Meat Puppets
So I found three photos that illustrate how quickly a complex human being can be reduced to a piece of meat and all his varied drives reduced to a single post-mortem cause. This the essence of martyrdom, whether it’s suicide bombers, peace activists, or US troops sent to fight for oil. Before their deaths they have the ability to stand for a great many things – after their deaths the meat that’s left is just a political butcher prop on which competing ideologues frantically carve simple, reductionist meanings.
Before
During
After
Earlier here.
That’s what happens when you stand in between people with Guns and bombs. Welcome to the real world.
Only if you are dealing with a people that value you and have a basic morality. Non-violence by Jews in WWII achieved nothing. Non-violence by native americans achieved nothing. As long as the dominate force looks at the person it can dominate as less than human, non-violence DOES NOT WORK. The British for all their flaws, were still human and moral enough to recognize the value of an indian, but probably more importantly was the fact that they were so overwhelmed numerically, and they didn’t want to really concquer the area, only skim off the top. Had Ghandi been fighting the Germans, or had the indians been a population 1/100 times smaller, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would be machine gunned to death within 5 minutes, along with hundreds of thousands.