.ZeeshanAleem: Prince Harry’s speech on Nelson Mandela was as terrible as it was vacuous
But in Harry’s telling, Mandela was most notable for surviving imprisonment — a remarkable feat indeed, but also the easiest part of his life story to depoliticize as a tale of personal endurance. Focusing on Mandela's imprisonment allowed Harry to make use of faux-profundities like “hope is the fuel that courage requires.” And when he did mention Mandela’s great deeds, the prince said “that doesn’t mean he was perfect. No. he was something better. He was human.
Harry committed an all-too-common sin among Western liberals who frame Mandela as a kind of prophet rather than a political figure. As Gary Younge’swarned: “[T]o make him a saint is to extract him from the realm of politics and elevate him to the level of deity. And as long as he resides there, his legacy cannot be fully debated or discussed, because his record is then rooted not in his role as the head of a movement, but in the beatified soul of a man and his conscience.
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