“Truth is like a vast tree, which yields more and
more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mine of truth
the richer the discovery of the gems buried there, in the shape of openings for
an even greater variety of service.”—Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948), Autobiography:The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929)
He was born Mohandas K. Gandhi 150 years ago today in northwest India, but by the end of his life he had richly
earned the title “Mahatma,” or “great soul.” He was the crucial link between
Henry David Thoreau, who came up with the concept of civil disobedience in New
England in 1849, and Martin Luther King Jr., who applied it in the struggle for
freedom in the Jim Crow South in the 1950s and 1960s.
At the time of the release of Richard Attenborough’s
Oscar-winning biopic about his life in 1982, a sizable contingent of
neoconservatives (perhaps best typified by Richard Grenier with The Gandhi Nobody Knows).tried to throw
hot water on Gandhi’s legacy by looking askance at some of his more unusual
ascetic practices,
Perhaps the best rejoinder to that may have come in
early 1949, when George Orwell’s Partisan
Review essay, “Reflections on Gandhi,” took a perspective on the Mahatma’s spiritual practices that was not far
removed from the neocons’, but came to a radically different conclusion:
“If, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large
body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to
Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally
settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly
because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred,
disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such questions
indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for
Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never
made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an
ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and
reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other
leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to
leave behind!”
Contrast Gandhi’s “smell” with that of another
lawyer who made a great impact in the political life of his country, Roy Cohn.
Gandhi led a nonviolent movement that resulted in something like the “decent
and friendly relationship” between India and Great Britain that Orwell
envisioned, and inspired a worldwide civil rights movement based on passive
resistance.
On the other hand, Cohn’s baleful influence began
when he served as a youthful aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy in his assault on
civil liberties. Decades after his death, America is still coming to grips with
his legacy, as client and all-too-eager protégé, Donald Trump applies his
tactics of smearing opponents and engaging in endless diversionary tactics.
In 1999, Time Magazine,
in its end-of-the-century issue, had named Gandhi, along with Franklin
Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, as “Person of the Century.” In contrast, the
political atmosphere in the wake of Cohn requires, to use Orwell’s useful
metaphor, a thorough disinfectant.
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