Gandhi and the Holocaust

 

Satyagraha is for Gandhi the 'most noble and best education' its adoption within the rhetoric of civil disobedience not only means a passive protest, a challenge by not doing as Thoreau indicated, but also a challenge by not reacting in violence.

For Gandhi, those who react with violence are afflicted by a certain degree of poverty and Satyagraha means to hold on to the truth, to resist in the name of the truth. My understanding of his proposal indicates that we are individuals who can achieve certain freedom through peaceful protest and that this level of resistance is in a way demonstrating the quality of the soul of the individual. 

Gandhi was criticized for saying that the Jews who were being tortured and killed in masses by the Nazis in Germany needed to accept their faith and in a way, this non-violent protest would elevate them from their counterparts. 

In fact, Gandhi tried to reach Hitler in writing on two occasions to convince him to find peaceful ways to get his message across. Those attempts to communicate failed because it has been said that none of the two letters actually reached him. I think that this is the error in Gandhi's Satyagraha.

Gandhi considered that Adolf Hitler was also human and this is true. Nonetheless, Hitler was not aware of his humanity nor cared about the humanity of those others he was hurting. I think that in order to be able to use non-violent means of protest we have to have an understanding of WHO we are protesting against and what are the ways these opposite leaders are exerting their oppression.

I think that the Jewish community in Germany was powerless against the discrimination and massive assassination of its members and that the world could have intervened more directly at the early stages. The non-violent protest would not have persuaded Hitler simply because he did not consider the Jewish population as equal to him. In fact, the superiority/inferiority issue brought a lot of energy to the nationalist movements in Germany that led the majority to believe that the Jews were indeed inferior.

Non-violent movements can only persevere in my opinion if both sides agreed that there is common ground from where we all can start an argument from. I criticize Thoreau's civil disobedience for not doing enough and Gandhi's Satyagraha for not connecting oppressor and oppressed, for not understanding that when reaching positions of power, certain individuals forget their own sense of humanity and look for any means to sustain themselves and their ideas into such power. 

Image taken from: https://qrius.com/happened-mahatma-gandhi-wrote-adolf-hitler/