10 Dissidents Who Changed the World: #5

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is his name, but some call him Mahatma, which is Hindi for “great soul.” Still others refer to him as Bapu, or “father” in Gujarati.

Everybody in the world seems to know Gandhi: he’s the skinny Indian dude with wire-framed glasses who dressed in sandals and a white bed sheet. And at the same time, nobody seems to know Gandhi.

Little Gandhi

Gandhi was born in Porbandar, a small coastal town in northwest India, on October 2, 1869. His family was in the business caste — the caste consisting of merchants, artisans, and landowners. His father was head of the local government. His mom was a devout Hindu, so Gandhi learned to practice vegetarianism, fast, and exercise mutual tolerance when he was still a pipsqueak subject of the British Empire.

When he was 13, his folks arranged for Gandhi to marry Kasturbai Makhanji, also 13. The wedding took place in May 1883. Between 1888 and 1900, they had four sons.

In 1885, Gandhi’s father got sick. Although Gandhi watched after him, one night Gandhi’s uncle came over to relieve him for a while. While Gandhi took the opportunity to reacquaint carnal desire with his wife, his dad died. Gandhi felt shame for this episode for the rest of his life.

Gandhi the Lawyer

At the suggestion of a family advisor, Gandhi — who was an average student at best — decided to study to become a lawyer so he could follow in his father’s political footsteps. In 1888 he left his wife and newborn son behind to travel to India’s Imperial capital: London, England.

By all accounts, Gandhi was a shy recluse in London. The lean boy with the big ears tried to fit in by taking ballroom dancing lessons, studying French, and attempting to play the violin. But all that just didn’t work. What Gandhi did enjoy was exposure to other vegetarians, students of theosophy, the sermons of Jesus, and the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita. While enjoying being exposed, he also hit the law books pretty hard, enabling him to pass the bar in less than three years.

In 1881, Gandhi, eager to see his family again, returned home to India. But when he arrived, he discovered that his relatives, to prevent the interruption of his studies, had withheld news of his mom’s death.

After recovering from his grief, Gandhi tried to set up a law practice in Bombay. Unfortunately, he was so shy that he couldn’t cross-examine a witness. Failing at law — and now with a second son to feed — he tried unsuccessfully to get a job as a teacher. In the end, he trudged along doing mundane law work.

Finally, in 1893, Gandhi took an offer from an Indian law firm to spend a year abroad, advising on a lawsuit in Natal, South Africa.

Gandhi in South Africa

South Africa was a lot different from India. For one thing, many of the white South Africans discriminated against blacks and Indians.

After arriving in Durban, Gandhi took a train to Pretoria. But along the route, a white passenger entered Gandhi’s compartment and, seeing that Gandhi was a “colored” man, had an official order him to move to third class. Gandhi, who had a first class ticket, refused. Gandhi was thrown off the train.

While working in South Africa, Gandhi was exposed to more racial discrimination firsthand. Blessed with an outsider’s view of the situation, he decided to tell fellow Indians how bad they were being treated. His outrage finally overcame his shyness, and Gandhi made a speech to an assembly of Indians. He urged them to unite despite their religious and caste differences, and to seek the equality they deserved. In return, the Indian community anointed him their leader.

When his year was up, and the lawsuit complete, Gandhi prepared to return to India. But, during his farewell party, someone brought to his attention a legislative bill that would take away Indians’ right to vote. When he suggested resisting the bill, his friends begged Gandhi to stay and help them. He agreed to stay for a month.

One month in South Africa turned into twenty years.

Becoming Mahatma Gandhi

In 1886, Gandhi did take six months’ leave to go back to India and retrieve his family. During the trip home, and upon his return to South Africa, his celebrity began to grow in the media.

In his early thirties, with the consent of his physically frail wife, and possibly out of regret for not being with his father when he died, Gandhi gave up sex. Taking a tip from Jesus and the Bhagavad-Gita, he also renounced his possessions, including his insurance policy. He explained:

Possession seems to me to be a crime, I can only possess certain things when I know that others who also want to possess similar things are able to do so. But we know…such a thing is impossibility. Therefore, the only thing that can be possessed by all is non-possession, not to have anything whatsoever.

About this same time, Gandhi read John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Ruskin argued that living by hand labor alone was preferable to a living sustained with machine labor.

Gandhi applied Ruskin’s beliefs by moving with family and staff to a farm in Transvaal that he called the Phoenix Settlement. He gave up Western dress and started making his own clothes using spinning wheels and handlooms. He printed his political pamphlets with a hand-wheel press. He stopped using electricity and oil-powered engines.

Gandhi Goes to Prison

In July 1907, the Transvaal government passed the Asiatic Registration Act, which required all Indians to obtain a certificate of registration which they would then be required to show police officers at any time and any place — even inside private residences.

Gandhi urged Indians to resist. Only 500 registered. For not registering himself, Gandhi went to jail for two months. When he got out, he continued to fight the Transvaal government’s attempts to make Indians second-class people. He went to jail a second time, got out, and continued the resistance.

Finally, in 1913, the Prime Minister of the Transvaal said with admiration and consternation: “You can’t put twenty thousand Indians into jail.” He negotiated a settlement with the Indians, restoring many of their lost rights. The next year, Gandhi left South Africa for good.

Gandhi lives with Untouchables

Gandhi went back to India and, in 1915, he founded the Satyagraha Ashram, a new communal settlement near his birthplace. Twenty-five people, including his family, continued their simple lifestyle there. Among the residents was a family of untouchables, India’s lowest caste.

For the rest of his life, Gandhi was an activist against the caste system. He helped poor farmers protest against undue taxation and discrimination. After becoming leader of the Indian National Congress in 1920, he led campaigns to reduce poverty, liberate women, and promote religious tolerance.

Above all, he worked to gain India’s independence from British domination. Always committed to non-violence, he led Indians to oppose the British salt tax in 1930 by marching to the sea and, illegally, making their own salt. Then in 1942, he openly called for the British to get out of India.

The Death of Gandhi

In 1948, a Hindu radical, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India, shot Gandhi three times at point blank range during his nightly walk on the grounds of Birla House.

Gandhi’s life continues to inspire today. Many people seeking change still study and implement his method of passive resistance, which he called Satyagraha. Because he brought down a colonial empire without using a gun, Gandhi is one of my favorite 10 Dissidents Who Changed the World.

Go to the next article in this series:
Ehren Watada - Dissident Lieutenant.

Go to the previous article in this series:
Sibel Edmonds - Dissident FBI Whistleblower.

Go to the series index:
10 Dissidents Who Changed the World.

Read More: Gandhi, dissident, satyagraha, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, India, Great Britain, empire

While our elected officials and the Mainstream Media put on their good cop/bad cop soap opera to entertain and divert the attention of the public, at the same time quietly supporting the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, and passing laws favoring corporations, one actor may be playing his part too well. His name is Maurice Robert “Mike” Gravel.

Some of you may remember Mike Gravel. He’s the former two-term Democratic Senator from Alaska. He’s the Senator that helped Daniel Ellsberg get the Pentagon Papers released. He’s the Senator that in 1971, by means of a one-man filibuster and various other parliamentary tactics, blocked Nixon’s renewal of the U.S. military draft.

And, Gravel is running for President of the USA.

Yes, Gravel has about as much chance of winning the Democratic nomination as Britney Spears becoming a nun. But regardless his chance at POTUS, Mike’s recent voice has ripped a larger hole in the status quo facade that the other candidates are hiding behind. And he’s ignited the minds of citizens.

Loose cannon? Yes. Breath of fresh air? Yes.

Watch him in action:

Read More: Mike Gravel, Iraq War, Democratic debate

Ex-CIA Director George Tenet wants to tell you something:

We don’t torture people.

Instead of torture, he prefers to call waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures “enhanced interrogation.”

The second thing he wants to tell you is this:

I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us.

Whoop-de-do. This from the guy who told Bush there was a “slam dunk case” that Saddam had WMD.

Didn’t Tenet resign because of his faulty intelligence? Well, don’t look now but he’s back, with a book, telling us he’s sure America needs something that resembles torture but isn’t torture because he calls it a different name.

Not only that, but Tenet is firing back at Bush, Condi, and Cheney, and after 3,300 dead troops he’s whining that his “slam dunk” comment was misunderstood.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has this to say:

George Tenet has been doing a slow burn ever since he left the CIA. He’s been angrier and angrier as he saw himself being essentially made the fall guy on WMD in Iraq. And he’s gonna come back saying he and his agency, the CIA, were pushed, again and again, by Cheney and Cheney’s people to give him the answers that they wanted.

Sniff, sniff. I almost feel sorry for Tenet, the torture monger.

As for Tenet’s “slam dunk” certainty that torture saves lives, Brigadier General David R. Irvine has something to say about that:

No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives.

Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been “rendered” to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that “credible evidence” supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his “confession,” and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements.

In other words, torture is great for getting false information about WMD used to lie a nation into an illegal war. That’s not such a great argument for torture…uh, I mean “enhanced interrogation.”

If America’s torture program (I’m calling it what it is), as Tenet claims, is worth more than the FBI, CIA, and NSA put together, then let’s turn over national security to the at-least competent intelligence gathering Google Labs right now…

Brig. Gen. Irvine continues:

Exhibit B is the case of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi deemed a “high-value” target by the CIA. After being beaten to an extent that he had several broken ribs, he was subjected to a form of crucifixion known as “Palestinian hanging.” Forty-five minutes later, he was dead, never having revealed whatever vital, ticking-bomb information his American interrogator was seeking.

Well, well, that “enhanced interrogation” Tenet is so proud of sho’ nuff packs a wallop, don’t it. We don’t torture people, indeed.

Brig. Gen. Irvine further says:

If there is reliable evidence that torture has, in fact, interrupted ticking time bombs and saved lives, the gravity of the crisis created by the administration’s free-wheeling torture policy demands straight answers which can be weighed and evaluated by a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission whose membership might include interrogators, jurists, theologians, national security specialists, military leaders, and political leaders. The damage to our national interests and the dismal record of war candor by this administration has made “trust us” an insufficient justification for such a profound change in American law and moral values.

‘Nuff said.

Read More: George Tenet, torture, Iraq War, WMD, CIA, George W. Bush, David Irvine

Click below to play the video, and hear the real scoop on the Iraq War from U.S. Army Infantry Sergeant John Bruhns:

Watch more real messages from real veterans and their families at VideoVets.

Thanks to deadissue for the link!

Read More: iraq war, war on terror, veterans, military

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid correctly maintains that the November elections were a referendum on Bush invading Iraq — over reasons the Prez lied about, no less — and that it’s a good idea to apply a tourniquet and bring the majority of troops home, the Vice President sees things differently…

After the weekly Republican policy lunch on Tuesday, Dick Cheney told the press:

What’s most troubling about Senator Reid’s comments yesterday is his defeatism. Indeed, last week he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat.

Yep, that Dick Cheney is quite the optimist. His comments yesterday reminded me of some things he said last year, when I got to spend an entire day with Darth Cheney.

Dick Cheney on the RMS Titanic:

The most troubling thing about the Titanic survivors was their defeatism.

If those selfish women and children had been less eager to occupy a lifeboat — if they would have got out and pushed — that luxurious feat of nautical engineering would have made it back to port.

Dick Cheney on the explosion aboard the LZ 129 Hindenburg:

At the time, it was the largest aircraft ever built. Unfortunately, the passengers and crew were all defeatists, which guaranteed loss of the zeppelin.

If I had been the captain, I would not have settled with the ship and crew burning up…I would have told them to blow harder, at the base of the flames.

Dick Cheney on the slow-paced construction of the Empire’s new Death Star:

The lack of faith and rampant defeatism in the stormtroopers is troubling. The new Death Star will be complete and operational on schedule.

Even if the rebels blow it to bits no larger than Bush’s peanut-sized brain, we’ll use a surge of hammers and nails to get back on schedule…the biggest surge of hammers and nails this galaxy has ever seen!

Read More: Dick Cheney, Harry Reid, Iraq War, Titanic, Hindenburg, Death Star