updated since his death, is useful.)

He spent many years working as a lawyer, speaking for rights for black South Africans, as a leader in the ANC (African National Congress, an anti-imperialist pro-independence movement). He grew up Christian, was baptized a Methodist, and attended throughout his childhood, even though this was mixed with tribal practices; his mother was the third of four polygamist wives, in the royal tribal family. Mandela was among the royal family of his tribe, yet the first of his family to attend school.

While he was interested in Soviet support for wars of independence, he didn’t trust the idea of communism. And through WWII he supported British rule. So he was a skeptical communist. He seemed to favor the non-communist idea of freedom to vote for all citizens as paramount, but willingly accepted socialism as a way to rule.

Early on he was a follower of Ghandi’s nonviolent resistance, more for pragmatic than ideological reasons. Later he came to believe the ANC had “no alternative to armed and violent resistance.” At trial he pleaded guilty to 156 counts of public violence and terrorism. I don’t know how specifically guilty he was personally for murders that took place, but there are claims that he, as ANC leader, was behind multiple bombing plots in which women and children were killed.

He could be compared to Yasser Arafat of Hamas, a terrorist leader of a terrorist organization, who later became a “respectable” leader of a people. But I was aware enough of Arafat to never see him as other than a terrorist. I don’t know how much of Mandela’s reputation is media created, but he wasn’t—as was Ghandi—a political prisoner; he was imprisoned for crimes he admitted committing, which was why Amnesty International refused to advocate for him.

The outcome of overcoming the suppression of a people based on race is an important positive outcome.  There is no overstating that. I have no patience for tearing down a person because of disagreement over race. But that is not the only issue of his life, so I’m trying to see the full picture.

Pro-Communist/Socialist Mandela
photo from here

His other efforts, using socialist means to “fight poverty,” are all statist tyranny tactics. He worked for income redistribution, using the typical socialist approaches, apparently unaware that these tactics never create wealth but only prevent wealth creation by the “haves.” Granted, there was a lack of basic needs, like water and electricity, suffered by the black poor but not the white wealthy. So, without the thinking of American freedom, it’s unfortunate but not unlikely for socialism to appear persuasive. Socially, he was pro-abortion. He codified pro-sexual promiscuity into the constitution—in a country suffering from the devastation of AIDS (one f his sons died of AIDS).

Personally, he was known to be friendly, relaxed in the company of everyone, and humble—even making his own bed while president. Promiscuity, combined with the strain of political strife, ended his first two of three marriages. Still, he is reported to have enjoyed his private family time.

South Africa is much better off today than during apartheid. But think how much better off the people would be if their great leader had used his influence to lead the people to guarantees of God-given rights, free market economics, and the pro-religion and pro-family principles necessary for thriving civilization.

The title “southern hemisphere hero” does not refer to the location on the globe of South Africa; it refers to the southern hemisphere on the Spherical Model. North is freedom; south is tyranny. So much of world history has taken place in the southern hemisphere, where people believe the choices are between anarchic tyranny and statist tyranny. But there is an entire northern hemisphere of freedom they’re missing.

The decision to allow all people a vote was a movement northward. It might be that Mandela accomplished all he could, as a single individual, in a difficult time and place, without the right beliefs. And not every “hero” has as much moral integrity as Ghandi or George Washington. But I believe the struggles his country still suffers could be solved by significant movement northward on the sphere.

So this remarkable man is to be honored, but with limits.