hi, everybody. stefan molyneux from free domainradio. hope you're doing well. it's canadian unidol time as i clarify some comments i madein my recent mandela video about mahatma gandhi where i said that he was not all -- that hewas praised to be and people have asked for clarifications which i'm happy to supply.just before we begin though, we are up to about 3 million downloads a month. now, people, i asked for about 50 cents ashow which is the combination of 40,000 hours of study which has produced this work i thinkis a fair price; and there's a whole bunch of you who are not supporting this show, whoare not donating. now, please, come on. this is a pretty unique show. i think it's a veryvaluable show. i think that all of the listeners
and watchers agree. i hope that you agree.if you are new to the show, ask it but don't worry about it. enjoy, imbibe, enjoy. if youcan't afford it, no problem, enjoy, but maybe you can share some videos. but if you do havea few shackles rolling around the old wallet, i would really, really appreciate it; andi think that it's the right thing to do. i mean i think you know it's the right thingto do. well, honesty, integrity, generosity, andrecognition that there's no such thing as a free lunch is very important. it helps makeme more enthusiastic. and of course, now we're doing a lot of work which involves traveland i have a full-time employee. so money doesn't grow on trees, and it's really yoursupport that keeps this show ad-free and at
the high level of quality that i think you'vecome to expect. so please, please, do the right thing. you know what the right thingto do is. go to fdrurl.com and sign up for a subscription,50 cents a day, whatever it's going to be, or a one-time donation. we take bitcoins,litecoins, and so on. but please do the right thing and sign up for something. it's veryimportant. you'll feel better. you'll feel like you're doing the right thing. philosophyis really there to be lived, not just listened to. so thank you very much for your support.that's fdrurl.com/donate. so gandhi. before i start, let me tell youwhy i think this is important. i think it's really important because idols and hero worshipdiminish you. i only became anything of substance
really in this world once i stopped worshippingpeople because all of the glory and power that was within me was being sprayed up ina useless mist to coat the demon feet of the illustrious. and i would really suggest thatthe further you look up, the further down you feel. and you don't want to feel likea supplicant at the feet of olympus watching the antics of the sky gods that you feel youcan never approach. hero worship diminishes you and it diminishes me. worship no one;only be yourself. now, talent is a kind of cancer. it's a weirdkind of growth that eclipses a lot of other things. you see somebody who's really greatat something: hockey, singing, songwriting -- anything. and what you're seeing is thescintillating bright side of talent or of
ability or of glory or something like that.what you're not seeing is everything that they haven't done because they've been doingthat, right? so wayne gretzky is really great at hockey.i don't know, 50,000 hours worth of hockey, but that's 50,000 hours worth of not studyingphilosophy or learning to play the violin or becoming a good cook or a well-roundedhuman being so to speak. and so you see a very concentrated laser-like diamond lightcoming from talent and a content to eclipse everything else. so beauty does this; powerdoes this as well. it tends to eclipse everything else. so i strongly, strongly urge you to retainyour power by avoiding hero worship. hero
worship is also extremely toxic to the recipient.there's an interesting paradox about we mammals which is that we desperately want to surmountlimitations. we desperately want things to become easier. we do not want to be boundedby restraints, and that's great. that's one of the reasons we don't live in caves anymoreas we wanted to make things easier so we have lighters instead to have to rub two stickstogether. so we wish to surmount restraints, but itis exceedingly dangerous for us to have no restraints within our lives. and when peopleworship us, what they're doing, what they're basically saying is "you can do no wrong.you are fantastic. you are the very best. you are glorious no matter what. i worshipyou. we're not worthy," as the old mike myers
bit used to go. it's very dangerous. it's very dangerous forthe recipient. it is a form of passive aggression. it is a way of humbling yourself and makingyour idols into gods outside of reality and to be outside of reality through the worshipof others, to walk on the foamy bubbles of other's upturned eyeballs is extremely dangerousfor the personality. so it's great that we want to surmount limits. it's not great whenwe actually do. the striving is awe. so i would be very careful when it comes to worshipping. now, worshipping people in a political contextis an abdication of your personal responsibility to make the world better. so if you believedthat there's some witch doctor who can cure
you of obesity or diabetes or lung cancer,then you're going to eat lots of sugar and smoke because the witch doctor is going tocome along, and you're not that responsible for a miracle that's going to happen in thesame way that those old televangelists would be "hey, yo!" and then throwing people backin the audience while listening to their wife whispering to their ear what the ailmentswere. and this belief in witch doctor is an abdicationof personal responsibility. who's responsible for your health? you're responsible for yourhealth. who's responsible for your parenting? you're responsible. who's responsible foryour life, your career, your money? you are responsible for your life, your career, andyour money, and your love, and your sex life,
and all of that kind of stuff. you are 150%responsible for your life. and this idea that from some ethereal realmof human perfection that we can only dream of can come bunjee-ing in these magical heroesto save us or to save the world or to improve the world is a pretty flaccid way to havepower in the world or rather to be powerless in the world. no one is coming to save you,as the psychologist nathaniel branden used to say. and no one is coming to save you.nobody is coming to save the world. nobody is coming to make it any better. nobody isgoing to bunjee in and make the world a wonderful place. no. ron paul is not going to do it,newt gingrich is not going to do it, nancy pelosi certainly isn't going to do it, andobama sure as hell isn't doing it now.
no one is going to come in. it's up to youto make the world better through your efforts. that's where the real risk and excitementand fear and reward and virtue, earned virtue lies. and the powers that be love it whenyou worship the magical person, the semi-deity because you know you're not that person. andit also puts you in a state of waiting or in a state of supporting or in a state ofpraising or in a state of expectation, all of which take your spine and grind it up tomound these flagpoles to the vanity of the mad and powerful. so this is one of the reasons why tearingdown idols is absolutely essential. tearing down idols is building us up. so with thatin mind, let's have a look at mahatma gandhi.
okay. now, there's a couple of things i'm goingto talk about. i'm going to substitute a couple of words because the word "caffers" in southafrican basically means nigger, so i'm going to use that just because not many people knowthat. gandhi, as you probably know, was born inthe indian state of gujarat. he was married when he was 13. his wife was 14. i guess thatwould be a cougar. and that's not particularly early by the standards of the time and hiswife got pregnant very quickly. and then two years later his father was dying, gandhi lefthis bedside and had sex with his wife and then his father died while he was having sex.some people theorized and i think gandhi even
confessed to this in a bleak way is that thisis one of the reasons why he became kind of repulsed by sexual love later on in his life. his relationship to sex is important, andthe reason why it's important is you want to have universal standards. it's a basicthing of philosophy. like physics, you have universal standards and in philosophy youhave to have universal standards. otherwise, it's not philosophy; it's opinion. and thinkof me if you want or anyone that you know who's even a prominent leader, think of mesaying this kind of stuff. it is the duty of every thoughtful human being not to marry.and in case you're helpless with regards to marriage, if you get an arranged marriage,you have to abstain from sexual intercourse
with your wife, as i put out a podcast aboutthat. and then, you find out that up here in thefree domain radio underground bunker compound in ontario, i have set up these ashrams, thesevillages where boys and girls bathe and sleep together naked but chastely and they're punishedfor any sexual talk in my compound. and men and women are segregated, and husbands arenever allowed in my compound. you are not allowed, if you're a husband, to be alonewith your wife. and if you feel passion, you must take a cold bath. however, in true mysticalfashion, the rules do not apply to me. so i have a secretary and my secretary hasa very attractive sister who is also my personal physician. and she's been around since shewas a girl, and she used to sleep and bathe
with me and i -- when people say that's kindof hypocritical, i say, "no, no, no. while she's bathing, i keep my eyes tightly shut.i don't know whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on. i can tell from the soundthat she uses soap." and after my wife dies, i have more women around me and they all haveto sleep with me naked to test my ability to resist lust because i say i'm an incrediblylustful human being. and there are experiments where women willattempt to arouse me with stripteases or other non-contact sexual activity, hover butt, lapdances or whatever; and it does appear that this sometimes cross over into sexual activity.so in one of his letters he wrote: "venus sleeping with me might be called an accident.all that can be said is that she slept close
to me." so it's more than just floating aroundgiving high cost lap dances. so this is around the time of india's independencefrom the united kingdom. and 77-year-old gandhi got rid of the woman, this woman who was 33by this time and replaced with someone almost half her age. and so he was in bengal thenwe get to some of the political stuff in a sec, but he was in bengal to see what comforthe could offer in times of inter-communal violence in the run up to independence. gandhicalled for his 18-year-old grandniece, manu, to join him and sleep with him. and he said, "we may both be killed by themuslims and must put our purity to the ultimate test so that we know that we are offeringthe purest of sacrifices. and we should now
both start sleeping naked." think of the pickup artistry community. this is the killed-by-muslims gambit which is not as common as you mightexpect. eighteen-year-old abha, the wife of gandhi's grandnephew kanu gandhi, rejoinedgandhi's entourage in the run up to independence in 1947. and by the end of august, gandhiwas sleeping with both manu and abha at the same time naked as part of his sexual test.they would massage him and so on. now, i mean this is obviously kind of salaciousbut it's also pretty creepy frankly. i mean these women are pubescent. they are relatives.they are sleeping with this old man naked. come on. that's pretty gross. that's prettycreepy. that's half incest, statutory rape. i mean you name it. it's really a pretty nastystuff. and this was at the time the followers
left him and his secretary, his other secretaryleft him and people were just appalled. and nehru who was the first prime minister ofindia after independence called these practices creepy and bizarre and all that, perverse. so it's not wildly unimportant how peoplelive their lives. like if you think of me doing this kind of stuff -- and i know youdo -- then you'd probably be pretty creepd out and you'd say, "well, that's pretty damnculty, right? i mean that's, you know, don't sleep with your wives. i'm going to sleepwith their daughters naked just as a sexual test. oops. i mean this is just nasty, creepy,run of the mill, mystical crap where the highest ideals are there for the basis of predations.
so maybe you haven't heard much about that.i think that was in the penthouse version of the ben kingsley movie. anyway, i'll haveto check. now, let's look at some of the history now.india was ruled by the british for about 150 years, and you don't usually hear much aboutwhat happened before the british came along, kind of important. like you hear bad thingsabout the industrial revolution because -- well, because charles dickens had a really terriblerelationship with his wife, was kind of a bastard, and therefore spent a lot of timein the shed writing. and so you hear a lot of bad stuff about theindustrial revolution. you don't really hear much about what came before the industrialrevolution which is kind of tragic because
-- anyway. but we'll get into what happenedbefore, but the thing to understand about the british control of this massive countryis that there were never more than 70,000 british troops in india, hundreds of millionsof people. and the running of the country was an enormousinfrastructure of native troops and police and bureaucrats. so you know from the recentabomination of an invasion of iraq that if the locals are not really into you, like they'retotally not that into you, then they will regularly blow things up and steal and killpeople and so on. that didn't really happen so much in india. as hitler observed, indiansmerely had to spit all at once and every britain in india would have drowned. evil but occasionallywitty.
so why did indians, so many indians like thebritish? well, because of what came before. so for eight centuries, that would be 800years or the approximate length of the hobbit part 2, for 800 years before the rush, thesubcontinent had been subjected to the plunder and depravity of the mughals -- i think thatthey were trying to pronounce mongols -- the mughals who were muslim rulers who came fromas far west as turkey. now what was it like to live under the mughals? well, think ofhomicidal clingons on their period. during the time of the 800 years that theywere under the subjugation of the mughals, delhi or the capital, was razed to the ground,burned to the ground eight times in that period. maybe it was the centenary. great pyramidswere constructed with the skulls of its inhabitants.
so that's not good. and the other thing, ofcourse, that was pretty tragic prior to the british coming was islam, of course, permitsthe enslavement of non-muslims. i love it. so indians were sold across the islamic worldsin such quantities that the international price of slaves collapsed. so there's an afghanmountain range called the hindu kush which translates as the hindu slaughter, and it'sso named after the huge numbers of hindus who died there while being frog-marched bythe muslims to the markets of arabia and central asia. the fun of the muslims will be revisited inthe partition of india and pakistan, but i think we can basically say not a great placeto backpack if you are carbon based. so there
was, of course, predation and exploitationin the colonial control of the world and a lot of westerners and western thinkers foughtagainst colonialism as a hangover from some of the papal sponsored crusades and otherforms of interventions from the middle ages. this is from a book. the notes for everythinghere will be in the description. an economist writes: "if one compares therate of growth during the 19th century, it appears the non-colonial countries had, asa rule, a more rapid economic development than colonial ones." there is an almost perfectcorrelation. that's colonial countries like britain, france, the netherlands, portugal,and spain have been characterized by a slower rate of economic growth and industrializationthan belgium, germany, sweden, switzerland,
and the united states. now, i know that the latter group are notperfectly non-colonial, but relative to the first group they're much less. the rule isto a certain extent also valid for the 20th century. thus, belgium, by joining the colonialclub in the first years of the 20th century, also became a member of the group characterizedby slow growth. it is obvious that this correlation is far from being proof that all colonialventures have been economically counterproductive. however, nothing excludes such a possibility. this correlation can be at least partial proofthat colonialism has not been such a powerful force for development in the industrialization.he's covering his ass. and for those of you
who have noticed the vast smoking moon craterof the us economy that has occurred since the us went full tilt colonial boogie throughoutbasically first part of the 20th and 21st centuries. well, yes, you can see that theus economy is not doing great because they have 750 military bases overseas and at somepoint may think of leaving japan and germany which they can't get over 60 years ago. there were other benefits to colonial rule.so in 1846, the british commissioner john lawrence -- you have to say it that, i don'tknow why -- told the local elites that punjabis could no longer burn their widows, commitfemale infanticide, or bury their lepers alive. hmm, lovely. now, when the punjabis protestedsaying, "you promised there would be no interference
in our religious customs," lawrence steadfastlyreplied, "it was british religious custom to hang anyone who did such things." so theystopped the punjabis from burning their widows, committing female infanticide, and buryingtheir lepers alive. ah, even more importantly in addition to outlawingthese barbaric practices, the british also did the slight subcontinental favor of outlawingslavery in 1843, at a time when an estimated 10 million indians were slaves which was upto 15% of the population in some regions. now i believe 10 million is 15% of your averagemumbai city block. and of course, the british exported to indiathe modern methods of fighting contagious diseases which caused a huge population explosionand much like in south africa where from the
early 20th century until the end of apartheiduntil -- the beginning of apartheid actually -- the black population rose tenfold, significantgains in the population of india were gained by sanitation and hand washing and other methodsof combating contagious diseases and so on. unfortunately -- sorry for this race throughindian history -- but, unfortunately, when it came to separating india from the uk, theybasically had a whole bunch of uk advisors and sort of top hindu political castes wereall trained as well as gandhi to some degree in british schools, in oxford and eton andall the other socialist rats nest wherein the ruling classes had retreated after thearistocracy had been somewhat controlled as a result of the industrial revolution. sothe central planning of the indian economy
went full pace from the late 1940s until theearly 1990s when they realized that socialism doesn't work. we in the west wait for thatlesson to boomerang back to us. that would be nice. so nehru, the first prime minister of indiasaid, "of course, we want to socialize. but we are not opposed to private enterprise.we want to encourage in every way private enterprise. we want to promise the entrepreneurswho invest in our country that we will not expropriate them nor socialize them for 10years, perhaps even for a longer time." isn't that lovely? what an invitation to come andget pickpocketed by the state. now, you may have seen the movie gandhi withcliff clavin, and you may not know that the
indian government finance one-third of thecost of production in order to make sure that gandhi was portrayed as an absolute pacifist,one of the reasons why governments like promoting pacifism when they're not imperialistic isbecause you can then screw your people more if they're absolutely pacifists. now, another fairly unsavory aspect of gandhiwas his abysmal racism. ah, oh, yes. yeah, i know. i hear you. i hear you. i really do.cultural context at the time, blah, blah, blah. but if you're going to consider theman to be a moral ideal, then you can't then say, "but in his virulent racism, it's different."no, come on. i mean if somebody is going to be a moral ideal, then they can't just bekind of immoral ideal in one area and then
really nasty in another area. that's likesaying i'm perfectly healthy except my arm that's missing. so gandhi, trained as a lawyer, couldn't getwork in india and went to south africa where he stayed for quite a long time. and he waspretty appalled at the treatment of indians in south africa, not at all appalled by thetreatment of what are called in south africa caffers or what would be known in americaand most of the west as niggers. gandhi, hindu. hindu, caste system. castesystem, the only aspect of a major religion as hindu is in fact the only religion thatformally advocates slavery and massive class distinctions where people are about the samelevel of pets once they're down at the untouchable
level. and so he cared about indians, buthe didn't care about blacks which he placed slightly above the animal level. so his satyagrahawas for the better treatment of indians, his sort of crusade. so he said, "you're treatingthem basically the same as the savage niggers which is completely wrong." so he stayed in 20 years south africa, neverhad any contact, social contact with the blacks. he was horrified when he was lodged with thenatives in the same jail ward. he hated wearing the same clothes, the same styles. he didn'tlike sharing the food, hated sharing the toilet, and he said niggers and chinese prisonersare wild, murderous, and given to immoral ways. niggers are, as a general rule, uncivilized;the convicts even more so. they are troublesome,
very dirty, and live almost like animals.and he -- should we get to this? let's dive into it now. okay. so there was the zulu uprising -- of the zulus,of course, a tribe in africa -- a zulu uprising against the white rule and who jumped to serveand became a sergeant in the british army against the zulu uprising. yes, it was thepacifist and egalitarian mahatma gandhi. he got a medal and he was very active; did anythinghe could to help kill as many blacks as he possibly could. so if you like nelson mandela and you likemahatma gandhi, you have to recognize that if they'd kind of been around at the sametime, mahatma gandhi would be the one to put
a bullet through the eyes of nelson mandela.you know, just one of these interesting things about people who don't learn moral philosophyfrom the ground up but live on charisma and nubile young women. so during his time, he actually supportedthe british government in three major wars. anyway, he said, "it is not for us to judgewhether the nigger revolt is justified or not," says gandhi. "we are co-colonists withwhites of this land, whereas the black savages are as yet unfit to participate in the politicalaffairs of the colony." the russian revolution fermenting throughoutthe themes of the 1900s, obviously 1917, erupted russia, began to really ferment against colonialism.and so the british actually shipped gandhi
off to india in order to quell some colonialstuff, but he kind of changed his mind. and the congress party which was founded and fundedby the british and which, of course, gandhi was prominent in, in 1921 he started deliveringthese violent speeches inciting racial hatred against the british. and during bloody demonstrations and riotsagainst the visit of the prince of wales, william francis doherty was an american citizenworking in bombay was murdered; and gandhi was implicated in riling up the crowds withhis anti-british and racial hatred and this guy was killed. i'll put a link into all ofthe details about this. but gandhi personally got involved in the cover up of this gruesomemurder through bribery and intimidation because
he was terrified that the details of the murderand his role in it would tarnish his image in the west. so a good marketer always knows where to burythe bodies, cover them up with lime and propaganda. now, there is this belief that gandhi achievedindian freedom without spilling a drop of blood. i would really argue with the pacifismof the british that made that possible combined with the unbelievably economically devastatingeffect of the second world war. people say, "well, british made so much money off colonialism."well,if they did, when they were broke at the end of the second world war, why did they giveup all their colonies? because the colonies were in that goddamn burden; controlling people,bullying people, shooting people, and jailing
people. this is not as productive as tradingwith people, right? so the british were not big on shooting dissidence.as george orwell wrote, "where is the gandhi in russia?" well, stalin would have just shothim the moment he stuck his head above his cubicle. so the british were not as violentand repressive as some of the other colonial powers, just say the eastern bloc after thesecond world war. and so it really was the british pacifism and not gandhi's pacifismthat resulted in this and the fact that the british had to leave because they didn't haveenough money to pay for the empire. think of the us empire. think of the war iniraq. most people are broke or going broke paying for it, but a few people are profitinglike mad. well, that's exactly what colonialism
is. it's just another one of these concentratedbenefits, diffused caste bullshit, rent-seeking things that people like when there's a governmentaround that they can bribe, bully, or intimidate. so it was the same thing with the colonies. so one of the great tragedies, of course,of the 20th century was the partition, the partition in india. so in 1947, there wasa partition and it was along muslim and hindu alliance. so prior to 1947, there was justindia; there was no pakistan. then pakistan was divided. there was one on this side, oneon this side, and hindus in the middle. now, the hindus wanted to set up something calledramraj which is a mythical hindu kingdom based on a caste ideology. caste is like the ultimateracism slavery, nasty evil bullshit.
and in the state of punjab alone, between11 and 12 million people lost their homes. they had to move where they live for centuries,one of the most massive dislocations in all of human history. at least one million peopledied in religious warfare alone. so the muslim minority was afraid that when the hindus gotempowered, they were going to be treated badly. and so they separated and gave the muslimstheir own country. there really had problems there. they gave their hindus their own country;maybe some problems there too. and all of this was happening that was just unbelievablywretched. and hitler received a nice letter from gandhicalling him his friend in 1940 when hitler's intentions and activities were not massivemystery.
so when you start this process of dismantlingwhat the british had held together with spits and stiff upper lip and boot polish, the resultingmadhouse slaughter in india and pakistan have had two major wars since with the casualtiesrunning into hundreds of thousands. they both have nuclear weapons. this would not havehappened had there been a more rational slow transition from the british. so again, i don't know how that would havelooked. i would have educated everyone in philosophy or wait till the internet, tillpeople can learn how to think better or whatever. but what did happen was 12 million peoplehad to move and the move was just wretched and people selling their treasured belongingsand wedding rings for like a bottle of water.
it was unbelievably horrendous. all the while, gandhi is reciting the murderoussermons from his favorite scripture, the bhagavad gita. gandhi is supposed to have taken a vowof poverty, demanded even when he was in jail the same comforts enjoyed by british highofficials in india. this apostle of peace, when a jewish delegation came to him to complainabout the evils of nazism, he said that "you should oppose the evils of nazism by somethingcalled soul force." in other words, that he said to the jews should fight nazism by committingmass suicide. and he also was very big on annexing kashmir -- the territory, not therobert plant's song -- by armed aggression. i can put some more of these staggeringlyracist quotes in there. in 1931, say, if this
is early, well maybe changed his mind later.so in 1931, gandhi fasted as a protest against a british proposal to grant a few basic rightsto the untouchables, the dalits, the lowest of the castes. so he's no friend of the lowerclasses. he fasted basically to maintain the slavery demanded by the hindu religion. so his loyalty was to the british crown. hewas sergeant major gandhi. he won a war medal for the zulu campaign. when war broke outin 1914, gandhi immediately contacted the war office, swore his unshakable loyalty tothe crown and organized the indian volunteer corps. he wrote to the viceroy, "i would makeindia offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical moment."he justified this by citing the bhagavad gita
and saying indians have always been war-like. and so he really likes the british. he fought-- he was a murderer. he murdered zulus for the british, as far as i can tell. i meanhe certainly participated in the army that murdered them. so churchill was a murderer;murdered the boers in the boer war of 1905, 1906. george orwell was a murderer; murderedpeople in the spanish/franco civil war. and gandhi was also a murderer. you know, i'm no expert in murderer as faras one of reading dostoyevsky, murdering people not so super great for your peace of mind.it tends to make you a little bit freaky. i played macbeth when i was younger, and it'sa pretty freaky play to do because you get
into that mindset. a murderer destroys thepersonality, destroys the empathy, destroys the integrity. and so a lot of the peoplewho we think are really, really great are murderers and there seems to be some strongevidence that nelson mandela was as well, certainly his second wife was. his advice to the british in december 1941,as hitler ruled from the channels of the vulgar, he says, "the jews should all commit suicide."and his advice to the british was "let them take possession of your beautiful islandswith all of your many beautiful buildings. you will give all these but neither your souls,nor your minds." okay. so a little bit on the inconsistentside. his treatment of his family was truly
horrible. and as a family man myself and asa stay-at-home dad, i judge people quite a bit by how they treat their families. so hehad a son, harilal. he wanted to go to college. he was interested in being a lawyer like hisfather was. gandhi would not allow it as he believed the western style education wouldnot help in the struggle for indian independence despite the fact that gandhi had a westernstyle education and was deeply committed to the struggle for indian independence. so his son wrote to him, "dear father, inyour laboratory of experiments, unfortunately, i am the one truth that has gone wrong." healso wrote of his father talking to india, "he is the greatest father you have," i.e.india, "but he is the one father i wish i
did not have." gandhi said his son harilalwas one of the greatest regrets of his life. gandhi had banished his second son just forgiving some money to harilal. the boy was so uncared for. no one came to his bedsideas he lay dying. gandhi's relationship to women -- i mean there'ssome stuff i do like about the guy. i think some of his quotes are quite nice. he obviouslylooked pretty gentle and photogenic like a spiritual garden gnome. and i like the factthat he was kind of the anarchist. i think that's interesting. but he's not a philosopher.he's not a philosopher. he's not reasoning from first principles. he's not building.so he's a witch doctor with regards to science, when it comes to ethics and philosophy. yougot to reason this stuff from the beginning.
universe lies your principles, know your history,particularly the history of ethics. you got to make your case. you got to really workat ethics before you start making pronouncements. fortune cookies are not physics. so yeah, he wrote some stuff about women thatwas nice. he once wrote of his wife, "i simply cannot bear to look at her face. the expressionis often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionallydoes, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something." when his wife -- he'd been marriedto her since she was 14 -- when his wife got pneumonia, gandhi refused to get her penicillinand simply allowed her to die. come on. it's the mother of your children. you might notlike her but throw her a drug or two.
so yeah, gandhi proclaimed the british empirewas for the welfare of the whole world, and he accepted the superiority and predominanceof the white race. he reminded the white people that upper caste indians share with the europeansa common heritage, the blood of the noble aryan race that never goes wrong. accordingto him, it was aryan blood which is responsible for the advancement of human civilization.he suggested to a guy named reverend doke to civilize the niggers by converting themto christianity and by infusing aryan blood into their race. he told the white coloniststhat the preservation of the racial purity, apartheid, was as important to the indiansas to the europeans. he did accept birth control for women fora short period, but he was once asked if he
would advocate birth control in cases wherethe health of the mother might be at risk. now he said one exception will lead to anothertill it finally becomes a general exception. he said, "my special function from childhood,you might say, has been to make women realize her dignity," but he denied them basic necessitieslike birth control and pain relief in child birth and so on, a big component of sex forpleasure. now, some indians believe or make the casethat gandhi actually delayed indian independence by 25 years due to his erratic beliefs. andthe india today doesn't really follow gandhi's teachings anyway like the later, you know,be the change you want to see in the world stuff. so he's revered as a holy man. i oncedated an indian woman who told me that when
ben kingsley went around india, everybodylike went nuts because he was revered so much, but the principles he supposedly stood forare not applied. so the violence against the untouchables,the dalits, continues. rapes, murders, beatings are all aimed at india's lowest class andcarried out by other indians. so the fact that he went on a hunger strike to stop thebritish from giving rights to the slaves of the indian society is pretty wretched. i'llwrite this stuff. i don't know if all of this is true. i've tried to double check everythingbut... he told an indian audience that black africans are raw niggers whose sole ambitionis to pass his life in indolence and nakedness. and yeah, he defended the caste system, praisingits fundamental divisions and so on.
so there's a reason why five times he didnot get the nobel peace price. so again, i feel like i'm taking a dump on the shiny baldhead of the dead, but i think it is really important. these people are fundamentallyflawed. i mean picasso was a monster. freddie mercury broke window panes over people's heads.i mean you really got to be careful when you worship people of extraordinary talent andsignificance. when you come across somebody who's reveredby people, the first question to ask is what purpose does that reverence serve those empower?reverence for someone almost cannot be sustained without the support of the media, withoutthe support of the clergy, without the support of the politicians and the people in power.so what purpose does it serve? well, having
someone that you can worship solidifies anew nation. and hopefully, some of this mystical religious worship of a deeply flawed, deeplyflawed, if not downright immoral human being, can recede and we can begin to reason witheach other and speak with each other as empowered and independent human beings free of theseempty ghost legs and chains of the venerated dead. thank you very much.