A Point in Fred Thompson's Favor

He doesn't think much of Mahatma Ghandi.  I don't either, for much the same reason:

“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” [Ghandi] said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

I try to keep things G-rated and am therefore self-censoring my response. For the curious, it would have involved a sacred cow, a scatological reference, and a suggestion for Mr. Ghandi to consider in his afterlife.

Comments

[DRaftervoi]

The Mahatma was wrong, because he did not understand the true nature of the Nazi movement. The British were, indeed, moved by satyagraha, and Gandhi wasn't crazy for thinking that the Germans would be similarly affected by such a campaign. But...in hindsight, he was dead wrong: "If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war."

Yo, G., all that pacifist crap is MORAL PREENING.

[Mark]

Eat sacred cow shit and die?

Delete this part if you want, Gail, just let me know if I guessed right!

"Moral preening". I love it!

Yo, D., I'm stealing that!

[Gail]

Draftervoi: I think Ghandi absolutely should have been aware that his idea of suicide for the Jews was not only stupid and counter-productive, but was bound to fail. Jews were dying - literally and figuratively - to leave Europe. All anyone would have had to have done would have been to ask any of the refugees who made it out what conditions were like, and they would have realized the extent of the German peoples' cooperation in Jewish extermination. The Third Reich wanted Jews to die. Jewish suicide would only have helped them in their endeavor. They viewed and treated Jews as animals, not humans. Their lack of regard for Jewish life makes the threat of suicide seem ridiculous.

Yes, moral preening is exactly right. Anti-war folks want to preserve their pristeen souls while others get dirty fighting battles to preserve their rights and freedom.

Mark: As I wrote to you, I didn't really have anything in particular in mind. Thanks for the laugh!

[DRaftervoi]

In defense of Gandhi (whom I have called a “diapered maniac” in a past post), his remarks in 1938 were made prior to Kristallnacht, and prior to the beginning of the mass deportations in late ’39. There was still, at the time of his remarks, some small shred of hope that the Germans could be SHAMED by the actions of their government and perhaps would have taken action against the Nazi regime. The revelations of the full extent of German perfidy wouldn’t come out until after the end of the war in 1945.

In hindsight, we are 100% correct in saying Gandhi was wrong, and that the course he advocated would only have made the exterminations easier for the Nazis. But “absolutely should have been aware” is an overstatement. Consider that the French, who within a year of Gandhi’s statements would find themselves at war with Germany, did virtually NOTHING to stop their impending doom. Consider the Oxford Union, "This House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country" in 1933.

Things would sure look different in few years, with Nazi Germany occupying France and sitting a mere 25 miles away across the Channel.

That’s the crux of Gandhi’s error, and why I used the term “moral preening.” It’s easy for people to be “pacifists” when there is no real danger. It’s easy to send others to their (morally superior) doom, but Indians were not Jews, and the British were not Germans. Gandhi’s assumption that the situations were parallel was wrong.

The Indians were in no danger at any time of being murdered to the last man, woman and child by the British. They were oppressed and politically disenfranchised…but the British had NO INTENTION, not ever, of ethnically cleansing the Indian subcontinent, and the British government, while it was full of your usual batch of rascals, was NOT full of two-bit rat-bastards like Goerring and Goebbels and Himmler, who were genuinely evil little f*cks - unlike, say, that nice Balder von Shirach. If guys like von Shirach or Speer or even that chowderhead von Papen had been representative of the average Nazi leader, Gandhi might have been right…but he was dead-ass wrong. Lunatics like Hess were running the asylum, and let’s face it, Hitler was freakin’ bull-goose loony. Would Gandhi have maintained his campaign of passive resistance (and more importantly, would the Indian people have followed him) if, say, the British had set up gas chambers and killed several hundred million Indians?

Well, maybe the Mahatma would have kept to his ideals because as I pointed out, he was committed to being morally superior to thee n’ me, but you can bet that his movement would have splintered after the first several hundred thousand or so had died. As I said: moral preening. It’s easy to throw the Jews under the Nazi bus.

So, yo, Mahatma: you can be morally superior to me all you want, but I will not wait until the last of my kin is murdered before I grow a freakin’ backbone, crawl out of the primordial pacifist ooze, and decide to fight back.

So, there’s my defense of the skinny little weasel. We should not judge him harshly because he was wrong about the Jews, we should judge him harshly because pacifism is morally wrong in the first place. Pacifism is de facto pro-fascist, because it CANNOT hinder the actions of a fascist government. They can’t be shamed. All pacifism can do is to slow down the responses of democracies to the rising danger around them.

[Gail]

There are people who are influenced by Ghandi's "moral preening" to this very day. They are the ones who, when kassams rain down on Israel and suicide bombers turn humans into shredded meat, advise Israelis to respond by turning the other cheek. They are the ones who march against the war in Iraq, who promote hatred of the US when we stand up for ourselves, when we try to make ourselves and the world safer by fighting terrorism.

I was hard on Ghandi, and perhaps should have been hard on his ideas instead. But think about his statement:

“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” [Ghandi] said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

He wasn't advocating a hunger stike, he was advising Jews to collectively jump from cliffs - that this would be heroism?

And this was before the Germans were even carrying out the final solution? All the more ridiculous to have suggested.

It showed a deep ignorance of Jewish law (which prohibits suicide), philosophy (suicide is seens as irresponsible and an act of insanity) and character (Jews are stiff-necked fighters and the culture is one which emphasizes and prizes life, not death). And it revealed his ignorance in ways you desribed above - there was a huge difference between the Jewish situation and the Indian situation. Indians were never in danger of extinction.

The remarks didn't make Ghandi an antisemite, they just reveal his ignorance of anything that was outside of his own realm. His lack of awareness of his ignorance and his willingness to give advice of suicide - a pretty serious thing, in my mind -is a sign that he lacked humility and common sense. He'd fit right in with the anti-war progressives of today, I have no doubt.

Given the outcome of the Holocaust, as a Jew, reading Ghandi's advice to commit suicide is very irritating.

(By the way, very nice to see your comments and to be arguing with you again!)