I don’t believe most Americans have any idea the dark nature of the enemy we face. I have a friend who greatly admires Gandhi, the renowned Indian pacifist. Recently we talked about the war. Our discussion went something like this:
“Rick, the problem I have with this war on terror is that I hate war so much,” he said.
“So do I,” I said.
He shook his head, discounting my words. “No, you don’t understand. I really hate war. This is why I love Gandhi so much. He had a better, more humane way. You’re different, Rick. You’re a ‘militarist,’ you see the world as filled with threats that must be neutralized. I don’t. People are basically peaceful. We should help them be peaceful and avoid war. No matter how you try to explain it—the necessity of fighting these terrorists—it just sits badly in my gut the thought of solving anything with bloodshed. Gandhi defeated the mighty British Empire, driving them out of India without firing a shot in anger. He would not have hurt anyone, yet he accomplished his goals without violence.”
“Yes, he did,” I said. “He was a great peacemaker, yet he was assertive, even aggressive…in his own genteel way. And he did what even the American Patriots in 1776 were unable to do—willingly get the British to turn over power to the people of India and let them run their own affairs as a liberated nation and he did it without taking up arms. Gandhi was an amazing leader of men and surely a hero.”
“Exactly,” said my friend. “But what we are doing in the Middle East is not that; it is not right. We are fighting and killing thousands. Gandhi wouldn’t have done it that way.”
“Again, you are right,” I said. “But let’s look closer. Perhaps we are making unfair comparisons. Would Gandhi have been successful standing as he did against the Ayatollah’s of Iran? How about against Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union? Or even resisting the Taliban in Afghanistan? What would Osama bin Laden do if challenged by Gandhi?”
My friend sat thinking for a moment. He was smart enough to realize that the British and the Taliban or al-Qaeda were, and are, totally incomparable. They are worlds apart.
“I’ll answer my own question,” I said. “In Osama bin Laden’s ‘Caliphate,’ his hoped-for global Islamic Empire he fights for, he has murdered thousands of Muslims, as well as Christians and others, trying to terrorize his enemies, and all of us, into submission. How would our friend Mahatma Gandhi have fared against Osama today? We both know the answer. Mahatma would not have lived beyond the first day of his famous ‘hunger strike against oppression’ before feeling the caress of the ‘Sword of Islamic Justice’ on his narrow neck. In Iran, the Ayatollah’s would have had no patience for his ‘effeminate passivity,’ as they would view it. In the Soviet Union, Stalin would have simply arrested him the first time he protested and no one would have ever heard from poor Mahatma again. Under the Taliban’s thumb he’d have died in obscurity in some Afghan hellhole, scratching his legacy with his own blood on cold, dank walls.”
The discussion went something like that for awhile. Yet, in spite of my efforts at cold realism, my friend would not be swayed. Apologetically (perhaps predictably) he blamed his passive views on his family background, and on his education. And while I admire him for his convictions, it is fortunate for him that others are willing to pick up arms, if necessary, to protect his life, and the lives of his wife and children. Under the Ayatollahs, or in Nazi Germany, or in Idi Amin’s Uganda, my fine, loving friend, if he had stood to resist tyranny as all true men must do, would have simply been arrested, tortured, then shot, likely first witnessing the rape and torture of his family.
“Code Pink” and other professional war protestors and appeasers today have shouted in demonstrations outside President Bush’s Texas ranch-house, “What would Gandhi do?” Well, we know what he would do. In the height of WWII against Hitler’s Germany, Gandhi sent a letter to the people of Britain advising them to surrender to the Nazis, to “stop the massive killing.” Later, when the horrific concentration camps were discovered and what remained of millions of murdered Jews, Gandhi criticized the Jews for fighting back as they did in Warsaw and other Jewish towns and cities. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” Gandhi said. He claimed that “collective suicide would have been heroic.”
I’m sure al-Qaeda would be thrilled if more Americans believed as Gandhi. While some aspects of his life I admire, his advice to surrender en masse to pure evil is insane, and if taken by us today would certainly bring on an American holocaust. Dictators are terrorists. They are experts at it, as was Saddam Hussein. They intimidate, torture, and murder to maintain power; otherwise a more brutal tyrant steals power from them. Gandhi was lucky he dealt with the benign and “proper” British, rather than Adolf Hitler. Calling on Mahatma’s trademark method of passive civil disobedience to resist the tyrant, such men as Ghengis Khan, or even Iran’s bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would have simply arrested Gandhi, beheading our hero while they sat eating their noon-day meal.
“O young people of Islam: Follow the orders of Almighty God and His messenger and kill those people (Americans)…. Death is better than living on this earth with the Unbelievers amongst us.”
- Osama bin Laden
April 27, 2006
“…(We) see it in our power to make a world happy—to teach mankind the art of being so—to exhibit on the theater of the universe a character hitherto unknown.”
- Thomas Paine
