The praise Nelson Mandela has received since his passing yesterday has been extravagant, well-deserved, and nearly universal. From every corner of the globe, Mandela has been lauded as a world leader without parallel in our era.
Praise for Mandela has been effusive even from many who had little use for him during the apartheid era. Conservative politicians from parties that spurned his struggle for national liberation while it was ongoing have been elbowing each other out of the way to memorialize him now.
This phenomenon has been particularly pronounced — and particularly jarring — at the website of the American conservative magazine National Review. Their outpouring of affection has shocked and dismayed many of the site’s regular readers, who have flooded the posts’ comments sections with expressions of outrage, many of them appallingly ugly, and the naked racism on display there has attracted a lot of attention around the ‘net.
More interesting to me, though, has been the way the writers at NR have dealt with the chasm between their present and past views. The editors’ unsigned editorial chose to avoid the topic entirely, instead tempering their praise for Mandela with criticism of some of his views, while the authors of each of the site’s two signed pieces wrote that their error in judging Mandela had been one of believing he was more of a leftist than he turned out to be. I’m not in a position to judge either of these writers’ sincerity, but the site’s collective