Victor Davis Hanson: Nonviolence Nonsense. Gandhi, again

NRO ^ | January 14, 2008 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Tolik]

Those who do not necessarily associate the name Gandhi with either humanitarian brotherhood or wisdom, and those who remember Mahatma’s idiotic thoughts about those facing the Holocaust ought to examine the latest Gandhi take on “the Jews” in the online edition of the Washington Post, this time from one Arun Gandhi.

He is self-identified as the “President and co-founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence” and “the fifth grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. He is president and co-founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, now at the University of Rochester in New York.”

In the Post, he writes:

The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger… We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity…

Everything in that brief excerpt alone is untrue for the following reasons:

1. The Holocaust was not just Hitler and a few SS “followers”; rather, it involved millions of followers (some of whom were active, some of whom were passive) in a systematic and near successful genocide of an entire people.

Neither Hitler, nor Himmler, nor Goebbels, nor any of the Nazi hierarchy could have wrought what they did without millions of German non-party guards, railroad employees, informants, and clerks and bureaucrats in the industry of death. Tragically this complaisance did not happen over night, but was prepped by years of National Socialist indoctrination that systematically and incrementally whipped up centuries old anti-Semitism by blaming — take note here, Mr. Gandhi — “the Jews” as being the “biggest players” in the world’s violence and problems.

2. Gandhi makes an incredibly asinine suggestion when he says, “But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews.”

Should the whole world not “regret” what happened to the Jews? Maybe sorta, kinda regret it? Are the Germans not supposed to feel guilty about the loss of six million under their auspices? And if all this should not be, as Gandhi implies, then is his assumed antithesis then correct?

To illustrate, try this counterfactual: “But it seems to me the Jews today should not only not want the Germans to feel guilty, but the whole world must not regret what happened to the Jews.”

3. “The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.”

Creating an autonomous, self-sufficient nation, as well as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, seems to qualify as both forgiving and moving on. Yet after five major wars against Israel since 1947, it is apparent that its neighbors can neither forgive its creation nor move on to accept its existence.


And what exactly does “regret turns into anger” mean? Is it anger such as blowing up civilians through suicide attacks, rocketing day-care centers from ‘liberated’ Gaza — or writing puerile, half-educated homilies, like Gandhi’s, from a “nonviolence” center on an American college campus?

4. “We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.”

Despite the scare capitals, I doubt whether Israel and “the Jews” are “the biggest players.” All one has to do is tally up the numbers murdered in the last decade in India, Pakistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Somalia, Nigeria, Congo, Chechnya, the Balkans, (and the list goes on), and discover that “the Jews” are pretty much bit players. If Mr. Gandhi disputes that, then let him produce evidence that shadowy “Jews” or “Israel” were, in fact, involved in the above various slaughters.

If the “Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity,” then I suggest such an assumed Armageddon most likely will begin either along the India/Pakistan border where two nuclear-armed countries share an existential hatred of each other — or it will emanate from Iran, which has promised to wipe out Israel. Clearly, Mr. Gandhi could do far more for world peace by leaving the University of Rochester and proselytizing against violence in the field, perhaps either in Waziristan or Teheran.

Moreover, it is worth noting, had anyone on a university campus written anything comparable about “the Arabs” and Islam, there would very likely be outrage rather than the present silence.

In this regard, one should remember that Gandhi primus offered to almost everyone from the British to the “Jews” his wisdom of nonviolent resistance to Hitler, suggesting that the slaughter might be a valuable lesson in humanitarian martyrdom. But then his own modalities were put into practice against a post-Victorian liberal Britain, not the Third Reich or Stalin’s collectivization project.

To put Arun Gandhi’s present musings in proper context, I leave you with an excerpt, somewhat similar in spirit, from his grandfather’s famous 1938 essay, “The Jews,” offering advice to the Jews of Germany about how to achieve “joy” (note the key counter-factual “If I were…”) through mass annihilation.

If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

It is hardly necessary for me to point out that it is easier for the Jews than for the Czechs to follow my prescription.

It is commonplace to compare our present complaisance about the dangers of radical Islam to the liberal democracies’ past failure to galvanize against the creed of fascist Europe. Much of what has been written since 9/11 (one can also compare the naiveté of Mr. Arun Gandhi on that as well) is both dangerous and silly — but no more so than what was offered up in the late 1930s.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

--Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

[steel_resolve]

Hanson PUNK SLAPS that bitch Ghandi PING!

[Tolik]

Its interesting to note that on a personal level liberal Hollywood has a dramatic increase of security personnel/bodyguards of former Israeli military personnel. (I gooogled it here: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=307824). Liberal hypocrisy ?..

[metesky]

I knew Ghandi drank his own urine, but I didn’t know he dipped his pen in it too.

[Billthedrill]

We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity…

Breathtaking. I can only assume that Mr. Ghandi is willfully ignorant of the entirety of human history including that of his own country. How many Indian people have the Jews killed? How many have the Muslims killed?

Frankly the Jews aren't even the "biggest players" in violence within Israel itself. That is not the chorus of the international elite, of whom Mr. Ghandi is a member in good standing, but perhaps what is called for here is a little less groupthink and a whole lot more think. They might take his membership card away but it sure beats a gas chamber.

[Savage Beast]

The quotation attributed to Arun Gandhi is a good example of the sloppy and absurd Leftist logic to which the people of today's world are constantly subjected.

Of course the people of the world--all decent people everywhere and for all time--regret the Nazi holocaust. We regret all the horrors of the past and present: slavery, torture, injustice, genocide, child abuse, murder, rape, plague, famine--the list goes on and on--the trans-Atlantic slave trade, torture and death for public amusement in ancient Rome, child labor in the Industrial Revolution, slavery in ancient Greece, surgical procedures without anaesthesia on prisoners in China, American persecution of Indians, English persecution of the Irish, the Inquisition, slavery and torture and death by stoning in contemporary Islamic theocracites, "honor killings", the genocides in Rawanda, the Bataan Death March and inhuman treatment of prisoners of war under Imperial Japan, the Pol Pot regime...the list goes on and on and on...

Of course decent people regret such horrors. We regret injustice and all the horrors of life.

But we must not feel guilty about such things. Guilt, like pain, is useful only if it spurs us to meaningful action. Otherwise, guilt is self-defeating.

The first thing we must do is insist on truth and honesty--something that Leftists find difficult, and often impossible, to do.

Then we must resolve to do everything we can to prevent such things' happening again in the future--although, considering the past as prophesy, we must face the truth about the difficult of implementing this resolve.

And we must resolve that we--as individuals--will never participate in the implementation of such horrors.

There is as much good as evil in human nature--probably more--but we must never overlook the potential for evil within ourselves. Only by acknowledging it and resolving never to allow the evil within ourselves to become manifest can we prevent it.

Mother Teresa said that she decided to go to Calcutta when she looked inside herself and saw a Hitler lurking there.

This monster is within all of us, and only by recognizing it and resolving to prevent its becoming manifest in our actions can we save ourselves--and others--from the potential for evil.

The price of goodness--like liberty--is eternal vigilance.

And murky, sloppy logic and mendacity encourage--rather than discourage--evil.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Arun Gandhi, like his grandfather, is a political man, not a spiritual man - too wrapped up in the machinations of power and influence to be considered a credible commentator.

[wyowolf]

there were quite a few Indians killed under the british, not trying to defend the idiotic comments of Ghandi but to say that he was in no danger is not totally accurate.

[Mr. Silverback]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

As James D. Harris said on Charlie Sykes' show this morning, history doesn't really repeat, but it does rhyme.

[wideawake]

there were quite a few Indians killed under the british

In the course of two hundred plus years of British rule, with various uprisings and wars, plenty of Indians died.

But very few died at British hands during Gandhi's nonviolent resistance movement, and Gandhi himself ran no risk of being seized by British secret police and being gassed in an concentration camp.

[nina0113]

Ghandi and the Indians also had the fortune of having the British as their oppressors.

Yep - if the Russians had won "The Great Game", the only thing that would have been accomplished by lying on the railroad tracks would have been to turn live Indians into dead ones.

[Tolik]

"There is as much good as evil in human nature--probably more--but we must never overlook the potential for evil within ourselves. Only by acknowledging it and resolving never to allow the evil within ourselves to become manifest can we prevent it."

I see a usual response to the idea of the Jewish holocaust uniqueness - that a life is a life, and a Tutu, or a Cambodian, or a  Gipsy, or anybody murdered by any -ism in the XX century is worthy a remembrance equally. Yes, true. Still, there is a reason why Jewish holocaust stands out among other evils. Its because it was perpetrated by a supposedly highly civilized society. There is only a handful of nations who could rival Germans in 1900 in the arena of human accomplishments: in business, science, music, industry, cinema, work ethic, comfort of living, arts - mixed and varied accomplishments. And then, before the eyes of one living generation, they perpetrated an industrial scale evil. I understand that its not PC and is a bigotry of low expectations that crimes of Japanese militarists, Khmer ruge,  Hutus, Stalinists, Maoists, etc, etc might take a second place to German's first. IMHO, its that none of them were on the top of the world as high as Germans. How somebody so cultured is capable of such evil is mind-boggling. (like when a carrier criminal kills somebody its on page 12, if an upstanding citizen does - its page 1). Even from Jewish own experience in the WWI, German occupation forces in Ukraine, for example, were remarkably better than reds, whites, or miscellaneous local powers taking over during the Civil War there. Then in WWII they were totally different species.

Once again, the above is not to diminish sufferings of anybody else. To me, we need more reminder about all them, not less. My point is that the speed itself of Germans degrading from the top of the world, culturally and all, to the all infecting evil, is horrifying.  

[Gator101]

Ghandi and the Indians also had the fortune of having the British as their oppressors.

How true. Your comment reminded me of Dinesh D’Souza’s excellent book “What’s so great about America” were he remembers a history teacher he admired telling him that if Hitler had be running India, Gandhi would have been turned into a lampshade.

[BufordP]

I hope I get the opportunity to use that line (”...lampshade”) on some peaceniks. Imagine the looks on their faces. It’s pretty much the reason why all the hypocritical peaceniks never march against the terrorists.

[Paradox]

Nothing is more useless than a dead pacifist, except, perhaps, a live one.

[Savage Beast]

Everything that you have said (post #31), Tolik, is true.

I have lived in Germany. I have been to Dachau.

In the light of what you have said, Churchill's selection of the theme from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was a stroke of genius.

For the exquisitely civilized German people to have degenerated into the horrors of the Third Reich exemplifies what I have said in post #25.

As much as we may deny it and wish it were not so, every on of us could repeat the horrors of the Nazis. To prevent it, we must recognize this potential and resolve that we will never allow it to happen.

Only by understanding that the monster that created the Nazi holocaust--and the millions exterminated by Marxism et al.--exists within each of us and resolving that it will never manifest its evil can each of us do what we can to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of the past.

Yes. The Nazi holocaust was unique.

When we are tempted to allow the monster within to express its evil, each of us must say no to it; each of us must tell Satan to go to hell; and each of us must submit to the love of God and allow this love to manifest itself.

[PzLdr]

I read at least one [and I think more] alternative history Sci Fi stories where Gandhi comes up against Nazi occupation of India. He doesn’t fare real well in those stories.

Dinesh D’sousa quoted one of his teachers in India who said that if Hitler had been running India as a colony, Gandhi would have been a lampshade [or words to that effect].

[Cacique]

btt

[Salman]

There are some genuine religious pacifists around, but it seems that a political "pacifist" is someone who takes the moral high ground and bears no arms while running interference for whoever kills innocent people.

A chicken terrorist.