Marxistoids, nihilists and other liars accuse Donald Trump of racism with great regularity. Most of them know only admiration for Mr. Mohandas Karamchand, better known as Gandhi.
I don’t blame you if you think his first name was Mahatma. But so it is not: that is an honorary title 1). In his autobiography, Mohandas wrote that he was not happy with that honorary title… Well, well.
I think those people mentioned above are often the same people who think that World War II was mainly a battle between Great Britain and Germany.
Or even worse: a battle between Hitler-Germany and Stalin-Russia.
A painful form of Eurocentrism.
As if Shinto Japan had NOT been waging war in Asia for years when Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland!
The same enthusiastically cherished ignorance also ensures that people know nothing and do not want to know anything, about the contributions of (among others) soldiers from India who fought against Rommel in Africa! 2) A very important turning point in the course of the war, comparable to the Battle of Stalingrad.
And they certainly don’t want to know about what a weirdo Mohandas Karamchand really was. I already heard before that he once claimed the Jews in Europe should have allowed themselves to be slaughtered by the Nazis. Something about kharma or something like that…
I only recently discovered that earlier on he actually wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler. One in July 1939 and one in December 1940. Both with the salutation ‘Dear Friend’.
This was thanks to a person named Kelly Rae Kraemer. She wrote a really amazing article titled ‘Dear Friend’: The Practice of Nonviolence in Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler and published the article in a ‘Journal of
Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis‘.
Let that sink in.
The article is a special illustration of what the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) can do to people.
I will first address her cheerful ignorance, then her hatred.
(In the collection of letters that Rae Kraemer consulted, the short letter from 1939 is number 200, the long letter from 1942 is number 520.)
Can ingnorance be criminal?
At the very beginning of a chapter called Background Rae Kraemer claims:
… on 23 July 1939, fewer than six weeks before Germany’s invasion of Poland led Great Britain to declare World War II …
Of course I am not referring to the fact that in human history no nation ever declared ‘World War‘. Nor will any nation do that in the future; not even Iran under the Ayatollah regime.
My main problem is that not only Great Britain but France too, had made a promise they would finally take on arms if Hitler’s Germany was going to continue on its path.
A few years after he wrote his book Mein Kampf (in prison), that path started with the occupation (in 1936) of the Rhineland. Then the Führer continued via the Anschluss of Austria and the tearing apart of Czechoslovakia. After that Chamberlain flew to Munich and received a piece of paper from Hitler, which he proudly held above his head after his return (1938).
This utterly embarrasing trip was the apex of British appeasement. After that the tables started turning. May 10 of 1940 finally Churchill became prime minister after the debate in the house of commons evaluating the German occupation of Norway.
Hitler’s Courage …
Neither letter 200 nor 520 ever reached Hitler.
Rae Kraemer nevertheless works on those letters using ‘methods of discourse analysis‘. She even writes about ‘linguistic exercises in power‘ and comes up with this: “… he works hard in his writing to [Hitler]…”.
Breathtaking.
But it gets even crazier: “... the assumption of friendship can clearly be seen as a standard Gandhian strategy”.
Seriously, she refers to this special form of doing ‘diplomacy’ -this praising of one of the most evil people in human history- as a ‘strategy’.
Mohandas even calls Hitler ‘courageous’ in letter 520…
Praising Adolph Hitler for his courage: it reminds me of another letter from 126 Sunni ‘Islamic scholars’ to the head of ISIS. They wrote that letter in September 2014 3).
In letter 520 she points out that Mohandas Karamchand reminds Hitler that people in India are also opponents of the British …
Gandhi-inspired collective hatred
After all that very special praise for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Rae Kraemer then goes on to give examples of previous exchanges between more and less conservative Christians and how they should have followed Gandhi’s example…
And then it comes: She does NOT do this by initiating a letter to Trump, but a letter that one Christian could send to another Christian to jointly stir up hatred against Trump.
It goes like this:
I greet you, as fellow Christians, because we share a common faith, that I believe to be larger than our differences. As your Christian friend, I have something important to share with you. I think you should know that many of your co-religionists are concerned by some of your recent political choices. We don’t understand your unsubstantiated claims that former President Obama is a Muslim, nor can we make sense of your unwavering support for President Trump, a self-confessed adulterer.
p 27 in ‘Dear Friend’: The Practice of Nonviolence in Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler
More to come soon
As announced here, I will write even more debunking things about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, mainly -but not exclusively- based on his often published and widely read autobiography with that remakable title The Story of my Experiments with Truth. Yes, without ‘the’ before ‘Truth’ ….
Notes
- Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913
He was the man who gave Karamchand that title, but also someone who criticized him quite a lot, including because of his dogmatic rejection of everything Western. - And that those Indian soldiers only came from very specific groups, especially the Sikhs (and Ghurkas).
- I produced -in Dutch- this very well thought out discussion of that terrible text.