Gandhi and Schiller

Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind.

It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man. – Mahatma Gandhi

Even the best man in the world cannot live in peace if his malign neighbour won’t let him. – Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, Act 3, Scene 4

One would like to know in what context Gandhi expressed the belief that the Nazis would have been best resisted non-violently. If he meant that Jews, socialists and others in Germany between 1933 and 1945 should have resisted their persecution non-violently, he could not have known the circumstances at the time. The persecutors did not understand the moral language of non-violence.

On the other hand, if he meant that Germans and the people in the countries the Nazis invaded and occupied could have used non-violent passive resistance as a means to defeat their oppressors, his thesis is definitely worth discussing. One assumes he meant that the allies should have refrained from waging war against Germany and have left it to the occupied people to shake off the Nazi yoke non-violently.

This assumes that the Nazis had occupied Germany in the first place. A good case can be made for that position since the Nazi government was never put to the test in a free election. That it came to power constitutionally is meaningless.

One would like to believe that the British left India primarily as a result of Gandhi’s non-violent tactics because the British were receptive to Gandhi’s moral position. Not quite. While, no doubt, it had a strong impact on British public opinion, other factors were far more important. The British empire, in India and elsewhere, was already in decline. For that reason alone Gandhi’s role cannot be used as a case in point.

However, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which the overwhelming majority of the population in occupied countries practiced non-violent non-cooperation with all civil authorities, not only with those of the foreign occupier, to such an extent that all communal life in their countries came to a standstill – no public services were functioning, let alone the administration of the occupier – while at the same time the shock caused by the Gestapo’s and the SS’s inevitable punitive measures was absorbed.

It is not conceivable that the Gestapo and hard-line Nazi officials and true believers would be softened by the moral strength of such wholesale non-cooperation, but it is plausible that most officers and men in the German army, even some of the generals, would be shaken in various degrees. The majority of them were neither Nazi nor anti-Nazi, like the rest of the population.

The reason, however, why such a scenario is far-fetched is that it assumes a discipline among ordinary people comparable to that of Gandhi’s mass following. In Europe such discipline did not exist. The Indians had it because Gandhi’s ideology was based on many elements of their religions. In Europe both Protestant and Catholic churches were divided.

The peaceful citizen in occupied Europe could not resist his malign neighbour non-violently if the vast majority of his fellow citizens did not do the same thing.

Was it really, or only, non-violence that liberated India? In colonized India there were hundreds of thousands of Indians to each British officer, so the cause of independence had sheer numbers on its side as well as time. The British people certainly came to love Gandhi and to respect the moral courage of his non-violent strategy, but the British officials who counted could also see the tide of violent anti-imperialism rising behind Gandhi, a tide that would dominate if Gandhi’s method failed. Likewise, in the American civil rights struggle: behind Martin Luther King stood Malcolm X. It is a lot easier to deal with the nice guy when you see the nasty guy behind him rolling up his sleeves.