No, they truly cannot understand why Winnie Mandela is to be given a state funeral in South Africa, or why enormous crowds are going to attend it. They think that necklacing was the worst thing that was done to anyone during the apartheid years, during which they think that only one child ever died. They think that the people who were necklaced were saints.
They think that if apartheid had to end at all, something of which they are very far from convinced, then the blacks ought to have waited patiently to be led out of it by the white, liberal, English-speaking, upper-middle-class figures of Helen Suzman, Alan Paton, Donald Woods and Peter Hain. Conveniently, the blacks would still have been waiting. As it is, they should at least be a bit more grateful. But of course, that sort never is, is it?
To those who are aghast at the mourning of Mama Winnie, there is probably nothing that can be said to explain the rage of the mourners at the amnesties for the apartheid regime's mass murderers, at the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize with FW de Klerk, at the lack of economic emancipation due to the keeping on of the old white elite, at the moving out of the ANC's leaders to the areas inhabited by that elite, and so on.
The struggle was not just called that. It was not waged on social media. It was waged on the streets. It was brutal and bloody. Through the crucial 27 years of it, Nelson Mandela was in prison, a focal point but not a participant. He did not see what was happening. He did endure it. He did not know what the rising generations of the ANC were like. He could not see what they were going to be like in power.
But Winnie was there. She was there with her people. She was there for her people. And at the very end, they will still be there for her. Whatever the opinion of anyone who never wanted them to be free in the first place, and who, by wishing to preserve the present economic arrangements, still does not want them to be free even now.
Amandla!
It was a joy to hear Peter Hitchens on BBC Radio 4 discussing this last night. As he said, that the Left is prepared to attend a state funeral for someone who advocates burning people to death with petrol says a great deal about the fanaticism of the utopian Left. The fanatic believe ends always justify any means.
ReplyDeleteHitchens put it beautifully in the paper at the weekend: “”Surely Winnie Mandela lost any respect she might have commanded (such as it was) after her endorsement of the practice of ‘necklacing’ those accused of informing by the African National Congress. This was a mixture of torture and murder, whose victims took 20 unimaginable minutes to die after petrol-soaked tyres were placed over their heads and ignited.
Mrs Mandela said: ‘Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.’
Yet she is to have a state funeral in South Africa, and there are Left-wing people in this country still prepared to defend her.
Ends do not justify means.
Why does this lesson have to be learned anew in every generation?”
He just doesn't understand. Nor do I, entirely. Why would I? But he doesn't even try to. Nor does he grasp that he is is exactly the kind of person to whose opinion they are indifferent. Not hostile. Indifferent.
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