PARTISAN REVIEW
of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it
makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists,
specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one
question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What
about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated?
If
not,
how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say
that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer
to this ql:lestion, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the
"you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a some–
what similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr.
Louis Fischer's
Gandhi and Stalin.
According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's
view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which
"would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's
violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed
anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impres–
sion that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer,
but Gandhi was merely being honest.
If
you are not prepared to take life,
you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When,
in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he
was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.
At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after
all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism
and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British gov–
ernment. The important point here is not so much that the British
treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command pub–
licity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in
"arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance
to hear what you are doing.
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? The
Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea
happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to
judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference.
But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against
one's own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how
does one put it into practice internationally? Gandhi's various con–
flicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty
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