I referenced Richard Grenier’s very lengthy article on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in this weeks’ Great Mondaydact Browser Buster, which was apparently quite controversial at the time it was written, but rather accurate even so. Mr. Grenier touched on a great many topics in his write-up, which are well worth analysing individually and in full – but if I did that, we’d be here all bloody week.

There is one particular aspect of his article, written nearly FORTY YEARS ago, which is highly relevant to our situation today. There is a big chunk of the article devoted to Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa, or non-violence, and Mr. Grenier dives into considerable detail about Gandhi’s waffling, contradictions, and major inconsistencies with respect to his own philosophy.

The popular belief about the “Mahatma”, or “Great Soul” is that it was his philosophy of ahimsa and satyagraha (a made-up term, apparently) or “truth-seeking”, drove the British out of India by making it clear that the will of the Indian people could not be broken by violence and intimidation on the part of the colonial overlords.

This is absolute tripe.

That is not what happened. In reality, the British Raj disintegrated because of larger global events that made the British Empire totally unsupportable and untenable. The Empire broke apart and devolved into the nations of the Commonwealth, and Britain’s global hegemony was replaced almost seamlessly by the Pax Americana.

Future historians will almost certainly look at that transition of power as the smoothest, least turbulent, and probably the happiest transfer of authority in human history, between a progenitor culture and the most successful of its offspring.

The use of non-violent resistance was popularised by Gandhi and the idea was taken up by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the USA to accomplish the landmark goal of civil rights for Blacks. So that’s it, then, right? Job done, non-violence works, and we’re all hunky-dory. The best way to achieve political change is to stand firm in defiance of violent men without ever striking back and let them wrestle with their own consciences.

Yes?

Um… NO.

Here is the very harsh reality: non-violence ONLY WORKS ON THOSE WITH MORAL SENSE.

Put another way, non-violence only works on those who are fundamentally and basically non-violent.

This has been true throughout all of human history. If you look at the way that Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it did so without a single battle, without any violence whatsoever, by infiltrating the ruling classes and military structure of the Empire.

(That doesn’t tell the whole story. I don’t want to get into a digression about the Arian Hersey and how St. Nicholas righteously Christ-slapped the stupid out of Arius at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, but you should go read the story, it’s a doozy.)

The reason why Indian non-violent resistance to the actually quite mild efforts of the British to enforce their rule worked on the Brits, is because White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are, fundamentally, a moral and civilised people who deplore violence.

They deplore it so much, in fact, that most WASPs (and most Catholics, for that matter) have no understanding of how violence works in the real world, and their minds reel at the very thought that violence is sometimes necessary, justified, and indeed even Christian. It is not an exaggeration to state that most Western WASPs have forgotten what it means to fight for what they believe in – which in large measure explains exactly why Western conservatives have proven to be so useless at preserving their culture, overall.

It is precisely because White Westerners are so dead set against violence, and so civilised, and so fundamentally decent, that non-violent resistance works on them. It works because Whites in the West are generally pretty non-violent.

There are exceptions to this rule. Anyone who knows anything about how rough the East End of London used to be back in the days before gentrification, knows that violence in those areas was extreme and terrifying. Anyone who knows about how immigrant groups of White Westerners, such as the Poles and Italians, behaved when they came to the USA, knows quite well that these minority imports were fully capable of lethal and extreme violence when provoked.

Anyone who knows anything about the sheer viciousness of the Balkans conflicts in the 1990s, and anyone who has seen the horrors of the refugee camps either on the ground or through the news broadcasts, knows that Whites are perfectly capable of brutalising each other when tribes of them come to blows.

But, overall, the reason why non-violent resistance works is because Whites fundamentally do believe in the very Christian tenet that the meek shall inherit the Earth. That IS Christianity, at its core, and that Christian programming has thoroughly infiltrated the Western peoples – to their great credit and benefit.

What happens with cultures that have no such programming?

Non-violent resisters get slaughtered. And those who did the slaughtering, laugh at them for their stupidity and enjoy the violence.

Don’t just take my word for it. Look at what Mr. Grenier had to say about India after the British left – after public support back in Britain for the Raj collapsed, after the Labour government under Attlee at the time decided that it was an untenable project, and after the pro-independence movement in India very successfully manipulated Western press coverage to cast the British Raj in the absolute worst light:

A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.

As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians—gentle, tolerant people that they are—gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, the film doesn’t whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some 4 million of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.

My grandfather was a direct witness to the horrors of the Partition – in fact, he got married barely six weeks before India achieved its independence. To his very last day on this Earth, he NEVER told me the true extent of what he had seen – because it was too horrible for him to remember.

What about outside of India? Well, let’s take a look at Africa, where human life is extremely cheap. It seems that at any given point in time, tribes are massacring each other up and down the continent, and Christians are among the most persecuted and beleaguered people on the entire Dark Continent.

Do you really believe that ahimsa, as espoused by Gandhi, would have worked for the Tutsis against the Hutus during the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990s? Or for the Christians being slaughtered in south Sudan? Or for the Christians persecuted in Nigeria? Or for the Boers who are being systematically driven out of their homes and off their farmlands in South Africa and Namibia and Zimbabwe?

To ask the question is to laugh at the absurdity.

Or look back in history, at the great Islamic Expansions from the 7th to 8th Centuries and the 15th to 17th Centuries. Do you honestly believe that the Persians and Arabs who flooded out of the Middle East and conquered the formerly Roman demesnes of Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and all the way through and up into Anatolia, would have been in the least bit impressed by peoples who refused to fight and tried to change their minds through love and peaceful protest?

How about the Mongols under Genghis Khan? The very same Genghis Khan who called himself “the Flail of God” and responded to a Khwarezmid envoy who came to him begging for peace, “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent me to punish you”? The same Khan whose armies razed cities to the ground and built pyramids out of their skulls?

Or the Aztecs and Incas, who slaughtered their enemies in ritual sacrifices and had bloodsport games involving a primitive form of modern football with a big heavy rubber ball, in which the losing team would be eaten?

Can you honestly claim that any of those tribes and nations and empires would have respected a weaker opponent that did not put up a fight?

Non-violent resistance works only on people who are moral and decent at their core, and who are taught and trained from birth to respect the value of human life. That is the very epitome of the Christian ethic – we believe that EVERY life has value to God, even when those people end up becoming serial killers and rapists and mass murderers. They do so in contravention of God’s will for them.

Turning to our modern situation, look at the people rioting and smashing and looting in the streets. Do they look like non-violent protesters to you? They very obviously are not. They are violent because violence WORKS to achieve specific ends.

The only way to stop violent people, who are not working for a true moral cause, is to be violent in return. That is the harsh truth. Non-violent resistance only works in service to a moral and decent cause, and only works on a moral and decent people.

That is the core lesson of non-violence, which the rest of the West appears to have forgotten by this point. Time alone will tell whether they remember, and understand, that violence has its place in society and is sometimes necessary in order to enforce social order.