Fred Thompson: Gandhi's way isn't the American way
 A former Tennessee Republican senator, famous for playing a district attorney on the television show Law and Order, and currently mulling a run for the GOP presidential nomination, believes that anti-war activists are using the wrong "symbol" for their movement since Mahatma Gandhi's "way isn't the American way."
"I feel bad for Nancy Pelosi, AND her neighbors," Fred Thompson said in a radio commentary, which the National Review turned into a column. "Anti-war activists from the group Code Pink have been giving her the same treatment the president gets at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. Camping on her San Francisco lawn, they’re demanding she cut off funds to the troops in Iraq."
Thompson adds, "Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking 'What would Gandhi do?'"
"And that’s a pretty good question," Thompson continues. "At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place? It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER."
Thompson makes note of some statements made by Gandhi, including "an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis."
"Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings," Gandhi had written to the British people. "You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds."
"Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka," Thompson writes regarding an interview Gandhi had with his biographer, Louis Fischer, in June of 1946 in which he called the Holocaust "the greatest crime of our time," but suggested that "collective suicide" by Germany's Jews may have been a better strategy.
"But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife," Gandhi told Fischer in 1946. "They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs."
Fischer asked, "You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?"
"Yes, that would have been heroism," Gandhi said.
In a 1994 interview, Noam Chomsky explained what he thought Gandhi meant by "collective suicide." The Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology insisted that Gandhi "was making a tactical proposal, not a principled one."
"He wasn't saying that they should have walked cheerfully into the gas chambers because that's what nonviolence dictates," Chomsky said. "He was saying, 'if you do it, you may be better off.'"
Chomsky added, "If you divorce his proposal from any principled concern other than how many people's lives can be saved, it's conceivable that it would have aroused world concern in a way that the Nazi slaughter didn't. I don't believe it, but it's not literally impossible. On the other hand, there's nothing much that the European Jews could have done anyway under the prevailing circumstances, which were shameful everywhere."
"The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won’t cut it in this country," Thompson writes.
Thompson refers to US troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq as an example of true heroism.
"Gandhi probably wouldn't approve, but I can live with that," Thompson said.
FULL THOMPSON COLUMN CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK
Original radio commentary that transcript is based on can be heard here.
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