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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:30
The Truth About Gandhi
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Hi everybody, Stephen Rolland here from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Canadian Unidle time.
As I clarify some comments I made in my recent Mandela video about Mahatma Gandhi, where I said that he was not all that he was praised to be, and people have asked for clarifications, which I'm happy to supply.
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So, Gandhi.
Before I start, let me tell you why I think this is important.
I think it's really important because idols and hero worship diminish you.
I only became anything of substance, really, in this world once I stopped worshipping people.
Because all of the glory and power that was within me was being sprayed up in a useless mist to coat The demon feet of the illustrious.
And I would really suggest that the further you look up, the further down you feel.
And you don't want to feel like a supplicant at the feet of Olympus, watching the antics of the sky gods that you feel you can never approach.
Hero worship diminishes you and it diminishes me.
Worship no one, only be yourself.
Talent is a kind of cancer.
It's a weird kind of growth that eclipses a lot of other things.
You see somebody who's really great at something.
Hockey, singing, songwriting, anything.
And what you're seeing is the scintillating bright side of talent or of ability or of glory or something like that.
What you're not seeing is everything that they haven't done because they've been doing that.
So Wayne Gretzky is really great at hockey.
I don't know, 50,000 hours worth of hockey, but that's 50,000 hours worth of not studying philosophy or learning to play the violin or becoming a good cook or a well-rounded human being, so to speak.
And so you see a very concentrated laser-like diamond light coming from talent, and it can tend to eclipse everything else.
Beauty does this, power does this as well.
It tends to eclipse everything else.
So I strongly, strongly urge you to retain your power by avoiding hero worship.
Hero worship is also extremely toxic to the recipient.
There's an interesting paradox about we mammals, right?
Which is that we desperately want to surmount limitations.
We desperately want things to become easier.
We do not want to be bounded by restraints.
And that's great.
That's one of the reasons we don't live in caves anymore, is we wanted to make things easier so we have lighters instead of having to rub two sticks together.
So we wish to surmount restraints.
But it is exceedingly dangerous for us to have no restraints within our lives.
And when people worship us, what they're doing, what they're basically saying is, you can do no wrong.
You are fantastic.
You are the very best.
You are glorious.
No matter what, I worship you.
We're not worthy, as the old Mike Myers bit used to go.
It's very dangerous.
It's very dangerous.
for the recipient.
It is a form of passive aggression.
It is a way of humbling yourself and making your idols into gods outside of reality and to be outside of reality through the worship of others.
To walk on the foamy bubbles of others' upturned eyeballs is extremely dangerous for the personality.
So it's great that we want to surmount limits.
It's not great when we actually do.
The striving is all.
So I would be very careful when it comes to worshipping.
Now, worshipping people in a political context is an abdication of your personal responsibility to make the world better.
If you believe that there's some witch doctor who can cure you of obesity, or diabetes, or lung cancer, then you're going to eat lots of sugar and smoke, because the witch doctor's going to come along, and you're not that responsible for it.
A miracle is going to happen, in the same way that those old televangelists would be, hey yo!
They're throwing people back in the audience while listening to their wife whisper into their ear what the ailments were.
This belief in witchdoctory is an abdication of personal responsibility.
Who's responsible for your health?
You're responsible for your health.
Who's responsible for your parenting?
You're responsible.
Who's responsible for your life, your career, your money?
You are responsible for your life, your career, and your money, and your love, and your sex life, and all of that kind of stuff.
You are 150% responsible for your life.
And this idea that from some ethereal realm of human perfection that we can only dream of can come bungeeing in these magical heroes to save us or to save the world or to improve the world is a pretty flaccid way To have power in the world, or rather to be powerless in the world.
No one is coming to save you, as the psychologist Nathaniel Brandon used to say.
No one is coming to save you.
Nobody is coming to save the world.
Nobody is coming to make it any better.
Nobody is going to bungee in and make the world a wonderful place.
No, Ron Paul's not going to do it, Newt Gingrich is not going to do it, Nancy Pelosi certainly isn't going to do it, and Obama sure as hell isn't doing it now.
No one is going to come in.
It's up to you to make the world better through your efforts.
That's where the real risk and excitement and fear and reward and virtue, earned virtue, lies.
And the powers that be love it when you worship the magical person.
The semi-deity, because you know you're not that person.
And it also puts you in a state of waiting, or in a state of supporting, or in a state of praising, or in a state of expectation, all of which take your spine and grind it up to mount as flagpoles to the vanity of the mad and powerful.
So, this is one of the reasons why tearing down idols is absolutely essential.
Tearing down idols is building us up.
So, with that in mind, let's have a look at Mahatma Gandhi.
Okay.
Now, there's a couple of things I'm going to talk about.
I'm going to substitute a couple of words because the word Kafirs in South Africa basically means niggers, so I'm going to use that just because Not many people know that.
Gandhi, as you probably know, was born in the Indian state of Gujarat.
He was married when he was 13.
His wife was 14.
I guess that would be a cougar.
And that's not particularly early by the standards of the time.
His wife got pregnant very quickly, and then two years later his father was dying.
Gandhi left his bedside and had sex with his wife, and then his father died while he was having sex.
Some people theorize, and I think Gandhi even confessed to this in oblique ways, that this is one of the reasons why he became kind of repulsed by sexual love later on in his life.
His relationship to sex is important, and the reason why it's important is You want to have universal standards as a basic thing of philosophy.
Like physics, you have universal standards, and in philosophy you have to have universal standards, otherwise it's not philosophy, it's opinion.
And think of me, if you want, or anyone that you know who's even a mildly prominent figure, think of me saying this kind of stuff.
It is the duty of every thoughtful human being not to marry.
And in case you're helpless with regards to marriage, if you get an arranged marriage, you have to abstain from sexual intercourse with your wife.
I put out a podcast about that.
And then you find out that up here in the Free Domain Radio underground bunker compound in Ontario, I have set up these ashrams, these villages, where boys and girls bathe and sleep together naked, but chastely, and they're punished for any sexual talk in my compound.
And men and women are segregated, and husbands are never allowed in my compound.
You are not allowed, if you're a husband, to be alone with your wife.
And if you feel passion, you must take a cold bath.
However, in true mystical fashion, the rules do not apply to me.
So I have a secretary and my secretary has a very attractive sister, who's also my personal physician.
And she's been around since she was a girl, and she used to sleep and bathe with me.
And when people say that's kind of hypocritical, I say, no, no, no, while she's bathing, I keep my eyes tightly shut.
I don't know whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on.
I can tell from the sound that she uses soap.
And after my wife dies, I have more women around me, and they all have to sleep with me naked to test my Ability to resist lust, because I say I'm an incredibly lustful human being.
And there are experiments where women will attempt to arouse me with strip teases or other non-contact sexual activity, you know, hoverbot lap dances or whatever.
And it does appear that this did sometimes cross over into sexual activity.
So in one of his letters he wrote, Venus sleeping with me might be called an accident.
All that can be said is that she slept close to me.
So it's more than just more than just floating around giving high cost lap dances.
So this is around the time of India's independence from the United Kingdom.
And a 77-year-old Gandhi got rid of this woman who was 33 by this time and replaced her with someone almost half her age.
And so he was in Bengal, and we'll get to some of the political stuff in a sec, but he was in Bengal to see what comfort he could offer in times of intercommunal violence.
In the run-up to independence, Gandhi called for his 18-year-old grandniece, Manu, to join him and sleep with him.
And he said, we may both be killed by the Muslims and must put our purity to the ultimate test so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices.
And we should now both start sleeping naked.
I think in the pickup artistry community, this is the killed by Muslims gambit, which is not as common as you might expect.
Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi's grandnephew, Kanu Gandhi, rejoined Gandhi's entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947, and by the end of August, Gandhi was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the same time, naked, as part of his sexual test.
They would massage him and so on.
Now, I mean, this is obviously kind of salacious, but it's also pretty creepy, frankly.
I mean, these women are pubescent.
They are relatives.
They are sleeping with this old man naked.
Come on.
That's pretty gross.
That's pretty creepy.
That's half incest.
statutory rape, I mean, you name it.
It's really pretty nasty stuff.
And this was, at the time, followers left him and his other secretary left him and people were just appalled.
And Nehru, who was the first prime minister of India after independence, called these practices, you know, creepy and bizarre and all that, perverse.
So it's not wildly unimportant how people live their lives.
Like, if you think of me doing this kind of stuff, and I know you do, then you'd probably be pretty creeped out and you'd say, well, that's pretty damn culty, right?
I mean, that's, you know, don't sleep with your wives.
I'm going to sleep with their daughters naked just as a sexual test.
Oops!
You know, I mean, this is just nasty, creepy, run-of-the-mill mystical crap where the highest ideals are there for the basis of predations.
So, maybe you haven't heard much about that.
I think that was in the Penthouse version of the Ben Kingsley movie.
Anyway, I'll have to check.
Now, let's look at some of the history.
Now, India was ruled by the British for about 150 years, and you don't usually hear much about what happened before the British came along.
Kind of important.
Like, you hear bad things about the Industrial Revolution because, well, because Charles Dickens had a really terrible relationship with his wife, was kind of a bastard, and therefore spent a lot of time in the shed writing.
And so you hear a lot of bad stuff about the Industrial Revolution.
You don't really hear much about what came before the Industrial Revolution, which is really kind of tragic, because... Anyway.
But we'll get into what happened before.
But the thing to understand about the British control of this massive country is that there were never more than 70,000 British troops in India, hundreds of millions of people.
And the running of the country was an enormous infrastructure of native troops and police and bureaucrats, right?
So you know from the recent abomination of an invasion of Iraq that if the locals are not really into you, you know, if they're totally not that into you, then they will regularly blow things up and steal and kill people and so on.
That didn't really happen so much in India.
As Hitler observed, Indians merely had to spit all at once and every Briton in India would have drowned.
Evil but occasionally witty.
So why did Indians, so many Indians, like the British?
Well, because of what came before.
So for eight centuries, that would be 800 years, or the approximate length of The Hobbit Part 2, for 800 years before the Raj, the subcontinent had been subjected to the plunder and depravity of the Mughals.
I think that they were trying to pronounce Mongols.
The Mughals, who were Muslim rulers, who came from as far west as Turkey.
Now, what was it like to live under the Mughals?
Well, think of homicidal Klingons on their period.
During the time of the 800 years that they were under the subjugation of the Mughals, Delhi, the capital, was razed to the ground, burned to the ground eight times in that period.
Maybe it was a centenary.
Great pyramids were constructed with the skulls of its inhabitants.
So that's not good.
And the other thing, of course, that was pretty tragic prior to the British coming was Islam, of course, permits the enslavement of non-Muslims.
I love it.
So Indians were sold across the Islamic world in such quantities that the international price of slaves Collapsed.
And so there's an Afghan mountain range called the Hindu Kush, which translates as the Hindu slaughter.
And it's so named after the huge numbers of Hindus who died there while being frog-marched by the Muslims to the markets of Arabia and Central Asia.
So the fun of the Muslims will be revisited in the partition of India and Pakistan, but I think we can basically say not a great place to backpack.
if you are carbon-based.
So there was, of course, predation and exploitation in the colonial control of the world.
And a lot of Westerners and Western thinkers fought against colonialism as a hangover from some of the papal-sponsored crusades and other forms of interventions from the Middle Ages.
This is from a book I'll put the notes for everything here will be in the In the description, an economist writes, if one compares the rate of growth during the 19th century, it appears the non-colonial countries had, as a rule, a more rapid economic development than colonial ones.
There is an almost perfect correlation.
Thus, colonial countries like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain have been characterized by a slower rate of economic growth and industrialization than Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
Now, I know that the latter group are not perfectly non-colonial, but relative to the first group, they're much less.
The rule is, to a certain extent, also valid for the 20th century.
Thus Belgium, by joining the colonial club in the first years of the 20th century, also became a member of the group characterized by slow growth.
It is obvious that this correlation is far from being proof that all colonial ventures have been economically counterproductive.
However, nothing excludes such a possibility.
This correlation can at least be partial proof that colonialism has not been such a powerful force for development and industrialization.
It's covering his ass.
And, you know, for those of you who have noticed the vast smoking moon crater of the U.S.
economy that has occurred since the U.S.
went full-tilt colonial boogie throughout the late last, basically last half and first part of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, well, yes, you can see that the U.S.
economy is not doing great because they have 750 military bases overseas.
And at some point may think of leaving Japan and Germany, which they conquered over 60 years ago.
There were other benefits to colonial rule.
So in 1846, the British Commissioner John Lawrence, you have to say it that way, I don't know why, told the local elites that Punjabis could no longer burn their widows, commit female infanticide, or bury their lepers alive.
Lovely.
Now, when the Punjabis protested, saying, you promised there would be no interference in our religious customs, Lawrence steadfastly replied, that it was British custom to hang anyone, sorry, it was British religious custom to hang anyone who did such things.
So, so they stopped the Punjabis from burning their widows, committing female infanticide, and burying their lepers alive.
Ah, even more importantly, in addition to outlawing these barbaric practices, the British also did the slight subcontinental favor of outlawing slavery in 1843, at a time when an estimated 10 million Indians were slaves, which was up to 15% of the population in some regions.
Now I believe 10 million is 15% of your average Mumbai city block.
And of course the British exported to India the modern methods of fighting contagious diseases which caused a huge population explosion and much like in South Africa where from the early 20th century until the end of apartheid, until the beginning of apartheid actually, the black population rose tenfold.
Significant gains in the population of India were gained by sanitation and hand-washing and other methods of combating contagious diseases and so on.
Unfortunately, sorry for this race through Indian history, but unfortunately when it came to separating
India from the UK, they basically had a whole bunch of UK advisors and the sort of top Hindu political castes were all trained, as was Gandhi to some degree, in British schools, right, in Oxford and Eton and all the other socialist rat's nest wherein the ruling classes had retreated after the aristocracy had been somewhat controlled as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
So the The central planning of the Indian economy went full pace from the late 1940s until the early 1990s when they realized that socialism doesn't work.
We in the West wait for that lesson to boomerang back to us.
That would be nice.
So, Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, said, of course we want to socialize, but we are not opposed to private enterprise.
We want to encourage, in every way, private enterprise.
We want to promise the entrepreneurs who invest in our country that we will not expropriate them, nor socialize them, for ten years, perhaps even for a longer time.
Isn't that lovely?
What an invitation to come and get pickpocketed by the state.
Now, you may have seen And you may not know that the Indian government financed one-third of the cost of production in order to make sure that Gandhi was portrayed as an absolute pacifist.
One of the reasons why governments like promoting pacifism when they're not imperialistic is because you can then screw your people more if they're absolute pacifists.
Another fairly unsavory aspect of Gandhi was his abysmal racism.
Ah.
Oh.
Yes.
Yeah, no, I hear.
I hear you.
I hear you.
I really do.
Cultural context at the time, blah, blah, blah.
But if you're going to consider the man to be a moral ideal, then you can't then say, but in his virulent racism, it's different.
No, come on.
I mean, if somebody is going to be a moral ideal, then they can't just be kind of a moral ideal in one area and then really nasty in another area.
You know, that's like saying, I'm perfectly healthy except my arm that's missing.
So, Gandhi trained as a lawyer, couldn't get work in India, and went to Africa, South Africa, where he stayed for quite a long time, and he was pretty appalled at the treatment of Indians in South Africa.
Not at all appalled by the treatment of what are called in South Africa, Kafirs, or what would be known in America and most of the West as Niggers.
Hindu.
Hindu caste system.
Caste system, the only aspect of a major religion as Hindu, is in fact the only religion that formally advocates slavery and massive class distinctions where people are at about the same level of pets once they're down at the untouchable level.
And so He cared about Indians, but he didn't care about blacks, which he placed slightly above the animal level.
So his satyagraha was for the better treatment of Indians, his sort of crusade.
So he said, you're treating them basically the same as the savage niggers, which is completely wrong.
So he stayed in 20 years.
South Africa never had any contact, social contact, with the blacks.
He was horrified when he was lodged with the natives in the same jail ward.
He hated wearing the same clothes, same styles.
He didn't like sharing the food, hated sharing the toilet.
And he said, niggers and Chinese prisoners are wild, murderous, and given to immoral ways.
Niggers are, as a general rule, uncivilized, the convicts even more so.
They are troublesome, very dirty, and live almost like animals.
And he... should we get to this?
Let's dive into it now.
So there was a Zulu uprising, of Zulus of course a tribe in Africa, a Zulu uprising against the white rule, and who jumped to serve and became a sergeant in the British army against the Zulu uprising?
Yes, it was the pacifist and egalitarian Mahatma Gandhi.
He got a medal and he was very active, did anything he could to help kill as many blacks as he possibly could.
So if you like Nelson Mandela and If you like Mahatma Gandhi, you have to recognize that if they'd kind of been around at the same time, Mahatma Gandhi would be the one to put a bullet through the eyes of Nelson Mandela.
You know, just one of these interesting things about people who don't learn moral philosophy from the ground up, but live on charisma and nubile young women.
So during his time, he actually supported the British government in three major wars.
Anyway, he said, it is not for us to judge whether the nigger revolt is justified or not, says Gandhi.
We are co-colonists with whites of this land, whereas the black savages are as yet unfit to participate in the political affairs of the colony.
In 1921, well, so the British, okay, sorry, the Russian Revolution, fermenting throughout the teens of the 19s, obviously 1917 erupted Russia, began to really ferment against colonialism.
So, the British actually shipped Gandhi off to India in order to quell some colonial stuff, but he kind of changed his mind.
And the Congress Party, which was founded and funded by the British, which of course Gandhi was prominent in, in 1921 he started delivering these violent speeches inciting racial hatred against the British.
And during bloody demonstrations and riots against the visit of the Prince of Wales,
William Francis Doherty was an American citizen working in Bombay was murdered and Gandhi was implicated in, you know, riling up the crowds with his racial hatred and, sorry, anti-British and racial hatred and this guy was killed and I'll put a link into all of the details about this but Gandhi personally got involved in the cover-up of this gruesome murder through bribery and intimidation because he was terrified that the details of the murder and his role in it would tarnish his image
So, a good marketer and a good marketer always knows where to bury the bodies, cover them up with lime and propaganda.
Now, there is this belief that Gandhi achieved Indian freedom without spilling a drop of blood.
I would really argue it was the pacifism of the British that made that possible, combined with the unbelievably economically devastating effect of the Second World War.
People say, well, you know, the British made so much money off colonialism.
Well, if they did, when they were broke at the end of the Second World War, why did they give up all their colonies?
Because the colonies were a net goddamn burden.
Controlling people, bullying people, shooting people, and jailing people.
This is not as productive as trading with people, right?
So, the British were not big on shooting dissidents.
As George Orwell wrote, where's the Gandhi in Russia?
Well, Stalin would have just shot him the moment he stuck his head above his cubicle.
The British were not as violent and repressive as some of the other colonial powers, just ask, say, the Eastern Bloc after the Second World War, and so it really was the British pacifism and not Gandhi's pacifism that resulted in this, and the fact that the British had to leave because they didn't have enough money to pay for the empire.
Think of the US empire.
Think of the war in Iraq.
Most people are broke, or going broke paying for it, but a few people are profiting like mad.
Well, that's exactly what colonialism is.
It's just another one of these concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, bullshit, rent-seeking things that people like when there's a government around that they can bribe, bully, or intimidate.
So, it was the same thing with the colonies.
So, one of the great tragedies, of course, of the 20th century was the partition, the partition in India.
In 1947 there was a partition and it was along Muslim and Hindu lines.
So prior to 1947 there was just India, there was no Pakistan.
And Pakistan was divided, there was one on this side, one on this side, and Hindus in the middle.
Now the Hindus wanted to set up something called Ram Raj, which is a mythical Hindu kingdom based on a caste ideology.
Caste is like the ultimate racism, slavery, nasty evil bullshit.
And in the state of Punjab alone, between 11 and 12 million people lost their homes.
They had to move.
This is one of the, where they lived for centuries, one of the most massive dislocations in all of human history.
At least 1 million people died in religious warfare alone, right?
So the Muslim minority was afraid that when the Hindus got in power, they were going to be treated badly.
And so they separated, gave the Muslims their own country.
Ooh, not for any problems there.
Gave the Hindus their own country.
Maybe some problems there too.
And all of this was happening that was just unbelievably wretched.
And Hitler received a nice letter from Gandhi calling him his friend in 1940 when, you know, Hitler's intentions and activities were not a massive mystery.
So, when you start this process of dismantling what the British had held together, you know, with spit and stiff upper lip and boot polish, the resulting madhouse slaughter, and India and Pakistan have had two major wars since, with the casualties running into the hundreds of thousands.
They both have nuclear weapons.
This would not have happened had there been a more rational, slow transition from the British.
So again, I don't know how that would have looked.
I would have educated everyone in philosophy or wait till the internet till people can learn how to think better or whatever.
What did happen was 12 million people had to move and the move was just wretched and people selling their treasured belongings and wedding rings for like a bottle of water.
It was unbelievably horrendous and all the while Gandhi is reciting the murderous sermons from his favorite scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Gandhi is supposed to have taken a vow of poverty, demanded and got, even when he was in jail, the same comforts enjoyed by British high officials in India.
This Apostle of Peace, when a Jewish delegation came to him to complain about the evils of Nazism, he said that you should oppose the evils of Nazism by something called soul force.
In other words, that he said that the Jews should fight Nazism by committing mass suicide.
And he also was very big on annexing Kashmir, the territory, not the Robert Plant song, by armed aggression.
I can put some more of these staggeringly racist quotes in there.
In 1931, Gandhi fasted as a protest against a British proposal to grant a few basic rights to the untouchables, the Dalits, the lowest of the castes.
So he's no friend of the lower classes.
He fasted basically to maintain the slavery demanded by the Hindu religion.
So his loyalty was to the British Crown.
He was Sergeant Major Gandhi.
He won a war medal for the Zulu campaign.
When war broke out in 1914, Gandhi immediately contacted the War Office, swore his unshakable loyalty to the Crown and organized the Indian Volunteer Corps.
He wrote to the Viceroy, I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at this critical moment.
He justified this by citing the Bhagavad Gita and saying Indians have always been warlike.
And so, he really liked the British.
He fought, he was a murderer.
He murdered Zulus for the British, as far as I can tell.
That's, I mean, certainly all participated in the army that murdered them.
So, you know, Churchill was a murderer, murdered the Boers in the Boer War of 1905-1906.
George Orwell was a murderer, murdered people in the Spanish-Franco Civil War.
And Gandhi was also a murderer and I, you know, I'm no expert in murder as far as what I've read of my dossier.
Murdering people not so super great for your peace of mind tends to make you a little bit freaky.
I played Macbeth when I was younger and it's a pretty freaky play to do because, you know, when you get into that mindset, a murderer destroys The personality destroys the empathy, destroys the integrity.
And so a lot of the people who we think are really, really great are murderous.
And there seems to be some strong evidence that Nelson Mandela was as well.
Certainly his second wife was.
His advice to the British in December 1941, as Hitler rules from the Channel to the Volga, he says the Jews should all commit suicide.
And his advice to the British was, let them take possession of your beautiful islands with all your many beautiful buildings.
You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.
Okay, so, a little bit on the inconsistent side.
His treatment of his family was truly horrible, and as a family man myself and as a stay-at-home dad, I judge people quite a bit by how they treat their families.
So he had a son, Harilal.
He wanted to go to college.
He was interested in being a lawyer, like his father was.
Gandhi would not allow it, as he believed a Western-style education would not help in the struggle for Indian independence, despite the fact that Gandhi had a Western-style education and was deeply committed to the struggle for Indian independence.
So his son wrote to him, dear father, in your laboratory of experiments, unfortunately, I am the one truth that has gone wrong.
He also wrote of his father talking to India, he is the greatest father you have, i.e.
India, but he is the one father I wish I did not have.
Gandhi said his son Harilal was one of the greatest regrets of his life.
Gandhi had banished his second son just for giving some money to Harilal.
The boy was so uncared for, no one came to his bedside as he lay dying.
I mean, there's some stuff I do like about the guy.
I think some of his quotes are quite nice.
He obviously looked pretty gentle and photogenic, like a spiritual garden gnome.
And I like the fact that he was kind of an anarchist.
I think that's interesting.
But, you know, he's not a philosopher.
He's not a philosopher.
He's not reasoning from first principles.
He's not building.
So he's a witch doctor with regards to science.
When it comes to ethics and philosophy, you've got to reason this stuff from the beginning.
Universalize your principles.
Know your history, particularly the history of ethics.
You've got to make your case.
You've got to really work it at ethics before you start making pronouncements.
Fortune cookies are not physics.
So yeah, he wrote some stuff about women that was nice.
He once wrote of his wife, I simply cannot bear to look at her face.
The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something.
When his wife, he'd been married to her since she was 14, when his wife got pneumonia, Gandhi refused to get her penicillin and simply allowed her to die.
Come on, she's the mother of your children.
You might not like her, but throw her a drug or two.
So yeah, Gandhi proclaimed the British Empire was for the welfare of the whole world, and he accepted the superiority and predominance of the white race.
He reminded the white people that upper-caste Indians share with the Europeans a common heritage, the blood of the noble Aryan race.
That never goes wrong.
According to him, it is Aryan blood which is responsible for the advancement of human civilization.
He suggested to a guy named Reverend Dock to civilize the niggers by converting them to Christianity and by infusing Aryan blood into their race.
He told the white colonists that the preservation of racial purity, apartheid, was as important to the Indians as to the Europeans.
He did accept birth control for women for a short period, but he was once asked if he would advocate birth control in cases where the health of the mother might be at risk in 1905.
No, he said one exception will lead to another, till it finally becomes a general exception.
He doesn't, so he said, "My special function from childhood," you might say, "has been to make women realize, "make a woman realize her dignity," but he denied them basic necessities like birth control and pain relief in childbirth and so on, a big opponent but he denied them basic necessities like birth control and pain relief in childbirth Now, some Indians believe or make the case that Gandhi actually delayed Indian independence by 25 years due to his erratic beliefs.
And India today doesn't really follow Gandhi's teachings anyway, like the later, you know, be the change you want to see in the world stuff.
So he's revered as a holy man.
I once dated an Indian woman who told me that when Ben Kingsley went around India, everybody went nuts because he was revered so much.
But the principles he supposedly stood for are not applied.
The violence against the Untouchables, the Dalits, continues.
Rapes, murders, beatings are all aimed at India's lowest class and carried out by other Indians.
So the fact that he went on a hunger strike to stop the British from giving rights to the slaves of the Indian society is pretty wretched.
And, you know, I'll write this stuff.
I don't know if all of this is true.
I've tried to double-check everything.
He told an Indian audience that black Africans are raw negros whose sole ambition is to pass his life in indolence and nakedness.
And, yeah, he defended the caste system, praising its fundamental divisions and so on.
So, There's a reason why five times he did not get the Nobel Peace Prize.
So, again, you know, I feel like I'm taking a dump on the shiny bald head of the dead, but I think it is really important.
These people are fundamentally flawed.
I mean, Picasso was a monster.
Freddie Mercury broke window panes over people's heads.
I mean, you've really got to be careful when you worship people of extraordinary talent and significance.
When you come across somebody who's revered by people, the first question to ask is, what purpose does that reverence serve those in power?
Reverence for someone almost cannot be sustained without the support of the media, without the support of the clergy, without the support of the politicians and the people in power.
So what purpose does it serve?
Well, having someone that you can worship solidifies a new nation and hopefully some of this mystical religious worship of a deeply flawed, deeply flawed, if not downright immoral human being
Can recede and we can begin to reason with each other and speak with each other as empowered and independent human beings free of these empty ghost legs and chains of the venerated dead.
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