The best way to measure a tree is when it is down, as somebody once observed on the death of Winston Churchill nearly fifty years ago.. When the history books are written, I feel I can safely say that the same will be said of the late Nelson Mandela, whose moral stature rivals EVEN BEFORE his death that of Britain's wartime leader, the soon to be canonized Blessed John Paul II and John XXIII or the Dalai Lama.
I am old enough to recall certain commentators and Administrations(mainly on the political Right) who seem to have made common cause with the then apartheid regime in their opposition to Mandela and majority rule( leading me to joke that they are indeed dogged defenders of minority racial groups- but only when the minority is a white one in a predominantly black country such as Rhodesia or South Africa), most notoriously those of Ronald Reagan and our own Margaret Thatcher). This of course surprises me not at all- just as the Marxist regimes of Stalin, Mao and Castro had their apologists or "useful idiots" in Western societies, so to do rightist tyrannies such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, apartheid era South Africa( the late Tory MP John Stokes, the so-called "Member For Pretoria" being the most notorious )or even the Third Reich as groups like America First and the Cliveden set in prewar Britain- as Clint Eastwood once quipped, once you go far enough to the Left, you get the same idiots coming to you from the Right.
Much capital has been demanded of leftists that they repent their real or alleged support for the Soviet Union during the Cold War,(pace the late Ralph Miliband) in the interest of justice shouldn't the Right be made to similarly apologize for its support for apartheid?
Terry
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