Gandhi by Harold Arthur McNeill; click for the full-size version.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

MY RECENT ARTICLE on Mahatma Gandhi has created some interest, and has been reprinted not only by the Historical Review Press in Britain, but also by John de Nugent and by Ironlight, a site whose motto is ‘illumination in the dark age.’ Ironlight also apparently commissioned an illustration especially for the article by the talented artist (and writer) Harold Arthur McNeill, which you can see here.

I also received a few letters disagreeing with my proposition that Gandhi was consistent in his belief in self-determination, and that therefore “equality” under multiracialism could not have been his ideal. One of the more intelligently-written dissenting letters was from a Mr. Allen, who wrote:

‘Gandhi’s remarks have less to do with asserting the need for racial purity than they do assuaging a British (and World) public that a) Indians share the values of the West, and b) Indians do not seek to “contaminate” white genes.’

‘Leaders often have to form arguments that identify common ground with their oppressors.  In terms of argument, Gandhi was trying to show that the Brits could follow their own logic (anti-miscegenation) to justify their leaving India.  Elsewhere in Gandhi’s writings, you do not see this emphasis on racial purity.  It is an opportunistic argument used to persuade an opponent, and also to argue an equality between whites and Indians, that the genetics of both are worth preserving.’

If what Allen says is true, then Gandhi was yet another opportunistic politician, saying one thing one day and another contradictory thing the next, depending on his audience, in a cynical attempt to get what he wants at the moment. Even if that is true, which I doubt, Gandhi still spoke the truth when he told the world in his newspaper articles that (in Mr. Allen’s words) the genetics of both Indians and Europeans are worth preserving. (Mr. Allen is also incorrect in stating that Gandhi was expressing the anti-miscegenation ideas I quoted in order to persuade Britain to leave India. At the time, Gandhi was in South Africa and primarily concerned with the position of Indians there.)

If Mohandas Gandhi deëmphasized race in his later works, after his return to his homeland, that’s understandable considering the vastly different racial, religious, political, and cultural landscapes of South Africa and India. If he disavowed his statements on race or self-determination, that would be a different story — but I have seen no evidence of that.

It is true that Gandhi at times seemed to view the world through rose-colored glasses — as in his strong desire to believe that all the natives of Imperial British India were one people, or that Jews were just a variety of European (as when he called them “the untouchables of Christianity”), or, for that matter, that all policemen in an ideal future India would be “believers in nonviolence.” But when he expressed himself on the Zionist efforts to take Palestine, he not only came down on the side of the native Arabs, but his words resonate with those of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Nick Griffin in calling for France for the French and England for the English. Gandhi wrote these words in 1938 — almost four decades after the statements on race I quoted earlier:

‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.’

It’s important that we help spread the truth about Gandhi, because once good-hearted and well-meaning people understand 1) that this man wanted freedom and independence for his people, not “equality” under centralized rule like his polar opposite “Martin Luther King,” and 2) that the version of history they are given in the schools and the mass media has been distorted for crass political purposes, some of them will begin to think for themselves.

Gandhi's remarks have less to do with asserting the need for racial purity than they do assuaging a British (and World) public that a) Indians share the values of the West, and b) Indians do not seek to "contaminate" white genes. 

Leaders often have to form arguments that identify common ground with their oppressors.  In terms of argument, Gandhi was trying to show that the Brits could follow their own logic (anti-miscegenation) to justify their leaving India.  Elsewhere in Gandhi's writings, you do not see this emphasis on racial purity.  It is an opportunistic argument used to persuade an opponent, and also to argue an equality between whites and Indians, that the genetics of both are worth preserving.

Mahadev Desai (left) and Gandhi meet with other Indian nationalists in 1939

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THIS WEEK Google replaced their normal search page graphic with one depicting Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known as Mahatma (Sanskrit for “Great Soul”) Gandhi, in recognition of his birthday, which is now celebrated as the International Day of Non-Violence. Gandhi’s movement of civil disobedience was a significant factor in India’s successful quest for self-determination and the ultimate withdrawal of Britain from the Indian subcontinent.

Barack Obama praised Gandhi on Friday, saying “Gandhi’s teachings and ideals, shared with Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1959 pilgrimage to India, transformed American society through our civil rights movement. The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led. We must renew our commitment to live his ideals and to celebrate the dignity of all human beings.”

Many people, Obama included if he’s sincere, see Gandhi and his movement in very simplistic and essentially mythological terms: Gandhi’s movement, they believe, was a “struggle for equality” within a multiracial paradigm. Actually it was the opposite of that.

Mohandas Gandhi wanted his people, the native people of the Indian subcontinent, to be free of the British Empire. He wanted his people to have their own country. He wanted them to have their own government, answerable to no other people. He wanted self-determination for his folk: their own territory, their own leaders. And he looked at this situation in explicitly racial terms.

Though there was much greatness in it to be sure, the British Empire outside the Anglo-Saxon dominions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, was a multiracialist empire which forced differing peoples together against their will, crushing their self-determination and freedom largely for crass economic reasons. Sound familiar?

What Gandhi was most emphatically not doing was seeking “equality” under the Empire. He was not saying “We are all the same. Therefore give us equal incomes, equal schooling, equal housing and we will all live in harmony and brotherhood as one people.” That is what representatives of the new world empire, like Obama, his handlers, and the billionaire moguls who long preceded them, wish he had said.

What Gandhi was saying was that his people were unique and worthy of survival — and in order to secure their survival they must rule themselves and possess their own territory. Hence his two-word slogan for his movement — his command to the British Empire — “Quit India.” His was no M.L. King-like quest for a chimerical “fairness” enforced by central authority in an equally chimerical race-blind society. Quite the opposite! He said in essence that this land belongs to me and my people — and you, your race, your bureaucracy, and your Empire should just get out.  Ultimately, they did exactly that.

Gandhi’s parallels in the Black community are Robert Brock and Marcus Garvey and Sharity Ross-Petit — not King.

Gandhi expressly stated his belief in maintaining the purity of not only his race, but all races, when he gently chided White nationalists who only cared about their own racial integrity and who crudely lumped all non-Whites together. He wrote in 1903:

“We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone.”

Gandhi also stated in his Indian Opinion newspaper, referring to a then-current issue in multiracial South Africa :

“The petition dwells upon ‘the co-mingling of the colored and white races.’ May we inform the members of the Conference that so far as British Indians are concerned, such a thing is particularly unknown. If there is one thing which the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is the purity of type.”

Greater India, even after the British left, was an artificial construct encompassing several peoples, and it’s not clear to me to what extent Gandhi recognized that further partitions would be necessary. But that’s a subject for another day.

Empires — from the ancient Assyrians in Palestine, to Tito’s Yugoslavia, to the Communist Chinese in Tibet — invariably say that they force differing peoples under one rule — their rule — “for their own good”… to “bring peace”… to make everyone “equal.”

And they invariably condemn any person who wants his people to be free of the empire’s rule — whether Gandhi or Jefferson or the Dalai Lama — as a “troublemaker,” a “hater,” a “terrorist,” or the like:

How dare Gandhi advocate breaking the King’s laws! We’re all subjects of the Crown, Indian and Briton, and Gandhi is a hooligan and criminal!

How dare the Dalai Lama insist that Tibetans should have their own territory and their own government, answerable only to Tibetans! How dare he call for an end to the mass importation of Chinese into Tibet! That’s anti-Chinese — that’s racist! (Of course, once you understand the Maxim of Self-Determination, you can easily see it’s nothing of the kind. The Maxim reads “Every people which considers itself to be a people should, to the maximum extent possible, live under its own government.”)

There is much to be learned from Gandhi and his efforts to gain self-determination for his folk. But we must see that struggle for what it was — a distinct people’s fight for a separate, distinct nation — before we can even begin to learn.