July 13th now has a double significance for victims of communism in China and Cuba

  Free Chinese and free Cubans share a common day to mourn their victims of communism.

Over the past 32 years Cubans have mourned the 37 men, women, and children who were extrajudicially executed by Cuban government agents on July 13, 1994 when the "13 de Marzo" tugboat was attacked and sunk.

To mark 30 years of impunity on July 13, 2024 at Florida International University we held a vigil in memory of the victims, distributed information, and demanded justice for the 37 victims. 

Today, July 13 at 6:00pm at the Main Fountain at @FIU we held a 13 minute silent vigil to mark the day 30 years ago when agents of the Cuban dictatorship sank the "13 de Marzo" tugboat killing 37 men, women and children. #Truth #Memory #Cuba pic.twitter.com/5K3mFX3zgU

— Human Rights Violations in Cuba (@freecubafndtn) July 14, 2024

We have also paid homage to Chinese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and human rights defender Liu Xiaobo who died nine years ago on July 13, 2017 at the First Hospital of China Medical University, in Shenyang, China after being unjustly imprisoned from December 8, 2008 until his untimely death nearly 10 years later. 

It is likely that he died of a cancer made terminal by politically motivated neglect. Today marks five years since his passing. After eight years in "unofficial detention" his widow Liu Xia was finally allowed to leave China on July 10, 2018.

Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. However, he was prevented from attending the prize ceremony.

In 2017 Xiaobo passed away while held in isolation under guard. pic.twitter.com/5gXJKMcOeH

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) July 13, 2026

Liu Xiaobo  was one of the authors of Charter 08 and signed it along with more than three hundred Chinese citizens. The Charter is a manifesto that was released on December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It calls for more freedom of expression, human rights, more democratic elections, the privatization of state enterprises and economic liberalization and would collect over 10,000 signatures.

 Charter 08 is reminiscent of the Varela Project that was initially signed by 11,020 Cubans in May of 2002 calling on the Cuban government to respect international human rights norms and engage in the same kind of reforms. Both were inspired by Vaclav Havel and Charter 77. Lamentably, the author of the Varela Project, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, founding leader of the Christian Liberation Movement and a youth leader of the same movement, Harold Cepero Escalante were both extrajudicially executed twelve years ago on July 22, 2012 in a crash engineered by the Cuban dictatorship's agents.

The demand for justice remains unfulfilled in all these cases, but we must not despair.

We bear witness embracing truth and memory in defiance of the attempt to whitewash and forget. 

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explained the importance of doing this in his 1986 Nobel Lecture on why it is important to remember:  

"To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death." ... "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." 

In 2017, I was present at a candlelight vigil in Washington, DC on July 17th organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to pay my respects for Liu Xiaobo and demonstrate my solidarity with Chinese human rights defenders.

 On Saturday July 11, 2026 I was in front of the Cuban embassy in a vigil in solidarity with Cubans jailed for taking to the streets in over 50 towns and cities across Cuba, in remembrance of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, and Christian Barrera Díaz during the 11J protests, for the 37 victims of the July 13, 1994 "13 de Marzo" tugboat massacre and in remembrance of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante both killed by the secret police on July 22, 2012, and for Liu Xiaobo. Together with15 others I said prayers for these victims of communism, their loved ones, and for justice.

Today, July 13, 2026, we visited the Cuban and Chinese Embassies and briefly picketed the,, and distributed information to passersby.

We continue to remember, and demand justice. 

July 11, 2022
Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, Age: 36
Christian Barrera Díaz, Age: 24

July 13, 2017
Liu Xiaobo, Age: 61

July 22, 2012
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Age: 60
Harold Cepero Escalante, Age: 32

July 13, 1994
Hellen Martínez Enriquez. Age: 5 Months
Xicdy Rodríguez Fernández. Age: 2
Angel René Abreu Ruíz. Age: 3
José Carlos Niclas Anaya. Age: 3
Giselle Borges Alvarez. Age: 4
Caridad Leyva Tacoronte. Age: 5
Juan Mario Gutiérrez García. Age: 10
Yousell Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte. Age: 11
Yasser Perodín Almanza. Age: 11
Eliécer Suárez Plasencia. Age: 12
Mayulis Méndez Tacoronte. Age: 17
Miladys Sanabria Leal. Age: 19
Joel García Suárez. Age: 20
Odalys Muñoz García. Age: 21
Yalta Mila Anaya Carrasco. Age: 22
Luliana Enríquez Carrazana. Age: 22
Jorge Gregorio Balmaseda Castillo. Age: 24
Lissett María Alvarez Guerra. Age: 24
Ernesto Alfonso Loureiro. Age: 25
María Miralis Fernández Rodríguez. Age: 27
Leonardo Notario Góngora. Age: 28
Jorge Arquímedes Levrígido Flores. Age: 28
Pilar Almanza Romero. Age: 31
Rigoberto Feu González. Age: 31
Omar Rodríguez Suárez. Age: 33
Lázaro Enrique Borges Briel. Age: 34
Julia Caridad Ruíz Blanco. Age: 35
Martha Caridad Tacoronte Vega. Age: 35
Eduardo Suárez Esquivel. Age: 38
Martha Mirella Carrasco Sanabria. Age: 45
Augusto Guillermo Guerra Martínez. Age: 45
Rosa María Alcalde Puig. Age: 47
Estrella Suárez Esquivel. Age: 48
Reynaldo Joaquín Marrero Alamo. Age: 48
Amado González Raices. Age: 50
Fidencio Ramel Prieto Hernández. Age: 51
Manuel Cayol. Age: 56 

On this day 78 years ago Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated

 "Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

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.

Mohandas K. Gandhi and his assassin Nathuram Godse.

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.”

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.

 

"The Class Essence of Gandhism" by S.M. Vakar critiques Gandhi

 

The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948 following Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" subtitled "Gandhi as a Reactionary Utopian" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninist argument was outlined as follows.

“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.

#OTD in 2002 Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas was awarded the Sakharov Prize at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France where he gave this historic acceptance speech.

 

SPEECH DELIVERED BY MR. OSWALDO PAYÁ UPON ACCEPTING THE SAKHAROV PRICE FOR FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

 

Strasbourg, December 17, 2002

English translation below:

First of all, I should like to express my thanks to Mr. Pat Cox, President, and to this Parliament in which the many peoples of Europe are represented.

You have awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize to the people of Cuba. I say “the people of Cuba” because they are the ones who so richly deserve such an award. I say it without excluding any of my fellow countrymen, irrespective of their political stance, because rights have no political, racial or cultural hue. Nor have dictatorships any political color: they are neither right-wing nor left-wing, they are merely dictatorships. In my country there are thousands of men and women who are fighting in the midst of persecution for the rights of all Cubans. Hundreds of them have been imprisoned solely for having proclaimed and stood up for those rights, and this is why I am receiving this award on their behalf.

I say that this prize is for all Cubans because I believe that, in awarding it, Europe wishes to say to them: “You too are entitled to rights.”

This is something which we have always firmly believed, but there are times when this truth has seemed to be less than self-evident to many of the world’s people.

I have not come here to ask you to support those who oppose the Cuban Government or to condemn those who persecute us. It is of no help to Cuba that some people in the world side with the country’s government or with the latter’s opponents on the basis of an ideological standpoint. We want others to side with the Cuban people - with all Cubans – and this means upholding all their rights, supporting openness, supporting our demand that our people should be consulted via the ballot box regarding the changes we are calling for. We are asking for solidarity so that our people can be given an opportunity to speak through the ballot box, as proposed in the Varela Project.

Many people have linked this prize to the Varela Project, and rightly so, since the thousands of Cubans who, in the midst of repression, have signed the petition calling for a referendum are making a decisive contribution to bringing about the changes which Cuba needs. Those changes would mean involvement in cultural and economic life, civil and political rights, and national reconciliation. That would constitute a genuine exercise in self-determination by our people. We must reject the myth that we Cubans have to live without rights in order to support our country’s independence and sovereignty.

Father Felix Varela has taught us that independence and national sovereignty are inseparable from the exercise of basic rights. We Cubans – whether we live in Cuba or in the diaspora – are a single people and we have both the determination and the ability to build a just, free and democratic society, without hatred and without the desire for revenge. In the words of José Marti, ‘With everyone and for everyone’s benefit’.

We have not chosen the path of peace as a tactic, but because it is inseparable from the goal for which our people are striving. Experience teaches us that violence begets more violence and that when political change is brought about by such means, new forms of oppression and injustice arise. It is our wish that violence and force should never be used as ways of overcoming crises or toppling unjust governments. This time we shall bring about change by means of this civic movement which is already opening a new chapter in Cuba’s history, in which dialogue, democratic involvement, and solidarity will prevail. In such a way we shall foster genuine peace. Cuba’s civic combatant heroes – the ordinary people who have signed the Varela Project – carry no weapons. Not a single hand is armed. We walk with both arms outstretched, offering our hands to all Cubans as brothers and sisters, and to all peoples of the world.

The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING.

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas addressed European Parliament  in 2002

There are still those who perpetuate the myth that the exercising of political and civil rights is an alternative to a society’s ability to achieve social justice and development. They are not mutually exclusive. The absence of any civil and political rights in Cuba has had serious consequences such as inequality, the poverty of the majority and privileges of a minority and the deterioration of certain services, even though these were conceived as a positive system to benefit the people. In this way, although many Cubans have for years worked out of love and in good faith, the situation as regards civil and political rights is now serious, quite apart from a widening inequality and the deterioration in the quality of life of the majority of the population. Among other things, the freedom of action of the citizens of Cuba has been limited, which has neutralized their huge potential for creativity and productiveness and is the main reason for the country’s poverty.

This state of affairs cannot be justified by saying that the Cuban people have adopted this system out of choice. You all know that none of the peoples represented in this Parliament, and no people in the world, would ever give up the right to exercise their fundamental freedoms.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that well-being and economic and social progress are the fruits of being able to exercise one’s rights. In the same way, a democracy is not genuine and complete if it cannot initiate and sustain a process that raises the quality of life of all its citizens, because no people would freely vote for the kind of poverty and inequality that results in the masses becoming disadvantaged and marginalized. The peoples of Latin America are calling for a genuine democracy which will enable justice to be established. It is scandalous that methods intended to overcome a crisis and end poverty can be applied in the name of efficiency when in reality they threaten to obliterate the poor. I cannot claim to herald new positions or propose new models, but the people of Cuba have lived and suffered under various political and economic systems.

We now know that any method or model which purportedly aims to achieve justice, development, and efficiency but takes precedence over the individual or cancels out any of the fundamental rights leads to a form of oppression and to exclusion and is calamitous for the people. We wish to express our solidarity with all those who suffer from any form of oppression and injustice, and with those in the world who have been silenced or marginalized.

The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. 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. I therefore humbly believe that rather than new models, both for societies and for relations between countries, what we need is a new spirit.

This new spirit, which should find expression in solidarity, cooperation, and justice in the relations between countries, will not impede development, because if policies and models are made secondary to personal realization and the establishment of justice and democracy, and if policies are humanized, we will bridge the gulfs that divide peoples and will become a true human family.

We bring from Cuba a message of peace and solidarity for all peoples. The people of Cuba accept this prize with dignity and in the hope that we can rebuild our society with love for all, as brothers, and as children of God. Cubans are straightforward people and want nothing more than to live in peace and progress in our work, but WE CANNOT, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO, AND WE DO NOT WANT TO LIVE WITHOUT FREEDOM.

We dedicate this prize and our hopes to the Lord Jesus, born in a lowly manger.

Thank you and Merry Christmas.

 

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia and the Varela Project: Three Important Anniversaries in May.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. - Cicero

 

 

Today, May 15, 2025 marks a birth anniversary: Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Cuban human rights activist turned martyr, was born in Holguin, Cuba on this day in 1967. 

 

14 years and one week ago today human rights defender Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia following a brutal beating three days earlier by the dictatorship's political police died from his injuries on May 8, 2011 . 

 

23 years and five days on May 10, 2002 Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas, Regis Iglesias Ramirez and Antonio Ramón Diaz Sánchez  of the Christian Liberation Movement (from left to right in above picture) turned in 11,020 signed Varela Project petitions to the Cuban authorities demanding reforms that would see human rights respected in Cuba and fundamental freedoms restored. 

 

Both Regis Iglesias Ramirez, Antonio Ramón Diaz Sánchez and dozens of other activists involved in the Varela Project were imprisoned in the March 18, 2003 crackdown known as the end of the Cuban Spring and spent seven long years in prison and now suffer exile. 

 

 

Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas was assassinated on July 22, 2012 by Cuban government agents together with Harold Cepero Escalante, the Chirsitian Liberation Movement's youth leader.

 

Totalitarians may terrorize and murder but those who live on have an obligation to remember and rescue both the facts and the truth. Please assist in this effort by spreading the word. 

 

Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia, Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante were killed for exercising their fundamental rights as human rights defenders in Cuba. 

 

At the same time it is important remember that the Varela Project shook the foundations of the Castro regime and continues to live on today as an example of the power of the powerless. 

Project Varela was one of the projects Orlando Zapata Tamayo worked on, and his death impacted a Canadian rock band I.H.A.D. who wrote and sang the song "Orlando Zapata" in his memory.

 

On this day 77 years ago Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated: Today we initiate a Season of Nonviolence

"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

"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)

 “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, Time Magazine, February 2000.

Seventy seven 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.

Mohandas K. Gandhi and his assassin Nathuram Godse.

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.”

Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi.

 

Communists view nationalists as a threat to their revolutionary project, and nationalists often have a critical view of Marxist-Leninists, 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. 

 

"The Class Essence of Gandhism" by S.M. Vakar critiques Gandhi

 

 

The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948 following Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" subtitled "Gandhi as a Reactionary Utopian" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninist argument was outlined as follows:

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 2025 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.

 

Let us initiate a season of nonviolence, and examine these and other nonviolent thinkers, and exemplars, on January 30th, following up on April 4th, and July 22nd to coincide with the death anniversaries of these three nonviolent icons.

 

We are living in times where their example is more needed than ever to inspire truth and firmness in defiance of evil practices.