Indiana smoking gun biography of mahatma gandhi

The Smallest Army Imaginable: Gandhi&#;s Constitutional Proposal for India and Japan&#;s Peace Constitution (1)

C. Douglas Lummis

Prologue

In , on his way to the London Round Table Conference, Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a Reuters correspondent what his program was.  He responded by writing out a brief, vivid sketch of “the India of my dreams”.  Such an India, he said, would be free, would belong to all its people, would have no high and low classes, no discrimination against women, no intoxicants and, “the smallest army imaginable.” (2)

Gandhi in London in for the Round Table Conference

The last phrase presents a puzzle:  What is the smallest military imaginable?  But the fact that it presents a puzzle is also puzzling.  For what is so unimaginable about no military at all?  The question is not rhetorical, for most people do find the no-military option unimaginable.  It is easy enough to pray for peace, to petition and demonstrate for peace, or to imagine oneself as a perfectly pacifist non-killer.  It is harder to imagine a state with no military.

One of the few places where this option is clearly and forcefully stated is in Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.  People who first hear about this article often respond by insisting that the words can’t mean what they say.  It is, after all, an axiom of politics that states have militaries.  This axiom is presumed to hold despite the fact that there exist today 13 countries with no military forces and no military alliances. (3)

“Zero” is easy enough to imagine; what is it that makes it so hard for us to imagine “zero military”?  Perhaps one reason is that the things the military is trained to do, and does, are so awful that it is essential to us to believe that they are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, and

Ian David ‘Dave’ Kitson, born 25 August , was an activist and campaigning member of the African National Congress and South African Communist Party who served almost 20 years in prison for plotting to bring down his country’s apartheid regime.

He studied mechanical engineering at Howard College, Durban, and, graduating in , he served as a sapper with the South African army. After the war he moved to London, his father’s country of birth, where he was active in the engineering union TASS and Secretary of the Communist Party branch in Hornsey. TASS sponsored him for a two year scholarship at Ruskin in

He went on to marry Norma Cranko, a South African who was also active in the Communist Party, and together they returned to South Africa in

After Sharpeville, where police fired on unarmed protesters, killing 69, he joined the ANC’s sabotage campaign. When the campaign’s leadership was decimated following mass arrests, David became a member of the high command, directing the revolutionary struggle. days later he was arrested.

Whilst in captivity, David suffered interrogation and his wife Norma was held for three weeks. He was given a year sentence (for sabotage and membership of the Communist Party).  

David continued to learn in prison, acquiring further degrees. He was philosophical about his plight as “a casualty of the conflict”. Norma divorced him, moved to Britain, and married fellow South African Sidney Cherfas. Norma would later divorce Sidney and remarry David when he was released.

Norma founded the controversial City of London anti-apartheid group, whose confrontational protests were not approved by the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s national leadership. The ANC and the South African Communist Party told Kitson to denounce his wife, which he refused to do. They were expelled from the Party, suspended from the ANC and his old union, TASS, withdrew the offer of a lectureship at Ruskin. (The then-leaders of the ANC and South African Communist Party who

Month of

The following events occurred in March :

March 1, (Wednesday)

• Artur Bernardes of the Mineiro Republican Party won the Brazilian presidential election, defeating former President Nilo Peçanha. He would be inaugurated as the South American republic's 12th president on November
• The RSFSR (Russia's Republic in the Soviet Union) and Sweden signed a temporary commercial treaty in Stockholm. The Swedish Riksdag would later refuse to ratify it.
• The first trainload of migrating Mennonite Christians in Canada departed from the railway station in Plum Coulee, Manitoba, after that province and Saskatchewan had passed laws requiring regulating schools within their settlements. In all, 6, Mennonites would relocate to the Mexican state of Chihuahua to reassemble in the Colonia Manitoba north of Ciudad Cuauhtémoc.
• Born:
• Died:Pichichi (Rafael Moreno), 29, Spanish soccer football forward, died of typhus

March 2, (Thursday)

• Margaret Haig Thomas, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda was cleared to become the first female member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, after the Committee for Privileges and Conduct agreed with her argument that she was entitled under the law to succeed to the peerage of her father, David Alfred Thomas, 1st Viscount Rhondda, who had died in
• Charles P. Steinmetz, German-born American electrical engineer and inventor, announced at the General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York, that he had "succeeded in producing and controlling an indoor thunderstorm" with the successful test of generators that could discharge over , volts of electricity at 10, amperes for seconds.
• All 25 crew of the Norwegian freighter Grøntoft died after the ship foundered in a North Atlantic storm about miles (&#;km) southeast of Nova Scotia. By the time the steamship Estonia arrived to the coordinates radioed from the ill-fated ship, there was no trace of the vessel, wh