This past week, Nelson Mandela died at the age of 95. The vast amount of reportage about his life and achievements has already begun that necessary and inevitable revision, cleansing the record of everything that might make us a little uncomfortable, leaving behind the Walt-Disney-singing-animal-musical-cartoon-version of Nelson Mandela and the world.

While everyone else is generating pure bullshit, I’d like to take the time to remind you of a few things that a provably true about Nelson Mandela, first and foremost the fact that he was a freedom fighter who approved and carried out bombings against a repressive government, and that he was an advocate of political violence.

In 1964, Nelson Mandela used his trial as a political forum. His government accused him of hundreds of acts of sabotage and, as the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), approving of bombings. The evidence of Mandela’s involvement in planned political violence has never been doubted nor refuted, not even by Mandela himself.

Nelson Mandela was found guilty of criminal acts, to include plotting to overthrow the government. He spent 27 years in prison largely because he refused to disavow the ANC’s path of armed struggle.

Sure, in the 1990’s, after his release from prison, a gray-haired Mandela smiled kindly and waxed peaceful with the likes of Bono and Oprah, and we all think of Nelson Mandela like a kind, gentle grandfather figure. Sure. And that makes the historical revision so much easier. The conversion of reality into a Walt Disney cartoon takes less effort, deleting any references to bullets or bombs or Mandela’s advocacy and use of both.

Our revisionist historians don’t want us to think about Nelson Mandela’s armed struggle because Mandela proved to be such a reasonable, thoughtful guy…and we would have to ask: Why would such a reasonable, thoughtful guy resort to such tactics? And then we would ponder other stuff.

We would consider how repressive the South African regime was. How unjust. And we would come to recognize that such an injustice was artificially maintained by support from the United States.

We would consider that a racist and repressive regime was propped up by the U.S. for decades while a freedom fighter sacrificed the best years of his life, refusing to compromise on principle, struggling from inside the bowels of a cold, dark prison.

We would think about how Nelson Mandela and his political organization remained on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s list of Specially-Designated Global Terrorists until 2008.

Yeah, 2008.

The United States considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist until he was 89 years old.

If the full context of Nelson Mandela’s life was treated fairly, we might have to wonder why a kind, reasonable, thoughtful 89-year-old remained labeled a terrorist by the United States. And how many other kind, reasonable, thoughtful people are labeled as terrorists by the U.S.? How many of them are driven to be “terrorists” by the U.S.? And what does that say about the true character of the U.S.?

So let’s not honor Nelson Mandela with an accurate view of who he was; let’s not continue the struggle against oppression to which he dedicated himself, by first speaking honestly of the necessity of his armed struggle and what that implies for us. Let’s not question how those forces that drove such a thoughtful and reasonable man to the tactics of bullets and bombs are still operating to drive other thoughtful and reasonable people down the same path, or we may have to stop and think about domestic heroes like Marie Mason, Leonard Peltier, Mark Neiweem, the Cleveland 4 (Brandon, Doug, Skelly, and Connor), Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Lucasville Uprising prisoners…dozens of Nelson Mandelas who will never receive a hug from Oprah and Bono. Instead, let’s just peddle bubblegum.

This way, through historical revision, powerful forces not only mark the physical death of Mandela, but can create a future where the real Mandela never existed, much as they have done with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even Mohandas Gandhi. It’s a future where true freedom fighters can remain imprisoned and viewed as irrational and thoughtless, no frame of reference to bridge the information-disconnect in our minds. Then the real danger of Nelson Mandela, the deeper truth he embodied, is neutralized. The powerful forces that shaped him won’t have to stand guard over his grave to make sure he stays dead…

But now they do.

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Note: The U.S. State Department arranged a propaganda film with poet Maya Angelou a year and a half before Mandela’s death… (Maya Angelou interview, CBS, December 8, 2012, “Face the Nation”)