One of our posts on facebook that helped to lose our access there.
Here is is for you now.
Thank you to our friend for keeping these on her computer.
Here is is for you now.
Thank you to our friend for keeping these on her computer.
"Among
the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon
the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
For those of you who say he did not say it.
friend fred shared on another page He was referring to the Indian Arms Act of 1878 (which was amended several times over the ensuing decades). This Act was, in practice, a total gun ban enacted to protect the British realm from an insurgency. By banning firearm possession for all but those authorized by the Realm they were able to all but do away with both military and private arms as almost no one was ever authorized.
Mr. Gandhi, as you correctly state, was a lifelong pacifist. But, he understood that in the extreme a society needs to have the capability to defend itself from invasion and oppressive governance. This is not contradictory. It's merely an acknowledgment of the existence of extremes. I have in person heard the Dali Lama (another life long pacifist) state the same thing. In short, pacifists are not entirely blind to the possibility of a need to defend oneself from extraordinary violence. However, they do believe that in most cases where one man would choose to take up arms passive resistance would be the superior choice. In India that proved to be true. In the Germany of the 1940's it wasn't. However, one of the first things that Hitler did was ban all the guns.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
-- Mahatma Gandhi
For those of you who say he did not say it.
friend fred shared on another page He was referring to the Indian Arms Act of 1878 (which was amended several times over the ensuing decades). This Act was, in practice, a total gun ban enacted to protect the British realm from an insurgency. By banning firearm possession for all but those authorized by the Realm they were able to all but do away with both military and private arms as almost no one was ever authorized.
Mr. Gandhi, as you correctly state, was a lifelong pacifist. But, he understood that in the extreme a society needs to have the capability to defend itself from invasion and oppressive governance. This is not contradictory. It's merely an acknowledgment of the existence of extremes. I have in person heard the Dali Lama (another life long pacifist) state the same thing. In short, pacifists are not entirely blind to the possibility of a need to defend oneself from extraordinary violence. However, they do believe that in most cases where one man would choose to take up arms passive resistance would be the superior choice. In India that proved to be true. In the Germany of the 1940's it wasn't. However, one of the first things that Hitler did was ban all the guns.
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