HITLER, GANDHI, AND WILHELM

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 138, 8 December 1938, Page 8

HITLER, GANDHI, AND WILHELM

The poetic theory that Alexander the Great was let loose "to scourge mankind" —a purge of humanity by an unmoral Mars—has not yet been applied to Herr Hitler. But criticism is moving in that direction, and moving from two widely opposite quarters —from India and from Holland, from Mahatma Gandhi and from ex-Kaiser Wilhelm. Both emphasise dehumanisation: A man alone, without a family, without God. Why should he be human? Wilhelm's question amounts to a negation. And the Mahatma, who claims that non-violent resistance is the cure for Hitlerism, concludes: It would then be religious resistance against the Godless fury of a dehumanised man. Of the result Mahatma Gandhi has no doubt, but he presupposes that "the Jews would have "a leader with courage and vision." Perhaps such a leader as might lead for thousands of years after his death, subduing successive Hitlerisms as they arise. I Against some leaderships the sword is no victory.

When Mahatma Gandhi says "If I were a German Jew I would refuse j to submit to expulsion or discrimination," he challenges death and also the worse-than-death, the concentra* tion camp. He would prefer a personal Calvary to a preventive war — not because he fails to recognise that "if ever there could be a justifiable war," a war against Hitlerism would in fact be such a war, but because war is never justifiable, and because the swordless leadership supports a cause which, like freedom, "though often lost, is ever won." It is more than passing strange to hear an Indian apostle of non-violence, in these days of re-armament, applying Christian principles to a "dehumanised" world menace, who at the same time is being assailed by the greatest sabre-ratller of his day, by him who lost the greatest war yet recorded in human history.

The former German leader resembles Mahatma Gandhi in denouncing the present German leader and in nothing else. Could any three figures illustrate, more vividly than these do, how various are the actors

who, on the world stage, tread their brief hour, judging and judged, human or inhuman; yet all destined, willy-nilly, to pass to a final judgment against which no bodyguard is effective, and from which no appeal can be lodged?