Reply #19: This is a bit skewed reasoning [View All]

I think one point of the OP is that the entire concept of terrorism is meaningless. All political violence creates terror in some target -- whether that violence is a suicide bomber or a fighter pilot dropping a bomb from 20,000 feet.

Terrorism is a way to label the political violence of unfavored groups illegitimate -- as it was when the ANC was labelled a terrorist group.

I'll go further than you with respect to Mandela. He wasn't just connected to a group that later became involved in political violence; Mandela was largely the founder of the ANC's "armed struggle," going underground within South Africa to organize it, while the organization strategically sent other leaders overseas.

That's why he was so popular when he was imprisoned.

They called it "armed struggle"; the government called it terrorism. Which it was, was entirely a political value judgement.

At the time Mandela began organizing armed struggle, the organization limited its targets to non-human targets -- mostly power lines and the like. After Mandela was imprisoned and after the ANC was in exile for many years, and after South Africa's border wars with neighboring states escalated to hyper-violent levels, the ANC began to target people associated with the regime.

Mandela was offered release if he renounced violence and he refused. The concept of armed struggle was extremely popular with the South African population, especially after internal state violence escalated into a covert civil war, and the ANC could not renounce violence and maintain political legitimacy, nor for that matter effectively protect the population in the townships without the use of political violence.

But in 1989 the government and the ANC entered an agreement whereby the armed struggle was theoretically suspended but not ended, and in fact, political violence continued to escalate right up until the elections.

How you can argue that Mandela's role in armed struggle disqualifies him from a "peace prize" -- a "peace prize" that has been awarded to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho; to Teddy Roosevelt; to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin; to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin; and to Woodrow Wilson?

You are confusing a "peace prize" with a "non-violence prize" which it manifestly is not intended to be.