Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, 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.”
Speaking only for myself, I am not and never have been a pacifist. It has always been left to semiotic tricksters on the right to ascribe such noble altruism to those who simply refuse to allow themselves to be rolled by cheap hucksterism. For the record, if Gandhi did in fact say such things, they deserve repudiation. But those particularities do not necessarily inform nor implicitly ventriloquize the sentiments expressed by the antiwar protesters in question.
I would safely presume that Gandhi was intimating that passive resistance helps enumerate quite clearly exactly which side is responsible for a particular violent incident. Personally, I think this is foolish -- there are few more efficient ways to get your skull bashed in than to tell a pure thug that you love him and respect his feelings as a human being, blah blah blah. As another wise man once said, fuck that noise. This does not obviate Gandhi's general point about violence begetting more violence, but sometimes, people have to make unfortunate choices between survival and death, or even between merely surviving and actually living.
But the bottom line is, the majority of protesters -- and the clear majority of American citizens, including those in the vaunted heartland -- are not ANSWER dupes or Gandhi disciples. They are people who understand fundamentally that a nuisance was sold as an existential threat, and that the world is now worse off for it all, and that the fools who initiated this mess have no clear (nor even a nebulous) plan to end the cycle they started.
And it's not if Thompson doesn't know all this; he may be a lot of things, but he's not an idiot. Yet he counts on his listeners and readers to be exactly that.
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