Can this please be over?

Vinod, at the Mutiny has a post up that makes me angry and sad. Apparently, former Senator Fred Thompson, on hearing an allusion to Gandhi in the recent antiwar rally in Washington, chose to take a swing at the Mahatma, effectively calling him an anti-Semite for advising a policy of non-violence for German Jews. Vinod goes on to call ahimsa "nihilism", and suggests that Gandhi's ideology comes down to "making the other guy feel bad".

This completely misses the power of Gandhi's strategies, but it also contains a pretty major internal flaw in logic. Namely, it assumes that it was possible for the Jews to avoid the Holocaust by doing ANYTHING themselves. Let's not forget that this is a real, awful event that occurred. People responded to it in many different ways, ranging from escape to violent resistance. Nothing worked. Yet Thompson and Vinod make veiled accusations about Gandhi's sentiment towards Jews because ... his strategy to prevent the Holocaust wouldn't have worked. Would the conservatives' favorite strategy -- a violent uprising -- have worked either? If anything, it would have resulted in an even faster, more brutal massacre.

But of course Gandhi's strategy wasn't just to make the British "feel bad". After hundreds of years of poor administration, replete with massacres and malign neglect, Indians did not have a strong hold on the British moral imagination, and no Englishman was going to cry over a brown corpse. Rather, Gandhi's strategy was twofold: first, to cripple the British economy (at least in India), and second, to bring international attention to the atrocities in India and, therefore, harm Britain's vital strategic alliances. This is REAL POLITICS, not some lame feel-good personal ideology. With the means of production in India immobilized and the Americans leaning on the Brits, independence was the only choice. The crux of Gandhian strategy is to know that the military power of one's foe is too great to defeat on that stage, so one must make one's own deprivations have political worth. If you must starve, starve because you're not working in the enemy's factories. If you must die, make sure you die in front of a foreign journalist's camera. Make sure that your suffering means something in the long term. Is that really such a squishy concept? The military alternative is the way of Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara. Would an Indian version of the Vietnam war really have been a better way to gain independence?

Now, would a Gandhian strategy have prevented the Holocaust? As I said earlier, I don't think so. But I don't think it could have been any worse than REALITY, so why should the suggestion of strategy justify Gandhi-hate?

Independent of all of this, I'm just really sick and tired of being in this era of politics, in which the only thing that matters is whether or not people are on the "right side". Some liberal protester namechecks Gandhi, and we suddenly need to believe he's a weakling anti-Semite. "UnAmerican Activities" comes back into the lexicon and suddenly we're all supposed to love Joseph McCarthy. The alternate reality is getting so extreme we even need an encyclopedia to hold it. And y'know, I'm sure that similar things have happened on the Left too. It's not conservatism, really, it's the "us vs. them" attitude, in which you can believe ANYTHING about your political opponents but must remain absolutely blind about your allies. We've gotten to a point where you have to choose between People's History and Patriot's History, and either way the only objective truth or moral righteousness in the world is on "your side". I'm just sick of it.