Can Gandhi's non-violence work? Part 1

This thought is not terribly original -- I've seen it elsewhere -- but I'd like to take it a bit further than the discussions I've seen before. I am obviously not a Gandhi scholar, so my treatment of Gandhi's moral and political philosophy will be necessarily cursory. I hope to get the general idea right, since that is the thing that interests me most.

Mahatma Gandhi's famous doctrine of non-violence brought independence to a nation (two nations, really -- India and Pakistan). That alone serves as lasting testament to the fact that non-violence can defeat an oppressive, violent force. But are there limits? Are there times when non-violence simply cannot cause such a force to stop?

Gandhi insisted on non-violence in every case of oppression, making no exceptions based on severity. Living during World War II, he famously said, "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." That is a pretty extreme position in favor of non-violence, to say the least. Sounding probably more reasonable, he also wrote, "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. But I do not believe in any war."

Much has been made of Gandhi's position. Most who hear about it, I think, can't help but scoff. And with good reason.

The obvious reaction is that it couldn't possibly work -- sure, maybe against the British, who were unwilling to kill every Indian in India, but not against the Nazis who were very much willing to kill every Jew in Germany and beyond. The strength of Indian non-violence lay in the bewilderment that it caused the British. The Indians were not dispensable in the eyes of the British -- inferior barbarians, maybe, but useful. The British needed the Indian population as a tireless workforce and revenue stream. The Nazis were in a very different position. They didn't need anything from the Jews other than their deaths.

So, of course, if the Jews had submitted en masse, bravely, defiantly, heroically to their destruction, well... they would have received it.

But I think Gandhi's point goes deeper than the critics have given him credit for. I think Gandhi was arguing two main points. I will discuss the first here, leaving the second for my next post.

The first point boils down to the idea that there can never be public support for a policy of destruction against those who are behaving admirably or virtuously (in the strongest sense of those words). This is what I find particulary interesting and original in Gandhi's thought. What he was positing is the existence of some behaviours -- specifically, the display of spritual strength required for brave, active non-violence in the face of pain and death -- that are essentially universals in evoking admiration. No person of any culture, no matter how oppressive, can view such behaviour without being moved to thinking that oppressing this person is unjustifiable. Certainly, Hitler himself might have been too mad to see it, but what I think Gandhi was implicitly positing is that public support among the Germans would erode despite the Nazi war machine's best efforts.

I don't know if Gandhi was right. I have no context for what life was really like for Germans at that time, and what kind of public sentiment was. I don't know if the fact that the Nazis were much more determined to kill the Jews than the British were to cause any harm to the Indians would have made a difference. It may be that any resistance put up by the Jews, even if effective, would not have reached the German masses since media was so tightly controlled.

But I think despite all that, it's clear that the Jews should have done exactly what Gandhi said. After all, it would have been worth a try. They had no other options. They were being sent to die anyway, and from what we can tell, had no method of effective violent resistance even if they had wanted it. The difference between what happened and what Gandhi advocated is that the Jews were (understandbly, of course) cowed and meek, whereas Gandhi was advocating mass acts of bravery. If one Jew, as I'm sure did happen, offered non-violent defiance he would have certainly been killed immediately. But if hundreds or thousands had acted the same way all at once? I find it harder to say.

I'm going to leave off for now. For the sake of readability, I'll split this long thought into two posts -- the second part should be coming tomorrow.