Ghandi, Aung San Su Kiy and other arseholes

I think peoplesrepublibofmeow makes some v good points,

these people did great things, they had their faults like all of us, you can't really brand them as such though.

Describing Gandhi or Mother Terassa as a bastard or a bitch first and foremost just makes people sound unhinged IMO

whatmeworry, what do you mean by easier to carry off?

TBH I would have thought Mandela or King would be an easier target to carry off than Gandhi. So why Gandhi, and why now?

Or is this just the logical endgame of an "all men are bastards" standpoint?

:) @ silli

Eclectic, No not yet. Am just swatting up on him, prepared... :o

Has anyone denigrated the Dalai Lama yet? ;)

Also, King was very much influenced by Gandhi. However, Mandela was not. If you read 'long walk to freedom', Mandela wanted to have raise and army. It is only through fate that it did not materialise. Mandela has never been a pacifist.

Lancaster. Not Manchester. You cannot base your views on Gandhi kit by reading one book. You have to read Gandhis biography in the language it is written (in Gujarati) for the correct interpretations.

beachcomber, good link. However you have to put Gandhis musings into perspective. He was a reformist and a person who liked discussions and debates. That is how he formed his opinions. He had a lot I excellent council too with persons called sardar Patel, Tilak, Anne basent, Nehru etc. he wanted to improve the skills of Indians and make India more self reliant. This meant discarding industry which was foreign in India at the time. It was due to Gandhi that the Manchester clothes industry broke down.

TeiTetua it is because there is an 'enter' between the lines.

24HourPARDyPerson, I agree with you on the nuance.

I didn't realise quite what a controversial figure Gandhi was.

This book sounds interesting

And he considered India?s chief enemy to be modernity, arguing until well into the 1940s that the new nation should abhor industry and technology and relocate its core identity and practice in the ancient rhythms of village life and the spinning wheel. ?India?s salvation,? he wrote in 1909, ?consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go.? The rather sinister concept of ?unlearning,? explicitly tied to the more ethereal notion of ?salvation,? has more in common with Wahhabism than with the figures of Mandela, King, or the other moral heroes with whom Gandhi?s name is linked.

There's a lot to unravel. I didn't know about the above, for example.

How come those ^ thingummies sometimes work and sometimes don't?

Yup, "nuance" is the word. And as Kritiq said, you have to allow for the time and place where people lived. Someone might have had wonderful ideas about one aspect of life that we cheer them for today, but been totally backward in other areas. You can't usually say "This was someone totally ahead of their time", because chances are, they were doing and saying what was normal for their era and location in some way.

Another birth control pioneer who saw it as part of the eugenics movement was Marie Stopes' American equivalent, Margaret Sanger. The eugenics movement seems to have appealed to a lot of people who (in hindsight) should have known better.

I heard that Stopes objected to the sexist last line of Kipling's poem "If...". She wrote to him and asked him to change it.

^If you can fill each unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the world and everything that's in it,
And which is more, you'll be a Man, my son!^

I thought that might be a credit to her and a discredit to Kipling, but then I learned that the proposed new line was
And you can lead the race across the ground you've won.

So maybe not so much.

does no, India at the time of the Portuguese and British was not a democracy. It was not a suppressive caste obsessed country like you are making it out to be either. It is all much more complex than I can type out on my iPhone. I argue that the Indians 'deserved' oppression because they were fighting within principalities is like saying that the British deserved to be taken over by the french as there was internal fighting between the north and south (scotts, English etc and between Catholics and Protestants!!)

Sili - I wasn't aware that India was a democracy before the British (or French, Portugese etc) arrived. Nobody took their vote away since they didn't have it. Nor did we (or others) invent a caste system to keep them in place. Your comparison with the UK today doesn't make much sense. That's not to say we don't need changes - root and branch reform is needed - banking system, land reform, worker rights and so on.

Jaysus people nuance

he did good - hurray let's follow his example
but also -
He did harm - let's not follow him there

You have to be able to criticize influential people, because of the very fact they are influential. Otherwise you'd have people blindly following daft teachings just because the Wise One uttered them.

It's not taking away from the good he did, or anyone did, to recognise sometimes they are very wrong.

People well said to does. Wish I had said it. :)

does, that is just like what is happening in Britain today. Dick Cameron and the conservatives are the 'Indian', suppressing the not so wealthy in their own country (see the comparison to caste/class system?) and the Chinese and Indians are taking over the businesses while this happens.

So, once these foreign nations take over Britain, let take away the vote for current British people. Lets have apartheid where 'British' are not welcome in a shop/area.

Thats okay then.

doesbuggerall
thats the same argument the british empire used for all it's expansionist campaigns.

"bloody savages cant stop fighting amongst themselves, better send the troops in, this boder area can be better defended a few miles inland anyway, and besides, cristianity comes in the wake of out soldiers"

yes exactly, but doing that will mean that we will have to humanise the tyrants and that may be painfull when humanising a mass murderer

i wouldnt call gandhi a misogynist bastard, just say he had a dark side.

Sillibilimili - I was just having a dig at your first point where you slag the British for treating the Indians like second class citizens. I'm sure someone of low caste would have been delighted to be thought of as second class by the British when their own countrymen treated them as somewhat sub- or non-human. The Indians were doing a jolly fine job of abusing their own people long before the British arrived.

people, no I am not thinking you are apologising for these people. I am trying to understand what you mean.

Agree with you if you mean that everyone has good and bad in them and that it is not always so black and white. If we stop looking at extreams and analyse everything to see the the greater impact then we may catch the bad quicker...i.e. Mao in China.

Agree if that is what you mean.

I also think that to look at people like Gandhi who achieved so much and then to condense it to 'Misogynist, child-abuser, baby killer' is unintelligent and arsehole-ish.

i dont think anyone is saying it will, just that maybe he shouldnt be idolised as a bekon for feminism.

doesbuggerall when did I say that?