Saddam Hussein down, next...Gandhi!

Former Senator and Law & Order DA Fred Thompson has launched his not yet launched 2008 Presidential campaign with a stirring radio address exposing the truth about Mahatma Gandhi. Seriously.

Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”
And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER.

Okay, first of all Saddam Hussein had OPEN IRAQ TO UN INSPECTORS DURING HIS "LAST CHANCE". THEY WERE FINDING NOTHING WHEN BUSH REFUSED TO WAIT TO BOMB/INVADE. How can conservatives still point to the decision to attack Iraq as some proud, visionary moment for our glorious leader? I guess I answered my own question.

Gandhi's call for the British and Jews to "surrender willingly" to the Nazis during WWII is easy to demonize and it seems to be Thompson's whole point here. Saying Gandhi's views of non-violence is "unamerican" is both crazy (would it have REALLY been better if the US desegergated through armed insurrection?) and meaningless. Is this really what Thomspon is talking about, the removed tactical analysis more about Gandhi's political situation than the actual war in Europe over 60 years ago? This is what you are bringing? And as horrible as it sounds, as Chomsky describes in an interview, this is essentially a tactical suggestion.

Q: You know what he said to Lewis Fisher in 1938 about the Jews in Germany -- that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which would "have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."

A: He was making a tactical proposal, not a principled one. He wasn't saying that they should have walked cheerfully into the gas chambers because that's what nonviolence dictates. He was saying, "if you do it, you may be better off."

If you divorce his proposal from any principled concern other than how many people's lives can be saved, it's conceivable that it would have aroused world concern in a way that the Nazi slaughter didn't. I don't believe it, but it's not literally impossible. On the other hand, there's nothing much that the European Jews could have done anyway under the prevailing circumstances, which were shameful everywhere.

The main point though, as Sepia Mutiny points out, Gandhi’s enemies aren’t America’s enemies. The protesters Thomspon is trying to smear with an association with GANDHI (?!) aren't advocating a "suicidal foreign policy", they are advocating a humane one. Gandhi was talking about social justice and equality, not how to maintain a global super power through arms.

But Thompson is right, you can't really learn anything through what some towel wearing freak had to say. The only visionaries are hack actors like Ronald Regan. And that guy who allowed Cole Trickle to race again at Dayton, and the dude who fired that gay ADA, but not for being gay, or that "actor" who played white supremacy huckster Knox Pooley on the 1987-90 TV show Wiseguy. Seriously.