FROM THE ARCHIVES: F FOR THE FATUOUS FAKIR:

The Mahatma: Gandhi unvarnished. (Jean Bethke Elshtain, July/August 2004, Books & Culture)

There is much to commend Gandhian conflict resolution as a method to put into play between persons or within organizations. Upping the ante to include struggles of aggrieved groups against a liberal democratic state is already something of a stretch—but not an impossible one if a sufficiently robust cultural commonality is already present. This was true of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with stress on the "Christian" part of that, could assume and work with appeals to a Christian-formed conscience of the nation as well as to its foundational principles. In the Raj, Gandhi could cannily exploit British principles to challenge British colonial practices. But if that option is not available, then what?

When Gandhi was asked what persons should do facing an Adolf Hitler—he indicated that the Jews would do well to "offer themselves up to be killed" as their unearned and visible suffering might soften the hearts of their tormenters—he did not endear himself to Jewish analysts of the Shoah. That scenario stretched Gandhianism to the breaking point … and it broke. The stunning example of morally courageous action in Nazi-dominated Europe by the villagers of Le Chambon, documented in Philip Hallie's wonderful book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, is no exception to this rule. The villagers united at risk to themselves and their families to save strangers—Jewish refugees. They did this under the noses of the German occupiers of the region. But, as it turned out, the leader of the German forces, who knew what was going on, permitted the Chambonnaise to go forward largely unimpeded. (There were threats—German soldiers tramping into homes, Andre Trocme, the pastor-leader put for a short time in a detention camp, and so on—but no mass slaughter, mass arrests, reprisals.) The protest of the Chambonnaise "worked" not only because of their undeniable courage but because they were extraordinarily lucky, in a then largely luckless surround, in the officer in charge.

One plus of Juergensmeyer's account is his acknowledgment that Gandhi did employ "many pressure tactics." Fine. Gandhi was certainly entitled to avail himself of such methods, which often proved effective. But at the same time, Juergensmeyer seconds Gandhi's motion that "all forms of force" are "coercive" and, therefore, bad. This requires somehow exempting Gandhi's pressure tactics—clearly a "form of force," though nonviolent—from the charge of coercion. The result is that Juergensmeyer becomes tangled in special pleading. If Gandhi did it—whatever "it" was—it couldn't have been coercive, you see.

Stanley Wolpert's Mahatma, too, is one about whom there is not much that is critical to say. But the critiques he does offer are quite vivid and troubling. For example: Wolpert notes Gandhi's praise for Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, with Gandhi using the occasion to call for "world disarmament" in these words: "I am as certain of it as I am sitting here, that this heroic act would open Herr Hitler's eyes and disarm him." Then there is this:

On July 23, 1939, Gandhi wrote his "Dear Friend" letter to Adolf Hitler. "It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. … Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success."

Hitler did not respond.

During the war, Gandhi supported neither side. Nor was Gandhi's response to nuclear weapons terribly reassuring. He indicated that, were a bomb about to be dropped, he would stand out in the open, looking to the skies, awaiting the bomb and imploring the pilot to the last moment. There is an individualistic grandeur to such a stance. But one is grateful that statespersons are obliged to think in harder-headed terms about the safety and well-being of the collective. After the war, Gandhi told a Western reporter: "Was not war itself a crime against humanity and, therefore, were not all those who … conducted wars, war criminals? … Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini." This awful statement, demonstrating a remarkable inability to discriminate properly and a corrupting naïveté when confronted with such cataclysmic events as World War II, further tarnishes Gandhi's image. One can argue, as I have, that the use of indiscriminate bombing of cities does not pass muster under in bello restraints. But to compare Hitler's atrocities against the Jews, Slavs, gypsies, persons with physical and mental disabilities, on and on, to a war-fighting strategy aimed at ending the conflict as soon as possible, is the sort of thing that would lead a teacher to give a student who pulled such a stunt a requirement to rewrite or face the consequences in a low grade.

Luckily for them, liberal icons don't get graded.

MORE:
-The Gandhi Nobody Knows (Richard Grenier, March 1983, Commentary)
-Pacifism and the War (George Orwell)

[originally posted: 7/13/04]

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2009 7:07 AM