George Orwell broadcasting to India on BBC, 1942. Gandhi denounced him as "pro-imperialist," saying that the Indian people could overwhelm the Imperial Japanese Army with "passive resistance" and still win their independence.Found this link on KABA, entitled Without Firing A Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense by Carl Watner.
Here is an excerpt:
There are many advantages of nonviolent civilian-based defense. For one thing, a nonviolent army is not limited to the physically fit. Children, seniors, people of every age and condition, even the infirm, are capable of refusing to do what they are told to do. For another thing, even though suffering and death are an inevitable part of any social struggle, nonviolent resistance minimizes both the numbers of casualties and the amount of destruction. Another advantage of nonviolent resistance is that there is no such thing as final defeat, so long as a few people exist whose minds and spirit are not bent to the will of the ruler. For example "[a]fter more than forty years the Tibetans continue to resist the Chinese military occupation. ... [I]f the will to resist is maintained ... the defense cannot be defeated."
300,000 dead Chinese demonstrate the efficacy of non-violent resistance during the rape of Nanking, 1937.This is the reply I left on KABA:
Comment by: Mike Vanderboegh (6/22/2009) This is just so much historical horseshit it cannot be overstated. Collectivists are not deterred by moral suasion -- THEY HAVE NO FRIGGING MORALS and they will kill anybody, ANYBODY, who gets in their way. See George Orwell's comments on pacifism. If the Germans or the Japanese had made it to India, Gandhi would have been food for worms in 24 hours. Collectivism's appetite for those who resist it is insatiable and can only be discouraged by what they fear most-- their own deaths. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.
Japanese are so over-awed by Chinese passive resistance they stage a beheading contest in appreciation. Nanking, 1937.And here is what I meant by Orwell's comments on pacifism, from The Partisan Review magazine, London, August-September 1942 issue, entitled: ‘Pacifism and the War’
"Children, seniors, people of every age and condition, even the infirm, are capable of refusing to do what they are told to do." Yup, worked out great for these Chinese children. Nanking, 1937.Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
Comfort Women. Chinese victims of Japanese mass rape. Nonviolent resistance worked out real well for them, too. Nanking, 1937.I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.
"A nonviolent army is not limited to the physically fit." You can even do it without your head! Nanking, 1937.Gandhi even wrote a pamphlet in 1942 about how the Indians should greet the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere called HOW TO MEET A JAPANESE INVASION by Mirabehn (his female English secretary) and MK Gandhi, 1942. It laid out the ways Indians could "in good conscience" collaborate with the Imperial Japanese Army.
Had the Japanese got as far as India. Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass.
24 comments:
Thanks for the rebuttal Mike; that's why I posted it on KABA.
--Mark
I really wish there was an organization out that which could take donations for provding guns and ammo to the Iranian Greens. I would certainly give them what I could, I would consider it a measure of ensuring and increasing the USA's national security.
Regarding "Without Firing a Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense PART II", by Carl Watner:
The efficacy of a strategy of non-cooperation depends on whether the adversary needs one's cooperation. Sometimes it does, and the strategy can work. Sometimes it doesn't, and the adversary can just kill everyone. Stalin was reported to have once said that "Death settles all questions." Know your adversary.
I recall that Gandhi once explained, it may have been to Margaret Bourke-White, that his non-violence was not a religious position, but a tactic that could work against the British because they were "decent chaps", but would not work against the Russians. Similarly, non-violence worked in the struggle for civil rights for Blacks in the 1960s, because they were about winning the sympathy of the American people, whose vote still counted.
I helped find buses for a freedom ride in 1962, but declined an invitation to come on it, because I was not prepared to take a vow of non-violence. I understood the merit of it: the movement then needed martyrs more than victors. But I was a Texan, the product of a long militia tradition. I could turn my other cheek to an attack on myself, but if others in my vicinity were threated with death or serious injury, my militia training would kick in, and I would start enforcing the law. That would not have worked out well for lawbreakers, even if they were the ones wearing the badges. Especially not well for them.
So the question remains, what is the nature of our adversaries in the struggle for constitutional compliance in the United States today? That is not easy to say, because it could go either way. Mass public demonstrations, such as we see in Iran this week, could either win the support of the majority of Americans, or it could alienate them and turn them against us. Everything depends on how it is sold. My take is that here, as in Iran, non-violence is a good first or second move, but if it doesn't work within a week or two, it is time for the bloodbath. The other side gets two strikes, then it's hang 'em from the lampposts.
Like the Mikado, we've "got a little list, of those who'd not be missed."
Is there any evidence that the Chinese practiced nonviolent resistance, much less an organized, nationwide satyagraha campaign, against the Japanese invasion? No: They tried to violently resist, failed, and surrendered.
You equate failing at violent resistance and then surrendering with conducting organized nonviolent resistance. That's a hell of a straw man.
Great post Mike. As usual you see right to the heart of the matter. I have to admit though, it's a little depressing that this would need to be explained to somebody. It's like they are willfully dumb.
DP
Mr. Gross sez: "Is there any evidence that the Chinese practiced nonviolent resistance, much less an organized, nationwide satyagraha campaign, against the Japanese invasion? No: They tried to violently resist, failed, and surrendered. You equate failing at violent resistance and then surrendering with conducting organized nonviolent resistance. That's a hell of a straw man."
Straw man? STRAW MAN?!? Who did the raped women fight? The children? Let us assume that "an organized, nationwide satyagraha campaign" was waged in both China and India. Do you suppose that that an army which made sport of playing catch with babies on bayonets would act with any restraint if they suffered the slightest loss of face? These people were monsters. Monsters. Can't you get that?
What did the Jews, Gypsies and all the other 11,000,000 who died in the camps do to deserve their fate, huh? WHAT DID THEY DO? who did they provoke? What do you think the response would have been if some German peaceniks had tried to block those trains? More bodies for the ovens is all.
Don't you get it? Principles mean nothing to collectivists. Humanitarian feeling means nothing to collectivists who are carrying out state policy.
Sheesh, get a clue.
Also, I must write this too. The only reason why the British let Gandhi get away with all of his activities with relatively minor response, was because the Brits were just completely exhausted and almost all of their enemy spent fighting the Nazis and repairing the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe missiles on their city. They were too exhausted to continue holding on to their empire.
If the British hadn't been tired out by WWII, Gandhi would have been reduced to vapor in less than an hour. The Brits were well known for their "anti-protest" activities in India and Burma throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Who was it who wrote that :
'Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who do not.' ??
Another great post Mike. The problem is in the USA, the people have willfully given up the first half of the second amendment. Until we have the people's militias across the country, there is nothing to stop the colletivists from further theft of our resources. I'm tired of writing my congressmen and senators (all Republicans); it does no good anyway. It didn't stop TARP, illegal immigration, or other massive Federal frauds and it will not stop anything else the tyrants really want. What will stop them is a well organized people's militia.
Problem is we don't know how to do that anymore.
I am Jewish, and I have studied the Holocaust/Shoah extensively. My family lost over 100 to those murderers.
Prior to that, and extending to 1991, all of my father's side of the family was victimized by the Soviets, early on with property seizures (2 1/2 generations of work, of sacrifice, of risk-taking, were stolen in the name of "the people"), and then with an overbearing system that generated terror as its primary product.
My family's experience, and all that I have read in history, tells me that the Nazis, Communists, Fascists, etc. - which is to say, ALL collectivists - don't give a rat's ass about morality as we know and understand it here in the West. They are motivated, like most of humanity, by 2 things: fear and greed, only more so than the average person. Unlike traders in the financial markets, fear and greed when you're dealing with political power mean "death or injury" (for fear) and "power" (for greed). They want power over as many people as they can obtain it, and they have no compunction, no remorse, about who they have to imprison, steal from, terrorize, torture, shoot in the back of the head or otherwise murder in order to obtain it. What stops them - the ONLY thing that stops them - is the naked threat of physically hurting or killing them (that, or else actually killing or wounding them - some don't respond to threats). For them, might makes right...and that's how those who deal with them MUST respond, because they simply won't survive or be even modestly successful unless they do.
Period. End of report.
I laugh when I hear some imbecile say "might does not make right" - but I'm really crying inside at their naive stupidity. Morally, they are correct, of course. However, I don't intend for my gravestone to say "He was right" after I've been murdered by someone that I didn't lift a finger to stop. Not opposing a wrongdoer (whether a person or a regime) with force because "might doesn't make right" would make as much sense as crossing a street when the sign said, "WALK," despite the fact that an 18-wheeler was running the light and barrelling down on me at 60 MPH. "But he had the right of way" is NOT going on my gravestone - I choose to exercise common sense, thank you very much.
Mike and the others on this thread who have stated this position are, IMHO, 100% correct. We in the US of A, who have enjoyed a system of generally good and decent laws, most of which have been enforced over the years as intended, and who have benefitted from a government that generally protects us from outsiders and from rogue elements within our borders, we who have enjoyed the softness and comfort of the Pax Americana of the last 65 years, generally don't appreciate how the real world works. Generally...but some of us do. We may not like it or agree with it, but nonetheless we understand. Those who do not are Lenin's "useful idiots."
I don't recall either the author or the name of the story, but I remember that its subject was the successful German invasion of India during WWII. I'm pretty sure that I remember Gandhi being shot and thrown in an unmarked grave about ten minutes after the local military governor interviewed him. And then said gov. went back to eating his breakfast.
Even Gandhi admitted that his tactics would have failed against anyone except the Brits.
emdfl
Oh, yeah, and I believe that I also remember that Nanking was declared an open city meaning no resistance was offered.
That worked out real well.
emdfl
..."after forty years...Tibetians"... blah, blah, blah...
Yeah, and how many of them are left from the original population? And how many of their monasteries have been destroyed? Most of Tibet is now lived on by imported Chinese.
Pacifism ONLY works if the ruling class isn't amoral. Otherwise they end up as dog food.
emdfl
In his excellent book "Modern Times," historian Paul Johnson destroys Gandhi on many levels, including the fact that his techniques could only work against imperialists who were not so bad. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, etc. would simply have made him disappear.
MBV is starting to remind me of Reese in the original Terminator movie.
With the enemy being like the cyborg: "will not feel pity or remorse....and simply will not stop".
"I don't recall either the author or the name of the story, but I remember that its subject was the successful German invasion of India during WWII. I'm pretty sure that I remember Gandhi being shot and thrown in an unmarked grave about ten minutes after the local military governor interviewed him. And then said gov. went back to eating his breakfast."
-----------------------
i remember that story too, though like you memory of title and author escapes me i do remember thinking it was exactly what would have happened under a nazi, or communist occupation annoyed by a pacifist movement.
Excellent analogy, read the book about Nanking.
Mike you are a deeply interesting person to have Nanking on your website.
Thanks for the insight and forthoght to implement historical information relating to a current situation. Go to sleep and you die.
F Rep 1st Para 2nd Pl FFL
Guerre ou meurent
Don't forget that King Obamarama's mentor once sat around a table with other traitors and calmly discussed the need to kill millions of Americans who coudn't be "re-educated" in the camps after their victory. Non-violence is horse hockey.
I remember reading a book about the Flying Tigers.
It said that the Jappenese used fire bombs on the Chineses wood built cities. And, that after all the bomb were dropped and the cities became raging infernos that they would straff the streets until they ran out of ammo.
None of those cities were military targets, it was a pure terror campaign.
The Imperial Jappanese Empire was about as nasty as they come.
IMO, Statyagraha is a fraud.
India threw Britain out because the British Empire was exhausted, and the British Government, like the French, was chopped off at the knees politically by US policy against "Imperialism".
ML King pretended to use the same techniques, but from the Deacons for Defense, to the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the increasingly heavy hand of the Federal government, the Civil Rights movement's success was based on force and the threat of force.
The alternate history story about a German invasion of India is The Last Article by Harry Turtledove.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Article
-Daniel Davis
Very interesting stuff, I tend to agree with your stance to a point here!
www.autpaxautbellum.net
Here's how resistance is supposed to work:
the elders summoned men from 30 surrounding villages, told them to fetch their weapons (many men in the region own a gun), and launched a “lashkar” — or tribal militia — of more than 1,000 people to drive out the Taleban.
Isn't it awfully nice to be able to produce a militarily-useful firearm when you really need one?
I know this is a very old post but I feel it would be remiss of me to fail to denounce it as a tasteless and spurious appropriation of a horror that is still raw in the minds of millions of living persons. I have no personal connection even to China much less the specific events at Nanjing, and am not squeamish by nature, yet even I find this absolutely ghastly - you demonstrate no sensitivity or gravitas with the subject and come across as just another ranting Internet pinhead unworthy of serious attention, more concerned with ideological vendettas than with real human suffering.
Hyper-individualists are often perceived as callous and arrogant, and you have certainly done nothing to counter that perception here. Please take this post down.
Post a Comment