"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi
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| Gandhi dictates a message, after breaking his fast, Delhi, India (1948), Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos |
Seventy eight years ago Mohandas Gandhi was shot three times in the chest and killed by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse at 5:17pm. Godse was part of a team of assassins that had tried 10 days earlier to bomb and kill Gandhi.
Gandhi, despite his successful struggle for independence and
the establishment of the largest democracy on the planet was felled,
after repeated assassination attempts, gunned down as he went to worship.
The assassins murdered the independence leader because they did
not believe that India could survive with Gandhi promoting Satyagraha
and a Muslim state next door. Gopal Godse, a co-conspirator and brother of the assassin Nathuram Godse, argued as late as February 2000 in a Time magazine interview
that: “In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow
honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have to
take a bullet in hand and kill someone.”
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| Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi. |
Despite hailing from a different ideological camp, Ernesto
"Che" Guevara in a different context had shared similar sentiments. In
the Message to the Tricontinental
delivered to a gathering in Havana in January 1966, later published in
April 1967, the Argentine communist guerilla wrote about the utility of
hate.
"Hatred as an element of the struggle; a
relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the
natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an
effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers
must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."
This is in line with the ruthlessness found in Karl Marx’s writings.
"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." - Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5 (The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18 May 1849)
Communists view nationalists as a threat to their revolutionary project, and nationalists often have a critical view of Marxist-Leninists, but they both agreed on their hostility to Mohandas Gandhi.
The
nationalists were open and transparent about their evil intent, but the
communists had more guile, and their reasons for rejecting Gandhi more
complex, but equally sinister.
“Although
Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as his
goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist methods
of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in
facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of
the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the
history of India's national liberation
movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this
doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the
Indian masses.”
What was this social essence of Gandhian thought that so troubled the Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union?
First,
the "reformist methods" of struggle referred to in the above quote were
means of nonviolent resistance and secondly his social theory rejected
class struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence.
On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that gave a more precise understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as follows.
'Satyagraha.' Truth
(Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore
serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement
'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love
or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase 'passive resistance,'
in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often
avoided it and used instead the word 'Satyagraha' itself or some other
equivalent English phrase.
The
Marxist-Leninists embrace revolutionary violence and a movement led by a
small vanguard of professional revolutionaries that carry out the
changes by whatever means necessary and reject nonviolence as naive.
They follow the doctrine of Vladimir Lenin as presented in his 1902
revolutionary tract "What is to be done."
This did not change once the Bolsheviks took power in 1917.
On October 2, 1920, the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, stated in a speech to Russian communist youth.
"The
class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all
interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated
to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old
exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the
proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."
According to Lenin, "To speak the truth is a petite-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim."
This
doctrine embraces both the lie and hatred of the class enemy as
necessities to achieve revolution. Gandhian Satyagraha is its
philosophical anti-thesis.
Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas have been set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth
systematically explores the strategic effectiveness of both violent and
nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between
1900 and 2006.[1] Their findings demonstrate that major non-violent
campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major
violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.
Today, India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with
a growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the
developed world and Communism has amassed a body count of 100 million
dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of the
communists were prescient:
"The socialists and
communists say, they can do nothing to bring about economic equality
today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor and to that end
they believe in generating and accentuating hatred. They say, when they
get control over the State, they will enforce equality. Under my plan
the State will be there to carry out the will of the people, not to
dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi
"It
is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by
violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will
fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence
in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as
the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to
which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi
It is Satyagraha that is relevant today in 2026 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the past century and the wars that plague the world now.
Gandhi's Satyagraha is a call to principled non-violence but even pragmatists and realists looking over the historical record cannot fail to be influenced by the fact that non-violent civic resistance works and offers a better chance of a better life for more people.
Others have embraced nonviolence based in adherence to the truth. They have achieved much, but in too many cases paid with their lives.
Like Gandhi, they also rejected communist ideology.
One was a Southern Baptist minister who transformed the United
States, but did not live to see his 40th birthday. He was assassinated
by a white racist in 1968. A radical critique of American society was
held by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He consistently pushed for reforms to end segregation and guarantee African Americans' right to vote through democratic norms and nonviolent action, and he urged the United States to live up to its own aspirational ideals.
The best way to characterize Reverend King's political philosophy is as belonging to what is known as Christian democracy. This political school is centered on a Christian understanding of humanity,
where "every individual is considered unique and must be treated with
dignity." It includes both center-left and center-right parties.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. sought to end racial segregation in the United States, and build the beloved community. However, he rejected communism as the means to achieve it.
"Since
for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral
order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost
anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the
“millennial” end.5 This type of relativism was abhorrent to me." - Martin Luther King Jr. Stride to Freedom (1958)
"Constructive
ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means,
because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the mean." -
Martin Luther King Jr. Stride to Freedom (1958)
Another
was an engineer, and a Catholic layman who founded the Christian
Liberation Movement, and nonviolently changed Cuba, but did no live to
see his 61st birthday. He was assassinated by Cuban government agents,
together with his movement's youth leader Harold Cepero in 2012.
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas presented a radical critique of the
communist dictatorship, and sought nonviolent means within the existing
system to achieve a transition to democracy in Cuba based in the rule of
law. In the two years prior to his untimely death, Oswaldo worked on
the book "The Night is Not Eternal" in which he gave an assessment of the fraudulent change of the Cuban dictatorship that, while recognizing class differences, rejected class hatred.
"Let
us remember that the Revolution here was made in the name of the poor,
but after using them to suppress the rich and leave everyone who had
something with nothing, the right of expression was taken away from
everyone and from the poor themselves, who long ago lost their voice and
cannot even say that they are poor. In this current situation of
inequality sustained by oppression, if these changes are implemented,
inequality will only deepen. We have always said this without class
hatred or hatred of any kind, but everything indicates that this
re-conversion of privilege is not implemented in a transition but in an
inheritance in which the oligarchy leaves its successors with other
styles and other content of inequality."
In 2002, when Oswaldo received the European Union's Sakharov Prize, and addressed the EU parliament in Brussels he spoke of the dangers of globalization, in terms that both Gandhi, and King would have appreciated and shared.
"The
talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is
global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain
human will be jeopardized. If there is no solidarity between people we
will be unable to preserve a fair world in which it is possible to
continue living as human beings."
The critique made
by Payá, King and Gandhi is against a "thing-oriented" society or a
government as a "soulless machine" that looks to the person or the
individual as an "economic automaton", or " the masses" that constitute
an economic class because either is a dystopian system. They argue that
the focus should be on the human person and policies that recognize and
respect the uniqueness of each human being and their fundamental
dignity.
We are living in times where their example is more needed than ever to inspire truth and firmness in defiance of evil practices.
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