Mahatma Gandhi Quotes
Dissociate yourselves from the satanic administration, and you will bring it to its knees. You will not have to lift a finger, let alone a stick or stone.
He advocated no cooperation with the British Colonial Administration which depended on Indian officials, administrators, clerks and other workers. The boycott strategy never worked in this case, but civil disobedience did. Boycott did work against the apartheid regime in South Africa a half century later however.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1869-1948, Indian political & spiritual leader, Quoted in “Mahatma Gandhi”, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1922
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British colonial economics imported raw materials to England which then exported them back to the colonies as manufactured goods. Gandhi correctly calculated that by minimizing purchase of English cloth, colonial control of India would not be as profitable. Gandhi not only called for the boycott, but called on Indians to spin their own cloth, set an example be spinning himself, and his Congress party adopted the spinning wheel as its logo and symbol which continues today. Narcotics, was at the time not only legal, but British economic interests controlled much of the world narcotics trade. Gandhi’s call for a boycott of narcotics was as much an economic tactic as it was a health measure.
Some Indians were engaged in a massive program of non-violent passive resistance, but were brutally beaten. Even the Viceroy was outraged. The quotation illustrates the limited power that even the Viceroy of India had as there was a bureaucratic, decentralized government in each state of India which reported to its own administrators and legislatures.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
This quotation is used by the moderate Egyptians and other moderate Arab leaders as well as Israelis and other experts in combating Islamic Fundamentalism to illustrate the thinking process of the Muslim fundamentalist terrorist leader. They are more than willing to sacrifice those they lead (though rarely themselves) if they think that something is to be gained. But if there is nothing to be gained, their “moral” responsibility requires not “wasting” their followers’ lives. Therefore, the way these experts believe they should deal with the radicals is to face them with overwhelming force (a variant of the Powell Doctrine) and never concede anything or let them gain anything from violence. A single concession makes the terrorism, sacrifice and violence worthwhile, but if there is no gain, the leader has wasted the lives of his followers and is less likely to initiate another attack.
He was elected to Parliament while in jail and never took his seat as he died of a hunger strike in jail.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
The Chief Secretary, Lord Castleregh, had put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under the single British Parliament at Westminster. He and his allies had bribed a number of the Irish MPs to support the union. With Union some Irish MPs would then be able to win seats representing Ireland in the British Parliament. Although Grattan and most of the Orangemen opposed the Union, 4 months later, the bill passed comfortably. Ironically, Grattan was one of the Irish MPs whose popularity won a seat in the unified British Parliament.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist, who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and in turn inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: "great-souled", "venerable"), first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.
