It was the same thinking that allowed American segregationists in the 1950s and 60s (and in some cases to this day) to call civil rights activists “Communists.” Some of them were Communists, after all, and segregation was a stick the USSR used to beat the U.S.
Hearing the news was sad but no shock - I do appreciate that he at least got to be home for his last few weeks. My first coherent thought, though, was this: They locked him up for 27 years, meaning he had only the other three-quarters of his life to accomplish anything. 
Pat Buchanan’s nativist-paleocon magazine The American Conservative, where I have sometimes seen articles about how life in post-Apartheid SA sucks and even some blacks miss the old days, has nothing but praise for Mandela.
Learn, Pubs.
I think you meant “nothing but praise for Mandela now.” I’m pretty sure these people were singing a different tune a couple of decades ago. Here are some examples, although they don’t include Buchanan specifically.
From CNN: Nelson Mandela death: Examining the backlash. Worth a read.
OK, some of those things I understand, like the labels of him being a Communist and a terrorist (given the ANC designation). But where are these torture and murder accusations coming from?
From Bush and Cheney?
Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of the South African transition: the example that “liberation” not only should theoretically, but can in fact, be something *more and other *than payback and settling of scores. How many other “heroes” and “fathers of the nation” and “revolutionaries” have failed at that, or not even tried.
During the time of the anti-apartheid armed resistance, especially after he was imprisoned, factions arose that went extremely violent against one another and against internal dissenters or challengers, never mind if they thought they detected an actual collaborator: look up “necklacing”. These included factions aligned with members of the ANC leadership: Winnie Mandela herself was found by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to have been liable for gross violations of human rights against other factions of her very movement in her role as placeholder leader during Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment.
Guilt by association, I suppose. In the latter years of Apartheid, some black factions were given to “necklacing” anyone suspected of supporting the regime. “Necklacing” involved putting a gasoline-soaked tire around the person’s neck and lighting it.
Back in the 1980s, I recall, Winnie’s terrorist-crook reputation was a stick to beat Nelson with. But I don’t think it’s fair to hold a man responsible for what his wife got up to while he was in prison.
So what exactly does this mean? Obviously, conservatives see it as “Winnie (and thus Nelson) Mandela ordered, and/or covered up, torture and murder,” but is it really?
Thank you, and rest in peace, Sir, I agree with my president, you are probably the finest person I will share my time on this Earth with.
That’s so sad. :(:(
The important thing to remember is that what Mandela achieved freed all South Africans – the blacks freed from oppression, the whites freed from fear – the fear they had to live with every day the system lasted, imagining what might happen if the black majority ever really got together and rose up. In their worst imaginings it might well have been like Haiti in the 1790s, when rebelling slaves simply killed every white person they could catch. But Mandela (and de Klerk, credit where it’s due) ended Apartheid with no civil war, no ethnic cleansing, no reprisals, no expropriations, no revenge. Even white officials guilty of actual crimes against humanity were let off the hook if they made a clean breast at the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. And now, the worst things South African whites have to fear are a high crime rate and AIDS, which the blacks have to live with too.
That’s the power of forgiveness. Mandela understood it.
President Obama’s remarks at the memorial service today: Remarks by President Obama at Memorial Service for Former South African President Nelson Mandela | whitehouse.gov
And in a bizarre occurrence, the sign-language interpreter for world leaders was a fake.
Holy crap. And he’d done it before! Terrible security and logistical lapse.