Arundhati Roy is truly a courageous and inspiring individual, as are all who dare to speak out against oppression. All, truly ‘Heroes’. She is incisive as a writer and social critic. It is therefore even more astonishing that she be waylaid by the corporate media's manufactured iconolatry of South Africa's Mandela. She compares him to Brazil's Lula dos Silva, as if Mandela were the mentor template for universal humanity, which is what is conjured up in the identifying paragraph in her recently published pamphlet: Public Power In the Age of Empire.

“Time and again we have seen the heroes of our times, giants in opposition, suddenly diminished. President Lula of Brazil was the hero of the World Social Forum in January 2002. Now he is busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Worker's Party. Lula has a worthy predecessor in the former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left thousands of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity". (Roy, p.24) The question: How is it that someone with her depth of intellect is led to misinterpret the historical 'facts' about these men and come to this invalid conclusion?

A critique is warranted, not of her person, because from her writings it is obvious she is for worldwide universal human rights. More specifically, it is of how a mind is persuaded that things are other than what they are in 'reality', notwithstanding the depth of an individual's intellect. Is it that humanity wants to be deluded? Is the only effective way of functioning in a duplicitous, hypocritical world to keep ourselves in a constant state of 'cognitive dissonance'? Ask Edward Bernays, master of the arts of psychological deception and propaganda.

Comparing Lula dos Silva and Mandela, the latter preordained into the oligarchy and a neo-plutocrat to boot, with the same pen stroke is a false premise. Granted one must argue issues forcefully and eloquently, as Roy usually does, yet in this instance, she is not seeing the obvious, and her conclusion must be flawed: that heroes, while in opposition always say and do one thing, yet when they attain power inevitably do the diametrically opposite. (“... Politicians and historical events are not always what they seem, that the lust for power and the seductions of ideology can overcome respect for the law, and that the fundamental political values we take for granted may not run as deep as we thought.” Gary Sick – ‘October Surprise’, pg.13, ’91.)

Let us keep in mind that painting all politicians with one brush-stroke may be a misreading. They are merely a broad reflection of us, the species: prone to arbitrary values, and imbued with specific cultural attributes. Mortals, one and all!

Anyone who survives, let alone physically, but more critically, psychologically through twenty-seven years (as did Mandela) of incarceration under a brutal, unrelenting racist regime, is a hero. However, to imply from this one word that the two men are cut from the same cloth is a mischaracterization, and clearly misleading, though not intentional.

This writer’s understanding, from what he has been able to cull of Lula dos Silva, from the limited press available is that he is profoundly humanist; fundamentally believing in a more egalitarian, truly democratic plurality, in economics as well as polity. Mandela, on the other hand, born into the myth of 'royalty', unfortunately is now, and has always been an upper class elitist, sold on the mythical system of unbridled laissez-faire capitalist ownership and control of 'free-market' economics. (An oxymoron in itself.) To perceive otherwise of him says that she has definitely been deceived by the manufactured cult image.

From the mainstream, so called 'free press'; given its hierarchical and therefore undemocratic censorial nature (being corporate owned and controlled), one deduces that 'freedom of speech', in reality, is a misnomer. It is free to those who own it, to be used to serve their particular interests, which are not necessarily the same as those of the masses of the people.

From the outset, for Mandela, it was understood that he would not have to compete on a level playing field. He never identified with the lot of 'ordinary' people. He was a 'chief' by birth. Being excluded from the political system however, as he was by the apartheid regime, was another matter. It was a personal affront and hindrance which he would not accept. It restricted him personally from freely plying his trade in the 'free market' economy. (Isn’t it odd how the elite superciliously believe in this social Darwinist notion of superiority, by birthright, if not alone through genetic endowment?)

This situation, quite rightly, he could not abide, and set out to do something about it. Being forthrightly outspoken, using his masterful rhetorical skills, honed as a lawyer, he dared to challenge the racist system at its fundament, in the name of all of the people. This was brave to say the least, but had little to do with deconstructing and restructuring the economic system from the ground up in order to serve the interests of the majority. He simply wanted his individual piece of the pie, and in order to get it apartheid had to go. For this courageous, outspoken endeavor, the racist regime decided to make of him a deterrent example, or so it believed would be the case, by interring him for all those years. Inadvertently, in the process, it established him as de facto spiritual leader, while conferring the myth of martyrdom upon the mortal man.

Given it had been imbued in him from earliest childhood that he was a 'natural' born leader, he always conducted himself in this manner, with assurance.

After his release, and even during the last years of imprisonment he may have been a party to the 'negotiated', 'peaceful' removal from power of that abhorrent regime, but unlike Lula dos Silva he never innately believed in a more equitable sharing of economic and political power. A proof of this, as Roy herself acknowledges: Mandela, when he came to power completely privatized and restructured the economy, but precisely as instructed by the masters of the global 'new world order'. If there has been any betterment for the toiling masses of South Africa, it has been incidental; through the emigration of millions of middle class managerial whites, replaced by a neophyte, reciprocal, echelon of blacks.

Roy's basic error of assessment: Believing, in the first, that Mandela ever had to be co-opted. He has always been one of 'them'. What has occurred in South Africa has been merely an exchange of skin hue rather than philosophy or ideology, an exchange of the set of managerial classes.

Lula dos Silva, on the other hand, in the eyes of the plunderers of global capital has attained the prestige and status of a pariah, for the very fact of his resistance. He yields only reluctantly, ceding to the demands for concessions by the powers that be (IMF, World Bank, et al.), as little as possible, at each crossroad. Specifically, because of the fact that his intrinsic vision is anathema to 'free market' mechanisms, unlike Mandela, he is a ‘marked man’, and must tread cautiously. Remember Allende of Chile, 1973.

Ergo, drawing a comparison of innate qualities of character between the two men based on hero status is like saying Condoleeza Rice and Martin Luther King Jr. are of the same cloth simply because of the like color of their skin. This is a ludicrous, thoughtless, racist claim. The comparative must go to the deeper essences of each. Rice, like Mandela, identifies more with the owners than she does with the 'people'. Therefore, a more apt comparison would be Rice and her boss Bush, with Mandela. All three are practiced rhetoricians. In truly diabolically disingenuous hypocritical doublespeak speeches to the gullible and ignorant, they avow their allegiance to all of the people, claiming to be on the side of societal progress. (The need to address the structural disparities in the economic foundations of the system.) Actions speak louder than words, notwithstanding the oratorical claims to veracity. Their actions identify them with their constituency: the elite owners.

Through education, Rice did somehow manage to extricate herself from the abyss of racist oppression, not equally accessible to the majority. Nevertheless a truly heroic accomplishment, yet she now identifies with the wage-slave owning classes. How perplexing! What could be more a case of the 'Stockholm Syndrome' (the need to identify with the captor/power, in the belief this is the only way to emancipation) than this? Most confounding is that downtrodden American blacks are generally proud that they can claim one of their own in such a powerful position. (Reverse Stockholm Syndrome: identifying with tyranny/power, in the belief that this too will somehow lead to personal liberation.) She is the epitome of the privatization and restructuring of the individual into the ownership and entitlement mentality - a' la, Mandela, Bush, and their cohort.

The innate nature of some people is that they do have the inner strength and fortitude to overcome the impact of the pathological hurts inflicted upon their psyches through generations of oppressive discrimination, no matter the source. However, they are the exception. The majority of people are still downtrodden, and continue to believe they are only three-fifths human. They are easily co-opted into identifying with anyone of the same ethnicity, who makes it to the top of the heap, as one of 'us', not availing themselves of critical thought to differentiate that that person is not automatically one of us simply because s/he accidentally happens to be of the same skin hue or the same religious fundamentals. The adage 'beauty is only skin deep' is overlooked in these instances, missing the point entirely, that this too is still racist thinking even if in the reverse.

Bush, like Mandela, both always having had a leg up on an uneven playing field, doesn't appear to have this flaw of character (the compassion to identify with those without power) in his make-up. Never himself having had to struggle to overcome the odds of racial discrimination, educational disadvantage, or economic hardship, and make it on his own, he totally discounts that this is the lot of the majority of people. He seems to lack the basic compassionate gene of being able to identify with the 'other': being the poor, malnourished, undereducated and struggling masses of the world. If being 'born again' implies a conversion, it applies more convincingly to Rice than to Bush, for apparently she has had no trouble identifying with the other – the affluent/powerful.

Roy's false perception of Mandela is that he was for the 'have-nots'. A more apt comparison might be between Lula dos Silva and the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. These two guys will surely never share a Nobel Peace Prize, as did Mandela and his ‘White’, supposed former nemesis, De Klerk, ex-President of South Africa.
 

Mervyn Soskolne has a degree in psychology, but most of what he knows he has learned through years of keen, comparative observation, sojourning for extended periods on four continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.