Saturday, May 03, 2003

A Plaster Saint of Peace?

Those who are critical of ANSWER and the rest of the leadership of the (objectively anti-)"peace" movement often hold up Gandhi and MLK as being moral exemplars against the moral turpitude and outrageous vomit n' fecal antics of our current "warnicks." King's personal flaws notwithstanding, MLK was generally consistent in his desire for peaceful solutions and felt solidarity with other oppressed peoples. The same was not true for Gandi (citation courtesy of the Former Belgian at Entre Nous):

BUT it is not widely realized (nor will this film {GANDHI-E.B.} tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi's so-called "nonviolent" movement from the very beginning. India's Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi's "fierce joy of annihilation," which Tagore feared would lead India into hideous orgies of devastation--which ultimately proved to be the case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an "unhealthy atmosphere" among many of Gandhi's fanatic followers, and that Gandhi's habit of going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with danger. "In matters of conscience I am uncompromising," proclaimed Gandhi proudly. "Nobody can make me yield." The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.
The Gandhi Nobody Knows, by Richard Grenier

Grenier is also the author of the hilarious novel, The Marrakesh One-Two, which is based on the real-life efforts of Moustapha Akkad to film the ultimate in reverential Islamic religious epics THE MESSAGE (a.k.a. Muhammed, Messenger of God), only to be brutally betrayed and stabbed in the back by his own fanatical and treacherous co-religionists. If you can track the book down in a used-book store, it will both amuse and enlighten you about certain timely matters. Akkad went on to satiate his thirst for jihad against the West by proxy, fake-slaying numerous Hollywood bit players as executive producer of the HALLOWEEN movie series.

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