Gandhi Reconsidered: When Paganism Met Progressivism

When an Indian-born man I knew a couple of decades ago expressed an intense dislike for Mohandas Gandhi, I found it a bit surprising. Wasn’t the “Great Soul,” that quintessential 20th-century icon, India’s George Washington?

That certainly is the narrative created by historians — who, history has taught us, can tell a lie — and works such as Richard Attenborough’s award-winning 1982 film Gandhi. But there is a reason why Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie responded to that movie by lamenting, “Deification is an Indian disease. Why should Attenborough do it?” And with Gandhi back in the news owing to a newly published biography about him, it’s fitting to examine what that reason might be.

Any discussion of Gandhi should start with what most characterizes his image: non-violence and respect for all peoples. And the image certainly is a bit different from the reality. Everyone knows, for instance, about how Gandhi advocated non-violence in India’s struggle against the British; what is less well known is that, after the British’s 1906 declaration of war against the Zulus in South Africa, Gandhi encouraged that nation’s Indians to support the military effort, writing, “If the Government only realised what reserve force is being wasted, they would make use of it and give Indians the opportunity of a thorough training for actual warfare.” And while the British weren’t amenable to this — thus, ironically, doing more at that time to ensure Indian pacifism than the drum-beating Gandhi — he was appointed a Sgt. Major in the British army and allowed to lead a stretcher-bearer corps.

Non-violence only works when there is free (complicit) press.

Non-violent demonstration in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union = off to the concentration camps. No press coverage. Goes nowhere.

Both Gandhi and MLK required a free press willing to participate. No press shows up for protests it’s a ‘non-event.’

Mohandas "Mahatma" Ghandi

The Moral Retardation of the Venerable Holy Men

"One thing I haven't yet figured out--but probably could if I gave it a little thought--is why these new-age folks automatically tilt way left and are so deeply morally confused. When your moral compass is that broken, you inevitably marshall all of your energy against what is good, and in concert with what is evil. ...Not to mention the king of all metaphysical hucksters, Deepak Chopra. He reminds me of no one so much as Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most overrated human beings in history. Gandhi also thought that it was evil to fight the great evil of his day, Hitler--in other words, Gandhi wasn't just morally confused, but morally deranged. ...." [snip]

On the Repressed Violence of the Nonviolent

".....The moral retardation of so many leftists just astonishes me. And it is literally retardation, for just as one may be mentally retarded but a decent person, one may be intellectually brilliant but a moral imbecile, as so many leftist professors prove (not that they're so brilliant, either). Violence is good or bad, depending entirely upon the uses to which it is put.

Which gives rise to an immediate corollary that even many religious people don't appreciate: that love can be good or bad, depending upon the use to which it is put -- or, to be more precise, the object to which the love is directed. For just as there is profoundly moral violence, there is profoundly immoral love, for example, the kind of corrupt and immoral love expressed by one of the most overrated human beings of all time, Mohandas Gandhi. Just as knowledge that knows falsehood is not really knowledge, love that improperly loves evil (for there are properly severe ways to love the evildoer) is a kind of hatred. [......] Gandhi's monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious." ..." [snip] bttt

Without a complicit press his goals would have taken longer to achieve but in the same way that conservative information reaches the people despite an antagonistic press, his message would have gotten out.

In my opinion Ghandi was successful because he was dealing with a morally just culture in the British. Had he been dealing with the morally corrucpt Nazi’s or Bolshevics he and his followers would have been liquidated. Heck, they probably would have reported it in the papers as a warning to others.

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