Letter to the UN
July, 2007 – The United Nations recently chose October 2nd as an “International Day of Non-Violence.” This date is the birthday of Mohandas Gandhi, and was chosen in honor of the man most consider an icon of nonviolence.
Gandhi was once asked by a reporter to give a message to the people. Gandhi replied, “My life is my message.” That’s an ominous statement to those aware of Gandhi’s less-popularized beliefs. For the past sixty years, India has used the mythical image of Gandhi as a pacifist hero as a vehicle to promote its agenda. The reality is that Gandhi was a first-class racist committed to cloaking deception and violence in pacifist terminology. It is appalling that the UN, which was formed in part to facilitate international social progress and human rights, is so blatantly promoting this man.
Gandhi’s writing, compiled in an uncensored series of volumes by the Government of India, is liberally sprinkled with verbal violence against the black South African natives, who he termed “Kaffirs.” His animosity towards black people is almost tangible and his racism is undeniable. A brief but shocking example illustrates Gandhi’s racism.
He lived in South Africa prior to Apartheid, but at a time when the nation still suffered segregation. In the city of Durban, there was a post office with two doors – one for blacks and Indians and another for whites. Gandhi, of course, was required to use the door for blacks and Indians. This deeply offended him, not because of the segregation, but because he was “forced” to share a door with blacks, which he felt was beneath him. Gandhi successfully lobbied to correct this “problem” by building a third entrance for Indians, thus further entrenching the South African policy of segregation.
In his Collected Works (CWMG), Vol. I, pp. 367-368, Gandhi wrote: “For the present our efforts are concentrated towards preventing and getting repealed fresh legislation. Before referring to that, I may further illustrate the proposition that the Indian is put on the same level with the native in many other ways also. Lavatories are marked ‘natives and Asiatics’ at the railway stations. In the Durban Post and telegraph offices there were separate entrances for natives and Asiatics and Europeans. We felt the indignity too much and many respectable Indians were insulted and called all sorts of names by the clerks at the counter. We petitioned the authorities to do away with the invidious distinction and they have now provided three separate entrances for natives, Asiatics, and Europeans.”
When it came to pacifism, the quality for which Gandhi is most admired, he was no better. Shortly before his assassination, as documented in his “Last Phase,” Vol. II, p. 326, he said, “If we [India] had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”
At the turn of the 20th century, during the Second Boer War, Gandhi volunteered to raise an Indian stretcher-bearer corps for the British Army. Considering Gandhi’s fervent racism, it’s no surprise he wished to help suppress the blacks of Africa. During the war, the British were responsible for the deaths of approximately 20,000 black Africans, many of whom starved to death in British concentration camps while Gandhi’s stretcher-bearers assisted British troops. Gandhi unwittingly accused himself of culpability for these deaths when he wrote in his autobiography: “He who volunteers to serve a band of dacoits (robbers), by working as their carrier, or their watchman while they are about their business, or their nurse when they are wounded, is as much guilty of dacoity as the dacoits themselves. In the same way those who confine themselves to attending to the wounded cannot be absolved from the guilt of war.”
Gandhi’s pacifism was eagerly abandoned whenever expedient. Although he once said there were “no causes that I am prepared to kill for,” in 1920 he wrote, “When my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence.” (CWMG, Vol. XXI, p. 133) Nonviolence was hardly useful in preventing Gandhi’s death, so of course others more capable of violence than himself were justified in defending him, his unwillingness to “kill for [any cause]”be damned!
It is impossible to fully document Gandhi’s abundant problems and hypocrisy in such a short letter. Let us simply say that he never remotely epitomized humanitarianism, social justice, or superior morality. According to G.D. Birla’s “In The Shadow of the Mahatma,” Gandhi told the British during WWII that “Hitler is not a bad man.” Should a man with such a warped moral compass be distinguished as a symbol of nonviolence?
The Gandhian state of India is one of the most violent nations in the world today, having overseen the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs over the past 20 years. The myth of Gandhi is merely packaged propaganda developed to benefit those in India who seek to hide their violence by wearing his mantle of faux nonviolence.
In an age when circumstances force us to wage war against ideologies, the world cannot afford to assist or even allow the continued propagation of the Gandhi ideology. If we are not careful we might one day be forced to engage Gandhism.