The Historian

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is a name and persona not fully understood by the West. Today, we often refer to him as the 'thin man in the loin cloth, who helped bring his country to independence', but we know little to nothing about his beliefs, his struggles, and his ability to transcend cultural and religious barriers. Here in the west, we carry no comparable measure to the 'man in the loin cloth', but we often briefly reference him when we discuss civil disobedience or nonviolence. Sure, we had Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s, but whom do we admire today? Where is the man or woman who speaks truth against the majority? Can he or she be found in the political scene today? I argue no. A man like Gandhi would be killed, labeled a heathen or unconscionable liberal with little or nothing to offer today's political scene. In fact, during his second civil disobedience campaign of the 1930s, Winston Churchill spoke of Gandhi in the...