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Gandhi also made statements after the war (and therefore without the possibility of being ignorant as to what happened) that people have raised very similar obj

by Crito 13y ago

Gandhi also made statements after the war (and therefore without the possibility of being ignorant as to what happened) that people have raised very similar objections to: --- “Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.” “You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” “Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.” [snip] Mahatma Gandhi has never lived under a thoroughly totalitarian regime; his generosity and humanity make it difficult for him to realize how very cruel a dictatorship can be. In India, and in Palestine, and other plces, violence or organized nonviolence is a form of “public relations.” … Thus gandhian nonviolence as well as its ugly opposite — Zionist terror — implies the existence of a free democratic society in England (and in America). It is to this court of public opinion that the resisters in India and kidnappers in Palestine have appealed. But suppose there were no democracy in Western nations? A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did. --- That last section in particular strikes me as quite similar to George Orwell's objection. (quotation from "Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs At The World's Crossroads", by way of: http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust-should-have-committed-mass-suicide/#comment-5298 http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-vi...)

ballard 13y ago
Gandhi gets misunderstood quite easily because of how well he understood how to defeat those that employ violence... By showing massive fortitude by acts of passive resistance, it both awes the bully and gains their respect instead of appearing as another target to be neutralized: whether demanding a harsher punishment in a court room or opposing an army without weapons, such uncommon acts of bravery demand intrigue. This is how to "be like Jesus," neither a wallflower nor a wimp, without creating more violence. (Yes, yes, leaders of movements rarely live to retirement... Often becoming martyrs thanks to assassins.)
- Crito 13y ago
  I think Gandhi's critics understand this. The standard objection to the universal application of these techniques is that people like the Nazis would not have been awed by such a display of bravery and resolution. Had the Jews all committed mass organized suicide (the organization of which would have been almost certainly impossible... but that is a tangential objection...) the Nazis would have been pleased that the job had been done for them. You might argue that even if Germany had been unswayed, the Americans and British would have been. That may be true, but then you are just pushing the task of using violence to stop Hitler onto another party. You haven't eliminated violence, you've just postponed it and had millions of people senselessly kill themselves instead of making the Nazis struggle with the task.
  - sp332 13y ago
    Most Germans didn't know about the atrocities until after the war. If Germany closed down the media so well, the people might not have known about mass suicides either.
    - Crito 13y ago
      The Nazi regime was fundamentally self-destructive. German citizens who witnessed the mass Jewish suicide and were swayed by into practicing non-violent resistance would have become targets of the Nazis themselves. Were they to kill themselves to make a point as well? The only way that loosing the support of the uninformed German masses would have stopped the Nazis is if those previously uninformed German masses took up arms against their government. The Nazis were only going to stop killing once there was nobody left to kill, or once they were killed. They played by a different set of rules.
      - brazzy 13y ago
        It looks like you've fallen into the trap of seeing "the Nazis" as the ultimate, perfect and monolithic evil. They were not. They were regular humans with quite disparate personalities and motivations. And they needed active support from the "uninformed German masses" - why do you think Goebbels was their 3rd or 4th most important man? The support was gained through propaganda, and the core parts of that were the all-around (including moral) superiority of the Aryan race and in contrast the portrayal of Jews as its absolute enemy, both despicable and threatening. If that propaganda had been revealed as a lie via large-scale non-violent protests, it would have caused serious and quite possibly unsurmountable problems for the Nazi government - they did not have nearly enough hardened ideologues to run the entire country.
brownbat 13y ago
Noting that Gandhi recommended that the Jews should have committed mass suicide to "arouse the world" to their plight, Sam Harris added the rejoinder, "So the world could do what, commit mass suicide in turn?" I think this was in "End of Faith."
- X4 13y ago
  That sounds like Game Theory, although much much more serious. The problem in this case is that it's Game Theory without (Social) System Theory cannot give an answer to this question. To me such an act would be, as you stated, the "End of Faith".
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did. False. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-make-lampshades-out-of-human-skin http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-... (primarily focuses on the lampshade myth, but also touches the issue of soap from human corpses)
- Crito 13y ago
  You are correct, though I think the quote still has teeth. They may not have turned a million people into soap, but on the other hand they also killed way more than just a million people.
  - gcb0 13y ago
    right. like the US president and UK prime ministers are not turning millions of middle eastern into soap as well. yeah, i can totally see how that is impossible. irony aside, the politics in play at those wars are exactly the same that allowed the nazists socialists to kill people in Europe as well (from the surrendering Jewish to the fighting french)
    - Crito 13y ago
      In the literal sense, currently nobody is turning millions of people into soap, and there is no evidence that this has ever happened. And to my knowledge, there are no boxcars full of humans speeding towards crematorium in the middle east right now. I don't think that the foreign policy of the Five Eyes is really a relevant tangent at this point in the discussion, but suffice it to say that I am 'Not A Fan'(tm). If you're looking for someone to disagree with there, you'll have to find somebody else.
      - cma 13y ago
        Right, now it's drone-launched crematoriums speeding towards boxcars.
jgamman 13y ago
maybe not in britain but the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion comes pretty close. It is no coindidence that Caroline Elkins' book title is "Britain's Gulag" which describes the end of empire in Kenya in the 1950s.

by Crito 13y ago

ballard 13y ago

Gandhi gets misunderstood quite easily because of how well he understood how to defeat those that employ violence... By showing massive fortitude by acts of passive resistance, it both awes the bully and gains their respect instead of appearing as another target to be neutralized: whether demanding a harsher punishment in a court room or opposing an army without weapons, such uncommon acts of bravery demand intrigue. This is how to "be like Jesus," neither a wallflower nor a wimp, without creating more violence. (Yes, yes, leaders of movements rarely live to retirement... Often becoming martyrs thanks to assassins.)

Crito 13y ago
I think Gandhi's critics understand this. The standard objection to the universal application of these techniques is that people like the Nazis would not have been awed by such a display of bravery and resolution. Had the Jews all committed mass organized suicide (the organization of which would have been almost certainly impossible... but that is a tangential objection...) the Nazis would have been pleased that the job had been done for them. You might argue that even if Germany had been unswayed, the Americans and British would have been. That may be true, but then you are just pushing the task of using violence to stop Hitler onto another party. You haven't eliminated violence, you've just postponed it and had millions of people senselessly kill themselves instead of making the Nazis struggle with the task.
- sp332 13y ago
  Most Germans didn't know about the atrocities until after the war. If Germany closed down the media so well, the people might not have known about mass suicides either.
  - Crito 13y ago
    The Nazi regime was fundamentally self-destructive. German citizens who witnessed the mass Jewish suicide and were swayed by into practicing non-violent resistance would have become targets of the Nazis themselves. Were they to kill themselves to make a point as well? The only way that loosing the support of the uninformed German masses would have stopped the Nazis is if those previously uninformed German masses took up arms against their government. The Nazis were only going to stop killing once there was nobody left to kill, or once they were killed. They played by a different set of rules.
    - brazzy 13y ago
      It looks like you've fallen into the trap of seeing "the Nazis" as the ultimate, perfect and monolithic evil. They were not. They were regular humans with quite disparate personalities and motivations. And they needed active support from the "uninformed German masses" - why do you think Goebbels was their 3rd or 4th most important man? The support was gained through propaganda, and the core parts of that were the all-around (including moral) superiority of the Aryan race and in contrast the portrayal of Jews as its absolute enemy, both despicable and threatening. If that propaganda had been revealed as a lie via large-scale non-violent protests, it would have caused serious and quite possibly unsurmountable problems for the Nazi government - they did not have nearly enough hardened ideologues to run the entire country.

brownbat 13y ago

Noting that Gandhi recommended that the Jews should have committed mass suicide to "arouse the world" to their plight, Sam Harris added the rejoinder, "So the world could do what, commit mass suicide in turn?" I think this was in "End of Faith."

X4 13y ago
That sounds like Game Theory, although much much more serious. The problem in this case is that it's Game Theory without (Social) System Theory cannot give an answer to this question. To me such an act would be, as you stated, the "End of Faith".

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did. False. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-make-lampshades-out-of-human-skin http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-... (primarily focuses on the lampshade myth, but also touches the issue of soap from human corpses)

Crito 13y ago
You are correct, though I think the quote still has teeth. They may not have turned a million people into soap, but on the other hand they also killed way more than just a million people.
- gcb0 13y ago
  right. like the US president and UK prime ministers are not turning millions of middle eastern into soap as well. yeah, i can totally see how that is impossible. irony aside, the politics in play at those wars are exactly the same that allowed the nazists socialists to kill people in Europe as well (from the surrendering Jewish to the fighting french)
  - Crito 13y ago
    In the literal sense, currently nobody is turning millions of people into soap, and there is no evidence that this has ever happened. And to my knowledge, there are no boxcars full of humans speeding towards crematorium in the middle east right now. I don't think that the foreign policy of the Five Eyes is really a relevant tangent at this point in the discussion, but suffice it to say that I am 'Not A Fan'(tm). If you're looking for someone to disagree with there, you'll have to find somebody else.
    - cma 13y ago
      Right, now it's drone-launched crematoriums speeding towards boxcars.

jgamman 13y ago

maybe not in britain but the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion comes pretty close. It is no coindidence that Caroline Elkins' book title is "Britain's Gulag" which describes the end of empire in Kenya in the 1950s.