166 thoughts on “Gandhi and the Jews”

1. Gandhi’s espousal of turning the other cheek is just insulting to millions of people throughout history who have had to fight and die in order to overthrow oppression.

   Let us wear the hat of a British imperialist. Wearing this hat, we would call the Rani of Jhansi an Indian warlord. Veera Pandiya Katta Bomman, Tantiya Tope, Ranjit Singh … would also be warlords. By 1857, all warlords were eliminated. After that, the British could have a civil rule in India. With the civil rule, the British behaved decently with Indians. More precisely, their oppression was sugar-coated. Twenty-five years went by. An intellectual class, composed of lawyers, teachers, writes and journalists, came into existence. A warlord class did not come into existence. The British kept up with their civil rule. Finally, the challenge came. The challengers were from the intellectual class. Gokhale, Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru, Rajaji, Maulana Azad, Bose, Jinnah … were all from this intellectual class. Being intellectuals, they knew history. They knew that the British were very good at wiping out the warlord class. So they stuck to civil disobedience.

2. “I don’t understand all the hate and bitterness directed towards Gandhi. He may not have been perfect, but how many other leaders (historical or current) can anyone name besides Mandela to be in his league.”

   Ah but you have to understand the Ayn Rand Brigade, Gandhi does not gel with their view of “rational egoism and individualism” so hence the hit piece.

3. Fred Thompson deserves to be discredited for making this statement – although it will probably appeal to the bulk of the American public and shows he’s a smart politician.

   I’m willing to bet you can find evidence on both sides of the issue. Both showing that Gandhi meant this in a literal sense and that he meant it in some figurative sense.

   At the end of the day, Gandhi is credit with accomplishing much. Pretty silly on Mr. Thompson’s part to try to make him a caricature of the anti-war crowd. (Even outside of the appropriateness of using him as a symbol and using his quote, Thompson’s underlying message lacks precision. Of course, he’s using a straw man.)

4. Ayn Rand Brigade, the hit piece, neocons/right-wing hawks ideas, conservative hit job in progress

   Signs of hitting against the intellectual wall, eh! Analyzing Mahatma Gandhi is never easy. But please do not trot out the trite phrases to gain support from the 65,000 readers!

5. some stupid decisions (like taking back andolen after Chauri Chaura)

   Gandhi was particular about the means, not only the end. This is why he stopped agitating after the Chauri Chaura incident.

   In contrast, compare Jinnah’s Direct Action Day statement. Jinnah was ambiguous about the means. Direction Action Day quickly degenerated into the Calcutta riots.

   This link suggests that many preparations had been done long before the Calcutta riots actually began–see, in particular, the paragraph titled “Comparison with Earlier Riots”. Surely, Jinnah had a suspicion that these preparations were on. Yet he made an ambiguous statement—he failed to insist Muslims’ direct action would be nonviolent.

6. Aye P.G. Wodehouse, well said see that’s the problem with people not knowing their own history. Commenting on Sepia Mutiny without knowing anything about Sepoy Mutiny/Indian Rebellion of 1857 and its brutal suppression. Please do click that link to know how well British kicked Indian ass.

   BTW, Indian leaders did try violence, well it didn’t work out well with their heads hanging at the doors of their own palaces/forts.

   On a lighter note, here is a conversation between Irish peeps Son: Dad, my teacher told me that the sun never used to set on the British empire. Dad: That’s because God would never trust the British in the dark

7. I think that to give the context that this article is coming from a libertarian is hardly hitting a intellectual wall. It provides context for someone who was asking why Gandhi is being called out. Ideologies/perspectives do offer context.

8. it requires more strength and tolerance to live every day, under circumstances as miserable as those at concentration camps, than to commit collective suicide.

   collective suicide only feeds statistics but accounts of those who survived the camps tell the real story, they arouse the world to take action.

   and yes, the world does occasionally need gandhi- more specifically we all need a bit of gandhi in ourselves (not the ‘turn the other cheek’ part 🙂

9. That essay by Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” is worth reading in full. It’s the last thing Orwell completed before his death. Here’s a link: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/898/

   Highlights:

   Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi’s case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity – by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power – and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?

   There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which – I think – most people would give to the word, it is inhuman.

   And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

   Orwell is one of my personal heroes– even if you disagreed with him, his commitment to absolute intellectual honesty was inspiring. Anyway, read the essay. It’s really good.

   Speedy

10. Protestors carry signs and have short amounts of message bandwidth. Their missions live and die by brief slogans and attention-grabbing antics. Personally this genre of discourse does little for either my aesthetic or my mind, but it’s very American and very important to some people, and one might as well complain about professional sports or sugary soda. Their slogans are not meant to be taken point blank literally so much as to signify a larger, archetypal train of thought. As long as they’re not blatantly offensive (“Kill all the —“) I they deserve a little room for reasoanble interpreation.

    Nobody knows what Gandhi would do any better than anybody knows what Jesus would do; furthermore it is widely accepted type of hyperbole. It is a stand-in abbreviation for a much larger set of ideas. (I presume that Fred Thompson does not write scathing NR articles everytime he sees a WWJD mood ring; I look forward to his next Matthew-despising screed against all the Christians who want Americans to visit the imprisoned, clothe the homeless, or feed the starving, citing the lonely prisoners, 1.44 million food-insecure househollds with children, and dozens of exposure-related homeless deaths each year as an integral part of The American Dream.)

    You can take an eduated guess about what Gandhi would do in this case, and I grant you that Thompson is probably right–Gandhi would not have gone to war. I even grant you that Gandhi’s fundamental philosophy for not going to war is one that Thompson is basically assessing correctly, and which I, in fact do oppose because I am not a pacifist. Thompson’s tonal implication, however, is that this philosophy is particularly anti-Semitic and particularly unAmerican, when it is not. Gandhi’s philosophy had nothing to do with it being Jews who were being killed, and it was not a unique thought to Gandhi. Nonviolent martyrdom has been glorified by pacifist schools of thought at least since the early days of the Christian church, and any Christian who worships in a church of St. Denis or St. Stephen or St. Paul (just the martyrdoms I’m more familiar with) or, you know, Jesus of Nazareth, has accepted that sometimes yielding one’s life without violent opposition to an unjust and merciless killing can have a lasting and valuable impact on the world, and that such martyrs are worth glorifying and learning from. It’s not exactly a totally new idea. It wasn’t until Constantine became a Christian that you had Christians fighting instead of being sacrificed on a wide scale.

    This is not about “Gandhi and THE JEWS,” it’s about “Gandhi and Oppression.” I find recasting this strain in Gandhi’s thought as being bout “Gandhi and the Jews” to be distastefully close to calling wolf and baselessly playing the anti-Semitism card. Given the trend of jingoistically pitting Judeo-Christian culture against other belief-systems, and constantly referring to the “war of civilization” that we find ourselves in, I find that particularly troubling. Gandhi is consistent about his principals as a function of race—you can argue against their practicality, as I do, but this is not about THE JEWS. It is not enough to grudgingly acknowledge this while mentioning Mel Gibson in the same breath and emphasizing, in the post-title, a spin that is entirely irrelevent.

    When a protestor carries a sign “What would Gandhi do?” that does not embody the sum and total of the anti-war movement. That singifies that particular group’s main touchstone of ideology–the image with which they wish to chasten the wealthy and the comfortable who make expenditure and deployment decisions well-insulated from dead and wounded soldiers, dead and wounded Iraqis, and a bleeding treasury. Protestors are reminding those comfortable people that there are other ways to live one’s life. This man, this “half naked fakir”, exhibited focus and self-sacrifice and sheer physical dedication to his cause that the winers and diners and schmoozers who claim the label “leader” cannot even conceive of taking on. If Thompson respectfully disagreed with the full implications of Gandhi’s pacifist philosophy, that would be one thing. But his contemptuous “swinging” language at the end gives away the fact that he is intentionally dismissing all that dedication, courage, and focus. His target is not the impracticality of Gandhi’s pacifism but the force of his dedication. He wants you to laugh at Gandhi. He wants you to stop taking this khadhi-wearing man seriously. He wants readers to stop taking idealism and peace seriously. I can’t respect that.

    When I am confronted with a “What Would Gandhi Do” sign, I don’t mentallly set up a GandhiSimulation2000 XP emulator based on his every action and comment. Instead there are some basic tools and ideas that spring up in my mind:

    –a moral, important cause is worth suffering and sacrificing for –forcing your opponent to directly confront the harm they are causing can set off their conscience –one’s entire life and set of habits have moral and economic consequences for others –nonviolence can work –believing the best of people can sometimes make it real

    These are the principals and ideals that I, as an Indian-American, an American, and a human being am proud of and draw inspiration and strength from. I guarantee you that if you did a survey of all Americans who claim to admire Gandhi and then interviewed them as to why they admire Gandhi, their reasons would basically average out to these. I guarantee you that these are the things most reasonable people think of when they think of “Gandhian” ideals. There is nothing unAmerican about any of this. For all that I disagree with it, for that matter, there is nothing unAmerican about pacifism itself. QUAKERS anyone? Thoreau? I mean, come on. Implying that these things aren’t a part of the American condition, are not part of the American way, is prima facie absurd. This is not about Gandhi’s specific ideas in foreign policy. This is about Gandhi’s habit of leading a considered, deliberate life. “What would Gandhi do” means that—would Gandhi think about the full economic implications of his policies and lifestyle? Would Gandhi give full weight to the death and violence his actions might cause? Would Gandhi hold morals above practical gain or a desire for revenge or a violent aesthetic? Are our leaders doing enough of these things? Can you honestly say me these values are necessarily unAmerican? No, and Thompson cannot, and so he reaches for the most absurd interpretation of the sign and then tries to make a lifetime of work and effort and accomplishment seem dismissively, laughably stupid. I can’t respect that.

    Code Pink could have come up with a better slogan, but capitalizing on their inarticulate methods to imply that Gandhi was an anti-Semite and that anyone who draws on his work for inspiration is unAmerican is just cheap. It’s a strawman argument instead of addressing the serious critics of the war. One does not need to accept Gandhi’s ideas 100% or even 25% to draw inspiration from his life, ideas, and works. I know it’s an amazing concept but people don’t need to perfectly embody their ideas and methods, or even be totally agreeable, to still be worth citing. Another amazing idea–people don’t need to be pacifists to oppose a a specific war. Another amazing idea: there are other ways to be a hero besides kill people or die while trying to kill people.

    Regarding the minimal acknowledgement of the idea that peace might be a good thing: Iraqis are the best people to go around trying to convince “those people” that they should be more like Gandhi. They also seem to think it would help if we left.

    I’m sorry for the long, scroll-requiring comment but the title of this post deeply upset me. The back-handed compliment about “best friends being Jews” and totaly dysfunnctional parallel with Gibson and Richards was also upsetting. So it’s not a very funny comment, and if anyone wants to lend me some wit, I’d be grateful.

    Thanks, Saheli

11. it underscores a key reason for Gandhi’s success with passive, non-violent resistance – it depends on your opponent’s moral code as much as your own.

    An aside:

    I think many miss out on this part. The strategy worked for those particular set of circumstances, as it did for MLK here and others who have adopted non violent resistance against somewhat civilized power structures. This type of passive aggressive strategy attacks the center of gravity of the powerful they are fighting. In the case of the Brits, it made them reflect on their moral code and it’s target was the public support for keeping India colonized. Without civil cooperation, Brits had no chance of controlling a country as vast as India.

    Strategies involved in conflict (violent or not) are diverse and need to be fluid. Taking a linear predictable approach to conflict only gives those who won’t play by those rules an opportunity to exploit the rules of the game. Each situation has it’s own dynamic that will result in a strategy fit for the scenario. Sometimes violences works, sometimes it doesn’t, at times it’s a combination of it, other times one uses methods of deception.

    ou can take an eduated guess about what Gandhi would do in this case, and I grant you that Thompson is probably right–Gandhi would not have gone to war. I even grant you that Gandhi’s fundamental philosophy for not going to war is one that Thompson is basically assessing correctly, and which I, in fact do oppose because I am not a pacifist. Thompson’s tonal implication, however, is that this philosophy is particularly anti-Semitic and particularly unAmerican, when it is not. Gandhi’s philosophy had nothing to do with it being Jews who were being killed, and it was not a unique thought to Gandhi. Nonviolent martyrdom has been glorified by pacifist schools of thought at least since the early days of the Christian church, and any Christian who worships in a church of St. Denis or St. Stephen or St. Paul (just the martyrdoms I’m more familiar with) or, you know, Jesus of Nazareth, has accepted that sometimes yielding one’s life without violent opposition to an unjust and merciless killing can have a lasting and valuable impact on the world, and that such martyrs are worth glorifying and learning from. It’s not exactly a totally new idea. It wasn’t until Constantine became a Christian that you had Christians fighting instead of being sacrificed on a wide scale.

    Well said.

12. And I think the side by side picture (Gandhi and Fred) is especially silly (just my aesthetic preference, I realize, so feel free to disagree).

13. Wow. Well said, Saheli.

14. Gandhi was a moron, whose followers have no neurons Just like the followers of A din I like to slam with the name thats not glam Many who rote it say that indeed he wrote it They say he was prophetic Indeed thats pathetic for he was illetrate eplileptic

    One of his wife had a good behind her name was Hind. In the land of Hind there was fellow whose said to be a

    Mahatma

    without ever knowing if there is an

    atma

    .

    The man had had a tiny schtik(Well had to have a jewish connection somewhere) who learned that his wife faked it.

    His anger was with kaama and he let go of his pajama He heard of a temple where sensuality was in ample He gave his blessings to those who wanted to deface it But they only wanted to hammer off the breasts and penises

    Not that unlike the blessings given by Hinds husband for butshikani for butparasti is shaitani.

15. Didnt know Michael Richards antisemite but the anti dentite Jerry was there to lend support on letterman.

    PS Gandhi engaged in calling South African Blacks Kafir(he did not even realise etymology of the word and how it applied to him)

16. Gandhi is a very smart man who used the right strategy for the right time against the right opponent. Maybe just for consistency’s sake he advocated the same solution for all the world’s problems. There is no “one solution fits all” for all problems.

17. Ayn Rand Brigade, the hit piece, neocons/right-wing hawks ideas, conservative hit job in progress

    ooh ooh ooh, let me try.

    sardar patel and bush tecumseh and ann coulter shivaji and rush vivekananda and rove

18. Well said, Saheli.

    People forget Gandhi was a whole iconoclast package – warts and all – some of his closest followers disagreed with him all the time (Nehru, Tagore, Patel, etc) yet looked him as their inspiration – but none of them doubted his dedication to a certain set of beliefs – as Orwell’s article linked earlier also implies.

    He rationalized a lot of things – some made sense, some didn’t but he was one of the few people who “practiced what their preached“, and was willing walk to the end of the earth for his cause – it was certainly not hate.

19. Although it’s been mentioned already, well said Saheli.

    Putting Gandhi in the same category as Mel Gibson and Michael Richards is completely ridiculous.

20. is british occupation in india comparable to american’s occupation in iraq? did indian’s fight among themselves killing atleast 60 ppl a day ever in the 200 year history? did they kill british 4/day for 4 continuous years? is the purpose of british in india same as the purpose of usa in iraq? i think it is apples vs oranges. fred thompson can be equated to an idiot for not understanding the what gandhi preached. but we can’t really blame these ppl..they are educated by Fox News!

21. some of his closest followers disagreed with him all the time (Nehru, Tagore, Patel, etc) yet looked him as their inspiration

    Well, from the little history that I have read, I disagree with the names thrown in within the bracket. I don’t know who else belongs to ‘etc’, but I know Tagore was not Gandhi’s follower by any stretch of imagination. Tagore started calling him the Mahatma and I think it was Gandhi who called Tagore Gurudev. That mutual admiration apart, they had different motivations altogether.

    And yes, Jawahar Nehru was Gandhi’s follower. No, a more accurate term would be ‘user’.

22. I know Tagore was not Gandhi’s follower by any stretch of imagination.

    Sure, if you want to nitpick then Tagore was not Gandhi’s follower, but they both respected each other, and, yet openly disagreed on many issues.

    So be it, use “friends/ confidant/ admirer/ your favorite word”. Ok, not follower.

    etc……..= long list but we are going tangential to Mr. Vinod’s post.

23. Great post Saheli!!! Accusing Gandhi of being anti-semite is beyond cheap. Why is “semite” only used for Jewish people anyways?? If you go by the dictionary meaning of the word, it would include some muslims too. Anyways, calling someone anti-semite is probably the cheapest way to get attention in the US. Gandhi was above all a spiritual leader and NOT a political leader and that is why as Kush points out, Nehru and Patel disagreed with him frequently.

    And I am sick of this self congratulating “American Way” people. For example, UPI reporter Pamela Hess was on C-SPAN describing the Iraq war and she said: “Iraqi society has higher acceptance for violence” ….. and I went WTF WTF out of my chair !!!! I guess killing 100,000 people from 30,000 feet using 500 tonne clusetr bombs is not violent enough for Ms Hess. WTF !!!

    This is the kind of delusion Americans are about “their way”.

24. I’m sure Mr. Thompson is a “good” Christian. What would Jesus do? Is Jesus’ way the American way? Stupid hypocrit.

25. Hehe Saheli, kicked some brown ass with your comment.

26. Others on this board have read/know more about Gandhi’s philosophies and how they changed over time than I do, and unfortunately I don’t have a year for these quotes. I found them in Walter Wink’s book on non-violent resistance ‘The Powers That Be’ (based in Christianity and Jesus – I’m not Christian, but I really loved it).

    From Wink (p. 118): “Gandhi was adamant that nothing could be done with a coward, but from a violent person one could make a nonviolent one. Even though he believed that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, Gandhi argued that ‘where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.’ He even went so far as to say, ‘At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before.'”

    That sure doesn’t sound like his advice to WWII-era Great Britain and the Jewish people. I’m not sure what to make of the contradiction. Maybe he was holding out for an ideal, or putting forth a radical alternative to the violence of WWII to try and get folks to ponder their choices?

    And yeah, Saheli gets a cyber-“right on!” from me too.

27. Absolutes in any philosophy or religion are often difficult to deal with. We can say that we would never do this or that. “I would never lie.” “I would never steal.” etc.

    The reality is that we are human, and humans are imperfect and frail.

    It’s always easier to deal with hypothetical possibilities rather than realities. I also cannot help but wonder if some of Gandhi’s points were allegorical or if he were using hyperbole in order to emphasize his philosophy regarding non-violence. Jesus didn’t really mean for you to pull an actual plank of wood out of your own eye when he tried to make his point about looking inward before criticizing others.

    Just some thoughts.

    “We’re all gonna be like a bunch of little Fonzies right now, and Yolanda, what’s Fonzie like?” “He’s cool?” “Correct-a-mundo!”

28. As a card carrying member of the vast right wing conspiracy, I was thrilled to see Thompson hit piece on Gandhi even before Vinod’s excellent post. After all, critical, non-fawning, and non-patronizing views of Gandhi are so hard to find in the West these days.

    That Gandhi’s philosophy would never liberate Iraq from a dictator who tortured children is obvious, to say the least. As Vinod wisely notes, “success with passive, non-violent resistance …depends on your opponent’s moral code…” King understood this, and pleaded America to live up to her own creed. If only the Palestinians understood this, but of course, if they did the Israelis wouldn’t have to isolate them in the first place.

    As for the charges of anti-Semitism, Thomson clearly comes up short of labeling Gandhi one, though he cleverly associates the two, not unlike those who conflate neo-colonialism with colonialism itself, or anti-illegal immigration policies with being anti-immigrant. Turnaround is fair play, and has useful purposes, such as revealing to Mutineers the absurdity of liberally labeling views one disagrees with as bigotry.

    Those who saw the Rand influence in Vinod’s post are right. Rand abhorred self-sacrifice and rejected the other-worldly asceticism of both Gandhi and Jesus. That these two giants are rarely attacked by serious thinkers who clearly disagree with their respective philosophies is a great shame. After all, neither represents the American Way.

29. Gandhi was adamant that nothing could be done with a coward, but from a violent person one could make a nonviolent one.

    It’s clear that when considering the age old problem of mind-body duality, Gandhi entirely favors the mind at the expense of recklessly discarding the body.

    And yet, when Jatin Das became a convert to non-violence, and fasted for more than sixty days till his death (age 25), Gandhi had no words for him, or for that fearless mind.

    Such was his politics, and adamant attitude. Read this excellent piece by Balbir Punj. Bhagat Singh (lived till he was 24) did write a letter to the Home Member, Government of India. More about that incident here.

30. So, Gandhi is now a complete racist. His anti-black remarks are fairly well documented. And now here is coming off as an anti-semite. I wonder how long before his idols are pulled down from north american public places.

31. It is interesting to note that a lot of people study / analyze / discuss people like Gandhi (and Netaji) without shedding any of their prejudices and with a closed mind regarding what they want to hear and learn. Thus people like Gandhi are either heroes or stupid and moronic.

    Gandhi had somethings that made him extraordinary and also some weaknesses which made him come across as someone completely out of touch with reality. He was a great man to many (and thus the ‘Mahatma’, someone here did not like calling that), a man with a very strong belief in his principles and also a man of very strong character. It takes a lot of character to follow what he preached and he did in fact do it a lot better than most men. If he believed what he was doing was right and throughout his later life his attempt was always to do what was right, he would do it undeterred and at the same time despite everything he never wavered from what he called the path of truth (I don’t know enough about this and quite possibly may be wrong, but I suspect what he called Truth would be akin to Dharma in Hindu philosophy?) Unfortunately, when people start disparaging him, they totally ignore these qualities of his which made him nothing less than great.

    On the other hand, he had weaknesses too. The very things that made him great also made him weak in other ways. His statements about a moral high ground are a classic example of that. He so strongly believed in the path of ahimsa that nothing else mattered. Similarly, he was quite inflexible in his views at times and quite impractical. Thus the disagreements with his colleagues. Unfortunately when people deify him, he becomes this totally flawless human being and we forget to consider that he was a one just as prone and capable of mistakes.

    As for his being racist or anti-semitic, thats just a load of BS not worth discussing!

32. That Gandhi’s philosophy would never liberate Iraq from a dictator who tortured children is obvious, to say the least.

    Manju, this might come as a surprise to you, but the British tortured children too. Chandrashekhar Azaad the Indian freedom fighter was whipped when he was 15 for being rude to an english officer. His case is well-documented because he went on to become famous, but I don’t see any reason to believe it was a unique incident. More than a moral code the British had a psychological need for a pretense of a moral code.

    Naiverealist:

    And yet, when Jatin Das became a convert to non-violence, and fasted for more than sixty days till his death (age 25), Gandhi had no words for him, or for that fearless mind.

    Gandhi(like Jesus) suffered from some kind of messiah complex: he believed he was in some way chosen to lead India to independence. He demanded complete submission to his will, and was uncharitable with anyone whose views differed from his own.

33. This is interesting. The British with their ‘divine burden to reign God’s empire on earth’ certainly had a God complex. Who could bring them to their knees except someone with an even greater God complex. Ser ko sava ser 😉 .

34. Gandhi may have been a fool, he obviously wasn’t, but I basically agree with Vinods crtitism of him. An even biger fool was Subash Chandra Bose, and I say that as a Bengali. He rolled out the red carpet for the Japaneese and if he would have succeeded some of us indeed would have been lampshades. What a bloody idiot.

35. Why are people focusing only on the Holocaust? We have an example much closer to home…the Partition. Gandhi actually asked the Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan to peacefully allow themselves to be slaughtered rather than fight back against Muslims. Fortunately they ignored him. He also called Guru Gobind Singh a ‘misguided patriot’. I think it was rather unfair to ask those upon whom he (Gandhi) had some influence (Hindus and to a lesser extent Sikhs) to be annihilated, whereas to those upon whom he had little to no influence (Muslims in the 1930s and 1940s) he said nothing. His hunger fasts were just immature, manipulative tricks to get his worshipping followers (who unfortunately were a big portion of Indians in those days) to capitulate to his demands.

    Another question to ask is how much India’s independance actually owes itself to Gandhi. How about the possibility that a post-war Britain, in a changing world (where colonialism was becoming a bad word), no longer had the will/desire to hold on to a far-flung Empire, especially a nation like India where a new, educated, aware generation was not likely to allow them to remain for long?

    I will grant that he was amazing in many ways, he walked the talk, and he did prevent India from becoming a war zone or a country run by warlords. He had a lot of lofty ideals. He was a good person. But as people have said, impractical and inflexible…and if his directives were carried out to there logical conclusion, then only his own followers would suffer.

36. Well said , Saheli . Lucid .

37. That Gandhi’s philosophy would never liberate Iraq from a dictator who tortured children is obvious, to say the least.

    The question is would Gandhi’s philosophy liberate Iraq from a brutal occupation, one that flattens an entire city as revenge for the brutal deaths of three contractors? It surely did not liberate Vietnam from a brutal occupation (perhaps more brutal than the Iraqi one, this one killed between 2-3 million Vietnamese and practically destroyed a whole country and basically poisoned acres of land). I guess supporters of Gandhi would argue that the occupation would not have been that barbaric and uncivilized if the Vietnamese had not reacted violently. Perhaps appeal could have been made to the occupiers’ better natures. Perhaps Ho chi Minh could have pointed out that the occupiers were not living up to their proclaimed ideals (but I think he did, after all Thomas Jefferson was one of Ho chi Minh’s heroes, but I digress).

38. And as for moral compass, I think it is unheard of for an an oppressor to acknowledge that he/she is one. The cognitive dissonance would be too much. Powerful oppressors therefore invariably justify their deeds in high sounding moral language. You merely have to read the speeches of the imperial Japanese (which I highly recommend, especially in the original Japanese) to realize this; remember that they were creating an Asian “co-prosperity sphere”, and unfortunately had to slaughter those Chinese who would not see their own interest in being in such a sphere). Same with Andrew Jackson who thought he was doing the noblest thing in the world while slaughtering native American women and children in Florida. Now in all these cases a Gandhian would argue that the oppressor should be confronted with the inconsistency between proclaimed principles and deeds, so that the cognitive dissonance becomes manifest. Will this work, and if it does, under what conditions? These questions are worth debating and I think, in Gandhi’s case, the evidence is inconclusive.

39. Gandhi may have been a fool, he obviously wasn’t, but I basically agree with Vinods crtitism of him. An even biger fool was Subash Chandra Bose, and I say that as a Bengali. He rolled out the red carpet for the Japaneese and if he would have succeeded some of us indeed would have been lampshades. What a bloody idiot.

    You being a Bengali is inconsequential. Bose was a national leader, and there is no need for your regional indulgence. Criticism is one thing, and calling a national figure revered by many a bloody idiot is another. I am little taken aback by your nonchalant pretentious swagger.

    It was under Bose Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs fought together. Women gave away their jewelry, and for the first time a women’s combat force – the Rani of Jhansi regiment – was formed.

    Kindly read about the Azad Hind Fauj, and the Bombay Mutiny before writing rubbish comments to an opinion of another person’s opinion of a dumbed down slogan. And read what Clement Atlee had to say about the reason behind Britain’s final decision to quit India.

    (from Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian).

    As between Indians and Englishmen this purification by fire has not taken place. When I remember how until even ten years ago all those Englishmen who had anything to do with us or our country, as a rule, denied every capability and every quality in us, and when I set the interested superciliousness of yesterday against the interested complaisance of today, I blush for the English character, and my shame is not lessened by the manner of the flattery.

40. Saheli, thank you for that cogent, well-reasoned and, most importantly, well supported response. I read this article yesterday and was so disgusted with the Micheal Moore analysis/theatrics that I came close to striking this site off my list. Who knows, it still may happen–I recently discovered this site, and while I love the spectrum of topics, I ‘ve been more than a little uncomfortable with an approach that I perceive takes criticism or identification of the author’s intent or subtext rapidly becoming text biases as a personal attack, worthy of implicit and explicit threats.

    Regarding the specifics of the attack, Gandhi was human, he never purported otherwise, with all kinds of frailties and foibles that form part of the human condition. Most of my readings seem to indicate that he was much less hyprocritical than most of us, including many other shining beacons to humanity (insert obligatory Thomas Jefferson reference here). Through a combination of many factors, including luck and the ability to analyze and capitalize on his particular environment, he accomplished something that most thought unthinkable when he first started out and inspired a lot of other people to try his approach as well. He successfully played the “White Man’s Burden” against its proponents. His point regarding the Jews was passive resistance–they shouldn’t just line up and nicely move into the cattle cars in an attempt to prove that they were good Germans, but actually do something to draw attention to immorality of the situation and hopefully inspire local and international outrage and if need be die on principle rather than leave their survival to the whim of their oppressors. As Saheli has beautifully pointed out, dying on principle shouldn’t be considered something incompatible with Western thought. For the record, some Jews have themselves have raised/debated the issue of what could be construed as an excessively passive (without the resistance part) approach to the Nazi threat.

    I tend to agree with those who suggest his approach would not have worked in Nazi Germany where the point was extermination, not rule, and where the population in question was a demographic minority–but since when has naivete (especially in the context of 20/20 hindsight) equated with anti-semitism? Maybe Gandhi was in fact an anti-Semite but citing that particular statement does nothing to prove the assertion. Call him out for being wrong, naive, a geo-political idiot if you want (and I’d have to disagree with you on the latter), but do not use snippets of a statement out of context to accuse the man of being an anti-Semite. It’s sloppy thinking, and helps to give credence to those who argue that logic and critical thought is the sole purview of the West.

41. Sorry, I should be clear: my reference to the anti-Semitism comment, was in direct response to the “some of my best friends are Jews” swipe, as well as to the charming “Gandhi and the Jews” title–there is an implicit suggestion that Gandhi made his statements BECAUSE the people in question were Jews. You know, sort of like repeatedly mentioning “Al Quaeda” and “weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq” in the same sentence implies there is a link between the two. But then, no one would do that.

42. Manju @ 78 says:

    Turnaround is fair play, and has useful purposes…

    No it’s not. It is intellectual dishonesty of the most blitheringly, gawdawfully (am using all these big words so as not to offend our oh-so-sensitive right wing by using a shorter, more effective participle) nasty sort. It’s a tactic that’s equally distasteful whether used by the left or the right. A bit off-topic, but pertininent IMHO: why does the present-day right wing, to a far greater extent than the present-day left, tout such Machiavellian notions as the one above as though they were a sign of great virtue ?

43. Signs of hitting against the intellectual wall, eh! Analyzing Mahatma Gandhi is never easy. But please do not trot out the trite phrases to gain support from the 65,000 readers!

    Sorry we hurt your feelings but how come your “intellectual wall” does not hesitate to trot out trite phrases like anti-semite, unAmerican, unChristian, evil. Save those for your religious discourses and radio talk shows.

44. This is embarrassing. Please ignore my comment #83. It seemed like a brainwave yesterday night, but I was not v sober(in fact, not sober at all) when I wrote that, and now it just looks stupid. #82 fortunately turned out better.

    The general point I was trying to make was made far more lucidly by sigh!(#88) and also ente: Gandhi used the British’s own belief in their civilizing mission against them. What is interesting is that he did not do it as a clever ploy, as a smart politician might, but he seemed to genuinely believe,at least in his formative years, that the British, and indeed the entire human race, was essentially well-intentioned, and only needed to be shown the right path. This was the reason for his hostility to anyone who wanted to take a harder line against the British than him.

    How far this belief was part of his innate psychology and how far it was due to his experiences of the British order as part of an affluent Indian family, it is hard to say. It is interesting that most of the violent radicals came from a lower social class than Gandhi, Nehru, etc, and perhaps their experience of the British empire was markedly different. If Gandhi had been born lower in the social order, or not spent many years studying to be a lawyer in Britain, we might never have known the Gandhi we know now.

45. would Gandhi’s philosophy liberate Iraq from a brutal occupation, one that flattens an entire city as revenge for the brutal deaths of three contractors?

    BTW, They were “mercenaries”. And that is the “American way” that a lot of people here are beating their chests about.

46. Vinod- We agree on many things here but your suggestion that Gandhi was an anti-Semite is disappointing. He was a monomaniac over ahimsa and his suggestion vis a vis the Nazis a grotesque over extension of this inherently limited tactic, but anti-semite he was not. I think there is a better case to be made that he was dismissive of the aspirations of the African people…

47. Gandhi I think is on the right track, but may not be the best with words, or at least can easily have his words manipulated. Even the Europeans learned not to humiliate your opponent completely, a mistake they made after WWI to the Germans, as Hitler used the Treaty of Versailles and the War Guilt cause to galvanize the German “ordinary men” into becoming merciless killers. But Gandhi takes it to an extreme with saying, never strike your oponent, for it gives him reason to strike back.

    I just hope all the people here staunchly against Gandhi’s strict non violence would take an equal stand and call Dr. King a loony toon for advocating the same tactic for Black civil rights, and understand the tactics of say, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the UNIA, and OAAU. yet when Malcolm X says statements like this:

    “It doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time, I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”

    he’s “advocating violence” or “terrorist” acts. Pure hypocrisy.

48. heroes are for inspiring not imitating. it is useful to have iconic images of Gandhi, Jesus etc. it is useful to have iconic images of King Leonidas of Sparta (good film no?)

    If all of humanity completely imitates these highly non-normative icons, or even applies their prescriptions as rigid principles, then the results would not be normative, and would not be pretty.

    Thompson and Vinod are spot on.

49. Naiverealist

    Bose was a bloody idiot, and being Bengali has everything to do about it because we have a tendency to support bloody idiots, be it Bose or Basu.

50. First and foremost, excellent post by Amitabh (#85).

    Gandhi ji was a good man. I’m referring to his fundamental nature, his “heart”; he was benevolent, without hatred (as far as I can tell), and very well-meaning. He cared deeply about people in general, was pained by the suffering evident in India, and had a genuine interest in attempting to increase his own spiritual awareness.

    So his intentions were good, although his methods in both spiritual and political matters were sometimes misguided. Occasionally extremely misguided.

    He was obviously also very intelligent and, in the case of the British at least, realised what would be the most effective revolutionary strategy in order to turn their own consciences against them. The fact that the Brits were exhausted — on multiple levels — by this time due the WW2 of course substantially helped matters.

    However, depending on your point of view, there is a way of thinking where passively allowing an unwarranted aggressor to attack you (and others) is as great a sin as attacking an innocent party yourself. There is not necessarily any great moral victory in allowing such a party to wipe you out and (more pertinently) then continue attacking others because you did not attempt to stop or at least delay them.

    “Offerring yourself to the butcher’s knife” is one possible response. Another would be to fight back and try to take as many of them as possible with you before they finally wear you down and defeat you. Or you can retreat, regroup, and live to fight abother day. I’m sure I don’t need to repeat the cliche about dying on your feet rather than living a lifetime on your knees.

    Amitabh’s quote about Gandhi ji somewhat misguidedly (and, frankly, ignorantly) referring to Guru Gobind Singh as a “misguided patriot”, if true, can also be applied to Gandhi ji himself if one were so inclined.

    Again, let me stress that I think he was a genuinely good man. Until relatively recently, I had elderly relatives who were a part of the Quit India movement, knew Gandhi ji, Nehru and Sardar Patel personally, and had even spent some time in jail with Gandhi after they’d all been incarcerated by the British for various seditionary activities. The man was obviously very idealistic and “one of the good guys”. However, he was not a saint, not some kind of divinely-ordained prophet (his habit in his later years of sleeping naked with young girls as a way of testing his sexual self-restraint is proof enough of this — imagine the disconcerting effect it would have had on the unfortunate girls who had to lie next to him), and should not be viewed as such.

    What he should be viewed as, nevertheless, is an extraordinary, albeit flawed, human being, who achieved extraordinary results during his lifetime and who was in moral courage and conviction certainly considerably superior in many ways to the “average” person. But again, not saintly in the true sense of the term, and obviously not infallible.

    At the end of the day, we can admire him for his positive qualities, the successful outcomes of many of his actions, and put all of this into its proper context so that an accurate picture of the man is perceived. So no character-assassination hit jobs, but not glorified blindly as a “living saint, a rishi who took birth” either.