Across at Neo-Neocon, Neo-Neocon has an interesting discussion of Gandhi's pacifism. Her discussion is wide-ranging, whereas the focus of this comment will be narrow. I was struck by the passages she cites of Gandhi's advice to the Jews in face of Nazi persecution. He speaks of a crime that is being visited upon a whole race 'with unbelievable ferocity' - and this in 1938, that is, before the genocide against the Jewish people had (strictly speaking) begun. Gandhi writes also that:
Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism.Prophetic words. But the words that follow them look to be a cruel joke in the light of the history that was to follow:
If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can.Cannot be worse off than now. Outside a system of religious belief, talk of suffering bringing inner strength and joy just looks like simple-mindedness against the experience of Auschwitz, and of a thousand other human massacres. But what Gandhi's words here reveal above all is that as a political tactic pacifism of this kind is only effective against those whose coercion and violence stay within certain moral limits - for whatever reason: whether because they themselves respect those limits or because they have to face, and are restrained by, a public which respects them. Against political rulers, or organizations, or movements, that are willing to set aside all limits such pacifism is an invitation to murder.
The point is demonstrated in a smaller way today by the willingness of would-be human shields from the 'peace' movement to face down soldiers of the US or the Israeli armies, combined with the absence of any similar effort by them to restrain the so-called Iraqi insurgency from their daily killings of other Iraqis, and the radical scarcity of shield-folk on the buses and in the cafes of Tel Aviv, Natanya or Jerusalem during hotter phases of the suicide-bombing campaigns of Hamas. Shrewdly, they prefer not to get killed.
