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.
Continue reading ‘Gandhi, Obama, and Race’
by Kevin Alfred Strom (American Dissident Voices broadcast of October 2, 2004)
TODAY I’VE BEEN READING a book entitled Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment. The book is very rare today. It was published in 1920, during that hopeful time when a strong and mostly-healthy America was awakening to the scientific truths about race and the infinite possibilities of racial progress. Knight Dunlap, the author, was a professor of experimental psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a substantial portion of his book was delivered by him as a lecture at Randolph-Macon College, just down the road from me in Lynchburg, Virginia. Despite some faults, the book is insightful and inspiring.
Continue reading ‘Beauty, Art, and Race’
by Kevin Alfred Strom
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY if a Liberal “social scientist” told you to jump into a pool filled with five hundred ravenous piranhas?
If you valued your life, you’d certainly refuse the invitation.
But what if the Liberal “social scientist” tried to convince you to go ahead and jump in, with the argument that “not all of the piranhas are aggressive. Some of them probably just want to make friends with you, and really aren’t hungry either. To say that a piranha is going to attack you, just because he’s a piranha, is a wicked stereotype, and probably contributes to the piranhas’ negative feelings about you.”
Continue reading ‘The Piranhas, the Birds, and the ‘Liberal’’
