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It was with much sadness we learned today of the death of a great man.
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“Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”Nelson Mandela
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The world was enriched by his presence.
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RIP.
E2NZ.org 
And Nelson Mandela recognised and celebrated rather more about New Zealand and New Zealanders than the extraordinarily maimed contributors here do. It isn’t that I won’t accept a critique but that what I read here reflects, for a large part, a lack of self-insight and cultural misnthropy in the writers. I have lived across the world – for decades, in a myriad of cultures and learnt very quickly that most migrants take their burdens with them. It isn’t what they find when they arrive that confounds them in reality, but what they fail to give in embracing a place or people. Not something that you could ever claim about Mandela.
I think the myth of Nelson Mandela is one of the few propaganda myths that is even more successful than the New Zealand immigration/tourism fables. This video shows Mandela singing about killing whites http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKiePbTcAfY back in 1993.
Additionally, Mandela once wrote a book titled “How to be a Good Communist” and his ANC governed in a tripartite coalition alongside the South African Communist Party. Mandela also advocated violence against women and children to achieve his goals. Admittedly, it is debatable whether violence is justified against a regime such as that of apartheid South Africa, but the ANC’s use of bombings against civilians, including against black people that did not support the ANC, is morally reprehensible regardless of the nobility of one’s cause.
South Africa also became more violent, corrupt, and worse governed under Mandela and the ANC.