Gandhi is an industry plant
Imagine, for a second, that you live in 1930s colonial India, your life mostly consists of working long hours in a cotton farm after the British laid you off from your job at the textiles factory, where you also farmed cotton. If the British Empire were oppressing you, forcing you to pay taxes on your salt and installing authoritarian governments and a British Raj to keep you in line. How would you respond?
A) Get to work, sabotaging British operations, looting, rioting and causing civil unrest in order to destabilise the empire and establish independent rule.
B) Walk for long periods of time as a form of “peaceful protest” and sleep with underage girls.
If you answered B, you might just be Mahatma Gandhi.
I know the paedophile accusations are an easy stick to beat Gandhi with, used by young, edgy westerners with no certain agenda other than intentionally playing devil’s advocate… And that’s exactly what I’m gonna do as well. After the response to last week’s article in which I very publicly call Prince Andrew a paedophile outside Buckingham Palace, I feel I’m on a bit of a roll so I thought I’d finally tackle this topic that has been in my drafts for several months now, a bit of a bugbear of mine.
As we all know, the British Empire granted India a very messy independence in the post-war period as a result of their cute, organised marches and them asking very nicely. And now Gandhi is held up as a perfect, saintly example of how to peacefully protest in order to achieve your goals, without all the need for damaging public property, throwing boxes of tea into the harbour or causing any kind of inconvenience to the ones being protested at.
Firstly, I just want to dispel any notion that Gandhi played a part in India gaining independence, he was merely a bystander that was just sorta hanging around when it happened. In the interests of making a sweeping statement and then finding supporting evidence after the fact, I happened upon this video by FactDesk and yep, just as I thought. Gandhi was just a figurehead, he may have united the will of the Indian people with his march, but the hard yards were put in by the real heroes, like Subhas Chandra Bose, who rose up to fight the British with real weapons, like bayonets and passion. While your precious Gandhi was spreading theories about peace and love, he was actually in favour of Indian support of the Allied Forces in World War 2, claiming that they could curry favour (lol) by allying with Britain and they would, in return, be granted independence. That’s not very non-violent of him. At this time, go-getters like Bose were uniting the true nationalists of India in the Indian National Army and offering support to Hitler and Nazi Germany… oh. Well, I’m sure that’s just one of hundreds of examples, many of whom definitely didn’t ally with fascist genocidal regimes probably. Anyway, individuals themselves rarely shape history and they certainly aren’t the reason Great Britain left India, you think the British care what their subjects have to say about whether they should be independent? No chance. Britain only left India because of a sustained century or so of mismanagement of a sub-continent, where they shut down textile production in a country where that was far and away its biggest export and shifted manufacturing to Britain, this kind of insourcing to pay far more for local labour surprisingly did not work immensely well and is one of the reasons that India was becoming a financial burden on a Britain recovering from a war and it had to be cut loose. Luckily, western countries have since learned their lesson and discovered that manufacturing in third world sweatshops is actually far more profitable, sustainable and ethically unimpeachable.
Now that I have thoroughly convinced you that Gandhi had nothing to do with Indian independence, let me drop a Clarkson-style bombshell on you: His name is not even Mahatma. Mahatma is just Sanskrit for great-souled or venerable, that be like me calling myself Unchained Cal and then everyone thinking that Unchained was my legitimate first name. This is exactly the kind of propaganda that would be stamped out in schools and libraries if they had any kind of collective conscience. And yes, I’m suggesting what you think I’m suggesting, teachers are in on it too. About now I can hear you asking “Why? Why would every authority in the world propagate a myth that peaceful protest works much better than violent protest despite all evidence to the contrary?” Gee, I don’t know, maybe because teachers have a vested interest in getting their students to stay quiet and obedient. Maybe because shop owners don’t like having their windows smashed in for no reason. Maybe because politicians, sitting in their ivory towers, eating prawn sandwiches, think it easier to hold up these Gandhi figures as the right way to do it because they know that the only way to enact real change is to smash up their ivory towers and shove their prawn sandwiches up their arse.
Whenever you’ve witnessed a protest for a good cause and seen some property damage has been done, some fires have been burnt, some statues have been torn down, all things that have drawn attention to the cause and been symbolic blows in the struggle for a better world, invariably you will have heard “They’re going about it the wrong way” or “I agree with their message but they’re not helping themselves by being peaceful” being said by the exact people who have a stake in the world remaining as it is. That’s why they always remind us of this old nonce who used to beat his wife. A man who, let’s face it, probably just had dementia and when he marched for peace thought he was just popping down to the shops. The establishment saw an opportunity to attach all the credit for toppling the British Empire to this genteel old man and took it with both hand so that future generations could chastise actual protestors with a “That’s not how the wife-beater did it. Tut, tut, tut.”
After a long life of exploitation, Gandhi was finally unburdened of life at the age of 78 by gunshot wounds to the chest (bit late in life for an assassination really). Proof, if ever it were needed, that the gun is mightier than the sword.
