The Left Wants to Cancel Gandhi Now, but the Internet Isn't Having It

No one is immune from the ravages of cancel culture. If you commit a sin, someone will find it, expose it to the world, and ruin your name and reputation no matter how much of a revered saint you are. This now includes leftist hero Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, because now the left wants to cancel him too.

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An article from NPR delves into all of Gandhi’s more disagreeable positions and wrote an article about it. NPR pushed the article into the public’s hands with a tweet that read: “While Gandhi is deeply revered as a spiritual and political leader, people are now scrutinizing his sexual practices and his early writings in South Africa, which many black Africans are calling racist.”

The article makes it clear that Gandhi harbored racist thoughts and wrote them down. They even start the section off with words in bold saying “Gandhi was a racist”:

Last year, a Gandhi statue was removed from a university campus in Ghana. Activists there and in Malawi are using the hashtag #GandhiMustFall. They’re angry about his early writings.

In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be “the predominating race.” He also said black people “are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.”

There’s no way around it: Gandhi was a racist early in his life, says his biographer Ramachandra Guha.

They make it clear, however, that Gandhi outgrew his racism. However, that doesn’t seem to matter. He once was racist and that’s enough for many.

He was also a perv, and famously slept naked with his grandniece in her late teens to test his willpower. The #MeToo feminists are up in arms to be sure:

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That included gender discrimination. Gandhi championed women in politics. But he was also obsessed with his own celibacy. In his late 70s, before he died at 78, he slept naked with his grandniece when she was in her late teens. He said he wanted to test his willpower to abstain from sex.

Nowadays, most people would call that abuse. Some question whether the young female was capable of giving consent as a minor to a man who was so revered and so much more powerful than she.

To be sure, this move by Gandhi was more than odd, venturing well into gross. Still, I’m not sure it’s worth overturning a man’s entire legacy over.

Many on the internet apparently think the exact same, as they made it clear that while Gandhi wasn’t perfect, cancel culture is now going too far.

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It goes on for miles.

The last tweet I posted has a very good point, but it’s not just historical figures, it applies to everyone. No one is perfect and everyone does things that they ultimately regret. Using someone’s mistakes as a way to define someone is not only a horrible representation of the person, it encourages a mentality within our society that is dangerous.

We become a society that’s too afraid to mistakes, and making mistakes is one of the best learning tools humans have into becoming better people, and as a result, a better society.

Cancel culture is a plague.

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