"Jews have particular reason not to be bamboozled by the Gandhi mystique. ...
In 1938 (several days after Kristallnacht), the great guardian of human conscience found nothing better to do than publish an open letter to Europe's Jews in which he urged them to embrace the very passivity that would eventually lead six million to annihilation.
In Mahatma Gandhi's defense it should be stressed that he didn't single Jews out. He had equally inane advice for invaded Czechs and attacked Brits.
Indeed, if anyone had listened to him, this would be a very different world today. There would be no Jews to encroach on Arab bliss, and German would be the planet's lingua franca. Third World moralizers like Arun would be enslaved and silenced. Unbound by the niceties of the British Raj, the Third Reich wouldn't abide any civil disobedience. ...
In 1946, already after the unprecedented then-recent horrors became known, the righteous pacifist showed that he learned absolutely nothing. Worse yet, he didn't really care.
"The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife," he volunteered to his biographer Louis Fisher. Alternatively, "they should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." Not quite believing his ears, Fisher tried to make sure and asked: "You mean the Jews should have committed collective suicide?"
Unmoved, Gandhi judged that "Yes, that would have been heroism."
After brief reflection, he added: 'The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died significantly.'"
When you can't live without bananas
Saturday, February 10, 2007
