House of Eratosthenes

both are true
- pdwalker | 08/11/2009 @ 20:52
I’ve never held Gahndi to be the icon and example that others have. For one, his tactics, though admirable, would only work against a country which was basically decent and good deep down, one which had simply gone astray from its values – ie the British Empire. Rumor has it that so desperate was he to see the Brits thrown out of his country, that he didn’t think the Axis powers which opposed Britain were really all that bad, when in reality they would have laid an even heavier yoke upon the Indian people. Some Indians even fought for the Japanese, though no word on what Gandhi thought about this.

Had India been a satellite of, say, the Soviet Union instead of the United Kingdom…Gandi and his followers would simply have been machine-gunned, and that would have been the end of his revolution. Instead, he was able to shame a Christian country into realizing that what it was doing in India was wrong, and thus was able to win Indian independence without violent revolution. The USSR wouldn’t have cared; recognizing no authority higher than itself (communism is officially atheist) it and governments like it were more interested in simply maintaining control by any means necessary.

Same story with Martin Luther King Jr in the United States. I don’t need to tell you what would have happened had his movement arisen in Maoist China instead, on behalf of, say, the Tibetians.
- cylarz | 08/11/2009 @ 23:55
Sorry, pdwalker, I’m going to have to vote for Morgan’s quote. Treating animals humanely is important, but respecting basic human rights is even more so.
- cylarz | 08/11/2009 @ 23:57
– cylarz | 08/11/2009 @ 23:55

Perzackly.
- rob | 08/12/2009 @ 02:00
[…] For File XCII Michelle, Meghan, Cassy The Video That Won First Place at Cannes Tea Party Commercial Morgan and Mahatma Niner Fiver Six Three Zip Leave Barack Alone! Andy’s Creative Writing Military Humor The […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/12/2009 @ 06:25
My dad, a preacher, a missionary, and a pacifist, holds a very high regard for Ghandi – one that I no longer share since discovering his advice to the Jews of Europe. In a 1938 essay Gandhi counseled Jews in Nazi Germany to neither flee nor resist but rather offer themselves up to be killed by their enemies, since their “suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy.” Yeh right.
I believe that in his own Hindu fundamentalism and anti-white Brahmanism he was unable to distinguish between the Germans and the British, between virulent anti-semitism that would lead to “The Final Solution” with gas chambers and mass-graves, and English colonial governance.
Even after the war in a 1946 interview he told biographer Louis Fischer: “Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs…” Gandhi seemed to believe that his “way” was the ONLY way, and despite every evidence to the contrary, despite the real and horrible predations of Nazi Germany and subsequent discovery of the mass-killings – *and* the world’s aquiescence (Neville Chamberlain anyone?) – that two groups of white people would react identically to his formulation.
Gandhi lost me there.
- DirtCrashr | 08/12/2009 @ 10:07
cylarz: why choose just one?

my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that an society or culture that treats animals badly will be unable to treat people well. They are, in my opinion, clear indicators of how those societies regard human rights, if at all.
- pdwalker | 08/12/2009 @ 10:38
I fail to see the worth in treating animals well when your religion demands that you treat people according to their caste, and allow people to starve while meat walks down the street unmolested.
- chunt31854 | 08/12/2009 @ 12:54
Well said, Chunt. Hadn’t even considered it from that angle.
- cylarz | 08/12/2009 @ 13:15
PD, is right.
- Daphne | 08/12/2009 @ 18:31
Absolutely. I am not in competition with His Ghandiness. You’ll notice I didn’t say mine’s better, or that I’m correcting what came before. Domesticated animals are helpless by their very nature; a man discredits himself when he takes physical advantage of this, and a society discredits itself when it allows him to.

However, I would say there is a surplus urgency involved in my version that the Ghandi version lacks. I do not know of any nation that allows its citizens, by law or by social norm, to assault animals — and then gloats about it. But I know of many that confer a greater right to life upon their convicted murderers and rapists than upon the children who would be murdered by them and the women who would be violated by them. They crow about it. They think of themselves as MORE civilized because they grant a superior right to life and the freedoms attendant to it, to those who’ve proven they don’t have any respect for it. Some of them use this as a yardstick…

…if I live to be two hundred years old, I’m not going to have any success noodling this out. I’d plea for help, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good.
- mkfreeberg | 08/12/2009 @ 18:55
I’ll always pick men over meat if it comes down to a knife fight, Morgan. I just have a hard time seeing things as such an either/or choice. Or even being an equitable argument. People that you are arguing against are complete nutbags who deserve derision for their faulty sense of logic and morality.
- Daphne | 08/12/2009 @ 19:01
But this year, they run everything. What to do.
- mkfreeberg | 08/12/2009 @ 19:08
Howl at the moon and gnash your teeth?
- Daphne | 08/12/2009 @ 19:09

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Morgan and MahatmaTuesday, August 11th, 2009

Morgan and Mahatma
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009