"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)
"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi
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| Body of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi. |
“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.” - Gopal Godse, co-conspirator in Gandhi's assassination.
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| Mohandas K. Gandhi and his assassin Nathuram Godse |
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. The beauty of nonviolence is that in its own way and in its own time it seeks to break the chain reaction of evil” - Martin Luther King Jr., Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community, 1967
Seventy five years ago on January 30, 1948, 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.
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| Reverend King Jr.'s home after the bombing. |
Sixty seven years ago on January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.'s home was bombed, damaging his home, but thankfully not harming his "wife, Coretta Scott King, who was inside with the couple’s seven-month-old daughter Yolanda." The bomb threats would continue, but his commitment to nonviolence did not waiver. He was a disciple of Mohandas Gandhi.
Both men faced numerous death threats, imprisonment, and assassination attempts, but maintained their commitment to nonviolence.
Despite his successful struggle for independence and the establishment of the world's largest democracy, Gandhi was gunned down
as he went to worship, after repeated assassination attempts. They murdered Gandhi because they did not believe 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, quoted in Time magazine in February 2000: “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.” Gopal Godse, the last living conspirator in the Gandhi assassination died in 2005.
Killers’:(1st row, from L)
Nathuram, Apte, Karkare; (2nd row) Badge, Madanlal, Gopal; (3rd
row) Shankar, Savarkar
Communists view nationalists as a threat to their revolutionary project, and nationalists often have a critical view of Marxism-Leninism, but they both agreed in 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 him more complex.
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 was 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 would give a better understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as:
'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 intellectuals and professional revolutionaries that carry out the changes "necessary" 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."
Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas were articulated and implemented around the world. Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth conducted a systematic examination of the strategic effectiveness of both violent and nonviolent campaigns using data from 323 campaigns conducted between 1900 and 2006. [1] Their findings show that major nonviolent campaigns were successful 53% of the time, compared to 26% for major violent campaigns and 7% for terrorist campaigns.
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 2023 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the 20th 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.
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| Reverend King's family hold a wake for the martyred civil rights leader |
This is not an approach for the timid. Martin Luther King Jr., a Gandhi disciple, followed this path, accomplishing much for African Americans in the United States, but he did not live to see his 40th birthday; he was assassinated by a white racist on April 4, 1968 at the age of 39.
The following is a 2018 documentary by Deutsche Welle about Mohandas Gandhi's assassination.
It is also offered in Spanish.
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