Gandhi Was a Racist? (Socialist idol being cast down?)

Daily Times ^ | 03-25-2005 | Yassif Latif Hamdani

[Yashcheritsiy]

Gandhi’s desire for Indians to be segregated from blacks was so strong that he went to Johannesburg in late August of 1904 to protest the placing of blacks in the Indian section of the city

LAHORE: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1870-1948), the man who inspired great leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, may have harboured racial sentiments against black people if an article on Sulekha.com is to be believed.

The article quotes a series of letters and petitions from Gandhi, linking the black people of Africa to savages and portraying them as little better than animals. Gandhi writes, “A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir”.

[Cronos]

Great -- the article says Ghandi "may have harboured" and everyone agrees with the assumption?

[Cronos]

Except for Jesus no one is perfect. Let's not tear down a great man because he had human weaknesses.

I agree with that.

[Cronos]

I don't buy that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington have been knocked off their pedestals

Hey!!! Both men were GREAT, but NOT perfect. No-one but Christ was perfect. I think that was the point and I agree with that.

[Cronos]

I am a Mahatma

Actually Diamond is only half-quoting --> the full statement was "If I die with grace and with God's name on my lips, then I truly deserve to be called Mahatma (great soul)"

[Cronos]

I read a great alternative-science-fiction story where the Germans had won WWII and taken over India from the British. Gahndi did his non-violence bit and got slaughtered along with all his followers.

I remebmer that - however, it does bring out a facty -- non-violence worked because the BRitish were in general too civilised, too moral to not listen to the demands -- quite unlike the Nazis. However, the book forgets one point -- the British were able to rule india because of Indian soldiers. The British alliances and friendships with the various peoples of India kept them in control for 150years. One example is during the Indian war against eh BRitish in 1857, Northern Indian princes rose up against the Brits, BUT the south did not rebel AND the British were able to put down the rebellion due to the timely arrival of their Sikh/Punjabi allies -- very strange consideringt he BRits had conquered the Sikh kingdom barely 40 years earlier, yet now the Sikhs considered the Brits the best of friends

That's the real secret: the BRits were friendly, colonising more by friendship and strategic alliances than by brute force. And it shows -- former British colonies all have this love-hate relationship with the Brits, quite unlike the former French, Belgian etc. colonies who all hate their former colonial masters. When the BRits got too uppity (during the fag end fo the Victorian period when they got the idea they were there to 'civilise' the rest of the world), that's when popular discontent arose

Anyway, back to the point. If the British had started playing hardball earlier with all of the Indian peoples, they would have been thrown out by force. If theNazis had conquered India, they would have been thrown out in a few years, by sheer brute numbers.

Permanent Empires are won threw winnign the hearts and minds

[cyborg]

good post

[Cronos]

I am well aware of the abuses by the Brits. I am aware because the British were horrified by the events. That is the difference.

Good point -- however, what C&S was pointing out was that there were a few little Hitlers among the Brits as well, but it goes to their credit that on the whole, the British disliked such incidents.

[Cronos]

Another great one was where the Confederacy won

I think it was the same series: the Cofnederacy survives, the Union then joins up with Nazi Germany while the Condeferacy supports the allies.

[CarrotAndStick]

Yes. Exactly what I meant.

[bboop]

Whoa, Claudius, That is an amazing post! Thanks.

[YLH]

I am surprised that you have been forgotten to mention that this is article that I wrote is from two sources:

1) An Indian website

2)Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi

Please do feel free to check on this yourself.

[psamtani]

Unfortunately, most of you are very ill-informed about Gandhi. Yes, its true that he inherited some racist characteristics from his upbringing and culture (and the dominant culture at the time, since he had a British education). However, his views on the state are very enlightening, here are some quotes in italics:

It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and fail to develop nonviolence at any time. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship.

I look upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear because, although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of the progress.

He was hardly a socialist in the Marxist sense. He was a socialist in the sense of the founding fathers, in that, he believed socialism should be voluntary, and not accomplished through the machinery of the state.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

He went on a hunger strike to keep the Brits from including a right to vote for the lowest Indian castes.

Ghandi’s always been known as a racist.

[Above My Pay Grade]

>>>He was also a deviant playboy whom enjoyed pouring oil on his bald head and rubbing it all over women’s bodies.<<<

This practice is extremely dangerous and should be avoided. It has been known to cause the women to develop extremely large goiters in their later years. :-)

[Clemenza]

Nice to see the League of Empire Loyalists who never met an English Toff Elitist they wouldn’t fellate are doing their Gandhi bashing today.

[aruanan]

He was hardly a socialist in the Marxist sense. He was a socialist in the sense of the founding fathers, in that, he believed socialism should be voluntary, and not accomplished through the machinery of the state.

Gandhi was a mass of contradictions. He refused Western medicine to save his wife's life when she had pneumonia but embraced Western medicine to save his own when he had malaria and appendicitis. A few notable things stick out about him. In a story about the Indian government's infomercial called Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley, Richard Grenier, Commentary (March, 1983) wrote in The Gandhi Nobody Knows:

If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now *there* was a meeting of East and West, and *may the better person win!* (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)

I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi's pretty teenage girl followers fighting "hysterically" (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was "testing" his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be *enjoying* the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, "Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?"), nor see the girls giving him *his* daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning ("The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there"), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western director.

To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitarianism is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie. The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi's attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of 'Gandhi' would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the "Kaffir Wars" he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.

For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria's coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling's Gunga Din, wanted nothing much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the "spirit" of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from he movie.

[aruanan]

[aruanan]

See post 156.