3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

Gandhi had revolutionized traditional Hindu teachings~ The concept of God as
absolute truth is ubiquitous to Hindu philosophical thought ; however, Gandhi made the
subtle distinction that Truth is God, rather than vice versa. Struggling for an English word to
describe his conception of enlightenment and salvation, he landed on the wood
"nonviolence," a term which proved somewhat puzzling to most Westerners. "To find Truth
as God," he wrote, "the only means is Love, i .e . nonviolence . . ." Zs As one scholar has
explained (quoting both Gandhi and King) :
In its active role nonviolence is a positive state of love, of doing good to the evil
doers, of mercy ; it "means the largest love, greatest charity." "It is the extreme limit
of forgiveness ." It is more akin to the Greek concept of , of what Martin Luther
King call[ed] "understanding goodwill ."~
Gandhi equated love and nonviolence . Violence could lead only to brutishness, never truth ;
therefore, it held no utility for him . His uniqueness lay in the fact that he not only preached
nonviolence but also practiced it to the exclusion of almost everything else in his life .
Conscientious objectors in America put a slightly different spin on Gandhi's teachings
while remaining true to their spirit . According to Rustin, Gandhi also taught that in such an
atmosphere, where the majority accepted the objectives of a social movement as valid,
"protest becomes an effective tactic to the degree that it elicits brutality and oppression from
For more on Gandhi's teachings, see C. Seshachari, Gandhi and the American
Scene : An Intellectual History and~uN (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications Ltd ., 1969), 83lOl
.
24~, gq .
uI~lS], 89 .
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