Beware the “Santa Clausification” of Nelson Mandela say Adam Curry and John Dvorak their No Agenda podcast #572, quoting Cornel West. Mandela was a communist and used violence in his early days. He never renounced it and was uncompromising, as revolutionaries generally are. And he changed the world and inspired millions, even if he may have fallen short of his goals, as Zizek says.
So, No Agenda and Cornel West say, honor Mandela for what he was, not for the Disney image the media is trying to portray him as. (No Agenda is available on iTunes)
Are we covering up some of the realities of how individuals regarded both the ANC and more specifically, Nelson Mandela in all these eulogies?
CORNEL WEST: I think no doubt we are. I mean, Nelson Mandela’s a spiritual giant, moral titan, and political revolutionary. We are witnessing the Santa Clausification of Nelson Mandela. We turned the revolutionary into an old man, a huggable old man with toys in a bag, smile on his face, no threat to anybody, domesticated, tamed, and no longer really full of the fire.
But we know at 95, brother Nelson Mandela was still full of fire. He had that militant tenderness and subversive sweetness and radical gentleness tied to refusing to be fearful or intimidated in the face of a vicious white supremacist apartheid regime.