The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (29 page)

The people who say violence never solved anything usually say it in tandem with the old saw that “might doesn’t make right,” which even at most relevant is a non sequitur. Flexibility doesn’t make right, either. Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, on the eve of the UN vote authorizing force in Iraq, cowrote an essay for the
International Herald Tribune
against war. “The current moment confronts the world with a terrible decision: will we stand by reason and law or act in force and aggression?… At stake is whether might makes right.”

Left out of his analysis is that even the United Nations, to which he was appealing, enshrines the notion that might makes right into its fundamental charter. The permanent members of the UN Security Council have final authority not because they are the wisest or “rightist” nations, but because they are (or were, at the end of World War II) the mightiest nations. And, ultimately, it is the might of those nations that give the laws of the UN relevance and force.

Regardless, it is true that might doesn’t make right. But might doesn’t make
wrong
, either. This point seems to be lost on a lot of people, particularly the sorts of people who brag incessantly about “speaking truth to power” as if the powerful are incapable of knowing the truth or being decent and the powerless are somehow noble and righteous. No doubt there are some noble and righteous powerless people, but some of the most disgusting, vile, and dangerous people reside in the ranks of the powerless as well. Growing up in New York City in the 1970s I was never mugged, frightened, or harassed by very powerful people. I can’t say the same of the destitute, deranged, or deviant characters who roamed the streets in those days. The root cause crowd might be right; powerlessness may drive some people to do evil things—terrorism, thievery, kidnapping, drug dealing, etc.—but that doesn’t make what they do any less evil.

The thinking on the international stage often seems to be that because America
can
work its will, it should not be allowed to. This is the sort of logic that says it is unjust for a teacher to intervene to stop a bully from tormenting a weaker student because the teacher is so much more powerful than the bully.

The comparative success of Western civilization is not simply the result of might making right, it is the result of right
creating
might. “Let us have faith that right makes might,” Abraham Lincoln beseeched, “and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” By no means was the West without sin. But so many of the sins uniquely attributed to the West—slavery, imperialism, racism—are universal sins of humanity. Take slavery, arguably the oldest and most evil human institution. “On the issue of slavery,” writes Thomas Sowell, “it was essentially Western civilization against the world.” And “what was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil.” That because “it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery.” Specifically, it was the conservative Christian abolitionist ideology, centered in Britain, which forced the end of slavery, at least in the West. In North Africa and the Middle East, where slave trading was an ancient practice, it took longer. White Europeans were still sold in Egyptian markets until the 1880s.

Anti-Western, or postcolonial, intellectuals and activists bring up the West’s rap sheet not because we were uniquely complicit in slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, but because we are uniquely vulnerable to such guilt mongering. “I think it would be a good idea,” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi famously replied when asked what he thought of Western civilization, as if Indian civilization was without sin. To this day, left-wing poseurs have this line stuck to their refrigerators or use it for yearbook quotes as if it is a brilliantly insightful and humorous bon mot, when in reality the joke is on them.

Gandhi was in many respects the pioneer of exploiting Western self-loathing. For many pacifists, “What Would Gandhi Do?” is a more important question than “What Would Jesus Do?” and for good reason. Jesus did believe that violent self-defense was sometimes justified (that’s why he instructed his followers to carry swords). Gandhi did not.

“The Mahatma”—which means, “great soul”—was undoubtedly one of the most idiosyncratic world leaders in modern memory. Particularly given the prevalence of New Age pieties these days, he has become a saint of sorts. A true ascetic, Gandhi voluntarily eschewed luxurious pleasures. He found satisfaction in more humble pastimes. Indeed, among his greatest joys and fascinations was the successful bowel movement. Paul Johnson notes
that the first question he asked of his female attendants every morning was “Did you have a good bowel movement?” One of his favorite books, which he reread often, was
Constipation and Our Civilization.
Deprived of a sense of smell, which no doubt impaired his sense of taste, his vegetarian diet was centered around the goal of a successful digestive cycle. Spices, flavor itself, were to be avoided for Gandhi saw eating as a utilitarian affair.

He had the same attitude toward nearly all the spices of life as well. He came to believe intercourse was a regrettable necessity justifiable solely for the production of children. He embraced the
Brahmacharya
, a spiritualized celibacy that accelerated his estrangement from his wife. By his middle years he took to sleeping with naked women (including his own grandniece) in order to test his capacity for self-denial, and claimed to have only one seminal emission, entirely by accident, in his sleep at the age of sixty-six. He felt great shame for his failure.

Sometimes his beliefs amounted to more than victimless eccentricities. Gandhi refused to let British doctors give his wife a life-saving shot of penicillin, ostensibly on the grounds that she should not have alien substances injected in her body. His fastidiousness was a death sentence for her. And yet he was willing to accept quinine when he himself later contracted malaria. He also let British doctors perform an appendectomy on him, another alien intrusion to be sure.

He was, in short, a peculiar duck. To his credit, unlike most of the iconic, cultish leaders of the twentieth century, he was not power-mad, nor cruel (though his wife may have differed with that). Gandhi benefited from his oddity. His personal asceticism conveyed a moral authority and legitimacy to his political views they did not deserve on the merits. In a way he was the mirror opposite of the sinful preacher who preaches against sin. The preacher is wrong for what he hypocritically does behind closed doors, not for what he says to millions. Gandhi was often admirable for what he did behind closed doors, but that does not mean he was always correct in what he instructed his followers.

For instance, his advice on both personal diet and public agriculture was not merely impractical and gloomy. Had his ideas been translated into public policy they would have subjected millions of Indians to even worse
starvation and even more pervasive poverty than they were already enduring. Gandhi’s social and economic vision was perhaps best described as Tolkienesque. Technology was the enemy of decency, the perfect political unit was the Arcadian village, a subcontinental Shire where, instead of hobbits, Hindus would work individually on their tiny looms.

Of course, you would not know this from the film that helped cement the Gandhian legend. For instance, in
Gandhi
the movie, audiences are led to believe that his first hunger strike was to protest the British police’s horrific slaughter of a crowd of peaceful Indian protestors. But Gandhi’s first hunger strike was devoted to protesting a British effort to grant the Untouchables—India’s lowest and most oppressed caste—greater rights and freedoms, including providing them with access to a form of affirmative action. That wouldn’t play as well on the big screen, alas.

The filmmakers were merely picking up on a practice begun by the British foreign office. Simply put, Gandhi was a creature of the system he sought to overthrow. For years the British Empire used Gandhi as the most convenient nationalist. Unlike other anticolonial activists, Gandhi worked assiduously to prevent violence. “The true oddity,” writes Richard Grenier, “is that Gandhi, this holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of nationalism and democracy, also absorbed from the British his model of virtue in public life. He was a historical original, a Hindu holy man that a British model of public service and dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the world, to become a great moral leader and the ‘father of his country.’”

Gandhi’s accomplishments were great, but absent the context of a liberal empire, he would have accomplished little or nothing. He was “not a liberator, but a political exotic,” writes Paul Johnson, “who could have flourished only in the protected environment provided by British liberalism.”
⁵
The reason there was never a German Gandhi to stare down the Nazi regime is that the Nazi regime was immune to such appeals. Orwell observed that “it is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring
a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?”
⁶

Hence, Gandhi’s brand of nonviolence was not a universal standard for all of humanity but was instead an exceedingly parochial, even backwater, idea. The Gandhian conception that violence never solves anything worked because nonviolence was an effective tool against the British conscience and a country exhausted by war with Germany. Violence wasn’t the answer for colonials in India. But, suffice it to say, violence
was
the answer for American colonists dealing with the same British Empire a century and a half earlier.

Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence led him to what can only be described as incandescently dumb positions. The Mahatma implored the British to surrender to the Nazis (and not the other way around). “I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity,” he told the British. “Let [the Nazis] take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.”
⁷

Fortunately there were no takers.

A starker illustration of the futility of Gandhi’s prescriptions can be found in his advice to the Jews. Asked what the Jews should do in response to the cruelty visited upon them by Gandhi’s “friend” Adolf Hitler, the answer was simple: Commit mass suicide. Gandhi—who despised the idea of a Jewish homeland in “Arab Palestine”—believed that the Jews shouldn’t allow the Nazis to bully them out of Germany. Hence he advised German Jewry to stand up to the Nazis with Gandhian civil disobedience. He believed that such defiance would “have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” When his biographer asked him, “You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” Gandhi replied, “Yes, that would have been heroism.”
⁸

Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was being realized, Gandhi never recanted his position that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” The Jews died anyway, Gandhi explained; at least if they’d followed his advice they would have died significantly. Theologians, ethicists, and philosophers can debate which aspects of this response are
the most offensive. Heroism, after all, is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. What is not open to debate is the stunning naiveté of Gandhi’s universal philosophy of peace. How likely is it that Jewish mass suicide would have “aroused the world” to Hitler’s violence, when the
mass
murder
of the Jews did not. Moreover, of what use is arousing world opinion when Gandhi’s preferred course of action is surrender? If all you propose is to call attention to violence but do not believe that force is ever justified to stop it, why bother?

Still Gandhian nonviolence is preferable to the sort of violence employed by today’s self-proclaimed anti-imperialists: Muslim terrorists. If the Palestinians, for instance, took Gandhian nonviolence to heart, they’d be living in their own state already. But instead they’ve opted for terrorism and bloodshed. When Hamas blows up pizza parlors or sends assassins to slit the throats of babies in their sleep, the “violence never solved anything” chorus remains remarkably mute. When Israel takes lawful action to prevent or punish such attacks, that is the cue for the very same chorus to kick in. That’s because, as ever, the claim that “violence never solves anything” is not a universal truism; it is a selective attempt to manipulate the conscience of those with might not to do right.

17

MIDDLE CLASS

W
hat do all of these folks say? I’m not too sure. But you can figure that out for yourself if you want to by reading Maya Angelou’s “Inaugural Poem” delivered at Bill Clinton’s swearing-in as the forty-second president of the United States. This passage serves as a less than ideal example of the Left’s obsession with identity politics—the idea that we are all locked into our status as gay, straight, black, white, etc. But there are three reasons why I’ve chosen it. First, it’s notable that at the inauguration of a president of the United States, the poem listed just about every flavor of humanity ever captured in a Benetton ad, but never once mentioned
Americans.
Second, it highlights the intense cognitive dissonance of the American Left.