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Was Nelson Mandela a bad man?

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The historian Lord Acton wrote that ”power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. But his less-known, follow on sentence was: “Great men are almost always bad men..' Did Nelson Mandela fall into Acton's category? Clearly he was a great man, but was he also a bad man? read more

Nelson Mandela was a man. “bad” and “good” are relative terms, that becomes even more relative when applied to celebrities, and even MORE relative when applied to revolutionaries, and even MORE relative still when applied to celebrity revolutionaries. read more

Of course Nelson Mandela did bad things but describing him as a ‘bad man’ in Lord Acton’s terms does not really make sense because Nelson Mandela is only in name the same man as the one who was sentenced on the 12 June 1964 to life imprisonment. read more

So of course, in some sense of the word, Nelson Mandela was a “bad man”, just as he was a good – a great – man also. Human beings are in a state of constant biological and psychological change and such is the complexity of our brains and our social networks that we can never avoid doing bad, some of us more than others. read more

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