Ira Chernus has an excellent piece in today's Religion Dispatches on the recent New York Times editorial claiming that Gandhi would have opposed Occupy Wall Street:
Gandhi abhorred the idea of cooperating with injustice of any kind; he would rather have died. So he dedicated his life to the belief that lasting solutions to humanity’s problems come from non-cooperation with injustice. And he called us to actively obstruct the workings of unjust systems—to clog the machine with our bodies, as his hero Thoreau put it.
Far from cooperating with the Wall Street machine, then, Gandhi would have us occupy it quite literally, bringing thousands to make it physically impossible for the tycoons, hedge fund managers, and stock and bond traders to perpetrate their outrages on the rest of us.
Of course the Mahatma knew that the authorities, the hired hands of the 1%, would use violence against satyagrahis. At that point he would say, “we are the 100%. we are here to bring well-being and prevent harm to all. No one is an enemy.” From this premise of universal love he derived his teaching of strict nonviolence: even when they beat, gas, and pepper spray you—even when they come to kill you—do them no harm and wish them no harm. But do whatever it takes, nonviolently, to stop their actions, which harm them as well as the rest of us.
Strict nonviolence is a hard teaching, to be sure, and one that is open to debate. But there’s no question that it’s far different from the bland cooperation with injustice that Desai advocates in the Mahatma’s name.
Much as with Martin Luther King, we have a popular mythological conception of Gandhi that depicts him, first and foremost, as a nice guy. What these depictions leave out is that he was also a hard-headed political strategist, who understood the need to deploy power for the acheivement of objectives. He also recognzied, as the Times piece does not, that there are always those who will happily use morality as a shield for their own continuing exploitation of the status quo. Gandhi may have believed that we are all part of the 100%, but he would have had no time for the argument that, therefore, we shoudl allow injustice to continue.
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