If the liberals back during the 1980's didn't start white washing Nelson Mandela's past, you wouldn't have to ask that question, you would already know the truth.
Should you care if Mandela was a commie ? Not really
Should you care that the left has used revisionism and have white washed Mandela's past in his early commie years of terrorism ? Yes.
The same people who sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War now seem to be trying to distance themselves and Mandela from the communist revolutions, terrorism and proxy wars of the past. Why is that ?
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Mandela was not a communist ideologue. "Mandela is the least ideologically rigid leader I have ever encountered," said John Carlin, author of
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. "He was the very opposite of a fanatic. He showed immense respect for all political points of view and never to my knowledge believed he had the answers to the problems of human life, much less the key to heaven on earth, as his Communist brethren might have done."
Indeed, Carlin said,during Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment at Robben Island, he "had long and heated debates with the one big South African Communist Party figure imprisoned there, Govan Mbeki."
Fostersaid that even if Mandela was officially a Communist Party member for a time, he would not have defined himself that way.
"Nobody who has even a passing familiarity with South African history, and Mandela's role, would describe him as someone with mixed loyalties," Foster said. "He was a disciplined, true-blue member of the ANC through his entire adulthood."
• For decades, there were few allies Mandela could have sought out in the fight against apartheid. At the time Mandela would have been a South African Communist Party member, all liberation groups (including the Communist Party) were banned. And within this small group of opponents of apartheid, only the Communist Party was multiracial.
"The Communist Party in South Africa was attractive to some because it was the only nonracial party at the time for activists who didn't want to be defined ethnically," Schechter said. "For many years, the ANC was only for Africans, the Indian Congress for Indians and the Congress of Democrats for Whites."
Indeed, Keller writes that the legacy of nonracialism was one of the most valuable legacies of Mandela’s alignment with the Communist Party, since it made racial reconciliation possible after the toppling of apartheid. (Keller also lists other, less positive legacies, including "remnants of Communist protocol and jargon (that) live on in the platform and demeanor of South Africa’s ruling party.")
• The Communist Party – due in part to its long fight against apartheid – does not have the same negative connotation in South Africa that it does in the United States. Former South African President F.W. DeKlerk -- who worked with Mandela to end apartheid -- told Schechter that Communist Party leader Joe Slovo "played a pragmatic and crucial role in engineering the compromises that led to a political settlement. … All this ‘commie’ talk obscures more than it reveals."
In fact, "half the members of the present cabinet in South Africa are party members," Lodge added. "It really isn’t an issue."
Bill O'Reilly says Nelson Mandela 'was a communist' | PunditFact