IMMORAL EQUIVALENCE

by Andy Nowicki

Say what you want about the cult of Martin Luther King-worship which has been legally sanctioned (complete with its own sacra-secular Holy Feast Day) and rendered socially mandatory in the U.S. for decades. Indeed, I heartily deplore the avalanche of bombastically sanctimonious rhetorical treacle which vomits forth from the mouths of our cultural betters each year on the third Monday of January. And let’s not even talk about the enforced platitudinous reverence we are asked to assume for all approved expressions of negritude during those insufferable “Black History Month” festivities in February.

However, the degree, extent, and intensity of Nelson Mandela-adulation we have seen zealously promoted by our rulers during these last few days since the death of that mythical, glorious, and uber-iconic Great Man of Africa ™ represents a step beyond, into an entirely new species of brainwashery.

King, or “Dr. King,” as his more obsequious admirers invariably call him, with a full-on unctuousness so loathsome it practically seems cultivated to provoke maximum eye-rollage from non-Koolaid drinkers-- was a far from perfect man. Still, putting aside the dubious company he kept, his questionable moral sense, and the unsavory peccadillos in which he reportedly indulged, King at least never promoted violence or terror. Indeed, his devotion to determinedly non-violent activism, pace his hero and role model Mahatma K. Gandhi, seemed real and sincere. Mandela, by contrast, didn’t just promulgate a race war in his country, but also actively engaged in it. Over the course of his career, he not only raised his fist, commie-style, and sang a bloodcurdling song about “killing the whites,” but actually played a leading role in the torture and murder of many whites and blacks, including women and children.

Despite my disgust for the predominant prescribed narrative of Mandela as genial, sainted Patriarch of the Rainbow Nation and Lord and Savior of us all, I have little interest in going the opposite direction and trashing him as a uniquely demonic and depraved figure in world history. The sort of things he did—torturing dissidents, murdering civilians, inter alia—in service of a supposed “greater good”—are the same kind of crimes that are routinely committed by heads of state, including the current president of the United State(s), in addition to many former ones. In that sense, Mandela was no better and no worse than most of the world leaders who gathered in Johannesburg earlier this week to congratulate themselves and one another on their shared righteousness and to snap a few fun shots of themselves partying it up en route to giving the Almighty Necklacer his official dirt necklace.

What stands out to me most about the fulsome and wearisome praise being heaped on Mandela doesn’t have much to do with the lovable, cuddly, and mystically wise “Madiba” himself, but with the seemingly arbitrary disproportionality of the world’s response to his passing. After all, the same brain-dead, pitifully indoctrinated world which furiously reviled Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Laden and avidly cheered their executions is eager to excuse, or more likely to ignore, the nearly identical Mandela modus operandi in undertaking his own, quite similar, depredations.

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Context explains much, but it never properly excuses anything. Tim McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was a protest against the commission of very real abuses by federal agents during the Waco siege two years earlier. Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda boys’ attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001 was in retaliation for numerous American military and cultural aggressions in the Middle East. Few terroristic atrocities are committed in a vacuum; everyone has legitimate grievances.

But if Timothy and Osama’s campaigns are beyond the pale (as I myself certainly hold them to be), then why (to use just one example among many) is the horrific Church Street bombing in Pretoria, orchestrated and approved by Nelson Mandela—justified? “Because Apartheid,” is all any of the Madiba-stooges can say, when they bother to say anything at all. This answer rings just as hollow as “Because..” followed by the recitation of any other grievance. The charred, bloodied corpses at the WTC and Murrah sites are just as innocent, and just as dead, as the charred, bloody corpses which were found scattered along Church Street on that terrible, forgotten day in Pretoria. And their killers are equally as culpable.

Indeed, gazing upon the farcical Johannesburg gathering that was the Mandela memorial service, one is struck by the essential moral equivalence between the victors and the vanquished, the undeniable homoousios linking those powerful rulers who currently bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, comporting themselves all the while like a bunch of spoiled teenage sluts on spring break, and those abhorred "terrorists" who have been judged and found wanting, before being sent to their reward.

Mandela at one time belonged to the latter group, then suddenly found himself among the former; he slunk with the bomb-makers before hobnobbing with the power brokers. But there is a rough kind of justice in this world: Mandela, the murdering terrorist cum revered elder statesmen, now finds himself lying in the blood-stained African earth, and the others will surely follow in their time, with a major reckoning to follow.


Andy Nowicki, co-editor of Alternative Right, is the author of six books, including Lost Violent Souls, Heart Killer and The Columbine Pilgrim. He occasionally updates his blog (http://www.andynowicki.blogspot.jp/) when the spirit moves him to do so.