From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 19:08:45 +0800
To: "'Joel O'Connor'" <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: RE: I must admit. . .
Message-ID: <896C7C3540C3D111AB9F00805FA78CE2013F863E@MSX11002>
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Someone claiming to be Joel O'Connor wrote:

> It only took one to turn India around.  Ghandi nearly 
> starved to death, used nothing but passifism and won
>  the race man.  

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. Ghandi may have been a great man and an
inspiration to us all but he *lost*. His first big political involvment was
trying to stop the British from allowing the Boers to take away political
rights from the "coloured" and Asian  population of Cape Colony. The Brits
caved into the white South Africans and we all know what happened next.
Then he tried to get them (well us I suppose, since I'm British) to "quit
India" in the 1920s & 30s - failed again, we got out 2 decades later, after
WW2,  when a British government was elected that was anti-colonialist. You
wouldn't have been able to persuade the 1945-1951 government to stay *in*
India. In fact they were so eager to get out they probably caused more
problems by the speed of the withdrawal.  Ghandi wanted a secular federation
of all India - but instead there was partition, the secession of an
inherently unviable Muslim state that was bound to end up with either civil
war or fundamentalism (and in the end got both, at least for some of the
time), and at least hundreds of thousands, and possibly many millions of
deaths that could have been avoided.  And then of course he himself was
killed.  And now India has the BJP.  Ghandi was perhaps *right* but he
certainly didn't "win the race".

Ken (and not his employers)