Unlike some people (but like George Orwell), I have never had much time for Mohandas Gandhi ("Mahatma" is not a name but an honorific). One of my more vivid cinematic memories from more than two decades ago was seeing the scene in Richard Attenborough's hagiography where Gandhi basically sets up 2,000 people to get bludgeoned to death by the British police in India just so he can play a cynical emotional blackmail game with their deaths. I left the movie theater to go vomit outside. [The reason Gandhi's real-life gambit worked at all is that the British were
And I am all too painfully aware (see e.g. the Orwell essay linked above) of his recommendation to European Jews that they collectively commit suicide rather than resist the Nazi murder machine.
Ripclawe points to another unlovely aspect of Gandhi: his anti-black racism.
Forced to share a cell [in South Africa] wth black people, he wrote: "Many of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves."He was quoted at a meeting in Bombay in 1896 saying that Europeans sought to degrade Indians to the level of the "raw kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness".
Some readers email Instapundit:
"It is important to realize that a large part of Gandhi's success was due to the fact that he was opposing the British, who don't deal with political opponents by killing them. An Iraqi Gandhi wouldn't have lasted long under Saddam."
[...]
"Harry Turtledove had an excellent short story, 'The Last Article,' about how Gandhi would have fared in a Nazi occupied India. It's a short story. Both in context and content."
Comments