Two Assassinations

[Even as the comic book superhero movie Black Panther continues to rake in millions in box office receipts, providing black people with - ostensibly - a positive role model, the 50th anniversary of a genuine black hero's - Martin Luther King, Jr.'s - assassination arrived on April 4. The occasion was marked by reflections on King's great physical courage during his last days. Knowing that so many people wanted him dead and that an attempt on his life was imminent, he continued to make public appearances and refused to give up his civil rights crusade. CNN revisited the seedy Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, reminding us of what a tight budget the Nobel Peace Prize-winner was living on, with Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, even the balcony where King was struck in the chin by the assassin's bullet. Looking at Jackson and Young, both portly old men, made me wonder how King himself might have looked if he were still living. He would be 89 this year.

The following was written at the time of the murder of Gandhi in 1948 by Dwight Macdonald, just twenty years before King's assassination. Though not as well known as George Orwell's "Reflections on Gandhi," Macdonald's essay is an impressive tribute to the man from whom Martin Luther King, Jr. learned the most about politics.]


SAINTS

GANDHI

"A moment before he was shot, he said--some witnesses believed he was speaking to the assassin-'you are late."' N. Y. World-Telegram, January 30, 1948


And indeed the man who killed Gandhi with three revolver shots was late - about two years late. The communal massacres showed that Gandhi's teaching of non-violence had not penetrated to the Indian masses. His life work had been invain - or at least it now appeared that he had taught a "non-violence of the weak" which had been effective against the British but that the more difficult "non-violence of the strong" he had been unable to teach. He insisted on his failure constantly, and constantly thought of death. "I am in thc midst of flames," he wrote last spring. "Is it the kindness of God or His irony that the flames do not consume me?" One imagines that he experienced a dreadful joy in the split-second he saw the gun aimed at him. 

Three historical events have moved me deeply of recent years: the murder of Trotsky, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the murder of Gandhi. That all three should be simply catastrophes - hopeless, destructive, painful - is in the style of our period. The Spanish Civil War was the last of the 19th-century type of political tragedies: the fight was lost, as in I848 or the Paris Commune, but it had been a fight; there was hope while it was going on, and defeat might be due to some temporary relation of forces; there was a basis for a future effort. 

But Trotsky and Gandhi were killed not during their great time of struggle to realize "Utopian" ideals, not while they were still fighting with a hope of success, but after their ideas - or at least their tactics - had been shown by the brutal logic of events to be inadequate. They were not shot in battle. They were executed. And their executioner was not the oppressive, conservative forces they had devoted their lives to fighting the bourgeoisie and the British imperialists - but the scum that had frothed up from their own heroic struggle to liberate mankind: young fanatics representing a new order - of Stalinism and of Hindu nationalism - which is hopeless, deadening, corrupting and monstrous, but which is also, alas, partly the product of their own revolutionary efforts. In the 19th century, czars and governors and secret-police chiefs were assassinated by radicals; today, it is revolutionaries (out of power) like Trotsky and Gandhi who are killed by our modern Nihilists, while Stalin and Hitler and Zhdanov and Himmler and Mussolini, and Molotov escape (unless they lose a war). OUR Nihilists have terribly perverted Liebknecht's slogan: "The main Enemy is at Home". Or perhaps they are just more prudent than their 19th-century ancestors. Which would be in keeping, too. 

Gandhi, like Trotsky, was killed after his most profound ideas and his lifelong political activity had been rebuffed by History. But, also like Trotsky, he was still alive and kicking, still throwing out imaginative concepts. The ideologue is baffied, but the human being - and by this sentimental phrase I mean the acute intelligence as much as the moralist - is not through: he has plenty of inspirations and surprises in store for us. Both men were still giving, by their personal example and still more by their unwearied experimenting with general principles, some kind of meaning, of consciousness to modern political life. Their assassins killed not only two men, but also two cultures.Which makes it all the more painful.

There was obvious irony in the great pacifist being killed by a gunman. But there was also an esthetic fitness. Gandhi was the last eminent personage who insisted on dealing directly with people, reasoning with them face to face as individuals,not as crowds roped off, watched by plain-clothes men, sealedsafely behind bullet-proof glass. It was a matter of principle with him not to deny anyone access to him, mentally or physically. He refused all police protection. I have heard people say he was a damn fool and got what he might expect to get. They are, of course, right. Our world is so structured that the "public man" can survive only by being private, and the most dangerous thing he can do is to meet his public face to face.

Gandhi was the last political leader in the world who was a person, not a mask or a radio voice or an institution. The last on a human scale. The last for whom I felt neither fear nor contempt nor indifference but interest and affection. He was dear to me - I realize it now better than I did when he was alive - for all kinds of reasons. He believed in love, gentleness, persuasion, simplicity of manners, and he came closer to "living up to" these beliefs than most people I know - let alone most Big Shots, on whom the pressures for the reverse must be very powerful. (To me, the wonder is not that Gandhi often resorted to sophistry or flatly went back on some of his ideas, but that he was able to put into practice as many of them as he did. I speak from personal experience.) He was dear to me because he had no respect for railroads, assembly-belt production, and other knick-knacks of liberalistic Progress, and insisted on examining their human (as against their metaphysical) value.Also because he was clever, hurnorous, lively, hard-headed, and never made speeches about Fascism, Democracy, the Common Man, or World Government. And because he had a keen nose for the concrete, homely "details" of living which make the real difference to people but which are usually ignored by everybody except poets. And finally because he was a good man, by which I mean not only "good" but also "man". 

This leads into the next point. Many pacifists and others who have an ethical-and really admirable-attitude toward life are somewhat boring. Their point of view, their writing and conversation are wholly sympathetic but also a little on the dull side. 

Intellectually, their ideas lack subtlety and logical structure. Ethically, they are too consistent; they don't sense the tragedy of life, the incredible difficulty of actually putting into practice an ethical concept. They have not succumbed to temptation because they have never been tempted; they are good simply because it has never occurred to them to be bad. They are, in a word, unworldly. Gandhi was not at all unworldly. He was full of humour, slyness, perversity, and - above all - practicality. Indeed, the very thing which leads people to think of him as unworldly - his ascetic ideas about diet, household economy, and sexual intercourse - seems to me to show his worldliness, or at least his imaginative grasp of The World: how could anyone be so concerned about such matters, even though in a negative sense, without a real feeling for their importance in human life, which in turn must come from a deep drive on his part toward gluttony, luxury, and sexual indulgence? 

The Marxists, those monks of politics, were shocked by his intimacy with rich men like Birla and Tata, just as the Pharisees, the Trotskyists of their day, were shocked by Christ's sitting at table with bartenders. (The Marxist has a richer intellectual tradition than the pacifist, but his ethical sense is equally simplistic.) It is true that Gandhi "compromised" with the rich, those untouchables of the class struggle, living at their villas (though carrying on there his own ascetic regimen). But he also "compromised" with the poor, spending at least as much time in the "untouchable's" quarters (he constantly complains of the smells and lack of sanitation) as in the Birla Palace. In short, he practised tolerance and love to such an extent that he seems to have regarded the capitalist as well as the garbage-man as his social equal.

Politics, Winter, 1948