"The reason Ghandi's campaign was so powerful was BECAUSE he was non-violent. If he had condoned violence he would have undermined one of the key points of his appeal. You totally fail on this one, Sicarus.
But he wasn't 'powerful'. he was utterly inneffective, and posed absolutely no threat to the state.
"There is a pattern to the historical manipulation and white
washing evident in every single victory claimed by nonviolent
activists. The pacifist position requires that success must be at
triburable to pacifist tactics and pacifist tactics alone, whereas the
rest of us believe that change comes from the whole spectrum of
tactics present in any revolutionary situation, provided they are
deployed effectively. Because no major social conflict exhibits a
uniformity of tactics and ideologies, which is to say that all such
conflicts exhibit pacifist tactics and decidedly nonpacifist tactics,
pacifists have to erase the history that disagrees with them or,
alternately, blame their failures on the contemporary presence
of violent struggle.'
In India, the story goes, people under the leadership of Gandhi
built up a massive nonviolent movement over decades and engaged
in protest, noncooperation, economic boycotts, and exemplary
hunger strikes and acts of disobedience to make British imperial
ism unworkable. They suffered massacres and responded with a
couple of riots, but, on the whole, the movement was nonviolent and, after persevering for decades, the Indian people won their in
dependence, providing an undeniable hallmark of pacifist victory.
The actual history is more complicated, in that many violent pres
sures also informed the British decision to withdraw. The British
had lost the ability to maintain colonial power after losing millions
of troops and a great deal of other resources during two extremely
violent world wars, the second of which especially devastated the
"mother country." The armed struggles of Arab and Jewish mili
tants in Palestine from 1945 to 1948 further weakened the British
Empire, and presented a clear threat that the Indians might give up
civil disobedience and take up arms en masse if ignored for long
enough; this cannot be excluded as a factor in the decision of the
British to relinquish direct colonial administration.
We realize this threat to be even more direct when we under
stand that the pacifist history of India's independence movement is
a selective and incomplete picture-nonviolence was not universal in
India. Resistance to British colonialism included enough militancy
that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as one
of several competing forms of popular resistance. As part of a dis
turbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of
resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his
disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance.
Ignored are important militant leaders such as Chandrasekhar
Azad," who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers,
and revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support
for bombings and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish
the "overthrow of both foreign and Indian capitalism." The pacifist
history of India's struggle cannot make any sense of the fact that
Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected
president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939. 6
While Gandhi was perhaps the most singularly influential and
popular figure in India's independence struggle, the leadership
position he assumed did not always enjoy the consistent backing
of the masses. Gandhi lost so much support from Indians when he
"called off the movement" after the 1922 riot that when the British
locked him up afterwards, "not a ripple of protest arose in India at
his arrest."? Significantly, history remembers Gandhi above all oth
ers not because he represented the unanimous voice of India, but
because of all the attention he was given by the British press and the
prominence he received from being included in important negotia
tions with the British colonial government. When we remember
that history is written by the victors, another layer of the myth of
Indian independence comes unraveled.
The sorriest aspect of pacifists' claim that the independence of
India is a victory for nonviolence is that this claim plays directly
1
into the historical fabrication carried out in the interests of the
white-supremacist, imperialist states that colonized the Global
South. The liberation movement in India failed. The British were
not forced to quit India. Rather, they chose to transfer the ter
ritory from direct colonial rule to neocolonial rule," What kind
of victory allows the losing side to dictate the time and manner
of the victors' ascendancy? The British authored the new consti
tution and turned power over to handpicked successors. They
fanned the flames of religious and ethnic separatism so that
India would be divided against itself, prevented from gaining
peace and prosperity, and dependent on military aid and other
support from Euro/American states." India is still exploited by
Euro/ American corporations (though several new Indian corpo
rations, mostly subsidiaries, have joined in the pillaging), and still
provides resources and markets for the imperialist states. In many
ways the poverty of its people has deepened and the exploitation
has become more efficient. Independence from colonial rule has
given India more autonomy in a few areas, and it has certainly
allowed a handful of Indians to sit in the seats of power- cont next post
Game Limit
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