Gandhi in the West

It is seldom appreciated how completely the New Left's protests failed to meet their aims. Gandhi's Western offspring hazarded their bodies in the expectation that voluntary suffering had the power to convert. The conscience of the evildoer was their object; confidence in the capacity of loving sacrifice was, at first, their common faith.

But this was a conviction almost completely misplaced. The spectacle of voluntary privation rarely touched the antagonist, still less invoked a personal transformation. Sacrificial courage was most often unrewarded, and pain simply endured, without discernible change. Suffering, in short, did not necessarily convert.

The unexpected pattern held with depressing constancy across the social movements of the Atlantic world. Opponents of militarism were ‘manhandled’ by workers; assailed by ‘night marauders’; struck with wrenches, blocks of wood, and steel rods; bumped by lorries; and threatened with butcher knives. At military installations, the authorities threw iron bolts; on city streets, the police led mounted charges. It was not just the violence of assault that shocked, but even more the ‘cheerful brutality’ with which it was enacted. ‘I hope this gets your f…ing eyes out’ menaced one English policeman; ‘You better get knives … You're gonna need them’, snarled a ‘button-cute’ blonde at a column of peaceful protest.