Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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Mandela was a terrorist. You're just having cognitive dissonance because you agree with him (as all right-thinking people should have.)

To the extent that "terrorist" has any meaning, it is when a less powerful actor attempts to advance an agenda through creating an unmanageable situation for a more powerful institution by causing an increased sense of risk within individuals who are part of the support structure of that institution, thereby making it too expensive for the institution to continue preventing that agenda from being advanced.

Where conventional war wins by killing enough people on the other side that they can't stop you from doing what you want, instead terrorism makes people so expensive (in lost government support from a targeted public, increased salaries and heightened security, and/or lost inflows of money from targeted clients and customers) that allowing the terrorist agenda to advance turns out to be cheaper for the institution being attacked than continuing to fight.

That's what the ANC did.

That's a bit condescending. Terrorism doesn't have an accepted definition, and that definitely isn't my definition of terrorism, nor many others. Perhaps people living in America are more inclined to your definition.

I believe that terrorism is defined by the desire to cause mass fear in the general populace by intentionally targeting innocent people, to send across some political message in whichever guise. 9/11 was a terrorist attack.

The Spear of the Nation targeted infrastructure of the Apartheid regime, and the policies of equality upheld by the ANC and Nelson Mandela were widely supported by both white and non-white people in South Africa. I do not think these actions were aimed at provoking mass fear or lobbying an ideal not commonly accepted in South Africa.

This period is often referred to as a revolution, and successful revolutionaries are not historically known as 'terrorists'. In the Anglo-Boer war a similar tactic was employed by the Boers to great effect, but I have never heard of anyone referring to their actions during this war as acts of terrorism. They fought against an act of war initiated by the British, the same way that the ANC fought against acts of violence by the ruling regime, except the ANC were severely under resourced.

Again, the spear of the nation may have done this. This doesn't make Nelson Mandela a terrorist. If he armed a bomb, killed someone, held someone hostage for international attention, I would be far more inclined to accept your definition, as with others.

Given that even the Iron Lady apologised for calling Mandela a terrorist, I'd say the commonly accepted belief is that he is and was not a terrorist.

> This period is often referred to as a revolution, and successful revolutionaries are not historically known as 'terrorists'.

Well, except that the term "Terror" as a political act and "Terrorists" for those who practiced it -- well, except in French, not English -- was coined to refer to a particular set of successful (to that point) revolutionaries and their actions (and embraced by them.)

>Terrorism doesn't have an accepted definition,

Then it's going to be very difficult to make an argument that Mandela was not a terrorist.

>In the Anglo-Boer war a similar tactic was employed by the Boers to great effect, but I have never heard of anyone referring to their actions during this war as acts of terrorism.

The first hit I get for "Boer terrorism" is: http://www.angloboerwar.com/books/78-stevens-the-complete-hi...

( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=Boer+terrorism )

Edit:

Sorry about going on about this, but I think that saying people are not terrorists because we agree with them is closely related to saying that people are terrorists because we don't agree with them. If "terrorism" has a meaning, the question of whether Mandela was a terrorist should be answered based on that meaning. If what we really mean to say is that we think Mandela was a great man who improved the lives of millions, we can just say that instead of arguing or insulting each other over semantics.

The connotations associated with terrorism are simply too strong to associate with Mandela. People will take great offence at this, no matter what pedantic definition you want to use for it. Regardless, your definition still doesn't account for the fact that Nelson Mandela did not personally do any of these things, or intentionally target innocents.

Its clear to me at least that any definition of "terrorism" must include the concept of inducing fear in the general populace by means of acts of violence on that population. That's also clearly NOT what Mandela did.

You're displacing and blurring both contexts and words to your advantage.

> having cognitive dissonance

I know what most people think is not always right, but read yourself, and try to add water to your wine a little.

The context of apartheid was really bleak. Colonization by whites on african land can only generate relevant tensions from black people toward whites. Most people are black in SA and in all africa around it. You can't have a ruling minority which is not like and expect nice things. Nelson Mandela was much more peaceful (and smart) than most others.

> Mandela was a terrorist.

First, people use terrorism when they're losing a war, not an political argument. Secondly, activists have been called terrorists because the cause they defend have been discredited after other activists used violence for the same cause. It's the media and newspaper inflating images which doesn't reflect the thought of the majority.

You can't mix and match opinions and definitions used by the media to discredit Mandela, and at the same time forget how the situation was in SA, and on top of it, talk about cognitive dissonance. If most view it as a hero, maybe he just it. Nobody sees Ben Laden as a hero. Bush actually invited Mandela and apologized after he was considered a terrorist.

Conclusion: everyone sees terrorists everywhere.

You are confusing things. Mandela was not a terrorist because he won, proper term is freedom fighter. History is always written by victorious.

No it not. History is written by historians, who are constantly reevaluating primary documentation and the conclusions that were drawn from them by previous generations of historians.

In perfect world yes, but quite often documentation that does not agree with ruling party gets torched.

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