Word: mandela
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...majority." The "true" leaders are always deemed to be those among the occupied people most willing to say the things the occupiers want to hear. Only once they're defeated can the colonial powers grant due respect to a "rabble rouser" like Mahatma Gandhi or a "terrorist" like Nelson Mandela. (Mandela has improbably been morphed into a pacifist in the American imagination; he was in fact the proud commander of a guerrilla army who got his own military training in Algeria and saw "armed struggle" as an integral component of his campaign against the apartheid regime...
...great events of our time. Think of Ali Husaini Sistani, the Grand Ayatullah of Iraq's Shi'ites, who in effect has a veto on plans to transfer power from those who occupy his country to its people. Still others affect our lives through their moral example. Consider Nelson Mandela's forgiveness of his captors and his willingness to walk away from the South African presidency after a single term...
...exceptional leader. No. 1 on France's hit parade of political popularity, an iconoclastic and intermittent minister, Bernard Kouchner was first celebrated for fishing out the boat people who fled Communist Vietnam and for bearing sacks of rice on his ministerial shoulder in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Nelson Mandela once whispered to him, "Thanks for intervening in matters that don't concern...
...Nelson Mandela has accomplished many things, but his greatest influence may be for something he didn't do: run for a second term as South Africa's leader. As the first President of a post-apartheid South Africa, he was, like George Washington, aware that everything he did would be a model for those who would follow. He once said, "I don't want to be an octogenarian President." What he really meant was that no man--not even one unfairly imprisoned for 27 years--should be above the law or the people...
...Mandela remains perhaps the only figure on the world stage who is an unambiguous moral giant. That is not to say he is pure. He is a hero precisely because he always admitted his errors and then tried to rise above them. And he has never stopped learning. I spent many days with him in 1993, working on his autobiography. He had to catch up on almost three decades of social change, and one of the things he had to learn about was AIDS. At first, this 75-year-old man did not have the most enlightened view. But within...