Cornel West Warns Against the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Nelson Mandela

Cornel West knows who Nelson Mandela really was, as opposed to mainstream propaganda about the man. Mandela was a violent communist-leaning revolutionary. He was no Santa Claus. Medialite reports:

Cornel West joined Jake Tapper on CNN to denounce what he sees as the “Santa Claus-ification” of the South African leader.

Asked if Mandela’s passing has caused the media to “cover up” how some people, especially those on the right in American politics, viewed him in the not-so-distant past, West answered affirmatively. “I think no doubt we are,” he said. Calling Mandela a “spiritual giant, moral titan and political revolutionary,” West described what we are now witnessing as a “Santa Claus-ification” of his legacy.

He explained, “We turn the revolutionary into an old man — a huggable old man with toys and a bag, smile on his face, no threat to anybody, domesticated, tame. And no longer really full of the fire.”

But even at age 95, West said Mandela was still “full of the fire” and had a “militant tenderness and subversive sweetness and radical gentleness, tied to refusing to be fearful or intimidated in the face of a vicious white supremacist apartheid regime.”