Gandhi's Birthday

King's trip to India
Gandhi in glasses
Harriet Tubman

Today, October the 2nd is Gandhi’s birthday. He was born in 1869, Just ten years earlier, in 1859 the United States was in the midst of trying to abolish slavery, and there was a great effort to eliminate the north coast Indian population.

1859 was the period just before the Civil War. A woman by the name of Harriet Tubman was helping slaves escape to Canada, with what was called the Underground Railroad. Tubman, herself an escaped slave, made about a dozen trips from the south to the north with rescued slaves. She lead them through a series of safe places and safe houses until she reached a safe place for the escaped “Negroes” to live. She was able to rescue almost her entire family. To insure that her route, and the people that provided her with safe houses and passages would not be revealed, she carried a pistol in her pocket. Any slave that wanted to return when the going got rough was threatened with her gun. She told them that she would not allow anyone to turn back and reveal their route, and that she would surely kill them if they tried. No one tried, and no one died by her pistol. Now that’s my kind of woman. No peaceful resistance there. It was do it her way or die. In the end nobody will argue with her results, or the methods that she used to achieve them.

The extermination of the American Indian is another story. For the most part they only offered peaceful resistance. A few Indians tried to fight the white man, but they were the first to die. The rest tried to get along peacefully and co-exist with the white man. The rogue white man, and the greedy white thugs, set out to just plain get rid of the Indian. Their excuse was that they were not being protected from the “predations” on their farmland and cattle. They formed groups of “rangers”, and killed the Indian people indiscriminately. The killing was finally stopped by white people with sore consciences. Anonymous letters were written to outside newspapers with the news of the slaughter. The killing was finally stopped by the outrage of the general populace. But few Indian People were left.

It has always been my theory that peaceful protest will only work against peaceful people. Gandhi was only successful, (if you want to call getting people killed during his protest against the British Empire “success”), because he was protesting against peaceful people. That, and India was not worth fighting for. (Sorry, but true)

Dr. Martin Luther King visited India in 1959, and was convinced to try Gandhi's Non-violent resistance in his fight for equal rights for his followers.
"Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation."

Dr. Martin Luther King was wise enough to know that peaceful resistance was a plan that would work in America at the time of his protests. In 1869 he would not have even had a chance to hoist his banner before surely being killed. He was a great and wise man that took advantage of his time and place.

Gandhi on the other hand was somewhat foolish in his peaceful protest, and sacrificed many lives. I believe that he was extremely lucky to have lived as long as he did. With very minor differences in circumstance, it would have been “Gandhi who?”

I think that some things are worth fighting for. I also believe that non-violent protest will only work against peaceful people. It is interesting to note that Dr Martin Luther King, whom I greatly admire, and Gandhi both met violent deaths at the hand of assassins. Neither packed guns.

Both Harriet Tubman, whom I greatly admire, and most of the north coast thugs died of old age. Both packed guns and stood up for what they believed in. Right or wrong.