Was Nelson Mandela Really a Hero?

A friend asks a very interesting question.

by Rod D. Martin
December 9, 2013

I did not write about Nelson Mandela's passing -- I was otherwise engaged at the time and simply didn't have bandwidth to address it -- but a friend asked a question about it on Facebook and, when I did have some time, I felt obliged to answer.

The question was very simple:  Was Mandela a hero?

This is a question that some conservatives have a great deal of trouble with, and that some simply answer no.  They have their reasons, and they're good reasons.  I shared most of them in the 1980s when all we knew about Nelson Mandela was what he'd said before his long imprisonment and what his party, the ANC, was doing at the time.  None of us agreed with apartheid, but none of us wanted the ANC to turn South Africa into Zimbabwe, or worse, a Soviet satellite.  So opinions were formed and continue to be held which, perhaps, do not reflect subsequent events.

Those events are titanic.  And hence my answer, which follows, to the question "was Mandela a hero?"

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