Poll Abraham Lincoln or Gandhi? (41 votes)
Not a battle. Which do you like better?
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Not a battle. Which do you like better?
@tifalockhart: I'm surprised you like Gandhi
@russellmania77: Whys that? His approach was brilliant. Make your antagonist look like the bad guy he is, it works wonders.
Lincoln, easily. I remember reading about Ghandi once and in a quote he said that the greatest thing the British Empire ever did was grant India Independence
How f*cking arrogant.
@tifalockhart: Gandhi didn't like black people
@rogueshadow: how is that being arrogant
how is that being arrogant
People always think kindnesses to their people outweigh that to others, what about the dozens of other colonies that the British empire gave up, why does India take precedence? That kind of thing just bugs me and I've always remembered it.
In the words of Martin Freeman:
'Ghandi was a sod.'
Also this is a good reason why AL>>>> >>>>Ghandi
Orange and apples.
@tifalockhart: Gandhi didn't like black people
Lincoln said:
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ..
In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, "It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and in their places be, pari passu [on an equal basis], filled up by free white laborers."
I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.
Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse and the increase of mixed breed bastards may some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.
Lincoln was racist too.
@deathpoolthet1000: a summary would be better next time, bro.
Orange and apples.
@tifalockhart: Gandhi didn't like black people
Lincoln said:
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ..
In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, "It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and in their places be, pari passu [on an equal basis], filled up by free white laborers."
I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.
Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse and the increase of mixed breed bastards may some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.
Lincoln was racist too.
I was inclined to see this as simply a product of the culture [still not exonerating him] until it got to the highlighted portions.
What an asswipe.
@rogueshadow: your sh!t must smell like roses
@rogueshadow: your sh!t must smell like roses
What?
Just tell me you didnt just said that.
@rogueshadow: your sh!t must smell like roses
so it's ok to dismiss Gandhi foe being racist (he wasn't) but not for Lincoln?
@jonny_anonymous: did I tell you something that would emply that? And yeah (he was) racist since he liked calling blacks "kaffir" hm??? And that thing I said to shadow was different so thanks for buttn into a convo that you assumed you knew about
What gives you the right to attack a prominent historical figure like that?
The things he were saying were just disgusting. He is directly claiming that mixed race people are some type of abomination and that they will eventually overthrow the supremacy of the white man. He says that he has no legal rights to free men, women and children who have been taken as property. What about his moral right to do so?
ASSWIPE
I don't need a right. He's not automatically better than me because he is a prominent historical figure, just think of all the important people who were outright evil or just really bad guys. Too many to name.
What gives you the right to attack a prominent historical figure like that?
The things he were saying were just disgusting. He is directly claiming that mixed race people are some type of abomination and that they will eventually overthrow the supremacy of the white man. He says that he has no legal rights to free men, women and children who have been taken as property. What about his moral right to do so?
ASSWIPE
I don't need a right. He's not automatically better than me because he is a prominent historical figure, just think of all the important people who were outright evil or just really bad guys. Too many to name.
In history the good guys are the ones that win.
QUOTE-Nelson Mandela.
India is Gandhi's country of birth; South Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a South African citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual and moral genius, and he shaped the liberatory movements in both colonial theaters.
He is the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.
Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilized our respective peoples against governments that violated our freedoms.
The Gandhian influence dominated freedom struggles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of the power it generated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless. Nonviolence was the official stance of all major African coalitions, and the South African A.N.C. remained implacably opposed to violence for most of its existence.
Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence."
Gandhi himself never ruled out violence absolutely and unreservedly. He conceded the necessity of arms in certain situations. He said, "Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor ..."
Violence and nonviolence are not mutually exclusive; it is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a struggle.
Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 23. Within a week he collided head on with racism. His immediate response was to flee the country that so degraded people of color, but then his inner resilience overpowered him with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the dignity of the racially exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the colonized the world over and to develop a blueprint for a new social order.
He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great soul). There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was violently removed from our world, he had transited into that state.
No Ordinary Leader : Divinely Inspired
He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence of the social and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the simultaneous and interactive development of the moral person and the moral society.
His philosophy of Satyagraha is both a personal and a social struggle to realize the Truth, which he identifies as God, the Absolute Morality. He seeks this Truth, not in isolation, self-centeredly, but with the people. He said, "I want to find God, and because I want to find God, I have to find God along with other people. I don't believe I can find God alone. If I did, I would be running to the Himalayas to find God in some cave there. But since I believe that nobody can find God alone, I have to work with people. I have to take them with me. Alone I can't come to Him."
He sacerises his revolution, balancing the religious and the secular.
Awakening
His awakening came on the hilly terrain of the so-called Bambata Rebellion, where as a passionate British patriot, he led his Indian stretcher-bearer corps to serve the Empire, but British brutality against the Zulus roused his soul against violence as nothing had done before. He determined, on that battlefield, to wrest himself of all material attachments and devote himself completely and totally to eliminating violence and serving humanity. The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer in his call for swadeshi--the use of one's own and the boycott of the oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their capital.
A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods, which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from piling up unmanageable foreign debts. Gandhi's insistence on self-sufficiency is a basic economic principle that, if followed today, could contribute significantly to alleviating Third World poverty and stimulating development.
Gandhi predated Frantz Fanon and the black-consciousness movements in South Africa and the U.S. by more than a half-century and inspired the resurgence of the indigenous intellect, spirit and industry.
Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality.
He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry. He preaches the gospel of leveling down, of emulating the kisan (peasant), not the zamindar (landlord), for "all can be kisans, but only a few zamindars."
He stepped down from his comfortable life to join the masses on their level to seek equality with them. "I can't hope to bring about economic equality... I have to reduce myself to the level of the poorest of the poor."
From his understanding of wealth and poverty came his understanding of labor and capital, which led him to the solution of trusteeship based on the belief that there is no private ownership of capital; it is given in trust for redistribution and equalization. Similarly, while recognizing differential aptitudes and talents, he holds that these are gifts from God to be used for the collective good.
He seeks an economic order, alternative to the capitalist and communist, and finds this in sarvodaya based on nonviolence (AHIMSA).
He rejects Darwin's survival of the fittest, Adam Smith's laissez-faire and Karl Marx's thesis of a natural antagonism between capital and labor, and focuses on the interdependence between the two.
He believes in the human capacity to change and wages Satyagraha against the oppressor, not to destroy him but to transform him, that he cease his oppression and join the oppressed in the pursuit of Truth.
We in South Africa brought about our new democracy relatively peacefully on the foundations of such thinking, regardless of whether we were directly influenced by Gandhi or not.
Gandhi remains today the only complete critique of advanced industrial society. Others have criticized its totalitarianism but not its productive apparatus. He is not against science and technology, but he places priority on the right to work and opposes mechanization to the extent that it usurps this right. Large-scale machinery, he holds, concentrates wealth in the hands of one man who tyrannizes the rest. He favors the small machine; he seeks to keep the individual in control of his tools, to maintain an interdependent love relation between the two, as a cricketer with his bat or Krishna with his flute. Above all, he seeks to liberate the individual from his alienation to the machine and restore morality to the productive process.
As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink the rationale of our current globalization and to ponder the Gandhian alternative.
At a time when Freud was liberating sex, Gandhi was reining it in; when Marx was pitting worker against capitalist, Gandhi was reconciling them; when the dominant European thought had dropped God and soul out of the social reckoning, he was centralizing society in God and soul; at a time when the colonized had ceased to think and control, he dared to think and control; and when the ideologies of the colonized had virtually disappeared, he revived them and empowered them with a potency that liberated and redeemed.
@jonny_anonymous: did I tell you something that would emply that? And yeah (he was) racist since he liked calling blacks "kaffir" hm??? And that thing I said to shadow was different so thanks for buttn into a convo that you assumed you knew about
A term that wasn't even racist at the time
I'm not history buff but I voted Lincoln. Didn't know about those racist comments that he said that is interesting.
From what I've heard, Gandhi doesn't sound like anything special to me. I know he starved himself. From what I've been told he was a pacifist and he told people to not fight back and they ended up dying because of him. Not really sure what he did that was so great but maybe someone would like to educate me and the others who know very little about him.
*Sees the argument spreading* <_< ..... >_> *phantom vote*
haha.
I'm not history buff but I voted Lincoln. Didn't know about those racist comments that he said that is interesting.
From what I've heard, Gandhi doesn't sound like anything special to me. I know he starved himself. From what I've been told he was a pacifist and he told people to not fight back and they ended up dying because of him. Not really sure what he did that was so great but maybe someone would like to educate me and the others who know very little about him.
He didn't just not fight, he lead a non-violent civil disobedience movement that sparked civil rights movements across the world and resulted in India gaining's independence
@deathstroke19: no argument, just love <3
@doomguy: Gandhi believed in white supremacy. He just thought India shouldn't be a colony, the others? Didn't bother him. And when did Lincoln wave a white power flag?
@doomguy: Gandhi believed in white supremacy. He just thought India shouldn't be a colony, the others? Didn't bother him. And when did Lincoln wave a white power flag?
no he absolutely did not and he also help spread the civil rights movement across the world including South Africa where he lived.
@doomguy: Gandhi believed in white supremacy. He just thought India shouldn't be a colony, the others? Didn't bother him. And when did Lincoln wave a white power flag?
" I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." - Lincoln
Or when five free black ministers visited the White House, Lincoln told them:
"You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.
... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race ... The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.
... We look to our condition, owing to the existence of the two races on this continent. I need not recount to you the effects upon white men growing out of the institution of slavery. I believe in its general evil effects on the white race.
See our present condition -- the country engaged in war! -- our white men cutting one another's throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of slavery, and the colored race as a basis, the war would not have an existence.
It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated:|"
I'm not saying Lincoln was a man who wanted the black race eliminated, but he damn sure didn't think blacks were to be equal to whites, and that blacks should live amongst his race.
or what about Frederick Douglass? He plain as day said that Lincoln was always the 'white mans president'.
MLK STOMPS!
As everyone has already said, Lincoln, though he himself wasn't exactly a pro-black rights person, was surely a much better person for his time. You can argue Lincoln words when he claimed he was pro-white supremacy, but his actions were all pointing to the opposite. In case people forget, the South seceded because they were afraid Lincoln was going to abolish Slavery thanks to his House Divided speech. Lincoln couldn't exactly say "I love blacks, blacks should be free" in 1861 when both the North and South were pro-segregation and the south was still pro-slavery. He had an election to win, but his friendship with blacks and his value of their personhood was present in his actions. He just was a slimy politician...
Gandhi, on the other hand, was a racist and a tool. Forget the fact that he called black South Africans "kaffirs", Gandhi called them "like animals in a zoo" and was vehemently opposed to people comparing the plight of the Indian people to that of sub-Saharan Africans. He said they were different, Indians were civilized and Blacks were not. Keep in mind, Gandhi was a pompous rich t*@t who only wanted change when he was denied a seat in the better side of a train. He wasn't altruistic or magnanimous, he was self-centered and egomaniacal.
Now compare them to MLK, a man who fought for equality for all--blacks, Asians, jews, women, the poor. MLK's lone vice is he suffered from infidelity in his marriage, but most great men often do.
MLK STOMPS!
As everyone has already said, Lincoln, though he himself wasn't exactly a pro-black rights person, was surely a much better person for his time. You can argue Lincoln words when he claimed he was pro-white supremacy, but his actions were all pointing to the opposite. In case people forget, the South seceded because they were afraid Lincoln was going to abolish Slavery thanks to his House Divided speech. Lincoln couldn't exactly say "I love blacks, blacks should be free" in 1861 when both the North and South were pro-segregation and the south was still pro-slavery. He had an election to win, but his friendship with blacks and his value of their personhood was present in his actions. He just was a slimy politician...
Gandhi, on the other hand, was a racist and a tool. Forget the fact that he called black South Africans "kaffirs", Gandhi called them "like animals in a zoo" and was vehemently opposed to people comparing the plight of the Indian people to that of sub-Saharan Africans. He said they were different, Indians were civilized and Blacks were not. Keep in mind, Gandhi was a pompous rich t*@t who only wanted change when he was denied a seat in the better side of a train. He wasn't altruistic or magnanimous, he was self-centered and egomaniacal.
Now compare them to MLK, a man who fought for equality for all--blacks, Asians, jews, women, the poor. MLK's lone vice is he suffered from infidelity in his marriage, but most great men often do.
So what you are saying is that behind all the politics and all that mess, Lincoln secretly thought blacks were 100% equal to whites and that they should have every right the whites does in the United States? If this is what you are saying, please provide proof.
Yes Lincoln hated slavery, ofcoarse he wanted to end it (so did just about everybody else in the North, and even some in the South, such as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who said the institution of slavery was evil), but that doesn't mean he saw blacks as being equals to whites.
@doomguy: Brah, I never said he was pro-equality, I said he was a product of his time and he was far more progressive than that racist Gandhi who was just a hypocrite. You're comparing a man who was born in the south in the 1800s to a poor family to a man who saw himself as superior to another group of people who were fighting for the same cause.
Point is, Lincoln wanted to free slaves because he thought it was wrong when he had no horse in the race. Gandhi's humanitarianism came because he was denied a seat he felt he deserves and didn't see himself as someone who fights for equality, but as someone who fought for INDIAN rights. I.E. His own rights.
If you noticed, I said MLK wins.
@deathpoolthet1000: To compare the two, Lincoln is an old guy who says "Who cares if f@6s get married? Let 'em!" and Gandhi is a civil rights leader saying "blacks should get equal treatment....but not those f@6s".
Which is worst?
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