WASHINGTON – Former GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich on Sunday fended off hard-line conservatives who slammed him for praising the late Nelson Mandela.
“Everybody says they love freedom,” said an incredulous Gingrich, comparing Mandela to America’s founding fathers during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He said the South African anti-apartheid revolutionary deserved acclaim from “everybody who is proud of the farmers at Lexington and Concord who stood up to the British army, everybody who is grateful to George Washington for eight years in the field fighting the British Empire.”
After Mandela died Thursday, Gingrich posted a statement that lauded him as “one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime.”
It provoked a barrage of online attacks that Gingrich ignored Mandela’s early violent activism and ties to communists.
“Such an amazing re-write of history since 1962 and 1990. Newt, I thought you of all people, a historian, would be true to who this guy really was,” Mike Winkelman wrote in a post on Gingrich’s Facebook page.
“This clenched-fist, murdering, guerilla warrior does not deserve respect from informed Americans,” posted Trish Baehr-Schaefer.
Gingrich said he was “very surprised” by the fierce backlash.
He defended Mandela’s decision to turn to communist allies, saying he didn’t have any “conservative allies.”
“There is no question that in the ’50s, Mandela moved from a nonviolent model toward being allied with the communists,” he said. “My point to conservatives is there weren’t any conservative allies. You know, Churchill allied with Stalin during World War II. And I think in a similar tradition, Mandela was desperate by that stage. He saw the scale of the oppression and the only allies that were available, quite frankly, were on the hard left.”