In the days following the death of former South African President Nelson Mandela, there has been a rush by the American Left to rewrite his legacy.

 
As @ConservativeLA noted at the outset, “My only further comment on the topic will be that the chatter has degenerated into hagiography awfully damned quickly.” As dictionary.com defines it, hagiography means “any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject.” Or as I put it, the deification is on.

The biggest part of the whitewash of Mandela’s legacy is the conspicuous absence of any references to Mandela’s communism. He was a member in high standing in the African National Congress, which is the communist party of South Africa. Mandela thought highly of some of the world’s most brutal dictators, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Fidel Castro, to name a few.

Mandela advocated violent means to achieve his ends. He had no words of criticism for his wife necklacing innocent people until he saw it as a threat to his political power. He was given at least two “get out of jail free cards” on the condition he renounce violence, which he refused to do in no uncertain terms.

So you have a communist who believed in violent ends to achieve his political goals being deified by the Left. Why, you ask?

Precisely for that reason. The real and only reason the Left stood in solidarity with Mandela when he was in jail was because he was a Soviet puppet who would have allowed and participated in a communist takeover of South Africa. But for that one fa, the Left would have let him rot in prison.

Remember, these Lefties are the same people who fought for 100 years to prevent civil rights for black people in this country. Their leader in the Senate during the 1980s was Robert Byrd, a high-ranking Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. Why would we believe anything they say on civil rights?

But this attempt to whitewash Mandela’s legacy is two-fold: 1) it gives a positive portrayal of a man who believes in communism as they do and; 2) it allows them to take a moral high ground on race when they know they haven’t earned it.

To the first point, the Left has stood arm-in-arm with every communist reprobate on the face of the earth. From Stalin, to Lenin, to Mao, to Castro, there isn’t a communist dictator on the earth that has not been whole-heartedly endorsed by the Left. They not only like the total power wielded by the government in such a state, they like the ability to rid themselves of their opponents (for just one of countless examples, see how Obama used the IRS as a weapon to stifle his political opponents).

To the second point, the reemerging narrative on Mandela and the 1980s is that President Reagan was a racist who loved and endorsed apartheid. To give you a taste of what an idiotic premise that is, listen to Reagan emphatically denounce apartheid in the summer of 1986.

The Left trots out this narrative to explain why Reagan wouldn’t go along with sanctions against the regime. They’ve always wanted to believe Reagan was a racist, so why not trot this out? It fits right in with this claim that Reagan began his presidential campaign in the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

This is the only way the Left can win; by rewriting the narrative.

 
If people knew of Mandela’s communist ties, his advocacy of violence, and his multiple denunciations of the United States, maybe he wouldn’t qualify as a saint in the eyes of so many. These are the dishonest tactics the Left engages in because their political agenda is a massive rejection of the truth.

The truth is the Left’s biggest enemy – the fact that Mandela aroused the world to the evils of apartheid and rallied the world to defeat it isn’t enough for the Left. The fact that he became a model of the Christian virtue of forgiveness by inviting his jailers to his inauguration and made F. W. de Klerk his deputy president isn’t enough.

The Left parades Nelson Mandela’s death as a way to venerate him, prop up the failed presidency of Barack Obama, and bash Ronald Reagan.

If the truth is to win out, Mandela has to be remembered not only for the good, but also for the bad and the ugly.

 
If we are to remember Mandela’s arousing the world’s consciousness of apartheid, he also must be remembered for initially wanting to replace apartheid with a Soviet-backed government. If Mandela is to be remembered as a racial healer in that nation, he also must be remembered for his defense of tyrants who treated their political prisoners far worse than he was treated.

Of course, the absolute best way for the truth to win out, not just in writing the history of apartheid and Nelson Mandela, but for the historical record in toto, is for the historians to listen to the Left’s account of what happened and write the exact opposite.