Poor old Nelson Mandela, not just eulogised by those who had been or would’ve been enthusiastic supporters of the Apartheid state back then, but also having to endure the humiliation of having smarmy fuckers like David Cameron and Tony Blair do so.
That day in 1990 that Mandela came out of prison, hot on the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing self liberation of Eastern Europe, was the greatest symbol of how much the world had changed, how powerless the old, heavily armed power structures had turned out to be in the face of the people. In the decades since we’ve seen the old guard frantically trying to and mostly succeeding to re-establish their old securities, turning Mandela and others like him from a symbol of revolution into a cuddly father figure of liberal democracy, whose success in overturning an evil regime had no consequences for our own societies. That’s why Blair and Cameron, the same kind of politican that opposed Mandela in the Apartheid era, one the leader of a party that up to his release from prison called him a terrorist, the other a war criminal now feel able to praise Mandela without shame.
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