” Whatever Gandhi’s motives, the appeal to Hitler was not new. The year before, American missionaries meeting with Gandhi pleaded with him to condemn Hitler and Mussolini, but he refused, insisting that no one, even these two fascists clearly uninterested in human dignity, was “beyond redemption.” Czechs and Jews were told to engage only in passive resistance, a sacrifice that would redeem them. Passive resistance failed to deliver either group, but Gandhi, for his part, never quite acknowledged this. (It was also not the only strategy they employed: consider the Warsaw Uprising of 1943, or the revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau the following year.) Gandhi did write another, more vehement letter to Hitler, but this, too, was never delivered. “
“Where the Holocaust was concerned, Gandhi was wrong. But the strategic impetus of nonviolence is to prove the moral virtue of the suffering. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this. His adoption of Gandhi’s non-violent agitation tactics was likely strategic, for it was well-known that Gandhi was himself a racist, advocating for racial “purity” and against the mixing of races. (He had also supported British suppression of the Zulu uprising in South Africa.)Yet, King saw beyond that: whether it was colonized Indians during the days of the British Empire, or black Americans during the civil rights era, the preservation of virtue through nonviolence was central. The agenda of the dominating powers in both cases was to subjugate and barely permit the oppressed to subsist. Indians in the British Empire, like black Americans during the civil rights era, were allowed to live, but without dignity or humanity, and always with the threat of state-sanctioned violence and incarceration.
During the Holocaust, the strategy was extermination. Hitler was not interested in permitting Jews some kind of minimal existence where they labored for the benefit of the German state; his plan was the active and intentional extermination of all of them from the face of the Earth. There was no question of the relative virtue of the oppressed vs. their oppressors; it was about their actual and pointed and complete extirpation. No amount of moral virtue could save them from the end that had been so meticulously planned for them.
Gandhi failed to see this. But he provided a workable plan for certain liberation movements—and this post-Floyd second chapter of America’s civil rights movement could be one of them. The situation of black Americans today is more similar to that of the colonized Indians. The vast web of subjugations small and large directed toward black Americans insures that their labors will be ignored, their character continually besmirched, their voices silenced in service of white supremacy. The American brand of subjugation is one of not only outright violence—from agents of the state as well as white nationalists—but also deprivation and neglect: excluding many millions of black people from access to health care, functioning educational systems, and countless other privileges that most white Americans enjoy.
posted by f.sheikh
