Peter Hitchens thinks there is a Mandela cult:

A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of  the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced.

[….]

This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in ‘Right-wing’ repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified.

That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela – and, in my view, greater.

George Jonas thinks Mandela was an incomplete terrorist:

As an anti-apartheid militant in white supremacist South Africa, Mandela seemed the embodiment of the fallacy that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. He was a proponent of the armed struggle, taking his cue from such role models as Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Although he denied being a communist, and may not have been a card-carrying party member, he was certainly “soft” on a system as bad as South Africa’s. Mandela, who was to become the secular saint of the century, during the 1960s wandered about in what America’s leading satirist wordsmith, Tom (“The Right Stuff”) Wolfe, called “a quasi-Marxist fog.”

[……]

If Mandela was a borderline terrorist in 1960, as I believe he was, acknowledging it is important. Reconciliation without truth cannot endure.

Humberto Fontova wonders why those imprisoned by more repressive regimes than South Africa’s are largely ignored:

Well, many Cubans (many of them black) suffered longer and more horrible incarceration in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (relatively) comfortable prisons, which were open to inspection by the Red Cross. Castro has never allowed a Red Cross delegation anywhere near his real prisons. Now let’s see if you recognize some of the Cuban ex-prisoners and torture-victims:

Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle, (29 years) Antonio López Muñoz, (28 years) in Dasio Hernández Peña (28 years) Dr. Alberto Fibla (28 years) Pastor Macurán (28 years) Roberto Martin Perez (28 years) Roberto Perdomo (28 years) Teodoro González (28 years.) Jose L.Pujals (27 years) Miguel A. Alvarez Cardentey (27 years.) Eusebio Penalver (28 years.)

No? None of these names ring a bell? And yet their suffering took place only 90 miles from U.S. shores in a locale absolutely lousy with international press bureaus and their intrepid “investigative reporters.” From CNN to NBC, from Reuters to the AP, from ABC to NPR to CBS, Castro welcomes all of these to “embed” and “report” from his fiefdom.

[….]

Here are some choice Mandela-isms:

“Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.”

“The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind!”

“There’s one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!”

Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin thinks Mandela’s introduction of unrestricted abortion to South Africa was “shameful”:

On Sunday, Tobin publicly disagreed with Francis again. While the pope said that former president Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who died last week, will “inspire generations,” Tobin issued a statement declaring that appreciation of Mandela’s admirable qualities should be tempered by his “shameful” promotion of abortion in his country.

While we are on the subject of abortion, Linda Gibbons has spent close to 10 years in Canadian prisons not for blowing up abortion clinics but for peacefully protesting outside them. Are starry eyed Anglican bishops gushing incontinently about her? Of course not. Yet, when history surveys the catalogue of wrongs visited on the innocent during the 20^th and 21^st centuries, I am reasonably certain that killing unborn babies will be at least as high on the list of state sponsored evil as apartheid.