Where do I begin?
- Criticized the Jews for defending themselves against the Holocaust because he insisted that they should have committed public mass suicide in order to “shame” the Germans instead of fighting back. His exact words were, “But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
- Wrote an open letter to the British people in 1940 telling them to surrender to the Axis even if it mean accepting genocide.
- Was very anti-black. I hope you can stomach reading how he treated black people in South Africa. It’s fucking disgusting.
- Refused his wife life-saving medication (for religious reasons), but those religious reasons all of a sudden no longer applied to him when he was in a similar position.
- Refused to have sex with his wife for the last 38 years of their marriage. He felt that in order to test his commitment to celibacy, he would have beautiful young women (including his own great niece) lie next to him naked through the night. His wife, whom he described as looking like a “meek cow” was no longer desirable enough to be a solid test.
- Believed that Indian women who were raped lost their value as a human.
- During his time as a dissident in South Africa, he discovered that a young male was harassing two of his female followers. He responded by cutting the girls’ hair off to ensure the “sinner’s eye” was “sterilized.” He later boasted about the incident in his writings, pushing the message to all Indians that women should carry responsibility for sexual attacks upon them.
- Argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honor.
- Believed that menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality.
- Waged a war against contraceptives, labeling Indian women who used them as whores.
- Held the attitude that women were simply creatures that could bring either pride or shame to the men who own them.
Sources:
Websites: Women Suffer From Gandhi’s Legacy, People who most likely chose Gandhi as a historical figure to do a report on and immediately regretted it, On Mahatma Gandhi, his pathetic racism and advancement of segregation of black people by Sentletse Diakanyo, Not All Peaceful: 13 Racist Quotes Gandhi Said About Black People by Nick Chiles
Books: Sex and Power by Rita Banerji, On Pacifism by Derrick Jensen, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
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