As well as a statue being brought down in Ghana, thousands have signed petitions in Leicester to have one of the famous Indian independence leader taken down.
From this we can glean a number of important facts, such as people have a real hard-on for statues right now, a lot of people really don’t understand history, and that Black Lives Matter have truly “jumped the shark.”
The reasoning for this is that Gandhi indisputably said some racist things about Africans from his time living apartheid-era South Africa. Leaders in the Anti-Gandhi protests have claimed he was fascist, racist and a sexual predator.
I’ll deal with the last part first. Gandhi used to sleep naked next to a rather young female family member in order to “test himself.” The idea being that if he managed to avoid slipping one to the youngun, he’d succeeded in his task. He apparently never failed at the task, so partly kudos, but still a little bit fucking weird overall.
Now to the accusations of being a fascist. I was talking to a dear friend earlier about how things were going in America. Now full disclosure, he is a CIS white male, and thus his opinion does not fully count but we did both agree that the term Nazi and Fascist are sometimes thrown around a little too liberally (no pun intended). In fact, one wonders if people actually understand that people who said things 100 years ago that are no longer applicable today are not exactly the same as a political ideology that orchestrated the biggest holocaust in history. It genuinely isn’t the same.
Now was Gandhi racist? In some respects he certainly was, but at least some of it can be attributed to the treatment he was given by blacks whilst living and working in South Africa.
But where wokeness has truly jumped the shark ironically is a complete ignorance of the evolution of our species. There are a lot of shit things happening in the world, but the planet is the most peaceful, rich, technologically advanced and racially diverse than it has ever been in history.
Things improve over time, and we get better as people. You simply cannot and should not judge people saying things over 100 years ago by the twisted and often times warped values of 2020. Gandhi probably didn’t think that trans people should get their own toilets either. He may even have felt that having a penis made you a man, while having a vagina suggested you were a woman. Obviously, today we realize that man and lady bits have nothing to do with sex, but back then, things were looked at differently….
Personally, I’m not a huge Gandhi fan, I prefer my revolutionaries to be carrying an AK47 and marauding through the Jungles of South America, and I am entitled to that opinion. This does not though mean I think his statue should be torn down. Gandhi was the leader of a peaceful movement that encompassed hundreds of millions of people and defeated what was at the time the biggest and most successful empire that had ever existed, the British Empire.
Leicester East MP for Labour Claudia Webbe called the petition a “massive distraction” and that Gandhi “was part of creating a movement in the same way that Martin Luther King created a movement”.
“His form of peaceful protest, like Black Lives Matter, is a force for change,”. Most importantly though she added the following,
“There is not any desire from the black community to move that symbol of change.”
It’s the weird white woke’s trying to be the thought place. You might not care much about Gandhi, but be very, very afraid of what this means to Freedom of Speech.
