As South Africans mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any honest and balanced assessments of Mandela’s legacy.

The Cold War, he [Isaac Chotiner of the New Republic] argues, “prevented many of the people fighting it from viewing Mandela in anything but Cold War terms.” How, he asks, could anyone even think of the apartheid regime as part of the Free World? The Cold War, he writes, “didn’t require anyone to wear these blinders.”

People say one thing, but party platforms and ideology are often ignored. This, he says, is what the pragmatic Mandela did. Conservatives who harp on it are engaging in “gleeful red-baiting.” The truth, he writes, is that Mandela “was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.”

In other words, he was a man of contradictions. His alliance with and membership in the SACP was simply a “marriage of convenience,” in a movement with few friends. He was able to receive money and arms from his Soviet and Chinese comrades for their “feckless armed struggle.” Despite ideology, when push came to shove, the pragmatists and the realists won out. Mandela emerged from prison a changed man, who brought reconciliation to his native land that could have erupted in civil war, and both avoided bloodshed and gave his backing to South African capitalists who could have been his enemy.

His Party membership can be explained simply by the fact that the Marxist-Leninist group was the only political group that allowed whites, blacks, Indians and mixed-race people as members.

First, let's be honest about Mandela's real history. While he opposed South Africa's Apartheid system of institutionalized racism, it was far from clear during the height of that struggle whether Mandela was an advocate of liberty or not. In fact, it looked a lot like the answer was "not."

Mandela's rapturous reception in the West... was about Western liberals having an opportunity to demonstrate how Not Racist they are (and, correspondingly, that their opponents are Secretly Racist). This is the primary remaining source of moral legitimacy for the American left, and they're going to hang on to it.

As Michael Moynihan points out, "For a man imprisoned for his political beliefs, he had a weakness for those who did the very same thing to their ideological opponents, but were allowed a pass because they supported, for realpolitik reasons, the struggle against Apartheid." He goes on to document Mandela's expressions of sympathy toward miscreants like Fidel Casto, Moammar Gadhafi, and the regime in Iran—not just during the struggle against Apartheid, but to the very end.

It is the American left that has not really wrestled with the Cold War and the evils of Communism as a system of global oppression.

it was President Reagan who made the end of Apartheid possible. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that South Africa's white minority could make a deal with Mandela without having to fear that they would end up living in a province of the Soviet Empire.

We got a reminder of this at Mandela's memorial when President Obama created a stir by shaking hands with Raul Castro, the successor to his older brother's brutal dictatorship.

He [Mandela] leaves behind a lot of problems, and it is possible that his less worthy successors will still wreck the country. But he also left behind a surprising legacy of freedom that goes beyond the dismantling of Apartheid and may give South Africa the political and economic means to survive and prosper.