Palestinian non-violence

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Tue Oct 24 10:00:28 PDT 2000


In message <p04330111b61b64bbefc0@[216.254.77.128]>, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Does nonviolence depend in part on the exhaustion of your opponents?
>Wasn't the British empire near the end of its life in India? In the
>U.S. south, wasn't the local elite under attack from the federal
>government and national opinionmakers?

Certainly the British Empire was at its end, but the role of non-violent resistance in dismantling it is generally exaggerated. On the contrary it was the often violent confrontations that dislodged Britain. The fatal blow to white prestige in the Far East was not struck by Gandhi, but the armies of the Emperor Hirohito, who overran the British colony in Singapore. From that moment on the Empire was doomed.

Elsewhere it was what Yeats called the 'terrible beauty' of violence in Dublin in 1916 that lit the fuse under British rule. (Which did not stop the British from executing the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington). Easter leader Patrick Pearse's writings exult violence as a great clarifier.

Non-violence was made important after the event, not by the Indians (and certainly not the Irish), but by the British (and later the Americans), who re-wrote the history of the civil disobedience campaign to remove the many bombings, Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army and other violent challenges to British rule.

While it is true that Churchill loathed Gandhi (a 'fakir') elsewhere the British establishment idolised him as the very model of what a 'responsible' liberation movement should be. Particularly solicitous of Gandhi's Congress Party was Earl Mountbatten, Viceroy of India (blown up by the IRA some thirty years later, following the Maze Hunger Strike, and inspiring the doggerel 'Ten Dead and not forgotten, we got Eighteen [soldiers killed at Warrenpoint] and Mountbatten')'

Indeed Sir Stafford Cripps sent Communist Party and Comintern member, the Anglo-Indian Rajani Palme Dutt on a speaking tour of India, pleading with the masses not to betray Britain in its hour of need (ie the Second World War).

The reward for India's forbearance was the British-made famine in Bengal, where, rather than let the Japanese get hold of a grain-rich region, the colonial authorities exported it all west, killing around three and a half million. (This genocide, I see Leo O'Casey celebrating as the 'People's War' over on another channel.)

Post-war, Mountbatten oversaw the decolonisation, conspiring to provoke a breach within the Congress Party, between Muslim and Hindu, that culminated in fierce inter-ethnic violence and the disastrous separation of the country.

Non-violence! Lenin pointed out that there was always a British strand of pacifism that counselled its enemies to lay down their arms in the sure knowledge that the existing division of the spoils was so disproportionately in favour of England that any disturbance of the peace could only be disadvantageous.

It is in this light that we should see the demand put upon Palestinians that they lay down their slings and stones, while Israel is firing machine guns from Helicopter Gunships. -- James Heartfield



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