I admit, I've never heard this before - and I'm not saying what you've posted isn't true. It's just that Ghandi was just a man, with the same irrational faults as the rest of us. The question is, did the good he did out weigh this racism of his? I'm a German Lutheran, and I'll be the first to admit that Martin Luther in his later years (probably due to organic brain damage he had sustained after surviving a number of catostrophic illnesses) wrote some very ugly Anti-semitic things - but that hardly negates his historical contribution. I think the same standard should be afforded Ghandi.
What, exactly, was Martin Luther's great contribution?
He claimed that people should read the bible for themselves and obey their consciences, rather follow the priest's teachings.
The result was IOO years of the worst warfare Europe had seen up to that time.
Germanic Christianity, to give the movement which Luther's agitation ushered in, is inferior in most ways to Latin Christianity.
The former sanctified work and money as ethical values, removed the prohibition against Christians lending money at interest, abolished most religious holidays, abolished most of the Sacraments, and gave license to the continuing division of Christianity into competing sects.
Germanic Christianity allowed the Germanic peoples, the most warlike and cold hearted of the Aryans, to meld their fundamentally anti-Christian attitudes and prejudices with religion.
Oh, and the reading of the bible HAS confused laymen just as the Catholic priests said it would.
Just take a look at the inane arguments going on about The Rapture, The Tribulation, and Revelations.
One cannot take metaphors and myths about the divinity of food preservation techniques - the primary source of religious mythology from Zarathustra to Jesus - literally and expect to get any sensible religious doctrine out of that.
Martin Luther was an intelligent fool, a tool of the Germanic lust for violent domination of others, and a trouble maker who left little but physical and intellectual wreckage in his wake.
I forgot to include Gandhi in my rant.
Gandhi did, indeed, write many anti-Black things.
He had a news paper column when he lived in South Africa.
He constantly strove to get the Boers to place Indian immigrants in a different and superior class than that they consigned the 'Kaffirs' (Blacks) to.
He did this mainly by unfavorably comparing Kaffir characteristic and behavior with that of Indians.
In his personal life Gandhi was a thorough going crank.
He insisted on stopping sexual relations with his wife after she entered menopause, claiming that celibacy was natural after conception was no longer possible.
On the other hand, he repeatedly slept naked with teenaged girls to 'test' his chastity.
He insisted on encouraging Indian cottage industry and handicraft in opposition to machine made cotton cloth, retarding India's progress as an industrial power.
He suggested that the Jews suffering under Hitler's pogroms commit suicide as an act of faith in their god and a reproach to the Nazis.
Gandhi was a terrible speaker at a time when most of his followers were illiterate and relied upon oral communication.
I suspect Gandhi was essentially a show piece, a fetish even for the Indian independence movement.
As such he played a successful part in motivating millions of ordinary Indians to forge an independent state out of nations which are at least as diverse as the nations of Europe.
He and his confederates did this in the teeth of the most powerful empire the world had known up to that time.
He deserves praise for his part in this, but Gandhi the man must be considered something much less admirable.
