Liberals reclaiming Mandela has got to be one of the weirdest ones. What do they think he was in jail for? How do they ignore him literally claiming to be a Marxist and being friends with Fidel Castro?
Also Bertrand Russel was incredibly wishy-washy when it came to socialism. He would call Marxism a religion, and said things like "Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred." He didn't seem like a bad guy though, just kind of useless in political terms, and personally I'd call him a liberal. But he was about as good as you can get for an upper class British professor born in the 1870s. He went to jail for opposing WW1, opposed Edwardian social mores, and was outspoken against racism. But that's all he really was, a professor who said stuff and he knew the kind of stuff he could say to still be a respected western intellectual. I guess you could compare him to Noam Chomsky.
