{"id":17164,"date":"2012-11-17T02:11:32","date_gmt":"2012-11-17T02:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=17164"},"modified":"2012-11-17T02:11:32","modified_gmt":"2012-11-17T02:11:32","slug":"gaming-gandhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=17164","title":{"rendered":"Gaming Gandhi"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — two clashing quotes about Gandhi that followed one another in my RSS feed today, funny & strange ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n.<\/p>\n

Strange, to say the least.<\/p>\n

Gandhi was a strategist — as a friend of mine once wrote, “he achieved self determination for the largest number of individuals with the lowest cost in human life” of any rebel known to history — <\/p>\n

He managed this feat by holding a position of non-violent non-cooperation, while showing that the ‘civilized’ opponent of the United Kingdom could not live up to its own imposed standards of conduct or law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And at least some of the time, he was notably unwilling to romanticize himself — he once said:<\/p>\n

My nonviolence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach nonviolence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes. Nonviolence is the summit of bravery. And in my own experience, I have had no difficulty in demonstrating to men trained in the school of violence the superiority of nonviolence. As a coward, which I was for years, I harbored violence. I began to prize nonviolence only when I shed cowardice. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So he’s not the total pacifist he’s sometimes portrayed as. <\/p>\n

But nuclear weapons? “Much more dangerous than, say, Xerxes and Alexander the Great. Or Genghis Khan, for that matter”?<\/p>\n

Not in India, not back then. In one of Hugh Everett<\/strong>‘s “many worlds”? — perhaps. And in Civ2<\/strong>, the game<\/a>? — apparently, yes.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Quote sources: Outlook India<\/a> and National Post<\/a>, with a tip of the hat to Rex Brynen<\/strong> at PAXSims<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — two clashing quotes about Gandhi that followed one another in my RSS feed today, funny & strange ] . . Strange, to say the least. Gandhi was a strategist — as a friend of mine once wrote, “he achieved self determination for the largest number of individuals with the lowest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[529,371,560,848,771,90,782,179,481,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-humor","category-india","category-nonviolence","category-nuance-subtlety","category-nuclear","category-pacifism","category-revolution","category-strategist","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17164"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17178,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17164\/revisions\/17178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}