Ghandi, Aung San Su Kiy and other arseholes

[solidgoldbrass]

Isn't it just the case that it's nearly impossible to achieve huge memorable changes in the world without being a bit of an arsehole? You've got to have a massive ego to think you can take on such a challenge, and so it's really not that surprising that pretty much everyone who achieved massive changes for the good turns out to have been a bit of a sod round the house and have various other unattractive traits.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Has anyone denigrated the Dalai Lama yet? ;)

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

:) @ silli

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?

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

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

Um, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela . . . all mentioned on this thread for their misogyny.

All men of colour and leaders of struggles for people of colour.

Just. Quite. Noticeable. Not. Dissing. White. Guys.

I don't think anyone is doing that though MrGin, so there is no need to say people sound unhinged .

Shame.

A thread like this had the potential to be an explorational discussion of women's place in history and current affairs.

Or a discussion of how women are written out of history, or not considered in history.

There is lots to discuss here; the Indian government's ban on disclosure of Gandhi's behaviour with women, the fetishization of femininity, the using of women as a 'resource' for non-violence, the problematic nature of non-violence as used against violence, barriers to gender equality in Indian society, religious chastity and the problems thereof.

Endless subjects.

All of which are more interesting than 'you are mad for wanting to discuss this' - which is rude, boring and aggressive and just brings any discussion to a halt really.

What is it with the mental health slurs on here at the moment BTW? Most unpleasant.

Oh and now we are racist too apparently .

Can we not discuss those topics without denigrating people who have achieved amazing things for mankind?

Sorry 'mankind' is a bad choice of word on a feminist board. Humankind?

Just for the sake of dissing a few white guys ...

Tolstoy.

He is an example of a celebrated white man known for setting himself challenges to do with "lying alongside" women I think. He hated himself in relation to his sexual desire if I recall correctly. He challenged himself to keep away from his wife's room as long as he could and only went there in a state of self-loathing and haste that must have been traumatic for her.

That sticks in my mind because he is so very hard on his characters, especially Anna Karenin, whose sexuality he was so stern about. His harshness towards his characters always seemed to me like a projection of his sexual self-hatred. And men do that a lot of course -- hate and fear their sexual appetite and project the fear/hated object onto the women who arouse it. Using women to play out a conflict in their onw head, perhaps similarly to Gandhi in this respect?

Ruskin, another white man who made lying alongside his wife a traumatic business for himself and for her, in his case because he, like young men today, was repelled by pubic hair (by extension, repelled by her sexuality).

Tolstoy in particular is someone I think of as brilliant, laudable, but problematic to say the least in his attitude to women. It isn't hard or unusual to admire and criticise the same person?

"Just. Quite. Noticeable. Not. Dissing. White. Guys."

Are there many examples of white guys leading struggles against oppression in the relatively modern Western world?

Okay, just try for a minute to imagine you are a woman of colour reading this thread.

You read comments about 3 people of colour who made a massive difference for the rights and opportunities of people of colour. One spend decades in prison and two were murdered for their beliefs. You may feel inspired by the actions of these people of colour who achieved so much in the face of extreme opposition. Depending where you live, you may as a person of colour, you are now have human rights as a direct results of one of their actions.

You read comments about the things they did in their personal lives that were not good to women, or that they said and did things in their lives that did not reflect feminist values. The suggestion here is that they aren't quite so worthy, that at best they and their achievements are "tarnished," and at worse, they don't qualify for being admirable, inspirational or heroic, if you are a good feminist.

It's expecting women of colour to choose between two intrinsic parts of their identity. It happens all the time and it sucks but it doesn't have to be like that. It's hardly surprising though many women of colour are cynical about some strands of feminism.

Solidarity in Feminism Or How White Feminists Fail Intersectionality?.Again

Racism, like sexism, doesn't have to be overt. If there was a thread talking about people who did bad things and the discussion focussed primarily on three respected feminists, that would be indirect sexism, and I'd be calling that one out as well.

Ta Oatie for the additions :)

The point though is that no one seemed to notice, or at least think it significant that the thread was focussing on dissing men of colour. Same thing often happens on discussion threads where no one "notices" that the targets of most of the dissing happen to be women. Both are examples of indirect discrimination. The latter tends to get picked up on sharpish on Mumsnet. I wish the former did as well. :(

I think it comes back to... People aren't perfect and it's pretty impossible to excel at everything. Sometimes single minded focus is needed... What about Einstein or the Dalai lama? Do you think any faults they have can detract from the good they do? I understand what people are saying but I think time and context are important.

Kritiq, I think that's down to focus. I tend to focus on all discrimination, some tend to only focus on discrimination of women, but maybe it's down to personal experience.

Yes Eclectic, to both posts.

To be fair, I meant posts in this room demonstrating indirect sexism would likely be tackled sharpish, not necessarily everywhere on MN. Even if the membership is predominately women, there's still internalised sexism stuff.

A quote from Gandhi re women (note that the Guardian article didnt' quote him, it was all hearsay):

Gandhi said this....

Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity - to me, the female sex, not the weaker sex. It is the nobler of the two, for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge."

"I learned the lesson of non-violence from my wife, when I tried to bend her to my will. Her determined resistance to my will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering of my stupidity involved on the other, ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule her."

SO Gandhi wasn't all bad then....

Frankly I'm disgusted by some of the comments on this thread.

Some people feel driven to do something about poverty or injustice, as Mother Theresa did, and Gandhi, and ASKK. And then the priviledged of MN put them down for it.

I think I agree, how do you define internalised sexism? I'm interested in internalised oppression... Are they similar?