On Monday, October 25, 1999 4:16 PM Kenneth Mqackendrick wrote: Subject: Re: Zizek on Havel
>"Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the
>first case of a military intervention in a country with
>full sovereign power, undertaken not out of any specific
>economico-strategic interest but because that country was
>violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group.
>To understand the falseness of this, compare the new
>moralism with the great emancipatory movements inspired by
>Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These were movements
>directed not against a specific group of people, but
>against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised
>practices; they involved a positive, all-inclusive stance
>that, far from excluding the 'enemy' (whites, English
>colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it
>to do something that would restore its own moral dignity.
I'm not sure why Kenneth prefers the Ghandi of yesteryear to the Havel of today.
This was the man Trotsky called "a fake leader and a false prophet" for his role in the Congress Party of India. Contrary to the popularly held view, this was no party of liberation and was in fact founded by English civil servant, AO Hume with the backing of the viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin. Hume argued that "a safety valve for the escape of great and growing forces...was urgently needed" and that "no more efficacious safety valve than our Congress could possibly be devised". Ghandi played a key role in perfecting this "safety valve".
His Satyagraha campaigns stressed that oppressors should be treated as equals who could be convinced of the truth and justice of the cause of the oppressed. What was key here was that he refused to allow the use of force by the oppressed. Satyagraha thus only served to reconcile the oppressed to the continuation of their oppression.
While Ghandi's campaigns depended on the support of lawyers, traders, money-lenders, village officials and sub-contractors, his affectation of traditional dress and customs also gave him wide appeal to the impoverished masses whose support he won to Congress. His methods allowed Congress to gain popular support through a form of limited opposition to Britain but at the same time avoided the large-scale violence which could have threatened the vested interests of the Indian bourgeoisie. The Oxford Modern History of India summed up Ghandi's role as "in a sense the government's best friend at that time" and credited him with ensuring that "resentment did not flame into insurrection".
There's a lot more that can be said about the pernicious role of this late 20th Century folk hero - none of it positive as far as I can see.
Russell