166 thoughts on “Gandhi and the Jews”

1. Rahul, I agree with you totally regards the exclusivism and hypocrisy of fundamentalist Christianity. They send missionaries all over allegedly to “save our souls from Satan.” Yet in the history, traditional culture and society of the United States, evangelical or hard-core Christianity itself has been the real “Satan” that America needs salvation from. The Mother of Lies in our ethos, just as Stalinist or diluted Stalinist doctrines were in the USSR. Both the whore and the pimp of racism, sexism, imperialism, virulent persecution of gays…you name it.

   It is no coincidence that the current George W. Bush administration is so devoutly evangelism-oriented. It was the evangelist vote that gave Georgie Porgie a second term in the close voting of 2004. It is to be hoped that the evangelical vote block, which is now beginning to feel that Bush and the Republican Party have let them down, will go to some independent candidate or third party. That would bring the Democrats back to the helm.

2. Dear friends, I read all the above comments. And till now I have come to only one unified, moral, logical answer. I believe, indirectly the question most of you are trying to ask is that “Is non-violence always the right way to fight injustice?” I say yes, even for a man like Hitler and the actions he performed. One has to be non-violent in order to stop the the violence from violent individuals. I have read much about both WW1 and WW2, and from what I know there was a non -violent solution for every event that took place during those years. For it was violence that gave birth to a character and emotions that Hitler possessed. It would take great sacrifices and losses but in the end each and every German who killed someone would feel guilty of doing so. It would have taken longer time that usual, but the result would not be any similar to what we have today. The aftermath of WW2, USA and USSR became superpowers and the cold war began and a lot of people lost lives in that. USA gained a lot of power and thought that they would never face defeat if on war with any nation. After that we saw the Vietnam war and USA lost a great number of men and wealth, we saw the first middle east war that caused the deaths of many Iraqis. Even USSR did not sit quietly, they tried to take over Afghanistan, even that caused a great amount of bloodshed. And why are we all forgetting the nuclear explosions. Now, if there had been a peaceful but time consuming solution for WW1, WW2 or Hitler, most of these events would not have occurred. And the men who would have sacrificed themselves in the cause, their lives would not have been lost for no reason and the future generation would have much or less but respect for them. “The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Well I think there would be at least one person with one eye, but still its not worth it.

3. “”Many lives were actually lost because of Gandhi’s stubborn insistence on non-violence.””

   This sort of misses the point. Gandhi never viewed non-violence as a mere “tactic” or “strategy” to defeat the British. It was instead a non-negotiable moral imperative, a way of living life. It was a purpose, not a means to an end. He viewed violence as a form of spiritual pollution that degraded the perpetrator. Gandhi would have preferred that he and all his followers die, and the dream of an independent India die with them, than that they degrade themselves by engaging in grubby violence. He was enough of an optimist about human nature to believe this was not the choice one normally faced, but he probably would not have shrank from the kind of martyrdom he urged on the Jews of Warsaw Ghetto.

   /shrug

   Personally, I don’t particularly agree. But there is no denying that Gandhi was on to something. If the last century ought to hold any lesson at all, its that the social structures and institutions put into place with violence are fleeting.

4. Well, if you address WHAT the peace protesters were rallying for, they were protesting our INVASION of a country that 1) did not attack us, 2) had no weapons of mass destruction, 3) did not have any Al Qaeda (but they do now, thanks to our intervention in their territory). What right do we have to do this? None!

   Our founding fathers would be rolling in their graves if they saw that we regularly entangle ourselves in other nations’ business, much to everyone’s detriment and our financial ruin. What happened to the Monroe doctrine as applied to the rest of the world? What about live and let live? It is not our responsibility to police the world and take out all the bad boys.

   We have 700 military bases in 130 countries, 9 trillion in foreign debt and 70 trillion in entitlement debt. What on earth are we doing meddling in other nations business when we are bankrupt and on the verge of economic collapse? Wake up people! Look into Ron Paul, the only man running for president who is smart enough to know what is going on and courageous enough to speak the truth.

5. Passage from India: How Westerners Rewrote Gandhi’s Message

   By Richard G. Fox

   Fifty years ago this January, Mahatma Gandhi was shot down in a prayer garden in New Delhi. He was seventy-nine years old, and had lived to see India win independence from Britain. His leadership of India’s masses reverberated on the world stage, not least in the United States, and changed profoundly how protesters dealt with those in power.

   How well his adaptors in the West understood Gandhi’s message, or how faithfully they adopted his philosophy, is a matter still being debated by historians. Revolutionary ideologies cross the world in steerage or even as stowaways, passing from place to place unheeded by those in power. Only afterward, when the actions and the actors are forgotten, can they come to appear as an inevitable and obvious flow of the culture.

   In the 1950s Gandhi’s legacy passed to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who took up the philosophy of nonviolence in his long march for civil rights. With King came the Congress on Racial Equality and other civil rights groups, then the Berrigans, Dellinger, and anti-Vietnam activists; Cesar Chavez and his farm workers; Mitch Snyder and the homeless; and the rights advocates for ecology, animals, reproduction, and gays today.

   However, what happens if we look at a time before King, and if we set aside the after-the-fact certainty that Gandhian nonviolence was inevitable? The methodology is one that Clifford Geertz calls “doing history backwards.”

   Gandhi and his methods were easily misinterpreted by Westerners. In order to fathom what he was about, Westerners fluctuated between hyper-difference, in which Gandhi was seen as the inexplicable product of a foreign culture; and over-likeness, in which they found similarities that were not really there. The real Gandhi lay somewhere in between.

   Gandhi departed from Hindu orthodoxy in two significant ways: on nonviolence and on caste. Ahimsa, or nonviolence, maintained that all killing should be avoided to accrue spiritual merit. Gandhi, who had encounters with poisonous snakes in South Africa and rabid dogs in India, redefined the concept and mandated killing for humanitarian purposes, as in the euthanasia of rabid dogs. If some Hindus were alienated by his lack of orthodoxy on ahisma, many more fell out with him over his championing of the untouchables, the lowest of India’s castes. In traditional Hindu belief, an untouchable’s contact with the person, food, or drink of a member of a higher caste would defile that person. For orthodox Hindus, it was a scripturally enjoined inequality, a product of individual karma (action) and performance of dharma (dedication to a calling), and a proof of the cycle of sansar (reincarnation). Gandhi never succeeded in justifying his stance against untouchability; in the end, he simply asserted that Hinduism needed to change.

   Attempting to understand Gandhi fares no better if he is misconstrued as a product of Indian asceticism. Although Gandhi followed various ascetic regimens such as brahmacharya (celibacy), his purpose was to gain the strength for successful worldly action, rather than to accumulate spiritual merit.

   Just as mistakenly, Gandhian protest can take on the guise of things Westerners already know well. Attempting to see in Gandhian nonviolence a form of Christian nonresistance glosses over the activist, confrontational element in Gandhism. Gandhi wanted worldly success, the independence of India, not divine martyrdom. He made salt, he burned cloth, he led boycotts, he was thrown in prison, but he never waited around to be thrown to the lions.

   The concepts of Gandhian nonviolence and pacifism are not at all close. Gandhi did not believe in turning the other cheek in every situation–evil had to be resisted, best done nonviolently, but better by violence than not at all. Passive resistance was the term that Gandhi originally used for his South African protest, but he soon disowned the term in favor of his neolocution, satyagraha or soul-force. For Gandhi, passive resistance was a weapon of the weak, used expediently, not morally, when violence was impossible or too costly. When Gandhi pondered the case of the British suffragettes and Irish Republican hunger-strikers offering passive resistance in jail, he saw an essential coercive element in the protests, which made them akin to violent resistance. Such passive resistors were perpetrating nonviolence to extract concessions from their enemies. The purpose of India’s nonviolent resisters, in Gandhi’s terms, was to suffer nonviolently to engender trust and respect in their opponents.

   Civil disobedience against the state, and the anarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departure from the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed by Thoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts. Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the same conviction or some might feel coerced into action. (The anarchist U.S. Catholic Worker movement was never reconciled to Gandhism). In Gandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individual acts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest. Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moral action.

   Gandhi’s truth was not just a product of his Indian tradition; nor was he parroting methods already known in the West. It was a syncretism of Western and Indian practices that drew upon Gandhi’s experiences living in England, South Africa, and India. By 1918 Gandhi had put together the three most important elements of his philosophy–namely, morally informed nonviolence, mass civil disobedience, and courageous suffering. The concept was almost as strange to Indians as it was later to Americans.

   In the West, Gandhi was perceived as powerful for his ability to hold back threatened violence from the Indian masses. That power was taken as spiritual. Gandhi “suffers himself to be adored,” as one New York Times commentator put it. Another commented that Gandhi’s penitential fasting for political ends illustrated the “difference between East and West.”

   A Gandhi sanctified in this manner spoke to American social activists only as a saint–which meant that he was heard best by Christian militants, rather than by secular ones, and that his work was taken as prophecy, not politics. Even this depended on seeing Christlike qualities in Gandhi and in tailoring nonviolent resistance to Christian nonresistance and pacifism. This over- likeness grew stronger from the 1920s on as Gandhi’s influence over Indian nationalism developed and as more and more American clergymen went to India to meet the Mahatma and bring his ideas home.

   John Haynes Holmes, a Protestant minister, pacifist, and activist with A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was a major agent of Western over-likeness. He began to preach a Christianized version of Gandhi and Gandhism as early as 1918 and met the Mahatma in 1931. In a 1922 sermon, Holmes said that “Gandhi is thus undertaking to do exactly what Jesus did when He proclaimed the kingdom of God on earth.”

   For many U.S. activists in the 1930s, even Christian ones, a Christ-like Gandhi gave no political direction. A. J. Muste remembered the period with regret: “In the thirties . . . we faced a terrible situation . . . .I did not know how to apply nonviolent methods effectively to the situation. The effort to apply Gandhian methods to American conditions had scarcely begun. Pacifism was mostly a middle-class and individualistic phenomenon.” Rejecting Christ and a Christ-like Gandhi, Muste turned to Trotsky and Communism for a period.

   In 1943, W.E.B. Du Bois disputed with Ralph Templin of the Harlem Ashram and the Kristagraha movement, over the worth of launching a Gandhian mass action. Du Bois argued that austerities–fasting, prayer, self-sacrifice, and personal abnegation–had been bred into “the very bone” of India for more than three thousand years, whereas a U.S. movement that embraced such tactics would be judged a joke or an insanity. “Our culture patterns in East and West differ so vastly,” he contended, “that what is sense in one world may be nonsense in the other.”

   Templin replied that Gandhian protest took its methods from Thoreau and the American abolitionists, so it was eminently suitable to the United States.

   In the fall of 1941, James Farmer began to plan a Gandhian campaign for racial equality in the United States. At that time, he worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Christian pacifist organization run by Muste. Farmer sent Muste a memo asking FOR to support a major effort at reforming U.S. race relations. Farmer wrote that “we must withhold our support and participation from the institution of segregation in every area of American life–not an individual witness to purity of conscience, as Thoreau used it, but a coordinated movement of mass noncooperation as with Gandhi. . . .Like Gandhi’s army, it must be nonviolent . . . .Gandhi has the key for me to unlock the door to the American dream.”

   By that fall, Gandhian rhetoric had spread to the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) and its leader, A. Philip Randolph. Gandhian nonviolence had begun to remake existing forms of protest in the United States in its own likeness. Randolph’s metamorphosis is a good example. Randolph’s roots were in the labor movement, and they emphasized mass action over spirituality and passive resistance. In July 1941, Randolph had called for a mass march on Washington to convince Roosevelt of the need for antidiscrimination laws in the war industry. He exhorted his followers to concerted action, such as marches and petitions. There was no mention of Gandhi or Gandhian technique; instead, Randolph invoked earlier black leaders such as Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Harriet Tubman.

   Soon after, Randolph came to a more radical consciousness and rhetoric, strongly influenced by Gandhian methods. In his September 1942 address to his March on Washington organization, Randolph spoke of a “Negro Liberation Movement,” and he had Indian nationalism in mind. “Witness the strategy and maneuver of the people of India,” he exhorted, “. . .mass civil disobedience and noncooperation and the marches to the sea to make salt.” He called for marches, picketing, and civil disobedience– and for the courage to accept courtroom battles and even imprisonment. By 1943, Randolph described his method as “nonviolent, good-will direct action,” which he said was a modification of “the principle of nonviolent civil disobedience and noncooperation set forth by Gandhi in India.”

   Bayard Rustin seems to have incorporated philosophical elements of Farmer’s CORE, Muste’s FOR, and Randolph’s MOWM. Like Muste, Rustin had renounced secular radicalism for Christian activism. On a bus trip through Tennessee, he refused to sit at the back and ended up in jail. In his article “The Negro and Nonviolence,” written in October 1942, Rustin rejects what he called the “pink tea” protests of the black middle class and white intellectuals. He argued for what he called “nonviolent direct action.” Rustin, the intermediary among several U.S. protest groups, was also an intermediary in his understanding of Gandhian nonviolence: he demystified it and put it into practice. He also placed something of a Christian likeness on it, which neither CORE nor MOWM did.

   The initial effort to relocate Gandhian nonviolence to the United States came from Richard Gregg, a lawyer who specialized in dispute settlement on the Labor Relations Board during World War I. Gregg traveled to India and lived in Gandhi’s Sbarmati ashram for several months in the mid-1920s; he returned to India as an observer during the 1930 Salt March. In Gregg’s Power of Nonviolence, published in 1934, he introduced a powerful image of Gandhian protest: he called it “moral jiu-jitsu” because it used active protest and love against an opponent to throw him off-balance rather than to beat him down by violence. The martial arts image dislocated Gandhism from Indian spirituality and ascetic practice. By moral, Gregg wished to emphasize that Gandhian nonviolence was not coercive; it compelled through superior social leverage, personal dedication, and moral balance.

   Gregg also began to shape Gandhian protest in the United States by emphasizing how unlike existing ones it was. He condemned American pacifists as ineffectual, selling out to the government whenever their beliefs were tested. Although Gregg minimized their otherworldly and ascetic elements, he still thought Gandhian methods depended on religion and faith.

   Jay Holmes Smith, a missionary to India, also helped establish Gandhian methods through the Harlem Ashram he established in 1940. He formed the Non-Violence Direct Action Committee “to study the application of Gandhi’s way to American life.” Their protests against draft registration and participation in mass marches began at the same time. By later instigating nonviolent resistance he also used the ashram as a staging ground for such protests against discriminatory hiring by Harlem businesses. Smith’s application of Gandhism was confrontational and, in practice, as subordinated spiritual merit to secular action.

   Moral jiu-jitsu and Kristagraha, or Christ-force movement, still conserved many notions of “Oriental” self- discipline or, alternatively, Christ-like understandings. When James Farmer left Chicago in 1943 and went to New York, he initially stayed in the Harlem Ashram but was soon put off by the voluntary poverty and renunciation. Farmer says he was “not one for asceticism,” and the final step in dislocating Gandhian nonviolence was to remove the fasting and personal austerities. The faith in it had to be made a secular and political, not religious, one.

   To do so required relocating Gandhism even more outside Orientalism and even further from existing Christian protest methods. The moving force turned out to be Krishnalal Shridharani, who acted with profound albeit brief influence on would-be Gandhian activists in the United States. Self-exiled from India in 1934, a Gandhian nationalist from childhood, poet and playwright in his native Gujarati language, Shridharani completed a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University with a dissertation on Gandhian nonviolence and its application to the United States. It was published in 1939.

   Shridharani defined Gandhian nonviolence as distinct from passive resistance, nonresistance, pacifism, and conscientious objection. Harshly condemning American pacifists for their lack of any activist program, he accused them of “religious appeasement.” In Shridharani’s view, nonviolent resistance was basically a secular technique and the religious trappings were mainly there to satisfy Gandhi. The irony of Shridharani’s de- Orientalizing was obvious to one reviewer: “we are confronted with the curious anomaly of having to learn from a follower of Gandhi . . . that American pacifism is too unworldly' andessentially religious and mystical.'”

   Shridharani made the rounds of American protest organizations. In 1943, he spoke in Chicago to James Farmer and thirty others involved with CORE. A.J. Muste also convened a meeting with him and American activists, and he advised a nonviolent direct action in Pennsylvania.

   Farmer was surprised at Shridharani’s dapper appearance and the cigars he smoked. Shridharani dispelled stereotypes about Indian abnegation at the same time he asserted his comfort with Western forms of pleasure.

   Richard Gregg and Jay Holmes Smith also had uncommon lives. Both were self-exiles. Gregg went to India to find new ways of managing disputes and returned with an empowering Gandhism. Smith’s original Christian mission to India radicalized him, and when he was exiled from that mission and forced to go home to the United States, he returned filled with a Gandhian Christ-force that had no place in his church but was to have a future place in U.S. social protest. Dislocation and relocation in terms of Gandhian nonviolent resistance echoed their own dislocation and relocation. That was true of Gandhi, also. On the path to satayagraha, he wore top hats in England, then the turban of an indentured laborer in South Africa, until finally, he bared his head in India.

   This article is adapted from a chapter in Between Resistance and Revolution, edited by Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, ©1997 by Rutgers, the State University. Reprinted by permission.

   ---

   Humanities, January/February 1998, Volume 19/Number 1

6. quiet strange, a number of people have run their mouth by calling Gandhi stupid and a fool, strange that list would incluse nelson mandela and martin luther king and many many many others.

   FYI gandhi was heavily a religious person and so that self surrender to the suffering only enlightens the self. e.g. jesus christ, lord mahavir, lord buddha etc….so in your idea all these people are fools and stupid….because jesus allowed himself to be crusified for the sake of the people, that is probably why almost 2/3 of the world considers him GOD. the heroism and glory that gandhi ment when he said the jews should surrender to the nazi’s.

   AHIMSA was, is and always will be the greatest weapon a man can possess!!!!

   pls do not blabber crap without knowing the full story, and do not take things out of context and comment on it.

   rigs puli

7. Subhash Chandra Bose did not “roll out the red carpet” for the Japanese Empire, Samjay. He knew full well what creeps both the Nazis and Japan’s leaders were. Accordingly, he arranged his invasion-liberation of India in such a way that only Indians would be in charge of policy-making and commands.

   The real reason Subhash failed is that the timetable of World War Two rolled against him. Had the USA developed the atomic bomb a year later than it did, or had he been able to begin his invasion of the Raj a year earlier than occured, Azad Hind Fauj troops would have reached Delhi successfully. And all along the way, millions of Indians would risen up to support them, using weapons Japan supplied because it suited Japan’s interests.

   They liberated the Andaman Islands, and at the Battles of Kohima and Imphal, inflicted thumping defeats on the British. But just when they were getting on a roll, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, and Japan — the source of his supplies — dried up. Subhash anxiously flew back to Japan to size up the situation, and died in a ‘plane crash. Possibly the Allies had planted a bomb in the ‘plane.

   Subhash was the true cause of India’s freedom, not that ugly bufoon they call “Mahatma.” It was exactly violence, and nothing but violence, that cut off the hands of British control. What Gandhi and Nehru did in fact achieve was the creation of a political culture and national consciousness, and the laying of the foundations for a mature democracy.

8. “War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” – John Stuart Mill

9. You what is really funny? Gandhi said all that to Europeans and Jews, but he supported India going to war with Pakistan. That was one reason for denying him a Nobel Peace prize. He also believed in the caste system with all his heart. He equated the caste system with the natural law of gravity. He was also quite racist. Even in his late thirties he wrote terrible things against black people and joined the British in some war against black people, as a stretcher bearer. He even wrote about helping British individuals who were wounded. Later, however, he said he helped wounded black people. A liar, a hypocrite, a racist, and a castist, and a Hindu extremist. That was Gandhi.

10. To say Iraq never posed a real threat to America is wildly naive and is re-writing history (thanks Democrats!) Hussein consistently denied weapons inspectors access to his facilities (illegal), AND, he was supplying weapons and money to terrorists–the same terrorist organization that took down the Twin Towers on 9/11. If left to his own devices, he would have continued to poison and kill his own people, and attack his neighbors on all fronts. He was, by all accounts, the next Hitler.

    And now, because America has been so cleanly brainwashed to believe the ‘no weapons of mass destruction’ argument as being the sole reason we were somehow ‘wrong’ to take this guy out, we have enabled Iran’s nuclear weapons program which will be unleashed upon the world by 2013 (if not sooner).

    America’s willingness to turn our backs on the world was what kept us out of WWII until it was too late for millions of Jews. History is about to repeat itself, so enjoy your delusion while you can.

11. Gandhi’s words were spoken as a true spiritual being. If you are a truly spiritual being then this world is nothing but illusion to you and death is nothing to fear as it is merely a return to a normal state. From this deeply spiritual perspective, Gandhi was correct.

    However, most people do not and cannot attain this level of spirituality and therefore do not understand what he was getting at.

    Gandhi was a true sage and his strength is many times greater than those who preach violence out of fear and loathing.

12. I know it’s an old thread, but since it’s apparently active again, another interesting Gandhi quote:

    “Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenseless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right. (H, 27-10-1946, pp369-70) “

    And these next ones basically embody what Spirit was saying:

    “Self-defence….is the only honourable course where there is unreadiness for self-immolation.” (ibid, p181)

    “I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race. (YI, 4-8-1920, p5)”

    http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/momgandhi/chap28.htm

13. Threadurrection

14. Is that what she said, Manju?

    “I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race. (YI, 4-8-1920, p5)”

    I wonder if that will take over the “be the change” quote. Will it fit on a bumper sticker?

15. Bess, thanks for doing your part in ensuring a successful threadurrection.