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From Chapter Five: Hitler’s Conversion

Like all the challenges he encountered during a lengthy career, Gandhi saw in fascism a test as much as an opportunity for nonviolence. Though he was not interested, therefore, in making Nazism out to be an exceptional phenomenon falling outside the ken of non-violence, neither was the Mahatma concerned with minimizing the unprecedented nature of its violence. Indeed he was keen to acknowledge this violence in as fulsome a way as possible so as to test the “matchless weapon of non-violence” against it. At the very commencement of war, then, Gandhi went much further than most in imagining the destruction of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in London, shedding tears in the presence of the viceroy at the thought of such an eventuality. Naturally these tears were taken as a display of hypocrisy, and went on to become the subject of numerous jokes by the Mahatma’s enemies. Even more outrageous were considered Gandhi’s statements that Britain could not represent her struggle with fascism as being dedicated to the cause of freedom so long as she held countries like India in subjection, arguing that the British were only able to fight Nazism by adopting its violence. But if leaders like Churchill were mobilizing their people to die in the cause of liberty, why not train them to do so in a nonviolent way that might for the first time disrupt the never-ending cycle of military preparations and war? Only prejudice, thought Gandhi, could lead men to approve the first and reject the second way of sacrifice, since both demonstrated that men could indeed be made to give their lives in the cause of an ideal.

Instead of embarking upon the contradictory task of rejecting fascist violence by trying to match its ferocity, the Mahatma advised the British to prove their principled opposition to Nazism by letting Hitler’s forces enter their country without a fight, while at the same time refusing to cooperate with them in any way. In the absence of armed opposition, he suggested, German troops would lose their purpose, and the refusal of civilians to cooperate with them would render Nazi rule impossible. But more than this it would display the kind of individual and everyday courage that were alone capable of converting Hitler’s soldiers to the path of virtue. Only such a course of action, thought the Mahatma, could translate into reality the anti-fascist resolve that Britain was trumpeting to the world in the name of her people. Before dismissing this advice as unrealistic, we should recognize that the Mahatma never expected his counsel to be followed. He was simply making the argument that Britain’s preparations for war were prompted by fear rather than courage, since they relied upon propaganda that demonized the Germans.