We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
~ Mark Twain, Speech, between 10/5 and 10/17/1907
Dr. Ron Paul has declared Gandhi to be one of his heroes, and is listed as such in his official campaign myspace page. Mohandas Gandhi, the middle-class, British educated Indian lawyer who was transformed into a principled strategic non-violent activist in South Africa at the end of the 19th century struggling against the unjust laws and policies of the colonial authorities. The most important theoretical result of the South African campaign was the development of Satyagraha, the word coined to describe what Gandhi’s movement was doing. He announced on September 11, 1906 in his newspaper Indian Opinion a contest to submit names to describe this movement. The final name was the fusion of two words as explained by Gandhi: “Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force…the Force which is born of Truth and love or nonviolence.” This sounds a lot like the driving force of the Ron Paul revolution.
Among the candidates for President of the United States one man has authentically celebrated and defended true patriotism and the defense of ones country citing both Gandhi and King stating: “Resistance need not be violent, but the civil disobedience that might be required involves confrontation with the state and invites possible imprisonment. Peaceful, nonviolent revolutions against tyranny have been every bit as successful as those involving military confrontation. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved great political successes by practicing nonviolence, and yet they suffered physically at the hands of the state. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is nonviolent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.”
Unlike Dr. Paul who is a paleoliberal Gandhi described himself as a socialist, although with his economic views reminds me more of a Hindu version of a Southern Agrarian, but he rejected Marx’s theory of class struggle as inherently violent and offered a profound critique stating: “The socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred. They say, when they get control over the state, they will enforce equality. Under my plan the state will be there to carry out the will of the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will.”
Gandhi’s revolutionary movement stands dramatically in opposition to the other revolutionary movements of the 20th century Communism and Fascism born in violence and sustained by levels of brutality and wholesale slaughter never seen before in human history that still leave wreckage today. What of the inheritors of Satyagraha? On balance they have done more good than evil in the world. Martin Luther King Jr. in the American South fought segregation and deep-seated racial hatred exercising Satyagraha as did Nino and Cory Aquino resisting the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia resisting Soviet Communism, the Dalai Lama in Tibet, the monks in Burma resisting Chinese Communism, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet and Oswaldo Paya Sardiñas in Cuba today are continuing this legacy in resisting tropical Stalinism.
Ron Paul echoes Gandhi when he states that: “All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it’s supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.” It seems that in 2008 in the United States that a physician and congressman from Texas challenging the political establishment in his run for president using both truth and firmness rooted in love of country is engaging in Gandhian Satyagraha. Both understand as Gandhi stated that: “The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.”
Gandhi despite his successful independence movement failed in the establishment of the India he had wanted to see: an agrarian society centered on the local village. Democratic socialists seized control and built the largest social democracy on the planet with all its defects. His failure stemmed in part because he was felled by Hindu assassins on January 30, 1948 who gunned the old man down as he went to worship. They murdered him because they did not believe that India could survive with Gandhi promoting Satyagraha. Gopal Godse, a co-conspirator and brother of the assassin argued as late as February 2000 in a Time magazine interview that: “In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have to take a bullet in hand and kill someone.”
The choice is clear: on one side the force which is born of truth and love or on the other the force that is born of lies and hatred. The ends justifying the means which was espoused by Machiavelli in the 15th Century and applied in our national politics today aspires to use amoral means to achieve “moral” results. The failure of this approach is all around us. Gandhi took the opposite approach, his autobiography was subtitled “my experiments with truth” and he sought to use truth and nonviolence to reject injustice and oppression believing that, “real non-cooperation is non-cooperation with evil and not with the evil doer.” Dr. Paul is doing the same thing today in an effort to save our homeland.
February 11, 2008
