I love Rolihlahla Mandela.
What I don’t care for is one particular sub-textual narrative surrounding his passing, which provides the state & its media and their half-witted water-schleppers the opportunity to praise from onhigh (an office tower on Eighth Avenue, for example*) the non-violent approach as transcendent-est beyond all things material and worthy of the greatest respect.
It is to remind the little people that the most admirable way to resist is to sit in prison for 27 years; to wait until we finally get around to saying it's okay for you to leave. And now we'll describe the nature of your struggle, and we'll define your legacy.
That's not even really promoting non-violence as much as it is advertising non-resistance in the face of those selling the story at any given time in history.
For, the same cultural organs that locked him up - and relentlessly hounded him as a terrorist before & after his release - send their prattling heads to heap exalted boilerplate upon his corpus at the same time they continue to employ violence & oppression in the name of fabricated premises and with a pre-emptive vengeance on a monstrous scale, which begins & ends with the bottom line.
Let alone its contempt for those currently sitting confined for their twenty-seventh year, let alone the cruel indifference toward those suffering right now under the fate of the state & her cronies' mis-doings, to swallow without a stink such self-important crocodile eulogizing from any of the free-or-other-world leaders is more disrespectful to Nelson Mandela than otherwise humanly possible.
What I don’t care for is one particular sub-textual narrative surrounding his passing, which provides the state & its media and their half-witted water-schleppers the opportunity to praise from onhigh (an office tower on Eighth Avenue, for example*) the non-violent approach as transcendent-est beyond all things material and worthy of the greatest respect.
It is to remind the little people that the most admirable way to resist is to sit in prison for 27 years; to wait until we finally get around to saying it's okay for you to leave. And now we'll describe the nature of your struggle, and we'll define your legacy.
That's not even really promoting non-violence as much as it is advertising non-resistance in the face of those selling the story at any given time in history.
For, the same cultural organs that locked him up - and relentlessly hounded him as a terrorist before & after his release - send their prattling heads to heap exalted boilerplate upon his corpus at the same time they continue to employ violence & oppression in the name of fabricated premises and with a pre-emptive vengeance on a monstrous scale, which begins & ends with the bottom line.
Let alone its contempt for those currently sitting confined for their twenty-seventh year, let alone the cruel indifference toward those suffering right now under the fate of the state & her cronies' mis-doings, to swallow without a stink such self-important crocodile eulogizing from any of the free-or-other-world leaders is more disrespectful to Nelson Mandela than otherwise humanly possible.
* the perch from which they successfully sold the war he openly resisted,
the perch from which they
