While I appreciate your sober take on Mandela, Lane, I think your criticisms are unfairly excessive. His legacy is to have left 27 years of imprisonment without vengeance or hard feelings, but rather with a commitment to a color-blind democratic process. His fight was to defend the same freedoms that we Americans won in the War of Independence against Great Britain. This, in itself, is enough of an accomplishment to warrant the accolades he receives today after his death. That said, his post-apartheid ambitions failed to materialize in part because of the enormity of the historical, cultural and educational gap between the newly freed people. South Africa's black population and white minority. Our founding fathers had no such obstacles, the colonists being very well educated compared to the Kingdom of Great Britain and Europe for that matter. But as you reasonably argue, he was far less successful as president than as the “founding father” of South Africa. Does this diminish his previous achievements? Take the example of George Washington: a great military leader and “freedom fighter,” yet his subsequent presidency was marked by scandals, allegations of corruption, and an often authoritarian attitude. Examples include his crude handling of the Whiskey Rebellion (Washington sent an army of 14,000 men to disperse a handful of border rioters in a brutal show of force) and later "Jay's Treaty" (it was the infamous Washington's famous political betrayal of Britain. Not only did he refuse to support the new Republican forces in France, but he also allowed American foreign policy to become pro-British again. independence, he showed a complete lack of sympathy for the SA..... middle of paper ...... the British, but also the assassinations in England) and later the Gahadar party, among others prone to violent change. As I wrote earlier, I have no doubt that many of those most critical of Mandela's tactics would be among the first to adopt them if they were subjected by their government to what black South Africans face: deprivation of the right to vote, seizure of their property, ban on political representation and lack of equal recourse before the courts. But the truth is that as long as people who suffer from a denial of basic human rights are ethnically or racially different, many will turn their backs and apply standards very different from those they expect for themselves and their fellow human beings. In a just society, nonviolence as a tool for change is often only a stopgap encouraged by those for whom change is anathema..