(On 10/7/2023)
“These type of attacks don’t work.” Buddy I will gladly teach you about Haiti gaining freedom from France, Congo gaining freedom from Belgium, India gaining freedom from England, and a hundred other examples of active resistance working.
(Submitter’s note: She’s extremely wrong about India.)
Indeed. And I’m not even talking about the famed Gandhi pacifism everyone’s heard about (after all, there were other forms of resistance in India at the time, some of them violent).
What I mean is…
Interesting, to compare the Indian road to independence and fight against British rule as something akin to the October 7th attack.
(Or more accurately, the British Raj’s road — so, that would be the package of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh).
The final run-up to independence was full of negotiations between the British, the Hindus and the Muslims. There was a whole lot of *talking*. Often frustrating and unsuccessful, but nevertheless crucial.
Not to mention that the UK had been exhausted and economically devastated by World War II, making holding the Raj/India that more difficult.
Or that the new British Labour government in 1945 supported decolonization of India, which Prime Minister Clement Attlee had himself supported for a long time by then.
Or that some of the British forces in India had mutinied in 1946, among other things due to their slow repatriation into Britain.
Or that the Indian elections in 1946 resulted in a decisive victory of pro-independence parties.
And so on.
If anything, the moments that at times *actually* resembled October 7th came not in anti-colonial violence against the British in India, but rather entirely between the native peoples.
As independence drew near, inter-religious violence exploded, and was further spurred on by the need of the political leaderships to neatly divide what was a very mixed and complex colony, where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs largely lived together.
There were a lot of truly horrible episodes and massacres in the run-up to the partition of India in 1947, and during the war that followed.
But that wasn’t some liberation struggle against colonial oppressors; rather, it was a brutal ‘fratricidal’ turf war between people who shared much except their religion.
So yeah, that “active resistance” worked… to kill hundreds of thousands of people, displace millions, destroy countless lives, with wanton rape and plundering and sadism… and all for what?
You want to compare that to the ‘active resistance’ of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Actually… by all means, do so.
And ask yourself the question: what did Hamas and company achieve? Where did their efforts bring the people whom they’ve been claiming to fight for all these decades?
Where indeed.
