This is true, but the real applicable question is the opposite: is it worthwhile to talk about the substantive content of the mutterings of someone who happens, in this case, to agree with us… or is it better to point out that he is a pompous ass and move on? The latter action surely does not deny the possible validity of the “prescription” (after all, Joe isn't running around with Kalashnikovs in Palestine).
Gitlin is lecturing the Palestinians, as Obama and every other Westerner does. And he is adding a meta-narrative (as others have pointed out): ah, finally, they have come around to realising that lobbing rockets is terrible… they realise they were wrong all along, etc.
On Jun 9, 2011, at 10:01 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> In a talk given to our Centre for Civil Society in 2009 - http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?11,22,5,1878 - Norman Finkelstein gave a stunning lecture to a large Durban crowd that included Gandhi's grandaughter Ela, in which he argued that Gandhi would have supported Hamas' rocket launches.
I do not see a problem with the idea that Gandhi, in specific circumstances, might have advocated armed/violent struggle, but I am not sure I agree with Finkelstein that the Hamas approach is the right one. The reasons would be pretty much what Robert Naiman listed in his message.
On Jun 9, 2011, at 10:03 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Robert Naiman
> <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:
>> Gitlin may be a pompous ass, but the underlying point is still
>> basically right.
>
> Um, what? I don't have a master's in mathematics, but I can do basic
> addition and subtraction: Israel has been occupying Palestine since
> '67, but the first suicide bombing was until ’94.
This seems to ignore two things: 1. all the militaristic behaviour when Arafat used to walk around in fatigues, and the decidedly militaristic approach (PLA, Fatah, etc) to the Israeli occupation and expulsion of Palestinians. 2. the lack of a strong, alternate non-violent movement. I could be wrong on both counts since my knowledge of Palestinian history is only elementary.
BTW, Israel has been occupying Palestine from the 1940s (and perhaps all the way back to 1917), yes, not 1967?
On Jun 9, 2011, at 10:51 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> I agree with Orwell
> http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/ghandi.html that Gandhi's
> strategy of peaceful civil disobedience could work only in a very
> specific context - the final days of the British rule in India when
> the Brits were essentially looking for a face-saving exit strategy.
> Peaceful protest could gently nudge them them toward accepting "the
> wisdom of leaving" while saving their face as a civilized, human
> rights respecting people (which is of course laughable given their
> prior and subsequent atrocities cf. the suppression of the Mau Mau
> rebellion in Kenya.) However, in different times or a different place
> this strategy would not work -cf. the 1919 Amritsar massacre of
> peaceful protesters for which the British war criminal General Dyer
> was never tried.
[I am responding to what you write above, and not to what is at the URL; for the sake of my own mental health, I try not to read anything by the pompous ass that is Orwell]
Only work? Was it the Black Panthers that brought about civil rights in the USA then? It is one thing to say (as Orwell does, IIRC, in one part of his condescending and shitty essay on Gandhi) that non-violence and civil disobedience only works in the context of a visible, violent alternative (S.C.Bose, Bhagat and others in India, the Panthers in the USA, etc) — which in itself is arguable (popular potrayal of apartheid in S.Africa, AFAIK, places the point of reversal at adoption of non-violence by Mandela/ANC) — but another to hold Indian freedom struggle as a singularity. To hold up Jallianwalla Bagh misses the very point: without non-violent struggle and civil disobedience, the entire freedom struggle might well have been the equivalent of Jallianwala Bagh.
—ravi