“They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”
Fred Thompson writes this, on activists using Gandhi upfront for their peace movement:
…posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”
And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?
It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”…
Gandhi actually did this?! Gandhi probably took his principle of non violence too far. It is the human resolve to stay alive that has ensured the survival of its species. It is said “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely…” Nazis had the power to subjugate the Jews, for the Jews to have done nothing about it, is tantamount to giving the Nazis absolute power – it certainly wouldn’t have made anything better – for the Nazis where driven by a strong ideology not a sudden whimsical notion. If Gandhi hasn’t been misquoted, as much as he was a shrewd statesman he was at times foolish too.
