Mahatma Gandhi: Suicidal Saint
Former senator Fred Thompson on the anti-war movement:
Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?
It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”
After I read that I had to fact check. Sure enough, Wikipedia cites it:
Perhaps one of the most potent criticisms of Gandhi for westerners were his views on the Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should have committed mass suicide, because this “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”[44] By extension, a common criticism of the pacifism preached by Gandhi is the question of what a world full of pacifists would have done against fascism once it had grown “aroused,” other then kill themselves as well.
It just makes you mad enough to want to pummel the next pacifist you run into.
ligneus:
Fred Thompson is making quite a stir on the blogosphere at the moment. Also in the MSM, this interview with him by John Fund in the WSJ is very good.
17 March 2007, 7:21 am