Thanks to TeacherKen for directing me to this terrific article that contains a dozen Mandela quotes that are not likely to be repeated in the mainstream media.
When you read Mandela’s obituary in the corporate media, he is sanitized and turned into a benign African version of Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was also sanitized by the MSM, which liked his lofty sentiments about justice but not his strong statements supporting unions and opposing the Vietnam War and poverty).
Here are a few of Nelson Mandela’s pithy sayings:
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
“Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I see nothing wrong with those Mandela comments.
What’s wrong with those remarks is the implication that prosperity is effortless.
What’s wrong is the assumption that hard work is sufficient for prosperity and that, therefore, anyone who isn’t prosperous must be lazy.
Rand Paul even sees that it is not easy to get ahead once you are behind . . . or he is just trying to get votes?
“How are you supposed to make child support payments if you’ve been in prison, and the best job you can get is $9 an hour?” Sen. Rand Paul asked, wearing a suit and tie at the opening of a new GOP office on Livernois Avenue in Detroit.
Child support, prison and the war on drugs are not usual topics for the GOP senator, who had previously gained media attention for launching a filibuster against President Obama’a nominee to head the CIA because Paul questioned the administration’s use of drones.
“These are things you haven’t heard Republicans talking about,” he said. “So I’m glad to be part of this today, not only just to mean that Republicans are showing up where we haven’t been, but with a new message and policy.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-rand-paul-detroit-minorities-gop-20131206,0,5668979.story#ixzz2mqm13wz6
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-rand-paul-detroit-minorities-gop-20131206,0,5668979.story#axzz2mql2AKIV
Furthermore, it is disturbing to note that there are people in America who actually enjoy the fact that some people are struggling. They even enjoy watching that struggle. I saw twins on Dr Phil that exhibited the “worst” in human decency. One sister has spent her life proudly putting down, making fun of, and trying to destroy her identical twin. She does this to make herself feel important, correct, better than, more prosperous, etc. than her twin. This is a sickness. It extends to people in all walks of society.
But, this is done daily, and for some reason, some think this is “Godly” … my brain is just shivering from the cognitve, spiritual, emotional dissonance here.
Dienne, Right on target!
Harlan, we have a phrase that describes the people who are unable to find prosperity despite the fact that they work hard. They’re called the working poor.
Deb, the Germans have a word for reveling in other people’s misery and misfortune which we have adopted in English. It’s called schadenfreude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
We have our own word for blaming other people for their misery and misfortune. It’s called TeaParty.
Correct, Sir!
Don’t you love how Harlan Underhill hijacks the thread?
There are 3, maybe more, who are able to turn any comment into some self-directed “discussion” having zero to do with the intent of the original post. Ignore. The intent is to keep things off balance and misdirected. Sad.
Read those quotes again. Mandela was no ‘liberal’ and he can’t and would not be coopted by the right wing; denatured and cleaned up for their own purposes. Among other traits, he was a revolutionary with a vision for a just society. His vision points out the glaring contradictions and lies that bubble up in ours.
A wonderful and necessary corrective post, before social amnesia casts a fog over memory.
quotes remind me of the work and writings of Freire
Shush. One quotes, or even mention, Freire in mainstream postings at their own peril. Freire arguments are not neatly pigeon-holed into a standard analysis; it is all too easy to fall back on an analysis that refuses to encompass any other dimension than its own; to shove Freire and other non traditional thinkers off to the side and ignore any alternative discourse that makes problematic the standard conversations.
In short, I was pleased to read that you made the connection between Freire, Mandela.
Might they be “free thinkers” who would reject even that label, much like Foucault continually rejected the labels that many, but especially the Marxists tried to pin on him???
No one is implying that working isn’t required. However, the compensation can’t be skewed so that hard work isn’t valued and so that working 16-20 hours is necessary for survival.
I get very perturbed at those who seem to think that circumstances often dictate opportunity and that every “unsuccessful” person is lazy or that every smart person is industrious. I know plenty of people who have I’ll gotten gains from being liars, cheaters, swindlers, and kiss-ups. There are as many if them as there are poor people. It is no wonder people compare business to sports. It isn’t always about truth or fact. Con artists abound all over.
But I waste my time …
Mandela’s biography has been sanitized in more ways then you identity. Before his release, he was a leader of the Communist Party and supported the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other totalitarian states. Quoting him on unionism, the rejection of capitalism, and fighting poverty is disingenuous and spacious. He is no model for America. However, he did reject violence in South Africa upon his release and brought a peaceful transition to his country. He should be honored for that great accomplishment.
Exactly. Sanitizing his life is helpful to no one.
How is it “disingenuous”?
“Mandela’s biography has been sanitized. . . ” Much in the same way MLK’s biography has been sanitized down to “I have a dream. . .”
I have gotten in trouble at school for sending out MLK’s “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam” April 1967 At Manhattan’s Riverside Church, on MLK day as it doesn’t fit the sanitized MLK version.
See: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm
Gandhi’s view of of creating prosperity was mistaken. To the degree that India allowed it to influence economic policy, it condemned millions to live in abject poverty unnecessarily.
“Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.”
I have no idea what Ghandi’s economic policy was but I have difficulty finding fault with these philosophical musings at least when he dismisses the idea that hard work automatically leads to success and wealth.
TE, you might know much more about Ghandi’s policies, but you certainly are not explaining them or their failure.
I don’t know of anyone who thinks hard work automatically leads to success and wealth, so rejecting that idea seems easy.
You might search over the term “Hindu growth rate”, a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the much slower economic growth of India compared to other asian economies.
Let me introduce you to our president, Barack Obama, who said just this past Wednesday what he has said several times before:
“If you work hard, you should make a decent living.”
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-urges-wealth-inequality-reduction-and-minimum-wage-increase
It remains to be seen whether he is committed to making that happen.
CT,
“It remains to be seen whether he is committed to making that happen.”
I’ll get macular degeneration, cataracts and detached retinas by the time he “commits to making that happen”.
Cosmic,
That goal is beyond the ability of the president of the United States to bring about.
“I don’t know of anyone who thinks hard work automatically leads to success and wealth, so rejecting that idea seems easy.”
Do you not recognize one of the great American myths: Horatio Alger? Many of us were raised on it. It’s corollary had to do with the undeserving poor.
Let me revise my statement a little. I don’t know of anyone that has given it much thought that believes hard work automatically leads to success and wealth.
Exactly 2old2tch. It’s “the American dream” that was sold to all of us. And it was supposed to be even more likely to be attainable if we went to college, but now millions of college graduates cannot find jobs that pay “a decent living.”
As to whom can turn that around, I think what FDR did is a great model for a truly motivated president.
It’s basically a scam that folks in DC from opposite sides of the aisle are polarized adversaries, according to Mark Leibovich, author of “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital,” Leibovich said, they are “a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made.”
He also said that, “ultimately, the business of Washington relies on things not getting done. And this is a bipartisan imperative. If a tax reform bill passed tomorrow, if an immigration bill passed tomorrow, that’s tens of billions of dollars in consulting, lobbying, messaging fees that are not going to be paid out.”
Yep, bipartisan crony capitalism and disaster capitalism are alive and well and living in the “Gilded Capital” today –so virtually no one ever leaves there anymore.
However, if FDR could turn around a country run by robber barons, then I think that Obama could it, too –if he really wants to do so.
See http://billmoyers.com/episode/encore-americas-gilded-capital/
I found this to be a balanced, realistic view of Mandela:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/12/07/mandela-ordained-nationalist-mark-tooley/
With the passing of all great men, our tendency is to over-emphasize their faults or, more likely, ignore their faults altogether.
From an eariler post re Glenda Ritz in Indiana . . . Mandela would have little in common with:
“These billionaire free market capitalists could care less about our democratic process in this country – they’ve now shown their hands from the billion dollar Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement being negotiated behind closed doors, the dysfunction in shutting down our government in Washington, the dysfunction in our statehouses and gerrymandering districts to prevent competition, and all the way down to simple school board seats in our community.”
where self-interest seems very much to be the watchword!
If you agree with the second quote…..please check this out…..i hope it can inspire you into action
I am not sure poverty is always man made, but prosperity certainly is. The poverty in North Korea, the hunger in the Ukraine in the 1930s, the Great Leap Forward all are man made, but the poverty that existed for most people for most of human history was just the best we could do.
Slavery, serfdoms, dictatorships etc. have all been “just the best we could do”? This is what people wielding power were WILLING to do for the masses, in order to control them and maintain their own power and wealth, not “the best” they could do.
OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said, “Countries get the poverty rate they are prepared to pay for.” Our nation has been cutting back food stamps, so the price our country is willing to pay is in sacrificed lives.
I would seriously consider moving to one of the more humane Scandinavian countries if it was not so damn cold there for my aging bones.
I am thinking of the whole time humans have lived on the planet. To steal a phrase from a favorite TED talk, it was the last 200 years that changed the world.
Just because people have been oppressed and exploited throughout time does not mean that it was ever the best that could be done.
I would not say that poverty and short lives were the universal product of oppression and exploitation. They were more the product of our inability to cooperate over distance, both in terms of time and space. We have gotten to the point where local drought does not mean the local population dies, where medicinal properties and practices need not be rediscovered every generation. We cooperate to improve each others’ lives on a scale that was unimaginable a thousand years ago.
it was the last 200 years that changed the world
What a ridiculous statement.
More evidence that TED talks are about confirming the technocrats belief in their own special place in history.
Economics a ‘science’ ? lolol. Solid point re “technocrats” and the limits of positivism in constructing, or understanding political and social reality as actually lived by ‘real’ people.
Two hundred years ago life expectancy at birth was below 35 in every country on earth. You don’t think doubling life expectancy is significant?
Leaving aside the fact that many people misunderstand what “doubling life expectancy ” actually means, picking one data point does not provide incontrovertible proof that “it was the last 200 years that changed the world”.
I can agree that changes in life expectancy are significant, but I don’t have to agree with your original statement.
I was presenting life expectancy at birth as a sort of summary statistic. What aspects of the lives of typical people three hundred years ago would you like to compare to the lives people live today? Stunting and wasting are the usual indicators of long and short term deprivation, but there are other physical quality of life indicators.
This is not about technology. It’s about heart, empathy and respecting the rights of other human beings.
Democracy was born in Greek civilization, a very intelligent culture that should have known better than to designate a small portion of their constituents as elites and the rest as the subservient underclass. As long as an oligarchy is permitted to exist, they will continue to co-opt all power and wealth, and the rest of humankind can be assured of a return to feudalism.
At the most fundamental level, it is about producing more than is required to feed, cloth, and shelter oneself.
Grow a heart.
Do you mean the sort of heart that would proclaim a policy that all students, irrespective of the challenges they face, would be reading and doing mathematics at grade level? I had thought setting unrealistic goals without an understanding of the real world constraints faced in carrying those goals out was thought to be a problem by most who post here. Perhaps I was incorrect.
Seeing everything in terms of “producing” is economist efficiency talk. Careful with that around children, especially gifted kids –who have often complained about being valued only as “human doers” and not as human beings.
The production we are talking about here is the production of time to look beyond the production of the necessities of food and shelter to the production of art, music, literature, all the pursuits that are rightly praised here as being fundamental to the creation of a whole person.
As in the Queen’s “we”? I was talking about a society that appreciates and addresses the needs of people who are struggling to survive on a daily basis and you are talking about the Arts. Read Maslow. It’s very difficult for people to actualize their potential and “produce” when their survival needs are not met.
I’m done with this conversation.
These conversations always become ensnared in a sort of Möbius strip loop that goes no place.
Great analogy, Deb! And experience has shown that not much more can be expected when dealing with these 3 that you referred to above.
This happens here and on some political blogs. It is frustrating. Yes, this is a “discussion” and all are welcome. But, when the same dead horse keeps being resurrected to again create esoterica, it becomes mentally exhausting. I often feel like someone who is attending a baseball game with peripheral people loudly discussing dog training during the game. It may have relevance to their interests but not to the game itself. If I wanted to discuss dog training, I’d be there instead of at the ball game.
In any case, you can never ever “stop” the endless loop. It is very like that Mobius strip … even if you cut it in half. The first time, you get a LONGER strip. And if you cut it once again … You know what that creates … two loops that are no longer one, looped together but no longer sharing any substance. So, we can stay on that original endless loop repeating the same things over and over to no avail. Or we can try to cut through it, making it twice as long, but endless (I know that is oxymoronic). Or we can cut it again, having two separate entities that can’t seem to find communication at all. I have reached the second cut … and it is more pleasant, you know?
Yep, I do know, Deb. You are right. Better to make the cuts. Life is too short and time is too precious to be wasted on the never-ending loop –which is a standard neoliberal diversionary ploy these days, so that economic and social inequities are never addressed.
Cosmic,
I mean we as in you and I. Your statement assumes that some people are producing enough surplus that they can give it to those that are not producing enough to sustain their lives without dying themselves. this was not the case for most of human existence.
There is no need to lecture me about the impact of poverty on cognitive performance. Members of my family have suffered from deprivation that is well beyond what you might find in a city in the United States. The problem is that you thinking you can simply legislate the problems away will only make it worse. You might want to read “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-minded Economics For A Just Society” by Alan Blinder.
Those of us who have been actually LIVING the American nightmare for decades ourselves don’t need to be lectured to by a “teachingeconomist” who thinks his relatives had it harder than us in another country. “Hunger knows no borders.”
Folks, since many of us personally witnessed how much of the calamity in our nation was brought about by government deregulation and trade agreements that benefit businesses, don’t be so quick to fall for the claims that legislation is no solution. That’s a “protectionist” strategy which enables the plutocrats to continue to rule our country.
Perhaps you could suggest some legislation that you believe would be helpful.
Nope. Not falling for it. No more rides down your Möbius strip loop.
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
Getting back to the original quote, i can think of no other living creature on our planet that has to overcome poverty to survive. Nature provides all that is needed. When humans work cooperatively and respect nature, we lack nothing. Please explore the link above to learn about the economy of happiness. When we are kind and caring, we all are happier.
Peace be with all of you.
“Nature provides all that is needed.”
Simplistic aphorisms are sometimes true and timeless. That aphorism isn’t true nor timeless.
What is needed is sometimes found in abundance (acorns around here this year) and sometimes completely lacking in “nature”. Nature provided abundant methane and carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos which resulted in a lack of oxygen for nearby humans and other animals causing many deaths.
Perhaps that was “needed” from a “natural” point of view.
South Africa under African National Congress rule has substituted slash-and-burn neoliberalism and class apartheid for racial apartheid, and while Mandela personally rued that fact, he tragically enabled it, or could not forestall it, when he came to power.
Ignoring that reality helps no one, and does not further our understanding of Mandela’s real accomplishments.
Here is a link to a corrective, via The Real News Network, to the delusions about him, and the cliches of the likes of Maya Angelou: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZpv8yTe3bw