[primelens]

> Look at the size of the war memorials outside Europe. Consider the sheer number of volunteers. During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000 from Canada, 2,400,000 from India. The vast majority had made an individual decision to enlist. What force pulled those young men, as it had pulled their fathers, half way around the world to fight for a country on which, in most cases, they had never set eyes? Was it simply an affinity of blood and speech?

Slipping India into that list is just bizarre and tantamount to distorting the truth (not the number, perhaps, but certainly the argument he bases on the number). These 2.4 million "volunteers" were not so much pulled by any affinity of blood and speech as grabbed by the scruff of their neck. Meanwhile countless millions more were struggling at home to overthrow the oppressive rule of the British.[1] The vast majority joined the relatively peaceful struggle for freedom led by Gandhi, but many took up arms against the colonizers and an Indian army even fought against the British and alongside the Japanese in WWII.[2]

So excuse me if I find that rosy picture about the loyal Indian bleeding for the "dear government" a little hard to digest. It would be a lot more believable if the dear government hadn't been massacring and looting the country for two centuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army

[waps]

It's very easy to "fight" against an unpopular enemy that won't retaliate, like Gandhi did. The death toll of the Indian partition was breathtaking, and Gandhi ... fasted, while refusing to implement basic security measures while easily preventable massacres happened. He was also smart enough to choose his captors wisely, in other words, in the partition he avoided contact with muslims -himself- He had little qualms about sending millions to their death.

That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew perfectly well were going to explode.

Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":

  There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
  mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes 
  the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of 
  babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of 
  victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and 
  corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly, 
  the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented. 
  Although some scholars question the use of the term 
  'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much 
  of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies. 
  It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well 
  as prevent its future reproduction."[1]

Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled orchestrator of public violence, who was very careful about constructing his public image. He has about as much claim to being a non-violent person as Hitler has, who has as far as I know never hurt a fly personally (actually Hitler did military service as a soldier, so I guess that's probably not true). Mahatma Gandi saw himself as being "above" base violence, saw himself as upper class, so he wouldn't touch arms himself. Not because he doesn't believe in violence, but because he doesn't believe in people of his social caste doing anything that could be understood to be work. He started out his political career recruiting for the army, and he's done the same job ever since.

Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army), but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is "decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do that for him.

And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself, unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India