To: Orcastraiter who wrote (1218 ) 3/2/2006 2:28:36 PM From: one_less Respond to of 1307 In public response to your PM on torture and how this issue is effecting the Conscience of the American people, consider this. All the noise about government conspiracies, who Bush partied with as a teenager, duck hunts, corporate corruption etc are having little effect on how American people are likely to vote. However, the torture issue is a nag that has legs. Gandhi's ideas about civil disobedience were masterful. But people over emphasize the association of passivism and undervalue Gandhi's real brilliance in dealing with the Brittish culture. Gandhi was a lower class Hindu raised in the British education system to be an expert on law and politics. He was between a rock and a hard place. The Brahman sect of Hindu would not respect his leadership and the British would never allow him to oppose their rule. He needed to awaken the conscience of the Indians across castes in Hindus and across religions for other Indians to rise up against the corrupt authority as a unifying vision, in a manner that would not challenge the Brahman ideology or pose a military threat against the Brittish. The passive resistance/civil disobedience is well recognized. However, the other side of that brilliance was how he destroyed the Brittish rule from within the Brittish culture. He had been a part of the Brittish culture and knew that in the hearts and souls of the Brittish people, brutality of passive people couldn't be tolerated. The Brittish civilians, therefore, withdrew their support for Brittish rule in India and that is what defeated the Brittish military government in India. Gandhi would never have confronted the Russians in such a way.