Churchill and Gandhi

Cicero is one of the poster over at Donklephant who we don't hear from often enough. Today, he's got a fine one on Gandhi and Churchill.

Here's my response to it, from the comments:

Wonderful exploration of these crucial topics. Bravo!

Some thoughts inspired by your thoughts.

As it stands, Gandhi advised European Jews to pacifism in 1938. Although it’s doubtful that Jewish behavior during the Holocaust had much to do with Gandhi’s nonviolent principles, their general pacifism in the face of a political cult devoted to their annihilation is tragic. European Jewry might’ve benefitted from having an indomitable leader in Churchill’s mold, had it been possible.

I don't think even a Churchill could have saved them. Without military might, and a nation as a refuge and bastion, they were doomed. No other nation would take them in. No other nation would risk its sons to save their lives. Isn't that the true lesson of the Holocaust? Isn't that the true reason for Israel?

Gandhian tactics work against essentially moral and democratic regimes. They rely on the ruling power's ability to feel shame and its desire to be humane. However badly such powers may behave in individual cases, their own inner light always can be touched and it will inspire them to do right. That is his essential belief. That is why he spoke of satyagraha as a weapon of the strong, not of the weak. It's the tool the loving parent uses on the child who is trying to strike him in a fit of temper.

In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self.

How truly telling, then, to learn there is a movement to influence the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to adopt the tactics of Gandhi against Israel.

One of the last foreigners to visit Yasser Arafat before he fell ill was Arun Gandhi, grandson of Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi. He traveled to Arafat's compound in Ramallah with a simple message: Put down the gun and adopt Gandhi's way of nonviolent resistance.

Is anyone proposing this for, say, Dutch secularists in confrontation with Islamist extremists?

[Islamist = political ideology based on a religion, not the religion itself. Not all communists live in communes.]

As for Churchill, yes I turn to him, too, and look to him as a beacon in this current war. But sometimes he scares me. It is too easy to get lost in his swirl of words and forget the ways in which that war was not like this one. Even to the degrees that the two wars are alike, he is not always our best patron saint. Not yet. Not unless things get really bad. Here's Churchill, after describing the bombing of London:

We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best." Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.

We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the enemy should be made to suffer in their own homelands something of the torment they have let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world. We believe it to be in our power to keep this process going, on a steadily rising tide, month after month, year after year, until they are either extirpated by us or, better still, torn to pieces by their own people.

The time has not yet come for us to apply that attitude.

You write:

Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

I cannot conceive that Hitler was insane. Every decision he made was rational. Sane men can do terrible violence. John Brown was another who often is called a lunatic but was not. The tactics of the Nazis, even when they seem the most irrational, had a sound, but cruel, foundation. In April and May 1945, when anyone could see the war was lost, they kept fighting, and they made sure to fight in the towns and cities of Germany that had not already suffered. They sought to bring down Germany into utter destruction and ruin.

Why? Not because they thought they could turn around and win (though there was some faint hope of a split among the Allies and a negotiated peace with the West), but so that the surviving Germans would live under occupation in conditions of such misery that they would resent the occupiers more than the Nazis, and that a myth of heroic resistance and a Golden Age under Hitler would take root and the Third Reich would rise again in time. [See Stephen G. Fritz's "Endkampf" for a fascinating account of all this.]

And it showed signs of working in 1946 and '47. If the German people had not been so utterly worn out by war, and if some Nazis had managed to survive in an unconquered enclave, in the Alps for instance, a real insurgency might have developed. As it is, it's easy to recognize the same game being played with better success in Iraq. It's why the insurgents waste firepower on blowing up water plants and electrical substations.

It's why the U.S. infrastructure building -- yes, the work of the dreaded Halliburtons and their contracting cronies -- is a front-line battle in this war.

As a culture we tend to be blind to the great qualities of our own civilization, obsessed with past transgressions. Confronting radical ideologies like Islamofascism requires us to believe in our own civilization, in spite of its flaws. We will need to express the power of our culture to others, and why it’s something worth living and dying for. That’s what should be at the center. Western culture can endure only as long as the majority of its citizens promote and have faith in its many ideals, while addressing its imperfections.

I can endorse that wholeheartedly. It's an excellent statement of the kind of attitude we need at the center. It requires an element of "joining" and of "preaching" and of "embracing what is flawed" that makes a lot of people uncomfortable -- especially Americans, maybe, who tend to value their individualism in part precisely because it allows them to avoid making morally compromising decisions.

As for modern-day pacifists, I was raised among them, among the remnants of William Penn's Delaware Valley Quakers. I respect them, when they are true to it, and especially when they keep the sense of perspective that Gandhi, in World War II, lost. I think of an anecdote of Leonard Kenworthy, a Quaker activist in Nazi Germany at the breaking of the war.

Often, on his way to visit the U.S. embassy for recent news, Kenworthy would find himself whistling “the very catchy tune of Wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren nach Engel-land, a favorite tune of the German radio broadcasts about traveling to Angel-land, a play on the world England.” Realizing this unintentional, implicit support for the war, this Quaker pacifist quickly switched to whistling God Bless America and got a “perverted sense of satisfaction from that defiant act.”