What Would Gandhi Do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

After the towers came down, I was in shock and very angry. I lost some acquaintences and thousands of fellow humans because some heartless fundies wanted a quick ticket to heaven. (I guess having faith in God isn’t necessarily a good thing) I watched my 2 favorite buildings in the world crumble down within 15 minutes of each other. So
I was very pro-bombing at the time. I knew that many innocent Afghans would probably die, but we lost innocents too. My natural reaction was: an eye for an eye. And I truly thought that I was being rational.

But now 2 weeks later, Gandhi’s famous quote keeps forcing itself into my brain: “An eye for an eye means that we all go blind.” I now think to myself: What a genius Gandhi was! He was able to see the big picture so clearly when everyone around him was consumed in anger. He knew that any retaliation for violence is simply a means of pleasuring oneself. Because, eventually, the victims of your violence will also retaliate. And so on and so on.

So I think that now is the time to ask ourselves: What would Gandhi do? What would his solution be after such a horrible attack? We can even ask ourselves about what his disciples might recommend. What would Martin Luther King Jr. do?

Any non-violent ideas?

2

Re-reading my post, I’m actually quite proud of a line that I came up with: “Retaliation for violence is simply a means of pleasuring oneself.” It’s almost like Gandhi came down and whispered it in my ear.

3

No, that’s my problem. One of the positive things that has come from the aftermath is that I have discovered in myself a pacifist, humanist side I didn’t know I had. But when it comes to offering ideas on how to actualize those impulses, I’m empty. I guess I’ve liked some of the appeals for vast amounts of worldwide humanitarian aid, to alleviate some of the suffering that can drive people to take up desperate means and support crazy causes, but as to their efficacy… I don’t know.

I wish we had Ghandi around–I am sure that some of my inability to come up with peaceful but proactive reactions are due to a lack of perspective and framework. I mean, we have military might and we’re good at using it. They say when you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I think that is what influences my thinking to a large degree.

4

George Orwell on Ghandi:

"However, Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in the truth.” In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not - indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not - take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world,” which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?"

The entire essay can be found here:

http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/ghandi.htm

5

Wumpus, I think that’s an exceedingly germane quote. It’s been awhile since I’ve read Orwell, and I’d forgotten how incredibly sharp his intellectual perceptions were.

As a strategy for success in this world, pacifism of the Gandhi/King sort relies, IMO, on one’s oppressor (or a potential rescuer) having a conscience. In India and in the American South, pacifism worked for Gandhi and King because both the British and the Americans had limits on the atrocities they would condone in their names. Even in Argentina, a regime that had ‘disappeared’ many of its own citizens who opposed its actions, hit the wall when the Mothers of the Disappeared went public to bear witness.

But I don’t see that Osama bin Laden has such a conscience. Or the Taliban. Or Saddam Hussein.

A pacifism of another sort was practiced once before, by the first-century Christians. But they weren’t trying to topple or even humanize a regime; they just believed something very simple - that the love that God had for them was bigger than the worst the world could do to them - and they died, accepting persecution rather than fighting the Roman Empire, in fidelity to that belief. Their only earthly goal was to bring more people to an awareness of what they had found. But this doesn’t compare directly with the pacifism of Gandhi and King, which was aimed at changing things in this world.

I’m a Christian, but not a pacifist; I believe there is such a thing as a just war - but they’re a lot rarer than people make out. (I opposed the Desert Storm portion of the Gulf War, and a decade of reflection hasn’t changed my mind about that.) As I’ve come to see it, it’s unquestionably not a Good Thing to kill people whom God loves (there isn’t any other kind, but the phraseology is important), so if one is going to do so, one had better have a damned good reason.

Reasons exist, though. I can morally choose to die rather than taking arms against my attacker. But it’s selfish of me, I think, to not go to the aid of others who are under attack and aren’t able to defend themselves. But if I can come to their rescue without adding to the spiral of violence, that’s what I’m called to do. Violence and killing are a last resort, one to be employed when nothing else will work.

The thousands in the WTC and the Pentagon were under attack and weren’t able to defend themselves - as were those in the WTC in 1993, and in our embassies in Africa in 1998. It’s hard to see how we can stop bin Laden from continuing to attack and kill people whom God loves (OK, I won’t use it again in this post) without a strong and real threat of violence at the very least. Given no credible alternative, we must do this thing: we must go in there and do our best to bring him out by force.

As Orwell accurately observed, there are situations where “If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way.” I can choose to offer my life - as a Christian, I see it as but one more card that can be played if necessary - but I can’t be so casual about the lives of others.

The potential pacifist is required, in this situation, to decide which lives he’d rather see lost - those of bin Laden and his henchmen, or those that bin Laden will undoubtedly kill, if left to his own devices, in the years ahead. The pacifist has to say it doesn’t matter which one dies, the aggressor or the victim of aggression. And that is where he and I part company: it most certainly does matter.

Either way, I am complicit in death, but if that’s the case, let it be the deaths of those who seek to kill others, rather than the deaths of people trying to live their own lives in relative peace, that I share responsibility for. When reduced to that, it seems simple enough to me.

6

Thank you, Wumpus, that was a GD post if I ever saw one. Dammit, I want to go get some of Orwell’s writings right now, I too had forgotten what a bright guy he was.

I am not a pacifist, but I hope I’m not a warmonger either. I believe that wars have served purposes, both good and bad. I believe that in today’s world, war may be necessary to maintain some of our percieved freedoms, rights and ways of life, as well as our security.

Anybody know what Dr. King had to say about violence, terrorism and war? I would be interested, but I can’t search on my machine right now.

And RTFirefly, you said it so well, I won’t even try.

7

I can tell you exactly how Gandhi would have responded- the same way he responded to Hitler.

In 1940, when the French army was beaten, and England stood alone against the Nazi onslaught, Gandhi wrote a letter to Winston Churchill saying (I’m quoting here) “Hitler is not a bad man,” and urged a rapprochement with Germany.

As for the brutal, expansionist Japanese empire, Gandhi insisted that nothing was necessary except that occupied peoples should make the Japanese feel unwelcome (presumably, the Japanese would have been heartbroken to learn that the people of Manchuria didn’t love them, and would have gone home in tears if the Manchurians had only shown them a degree of disdain).

If that’s not shocking enough, Gandhi sent a fawning letter to Adolf Hitler, beginning with the words, “Dear Friend.”
He urged Hitler to be magnanimous.

Gandhi had his accomplishments, but he had NOTHING to teach us about dealing with geneuinely evil people.