The Charlotte News

Saturday, April 11, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note:

Today, comes the news on the front page that the Indian National Congress, the central Hindu party in India, had rejected the British offer tendered by Sir Stafford Cripps for dominion after the war in exchange for full support in the war effort and continued control of defense by the British.

The editorial column laments the news and offers harsh criticism of the judgment of the majority party in India, suggesting that it was a sign that India was not ready for independence, that it was unprepared to defend itself against foreign invasion without the help of a protector, that its rejection of the offer was signal of an intent not to fight against the Japanese.

This assessment turned out wrong, as the Indian Army and air corps distinguished themselves many times on the field of battle, from Burma to North Africa and Sicily, as well as in defense of home turf during the war. The Indian armed forces rose from a little over 200,000 at the outset of the war to 2.5 million by its end. In consequence, the Japanese would never get beyond the bombing of Calcutta and Ceylon, and India, and with it the Indian Ocean, would remain largely secure from Axis threat throughout the war.

As we mentioned previously, Gandhi, for his guidance of the Congress away from acceptance of the British offer, would be jailed by the British for nearly two years, from August 9, 1942 until May 6, 1944 when his failing health mandated his release.

The question remains whether, had India followed Gandhi’s lead and followed the path of Satyagraha, that is, as Gandhi defined it, "the Force of truth and love or non-violence", not "passive resistance" as he had earlier phrased it and as the press still defined his path, would the war have been won at all? Would India have succumbed to Japanese invasion without British support behind it? Would Hitler have been able to find a way to link with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean? Could the Japanese have attacked the British in the Middle East, in north Africa, and thus done to the British Army that which the Americans under Patton and the British under Montgomery did to the Nazis under Rommel in 1943?

Or do the questions miss the point? Was Gandhi, in obeying a creed of non-violence, standing fast as a symbol which stood in marked contrast to the Axis oppressors, as mightily as the tanks and airplanes the Indian military operated in the war?

Well, questions without answers, as surely as are the same questions when applied to the non-violent aspects of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s, patterning itself after the tactics of Gandhi, when contrasted with the militant groups of the Movement seeking essentially the same end--economic and civil justice. The questions cannot be answered because what was was: whether one would have had as much impact on America without the contraposition of the other is like asking whether Kennedy would have been as powerful a force for conscience in American history without Wallace raised in stark relief to his south, or whether America would be a better or worse place to live today without the Civil War in its history, or whether day would be safer without night.

At the same time, that is not to say that violence, racism, or war are ever justified in some yin-yang ding-dong manner or should be treated with a shrug of the cynical shoulders and dismissed as merely part of the game. But once events so circumscribed have occurred, one cannot factor them out of history and suggest that all would have been better or worse without the particular events, and thus we should eliminate them from discussion. History is as it is, in the abstract at least. We cannot change it; we may interpret it and analyze it, find additional facts or other perceptions of facts and inject them into the discussion, but we cannot take part of it out and ask whether, without that part, the rest would have been different. It is a fool’s errand.

We are born into a set of circumstances pre-existing our being; we take it as we find it. It has been so since man first uttered a sound communicative of a thought to another human being.

What if the young ten year old boy, chronicled in the short American Mercury piece on the page this date, the son of the prosperous Belgium rentier who had sought only to get along and go along with the Nazis taking over his country, had not come to the aid of the little girl at the railroad crossing being kicked by the Nazi sentry, had not called the sentry a "savage Hun", had not then been pushed up against a tree and shot in the head for his youthful act of disobedient chivalry, had not been delivered home to his wealthy father a bloodied corpse? What if his father had, before the event, taken a rifle and shot the sentry, rather than nodded and smiled at him as he passed? Would the war have been won by the Allies just the same way and in just the same time?

What if the nucleus of one single atom of an unstable isotope of uranium, indiscernible to the human eye in its natural state, had not been fissioned to start a chain reaction?