Mandela and the communist spirit
- By Heiko Khoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, December 10, 2013
Nelson Mandela's death aroused a global chorus of praise for the man and his work. At the premiere of his biographical film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, wept when news of Mandela's death reached her and Prince William. Bill Gates, who, with $67 billion, is the second richest man on earth, expressed profound admiration for Mandela's struggle against apartheid and his campaigning on HIV/AIDS issues.
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Mandela: Remembering a Champion [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn] |
For the wretched of the earth - its 2.4 billion people living on less than $2 a day - Mandela was also their hero. This global carnival of tears; this celebration of his life and struggle, this festival of memories of revolutionary dreams is classless. Mandela's death signals a momentary lapse into a universal emotional state that commemorates the colossal revolt of the masses against oppression. By unifying the psychic state of the princess and the pauper, the billionaire and the beggar, Mandela, in death, has awakened a moment of global mental unity, in which the idea of communism - of a society where there are no classes - temporarily penetrates the universal mind.
Bertolt Brecht once wrote a poem called "General your tank is powerful" to which the following lines might be added:
The forbidding prison has high walls of steel, covered by electrified fences,
It crushes resistance and breaks a thousand spirits,
But it has one defect,
It needs a guard.
Many years ago, my deceased friend and comrade Nimrod Sejake, who shared a prison cell with Nelson Mandela in the 1950s, told me tales of their life in that cell. From behind prison bars they continued their revolutionary work by speaking and acting in ways designed to penetrate, the conscious and unconscious minds of their prison guards. They would explain to their jailers that they too were in prison - forced there by economic laws- but without criminal charges.
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