Gandhi's personal family life no so "enlightened".

*Mods* if this isn't the right forum, please move..


10 Curious Controversies About Mahatma Gandhi
JO RODRIGUEZ OCTOBER 31, 2014
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—hero of India’s independence through his nonviolence movement and one of the most revered figures in the nation’s history—led a glorious life, one which seekers of peace and wisdom have emulated for decades. He is known as “Mahatma,” or “great soul,” a title reserved only for the most righteous and most venerated of men.Then again, it’s also worth noting that he was human, and to be human is to err. Over the years, historians and critics have found certain controversial quirks in the man’s life.

Don't shoot the messenger. This saddens me & shocks me as I'm sure it will cause you to feel the same.


Source:
listverse.com...

a reply to: Mjab6910

I dunno, seems like a rewriting of history/character assassination to me.

Motivated by who knows what.

Apparently he may have been gay (according to some secret letters), didnt always get along with his family and may have worked for the Dutch in S. Africa?

One thing seems clear, he did not support the Zionist/Jewish claim to Palestine.

The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine.

Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.

I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

originally posted by: Mjab6910
Don't shoot the messenger. This saddens me & shocks me as I'm sure it will cause you to feel the same.

Need a hug?
It's a painful part of the maturation process to realize that our childhood 'heroes' were human, like us all.
That no matter how much Love and Wisdom and Peace he shined, in his/our life, that he/we also get gassy, and fart and experience the same emotions and feelings that we all do, as humans!
Some manifest more of this, some more of that...
Even the unconditional Love of 'Jesus' was punctuated by very 'egoic/human' moments of anger!

Don't let the pain of your discovery of Gandhi's humanity over-shadow his Light!
(The same for your father; and you will ask the same of your son...)

I dont think its widely accepted that Ghandi was (a)God as opposed to Jesus, but just give it a thousand years or so.

A soul bound to flesh can only see light when there is dark contrast. An enlightened soul does not recognize the dark.

If he was more good than bad I do not know.

But the quote "An Eye for an Eye Will Make the Whole World Blind" is for me a miss understanding of the nature of direct karma and mirroring back behavior.

A soul in a direct karma retribution situation very quickly becomes careful on how they treat others since they know what they bring to others will be mirrored back at them.

You have to be really illogical and insane with no self control to harm another if you will receive the same harm back. The whole have empathy for the aggressor to escape karma only prolongs and increases suffering.

a reply to: LittleByLittle

That's only if they actually believe in karma.. and even then there's a chance of retaliation.

I don't really understand how it seems like a misunderstanding to you though, care to explain? The quote is all about the harmful effects of endless retaliation.

First you say you have to be really illogical and insane to harm another if you will receive the same harm back. But then you criticize having empathy for your aggressor, making it sound like retaliation is the way to go. I'm a little bit confused.

I knew about the sex scandals and the racism in South Africa. In fact, they left out a lot about his time in South Africa. He fought for the Indian immigrants "right" to be treated equally with the white upper class, but wouldn't even ride in the same bus with South Africa's black people. (For the record, white people only made up about 10% of South Africa's population.) He even was pro-war against the black South Africans during the "Kaffir Wars".

Instead of this being "character assassination" or "revisionism", it's more like the truth was concealed for a long time. It would be like if 80 years from now, scandalous stories were revealed about some well loved celebrity, televangelist, or philanthropist. Would you instantly reject the accusations because they go against their highly controlled public image? Or would you look into them further to find out the truth?

I can add to this. In many ways, the India we see today is an outgrowth of Gandhi's socio-political desires. What many people forget is that India coming out of WWII was excellently positioned to thrive. It had won its independence, hadn't been torn apart by civil war like China had, and it had escaped the worst ravages of Japanese invasion. And thanks to Gandhi, the British colonial rule had ended pretty much peacefully leaving behind well-developed economic infrastructure and the critical social and economic institutions and professional, disciplined civil service needs along with independent courts. They also left behind the legal code based on English Common Law.

All of this should have left India well positioned to take advantage the same way that the US and a reformed Japan and Germany ended up doing, creating a similarly positioned economic powerhouse. Imagine that world ...

What went wrong?

First, you have to understand that we in the West are almost uniformly taught to adore Gandhi. However, his legacy in India and similar countries is far more controversial. One of the reasons why has to do with aforementioned India/Pakistan split. But the other reason does has to with a new reassessment of his political and economic theories and ideas which were odd and wound up being put into wide practice, and we can see their fruit in much of India today.

Gandhi was first and foremost a moral thinker. We can see this in the list mentioned. He openly and freely admitted that he would rather people live in grinding poverty under his own system than prosper under another. Again, I think the OP's list alludes to this at several points. In Gandhi's morality, suffering and poverty are moral and to be desired, and perhaps he thought he was saving people ... a sort of collective salvation. In that sense, he was shoving his morality down all of India's throat.

He preached a kind of radical self-reliance that sounds almost Jeffersonian. It was called gram swaraj in which every person and every village must be self-sufficient. What it really ends up boiling down to is a sort of glorified subsistence existence leaving people vulnerable to disaster and hostile to trade, investment, technology and more complicated forms of economic existence.

Don't rush into technologically oriented devlopment. First make sure what impact it will have on employment, and through this on the well-being of the poor people.

Gandhi

This is where he starts to sound a little more Marxist in the sense of Marx's Labor Theory of Value where he seems to be saying the labor in and of itself is valuable without looking at the value of what is produced by the labor. So he is creating a nation of people employed in the subsistence tasks of merely fighting to keep themselves alive. The labor has value only inasmuch as it kept them from dying, but not in actually making either the people or the country prosper.

Then Nehru took Gandhi's framework and applied Fabian socialism to it. Now you had a subsistence level state laboring to support a centralized state trying to forcefully industrialize itself. After Nehru came the slide into autocracy with Indira Gandhi, and the rest is, as they say, history.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism Kevin Williamson, pg 53-58

I paraphrased, of course.

a reply to: Mjab6910

Just another reminder not to buy into the romanticized view of people. Like has already been said on here, every person is human, and no one is perfect.

But in the end, it's better to have a well-rounded view of an individual than to only know about their redeeming qualities. Life isn't a Disney fairytale...it's more like the original Brothers Grimm versions.

a reply to: Mjab6910

A bit like Mother Theresa, Gandhi is venerated in a godlike fashion.
The reality is somewhat different - both had many faults.

The truth is that Gandhi was a pretty loathsome character, but to openly state that would be to offend the PC Brigade and those who have built up this image of ultimate virtue and humility.

a reply to: Mjab6910

something i heard about ghandi,


there was another one i can't find any more.
what did ghandi say when he got shot?
Holy Cow!

a reply to: Mjab6910

A poem I like raises the point that no matter how good a person is, they'll always retain a little 'germ' of evil. Conversely, in the hearts of the worst people will be found a 'glow worm tenderness' of love and goodness.

Basically there are no pure saints and our sinners aren't all the way bad.

If Gandhi was a human, he'd have human prejudices and human hormones revving through his system from time to time; he'd be a caricature of a human if he pretended to be anything else.

He may well have been a curmudgeonly asshole in his personal life. Still, his overall impact on the world at large forgives him.

a reply to: Mjab6910

Another troubling aspect of Gandhi was his ideas, for instance his pacifism. He once stated the German jews should commit collective suicide to convince the world of Hitler's evils. Ironically, he was advocating the deaths of more Jews than in the entire holocaust.

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..."

One might do well to read Orwell's reflections on the man.

Reflections on Gandhi

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

Wow! Thank you for this information and link. I actually think I will take that hug, offered above in the thread.

a reply to: Alien Abduct

I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but what do you mean by not recognising the dark? Is it the view that darkness can act as a catalyst for expanded awareness and growth?

a reply to: TheLaughingGod

In a sense yes.

A soul bound to flesh (the material world) needs darkness to see the light.

An enlightened soul (a soul that may have been previously bound to flesh) no longer needs the darkness for contrast. Doing so in the eyes of an enlightened soul would be akin to having to constantly look at a piece of paper with "1+1=2" written on it in order to remind one's self that one plus one does in fact equal two.

I hope that helped.

a reply to: Alien Abduct

Thank you =)