Gandhi was a what?
What do you understand when you hear the word pacifist? .... without looking up the dictionary...
A pacifist is a person who
A) Prays for world peace/attends peace concerts
B) Seeks to avoid confrontation as a way to resolve conflicts
C) May be a confrontationist, but rejects violence
Thanks to everyone who took the poll while it was on. I had to remove it since it caused some other technical problems. If you picked one of the first two choices, did Gandhi meet your definition of a pacifist? My understanding is that Gandhi was ready to pick a fight before you could say "snap poll", and regularly encouraged unpleasant confrontations. He just didn't care for violence.
I guess a pacifist is someone who is in favor of peace, but peace is not well defined. Some say it is simply the absence of war and some others seek a more stringent definition. The kind folks who last edited the Wikipedia page on Peace say
A pacifist is a person who
A) Prays for world peace/attends peace concerts
B) Seeks to avoid confrontation as a way to resolve conflicts
C) May be a confrontationist, but rejects violence
Thanks to everyone who took the poll while it was on. I had to remove it since it caused some other technical problems. If you picked one of the first two choices, did Gandhi meet your definition of a pacifist? My understanding is that Gandhi was ready to pick a fight before you could say "snap poll", and regularly encouraged unpleasant confrontations. He just didn't care for violence.
I guess a pacifist is someone who is in favor of peace, but peace is not well defined. Some say it is simply the absence of war and some others seek a more stringent definition. The kind folks who last edited the Wikipedia page on Peace say
Peace is commonly understood to mean the absence of hostilities. Other definitions include freedom from disputes, harmonious relations and the absence of mental stress or anxiety, as the meaning of the word changes with context.With this latter definition, MG was not a pacifist, but he was by the former definition.
posted by Kurma at 9/19/2006 10:40:00 PM
5 Comments:
Another definition of pacifism would be one who does not endorse or support physical violence in the pursuit of a cause or political agenda.
A pacifist may not be in favor of peace, if that peace comes through oppression or tyranny.
In which case, yup: Gandhi was a pacifist. The best one since Jesus...or whoever else you'd use in place of "sliced bread" when it comes to the pacifism metaphor. :-D
Wa gwan Thojo?
I noticed that none of the 2-3 comments I posted 2-3 days ago on have been added to your blog?
Did I say something offensive?
OK. I see I made some mistakes in posting and that's why it didn't get through.
Anyway...
Some pacifists are confrontational, some not.
So far in my readings of Gandhi, there are many things I agree with and some I don't.
Such as his regressive, male-centered views of sexuality and his stance on how women should react in cases of possible rape.
You can google those topics to see what I mean. There are some qoutes of his regarding these topics on the net, usually in an interview session.
Interesting... and you're exactly right. Gandhi used very confrontational techniques to make his points. They were not violently confrontational, but they sought to stir controversy, disturb the "peace", so to speak. They often resulted in extreme violence. In my mind, peace is the absence of strong emotional input, being violent is not being peaceful, but so is being manically happy, or angry, or jealous, or in any other state of high emotional affect.
Especially in the US of A, some of these words have different, and sometimes pejorative meanings. For example, secular is used as the opposite of religious. But secularism from a state's perspective is not really the freedom from religion, (which is silly because most people believe in one way shape or form), but freedom of religion where the state remains religiously neutral even though various members of the state may espouse various faiths.
Whether G was pacifist is an interesting question that I had to answer to an American friend once. My argument was that he was an extremist. An extremist in believing that non-violence is the BEST way to get independence to India. But in general he was not a pacifist. He would use extreme violence (not physical but psychological) to get his own way.
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