Abstract
American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Religious studies,History,Cultural Studies
Reference96 articles.
1. Scott Bennett discusses the WRL in “‘Pacifism Not Passivism’: The War Resisters League and Radical Pacifism, Nonviolent Direct Action and the Americanization of Gandhi, 1915–1963” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1998).
2. Tracy , Direct Action
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