suziezuzie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I heard that Gandhi in his
philosophy of passifism once commented
that the jew of Germany should have sat quietly in silent protest
while Hilter exterminated them. Has anyone else heard anything about
this?
Empty Bill helps out boys and girls!
What Did Gandhi Do?
One-sided pacifist.
By David Lewis Schaefer
In the weeks leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, American college campuses
were plastered with posters asking What Would Gandhi Do? The implication, of
course, was that the U.S. should emulate the tactics of the celebrated Hindu
pacifist who successfully led the movement for Indian independence from
Britain.
The analogy, it should go without saying, overlooks major differences between
the two cases. Whereas the 20th-century British were far too benign an imperial
power to choose to slaughter peaceful resisters to their rule, theres no
evidence that Saddam Hussein, already responsible for the massacre and torture
of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen (to say nothing of the many more who
died in his aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait) would likewise have
succumbed to friendly persuasion Jacques Chirac to the contrary
notwithstanding. (Its not that we didnt try!)
It is interesting, in this regard, to recall how Gandhi himself responded to
the evil perpetrated by one of Saddams role models, Adolf Hitler. In November,
1938, responding to Jewish pleas that he endorse the Zionist cause so as to
persuade the British government to open Palestine to immigrants fleeing
Hitlers persecution, Gandhi published an open letter flatly rejecting the
request. While expressing the utmost sympathy with the Jews and lamenting
their age-old persecution, Gandhi explained that the cry for the national
home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me, since Palestine belongs to
the Arabs. Instead, he urged the Jews to make that country their home where
they are born. To demand just treatment in the lands of their current
residence while also demanding that Palestine be made their home, he argued,
smacked of hypocrisy. Gandhi even went so far as to remark that this cry for
the national home affords a colorable justification for the German
expulsion of the Jews.
Of course, Gandhi added, the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no
parallel in history, and if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name
of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution
of a whole race, would be completely justified. Hitlers regime was showing
the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by
any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. Nonetheless, the
Hindu leader rejected that notion, since I do not believe in any war. And for
Britain, France, and America to declare war on Hitlers regime would bring them
no inner joy, no inner strength.
Having rejected both the plea that Palestine should be offered as a place of
refuge for the Jews and the idea that the Western democracies should launch a
war to overthrow Hitler, Gandhi offered only one avenue for the Jews to resist
their persecution while preserving their self-respect. Were he a German Jew,
Gandhi pronounced, he would challenge the Germans to shoot or imprison him
rather than submit to discriminating treatment. Such voluntary suffering,
practiced by all the Jews of Germany, would bring them, he promised,
immeasurable inner strength and joy. Indeed, if the Jewish mind could be
prepared for such suffering, even a massacre of all German Jews could be
turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy, since to the God-fearing, death
has no terror.
According to Gandhi, it would (for unexplained reasons) be easier for the
Jews than for the Czechs (then facing German occupation) to follow his
prescription. As inspiration, he offered an exact parallel in the campaign
for Indian civil rights in South Africa that he had led decades earlier.
Through their strength of suffering, he promised, the German Jews will score a
lasting victory over the German Gentiles in the sense that they will have
converted [them] to an appreciation of human dignity. And the same policy
ought to be followed by Jews already in Palestine enduring Arab pogroms
launched against them: if only they would discard the help of the British
bayonet for their defense, and instead offer themselves [to the Arabs] to be
shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger, the Jews
would win a favorable world opinion regarding their religious aspiration.
In a thoughtful personal response dated February 24, 1939, the Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber who had himself emigrated to Israel from Germany a
short time earlier and combined his Zionism with earnest efforts to peacefully
reconcile Jewish and Arab claims in the Holy Land chided Gandhi for offering
advice to the Jews without any recognition of their real situation. The
individual acts of persecution that Indians had suffered in South Africa in the
1890s hardly compared, Buber noted, to the synagogue burnings and
concentration camps instituted by Hitlers regime. Nor was there any evidence
that the many instances in which German Jews peacefully displayed strength of
spirit in response to their persecutors had exercised any influence on the
latter. While Gandhi exhorted them to bear testimony to the world by their
conduct, the fate of the Jews in Germany was to experience only an unobserved
martyrdom without effect.
Turning to Gandhis allegation that to claim a homeland in Palestine was
inconsistent with the Jews claims to equal citizenship in the other countries
of their birth, Buber recalled to him that the Indians of South Africa whose
cause Gandhi had championed themselves drew sustenance from the existence of
India as their living center. It was only the existence of such a home that
made Diaspora tolerable, respectively (Buber added) for both Jews and Indians.
As for Gandhis denial that the Jews had any place in Palestine, since it
belonged to the resident Arab population, Buber reminded him that the Arabs
themselves had previously acquired the land by virtue of a conquest of
settlement in contrast to the peaceful methods of the Jews in purchasing
land there. Why, indeed, in view of the primitive state of Arab agriculture,
should Palestinian land be held to belong exclusively to the Arabs, when Jewish
settlers had done far more to develop that lands fertility in the past 50
years than the Arabs in the preceding 1,300? With proper development, there was
no reason that the land of Palestine might not support millions of Jewish
refugees along with resident Arabs at a far higher standard of living than the
latter had heretofore enjoyed. Finally, Buber reminded Gandhi that when the
subject was the rights of Indians, as opposed to those of the Jews, Gandhi
himself had remarked (in 1922) that he had repeatedly said that I
would have India become free even by violence rather than that she should
remain in bondage.
Those who profess to concern themselves with the advancement of justice in
the world have far less to learn from Gandhis inconsistent and one-sided
pacifism than from Bubers observation that while war is in principle
abhorrent, it is better to resist evil by force than to allow it to triumph
over the good.
David Lewis Schaefer is a professor of political science at the College of
the Holy Cross.
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