Gandhi Shocker?
During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”
Reported by actor-senator Fred Thompson, who Ann Althouse (to whom the hat is hereby tipped) thinks isrunning for president. Confirmed here, albeit in the context of Gandhi's belief in the moral persuasive power of an absolute commitment to nonviolence:
[B]ecause he viewed many pacifists as specialists in evading unpleasant truths, [George] Orwell did admire Gandhi's unflinching honesty with regard to the Holocaust: When asked about resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi argued that the Jews should have prepared en masse to sacrifice their lives in nonviolence -- something Orwell regarded as "collective suicide" -- in order to "[arouse] the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."
