One Degree wrote:First: Do we know Gandhi’s teachings were not the stimulus for rebellious thought? Someone overcame the Indian military’s devotion to the British which resulted in rebellion.
Second: I don’t see Gandhi’s greatness in his degree of success, but in his understanding. His success was dependent upon how many were strong enough to not give in to their weakness. He was well aware of this. The weakness of his followers does not diminish his basic truth. It is those who fear for themselves who make slavery possible.
So, even if in practice his methods are difficult to achieve success, he is still correct. It is just a matter of how many are strong enough.
I don't know how one could see Gandhi stimulating the rebellious thought and then action as it instead seems more aptly attributed to someone who diverged with Gandhi's non-violent approach.
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/how-gandhi-patel-and-nehru-colluded-with-the-british-to-suppress-the-naval-mutiny-of-1946/story/1/5567.htmlSection B: Motivation for the naval mutiny
The motivation for the naval mutiny can be best understood in the words of mutineer, BC Dutt, who had participated in the second world war pp. 75-77, [24]:
One day a friend of mine, Salil Syam, returned from Malaya with strange tales of the Indian National Army. I had heard about them in Burma. I had seen some of them at Rangoon. They had handed over Rangoon to us. But they were whisked away within a few hours of our landing in Rangoon. Having been in the occupation forces in Malaya, Syam had come in direct contact with them. He had brought letters from some members of the former Azad Hind Government addressed to Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose. He also brought relevant literature and photographs. He did not know how to get them delivered. In the RIN it would have been considered high treason if Syam was found with the letters. I felt frightened and elated at the same time. The name of Subhas and his Azad Hind Fauj were not even mentioned in the Navy. His exploits in Singapore and Burma were just beginning to percolate into the country. The nationalist press had started printing discreet news items about them. It was all rather vague. To the post-war youth, Subhas Bose had already become a legend.
I felt I was holding a live bomb in my hand when Syam told me the contents of the packet he had smuggled into the TALWAR from across the seas. He asked for my help in reaching the letters and the literature to Sarat Bose and Nehru. I did not know how to reach the two letters to their destinations. In those days, one did not use the Royal Mail for things like the ones, we had in our possession. Until then I knew no one connected with the nationalist movement. But I had to do the job somehow. I felt I was a small man entrusted with a big job. From an insignificant naval rating I had suddenly become an important messenger of significant tidings for my country. In the course of clandestine efforts at getting these letters and the literature to the destination, I got involved in activities which committed me to a cause officially illegal but, to a man in my state of mind, enabling. In the ensuing weeks, my way of life changed. I came in contact with the type of people we had been taught to leave severely alone. But I found myself in complete sympathy with the cause they espoused.
I was twenty-two. I had come through a war unscathed – a war fought to end Nazi domination. I had seen the British people defending their country. I had served alongside British sailors and others from the other Commonwealth countries in different theaters. They knew what they were fighting for. I began to question my whole existence. What did I fight for ? Whose war did I fight? Was it for my country? I was a sailor, but in whose service? Is it enough to be competent in one’s profession? In whose service have I placed my professional expertise? These questions appeared more and more crucial as the days passed. To the British authorities, we were servicemen. We were not supposed to think, but do our jobs with unquestioning devotion and loyalty. But loyalty to whom? To nationalist India we were mere mercenaries, whereas closer contact with the British servicemen had thoroughly shaken my sense of loyalty to the Raj. And the association with the men from free countries had given me a sense of identity with my own country. It was up to us, I felt, to prove that we were as much sons of the soil as nationalist Indians who were fighting for the country’s independence. Without quite realizing it, I became a conspirator." pp. 75-77, [24].
It is pertinent to note that eminent historian Bipan Chandra has expressed a different view as to the genesis of the naval mutiny: "In our view, the three upsurges were an extension of the earlier nationalist activity with which the Congress was integrally associated. It was the strong anti-imperialist sentiment fostered by the Congress through its election campaign, its advocacy of the INA cause and its highlighting of the excesses of 1942 that found expression in the three upsurges [including the naval mutiny] that took place between November 1945 and February 1946. The Home Department’s provincial level enquiry into the causes of these `disturbances’ came to the conclusion that they were the outcome of the `inflammatory atmosphere created by the intemperate speeches of the Congress leaders in the last three months [30]. The Viceroy had no doubt that the primary cause of the RIN `mutiny’ was the `speeches of Congress leaders since September last ’’ p. 1055, Vol. 6, [11], Chapter 36, [31]. We however accord precedence to BC Dutt’s analysis of the genesis given that he was a leading participant at the scene of the mutiny and would therefore be privy to the organization of the same. Besides, the British administration was seeking to downplay the impact of the INA which sowed seeds of discord in the bulwark of the Raj, the British army, and lead to strongly anti-British spontaneous mass movements throughout the country. They would also like to apportion at least part of the "blame" to Congress to put it in the backfoot in ensuing negotiations that lead to the transfer of power. So, BC Dutt’s conclusion ought to override that of the rulers whenever the two are at variance. Incidentally, even Bipan Chandra has acknowledged that "The Congress did not give the call for these upsurges; in fact, no political organization did’, Chapter 36, [31].
I don't know what you evaluate Gandhi if not on the success, or lack there of, on non-violence to enact change.
It seems to me that his methods aren't just 'difficult' in achieving success as much as that they didn't work. The point not being necessarily that non-violence can't work but he is hardly an exemplar of it's success in that he wasn't of change.
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/how-gandhi-patel-and-nehru-colluded-with-the-british-to-suppress-the-naval-mutiny-of-1946/story/1/5567.htmlThe import of the mutiny may be judged from an extract of a letter written by P.V. Chuckraborty, former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, on March 30 1976: "When I was acting as Governor of West Bengal in 1956, Lord Clement Attlee, who as the British Prime Minister in post war years was responsible for India’s freedom, visited India and stayed in Raj Bhavan Calcutta for two days`85 I put it straight to him like this:
‘The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?’ In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, ‘Minimal’." [28].
To me it almost appears that it is a fetishism for the weakness of will when one see's his attitude for example in regards to the Jews during the holocaust.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/lsquo-the-jews-rsquo-by-gandhiIf I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
The supposed strength of his resolve to not use violence is reminiscent of the christian morality that valorizes the inability to enact one's will as if it's a strength. Oh I could do this, but I don't how how strong my moral character.
http://rickroderick.org/204-nietzsche-the-death-of-god-1991/Now, I want to make this… ah, start this with a typology and then to read a brief portion of the genealogy where Nietzsche thinks he has uncovered, as it were, a text that’s at the very heart of Christian morality – for Nietzsche – in this typological sense. Ah, the Christian type, Nietzsche says, is reactive. He calls it a “slave morality”. And in this type of morality, reactive forces prevail over the active ones. And here you want things, but there is, as it were, principles and rules that stand between your will and fulfilling the will or the desire. And the extremes that we know throughout history that this has achieved are unbelievable, but their achievement has always had some perverse opposite character. And I will try to use just one example here, and that’s the monk who is going to think about the pleasures of the flesh no more.
...
Now the Christian will take that same inability and turn it against the active type and use it as a reproach. The things they can’t do – their limitations – become virtues. Now they are virtuous because their limitations, their faults, their inabilities to get the things they want, now are valued highly. Whereas the active type, who previously was valued highly, who goes ahead and acts out is considered immoral, and even worse, turns the punishment inward in the form of guilt, because the morality is general. So he goes “I did what I wanted… oh I feel awful about it!”, and Nietzsche finds that mendacious and perverse. “I did what I wanted to do, god I feel terrible!”, “I did what I was inclined to do, oh I feel awful!”
To me, Marx's criticism of Christianity seems apt in criticizing the same attitude of Gandhi in regards to the Jews during the holocaust.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfThe social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces69. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor's compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, selfcontempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its selfconfidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity. (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, MECW 6:231)
If this is what you admire in him, then this is expressedly what is not revolutionary about him.
Potemkin is essentially right that to claim him as a revolutionary shows that one essentially doesn't understand Gandhi nor the nature of revolutions.
To which it's not that people have some fetish for violence but are simply more realistic, it's not force for it's own sake but the means to be properly tied to the ideal ends they're trying to realize.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1899/07/physforc.htmIt may be interesting, then, to place before our readers the Socialist Republican conception of the functions and uses of physical force in a popular movement. We neither exalt it into a principle nor repudiate it as something not to be thought of. Our position towards it is that the use or non-use of force for the realisation of the ideas of progress always has been and always will be determined by the attitude, not of the party of progress, but of the governing class opposed to that party. If the time should arrive when the party of progress finds its way to freedom barred by the stubborn greed of a possessing class entrenched behind the barriers of law and order; if the party of progress has indoctrinated the people at large with the new revolutionary conception of society and is therefore representative of the will of a majority of the nation, if it has exhausted all the peaceful means at its disposal for the purpose of demonstrating to the people and their enemies that the new revolutionary ideas do possess the suffrage of the majority; then, but not till then, the party which represents the revolutionary idea is justified in taking steps to assume the powers of government, and in using the weapons of force to dislodge the usurping class or government in possession, and treating its members and supporters as usurpers and rebels against the constituted authorities always have been created. In other words, Socialists believe that the question of force is of very minor importance; the really important question is of the principles upon which is based the movement that may or may not need the use of force to realise its object.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/humanism-science.htmIs there in general a limit beyond which a deviation, forced by extreme circumstances, from the abstract general norms of humaneness in the name of and for the sake of the triumph of a concretely and historically understood humanism is transformed into - in full agreement with the laws of the dialectic - a crime against the very goal for the sake of which the act was undertaken? To speak more to the point, can this fatal limit be determined, for it always exists somewhere or the other? In actuality this border forms the great divide between the authentic communism of Marx, Engels and Lenin and those “left” doctrines which interpret Marxist moral formula as indicating that “all is permitted.” It is one matter to understand that violence and murder are inevitable actions summoned by the extreme circumstances accompanying the deadly battle of the classes, actions to which the revolutionary must resort, recognizing fully their inhumanity. It is quite another matter, to look upon these activities as the optimal, the safest and even the only methods of establishing “happiness” on Earth. Both Marx and Lenin morally approved violence only in the most extreme circumstances, and then, only on the minimal scale, that which is absolutely necessary.
Lenin wrote that Communists are opposed to violence against people in general and they resort to coercion only when it is imposed upon them by authentic admirers of violence. The only justification for violence is as a means of opposing violence, as violence against the violent, but not as a means of influencing the will of the majority of the working people.
Therefore Communists are never the initiators of actions such as war or the “export of revolution” at the point of the bayonet. Lenin always categorically and consistently opposed “left” ideas of this type. In his understanding the scientific spirit of communism is always inseparably connected with the principle of humaneness in the direct sense of the word.
This also forms the principal difference between Lenin and those doctrinaires who allow themselves the pleasure of cynically counting up the number of human lives “worth” paying for the victory of world communism. ... As a rule such calculations in today’s world are the occupation of people characterized by primitivity both in terms of theory and in their moral profile. ‘
In order to resolve the problem of uniting high moral standards with a maximum of the scientific spirit, the problem must first of all be viewed in all of the acuity and dialectical complexity which it has acquired in the difficult and tumultuous time we live in. A simple algebraic solution will not do. The problem of the relationship between morality and the scientific spirit has been resolved only in the most general fashion by Marxist philosophy. In concrete situations, on the other hand, it will occur again and again in the foreseeable future; each time it will have a new and unexpected twist. Therefore there can be no simple or ready-made solution for each individual occurrence of the conflict between the “mind” and the “conscience.”
There can be no simple prescription or mathematical formula capable of meeting every occasion. If you run into a conflict of this nature, do not assume that in each instance “science” is correct and “conscience” rubbish, or at best a fairy tale for children. The opposite is no closer to the truth, namely that “moral sentiment” is always correct, that science, if it runs into conflict with the former is the heartless and brutal “devil” of Ivan Karamazov, engendering types like Smerdyakov. Only through a concrete examination of the causes of the conflict itself may we find a dialectical resolution, that is to say, the wisest and the most humane solution. Only thus may we find, to phrase it in current jargon, the “optimal variant” of correspondence between the demands of the intellect and of the conscience.
To be sure finding a concrete, dialectical unity between the principles of mind and conscience in each instance is not an easy matter. Unfortunately there is no magic wand, there is no simple algorithm, either of a “scientific” or a “moral” nature.
This also makes more the amusing to me your earliest comment
One Degree wrote:I must second Gandhi. He understood revolution (freedom) is about willingness to sacrifice and not power. You can’t enslave someone who refuses to be a slave.
The above expresses the view that he was exactly of such a mentality, that of a slave in terms of how subservient he was to the British and seems to have been viewed as such.
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/how-gandhi-patel-and-nehru-colluded-with-the-british-to-suppress-the-naval-mutiny-of-1946/story/1/5567.htmlGandhi was "always anxious to accommodate his opponents’’ as his secretary, JB Kriplani, would write. p. 134, [5]. Invariably, such accommodation of the opponents was at the expense of the interests he was supposedly defending. Many British officials, including those at the highest level, like Viceroys Chelmsford, and Linlithgow and Director general of Intelligence, Puckle , British minister and member of Parliament, Ellen Wilkinson naturally found him as an "asset’’ p. 94, Vol. 3, p. 138, Vol. 4, [17], an ally p. 179 [18], "the best policeman the British had in India’’ p. 219, [1] , and "out, he might prove of great assistance to them ’’ p. 179 [18]).
Your hero is no revolutionary except for people who like to fantasize about their strength of moral restraint as somehow being effective in challenging those who use violence to achieve their ends quite blatantly and of course pitch to the massess the virtue of laying down and accepting it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1915/11/conscrpt.htmIndeed that lesson has been all too tardily learned by the people and their leaders. One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their willingness to kill in defence of their power and privileges. Let their power be once attacked either by foreign foes, or domestic revolutionists, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill, and kill, and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood.
The French Reign of Terror is spoken of with horror and execration by the people who talk in joyful praise about the mad adventure of the Dardanelles. And yet in any one day of battle at the Dardanelles there were more lives lost than in all the nine months of the Reign of Terror.
Should the day ever come when revolutionary leaders are prepared to sacrifice the lives of those under them as recklessly as the ruling class do in every war, there will not be a throne or despotic government left in the world. Our rulers reign by virtue of their readiness to destroy human life in order to reign; their reign will end on the day their discontented subjects care as little for the destruction of human life as they do.
And looking at your avatar I wonder how much you admire Mark Twain who has a very clear position on the French Revolution.
https://www.bartleby.com/71/0530.htmlTHERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
, because I find it to be interesting how the daughter of a Mennonite mother grew up to be a Communist resistance leader , in Nazi occupied Netherlands . In addition , I also collectively admire such forces as these . 
, of the 
- By skinster
- By Godstud