George H. Smith in the June 1983 volume of The Voluntaryist gives one more example of Rothbard’s penchant for manipulating (in this case, manufacturing) evidence whenever he needed it. It is an article deriding the menace of Gandhism.
Smith correctly calls it “Leninist.” ((This, by the way, is Rothbard’s own term. By it he meant not the substance of what he wrote but the strategy and tactics he used which he admitted he borrowed from Lenin.
Ah. I knew I wasn’t mistaken. I know the smell of sulphur as well as anyone. …
Anyway, since I’ve read quite a bit on Gandhi (including the multi-volume biography by Pyarelal, Koestler, Chaudhuri, and dozens of others, as well as Gandhi’s own writing), I feel I am on very strong grounds when I say that Rothbard could not have known much about Gandhi at all, if he thought that Gandhi’s habit of sleeping with some young women of his circle was unknown. It was not. It was widely known.
To be clear, there was never any sex in these arrangements and the whole thing was highly public and visible to everyone. The young women were around the ages of 18 or 19 (maybe one was 17? I’ll check) and vied for the honor of sleeping next to him.
This happened when Gandhi was in his eighties, and it happened after the death of his wife of nearly seventy years (he’d had a child marriage, a common practice in those days).
The young women helped him walk (he called them his crutches), bathed him, and often administered the enemas that were routine in his nature cures. Gandhi wrote about all of this at length, because he saw it as part of a spiritual practice testing his celibacy. He derived this apparently from Tantra and berated himself endlessly when he felt he had been aroused subconsciously or in his dreams (!), instead of just feeling like a “mother” to the women.
I’ve written about this at Counterpunch and Dissident Voice and I believe I was among the first to describe Gandhi’s practices as both arising from repressed psychological needs as a widower and from bona-fide Tantric techniques.
I even corresponded for a while with an academic who had written a dissertation to that effect. Gandhi was a strongly sexed man, who married in childhood (13), fathered several children, and took a vow of celibacy in his forties. There is no evidence that he ever broke his vow, although he enjoyed warm and slightly very flirtatious relationships with several female admirers.
[Correction n July 18: Sorry, I overlooked more recent research since my 2005 piece that shows Gandhi had “spiritual marriages” with a couple of his close women friends and a very close emotional relationship with a male friend. These were very close but not physical, so far as I know. His own words certainly show him to be a highly sexed man and reveal what many will insist is a homoerotic tendency. My own conclusions are different, but I can see some one else thinking he was “creepy” or “freaky”.]
Where Rothbard misrepresents is in claiming that this is unknown. Gandhi himself talked incessantly about his sexual feelings in his letters and even in his startlingly honest autobiography, “My Experiments With Truth,” probably the most revelatory autobiography ever written by a man in his position. Also, there is very little traditionally Hindu about Gandhi in any way. He was a Westernized eclectic, most influenced by Jesus, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and Ruskin]
He was strict (even authoritarian) but affectionate with his own wife, and most of what took place after her death was a kind of acting out of subconscious drama that he never confronted consciously.
What he did was certainly not harmless to the young women, who must have suffered a good deal of psychological damage.
But it was not intentional, and he was no charlatan.
Even Koestler never thought so.
Anyway, whatever you think about Gandhi or mysticism or Tantra, those who met the man were largely captivated.
Except for a few like Churchill who famously dismissed him as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer,” most people were impressed by Gandhi’s patent sincerity, demanding personal discipline, and complete unwordliness with regard to money or power.
He loved India and he loved her villages and he wanted to free the masses of people from the most grinding poverty and oppression. No one can doubt that.
What is even more remarkable he never expressed hatred for the British and showed sincere affection and respect even for the officers who arrested and beat him.
When he was shot, his last words were “He Ram” (a salutation to God).
Gandhi’s stature as a political figure and as a man is probably a bit higher, I’d guess, than Rothbard’s, which makes R’s shoddy scholarship even stranger.
In sum, Rothbard has no qualms about
1. Attacking major figures (Gandhi, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and others) in vicious and often personal terms.
2. Misrepresenting both what his targets said and what others have said about them.
3. Refitting the facts/history to suit his own ideological goals and individual temperament.
Why am I spending times analyzing Rothbard’s missteps?
Because for some time I have felt something terribly amiss with the Ron Paul movement.
There is more going on there than meets the eye and it is not just picking the right strategy or Rand’s tactics or alleged opportunism (or not). My misgivings are not confined to Paul. They extend to the people who promote him, many of whom are anarcho-capitalists (if there is such a thing).
Rothbard is the central figure of this group.
That seems to be not just because of his scholarship (there are many Mises scholars) but because of his relative political success and the success of his acolyte Ron Paul.
Paul, Rothbard and Co. have become the mouthpiece of antiwar, antistate libertarianism. What they say needs to be examined carefully. It would be smart to give them more than uncritical support.
With all the establishment propaganda and co-optation out there, one can’t be too suspicious. And Rothbard and Paul have given any thoughtful observer plenty to worry over.
Here are some excerpts from the Smith piece.
“THE ROTHBARDIAN FLIP-FLOP
One of the first times I talked to Murray Rothbard was at the 1975 California Libertarian Party Convention. Looking for a conversational topic, and having just read Arthur Koestler’s anthology The Heel of Achilles, I mentioned to Murray one of the essays, “Mahatma Gandhi: A Re-valuation.” Calling it “Gandhi revisionism,” I related some of Koestler’s debunking, such as Gandhi’s practice of sleeping with young girls to
test his vow of celibacy.
I vividly recall Murray’s reaction. Stating that Gandhi was a “good guy” who was “sound” on British imperialism, Murray emphasized that one’s personal life is irrelevant to one’s political beliefs and accomplishments. A simple point perhaps, but it sunk in.
Considering this background, it is surprising to see the Koestler piece re-emerge. This time, however, the article (reprinted in a recent Koestler anthology) is used by Rothbard to attack Gandhi with surprising vindict¡veness. Calling Koestler’s piece “a superb revisionist article,” Rothbard employs a Classic Comics version to argue that Gandhi was a “little Hindu charlatan.”
Something changed Rothbard’s view of Gandhi. Was it a scholarly assessment of Gandhi’s ideas and influence? The facts suggest otherwise. Rothbard displays little familiarity with Gandhian literature, primary or secondary. He seems to think that Koestler uncovered obscure information about Gandhi, but Koestler relied on standard biographies and anthologies (as his footnotes reveal). “The time has come,” Rothbard announces, “to rip the veil of sanctity that has been carefully wrapped around Gandhi by his numerous disciples, that has been stirred anew by the hagiographical movie, and that greatly inspired the new Voluntaryist movement.”
What “veil of sanctity”? Gandhi’s sexual theories and practices, his dietary habits, his treatment of his children — these and other “revisionist” aspects of Gandhi’s life were extensively discussed by Gandhi himself, and they appear in many Gandhi biographies. This may be scintillating revisionist fare for Murray Rothbard, but not for people who have read more than a solitary article. (Rothbard apparently hasn’t even seen the movie.)
Has voluntaryism been fueled by a trumped-up, sanctified Gandhi? Not one iota of evidence is given to support this claim. Not one word of voluntaryist writing is quoted to support Rothbard’s contention that we are, in effect, Gandhi disciples…”
And this:
Nonviolent resistance is not just a fallacy or mistake. True, it is “Hindu baloney,” nonsense,” and a “fad,” but it “cuts deeper than that.” It is a “menace,” “a spectre haunting the libertarian movement” which “has been picking off some of the best and most radical Libertarian Party activists [i.e., RC members], ones
which the Libertarian Party can ill afford to lose if it is to retain its thrust and its principles.” (How such a ridiculous fad appeals to the Party’s best and brightest is not explained.)
Here lies the solution to our puzzle. Here lies the difference between the 1975 Gandhi and the 1983 Gandhi: the latter is a threat to the Party, whereas the former was not. The good of the Party required some quick, if inaccurate, revisionism, so Gandhi got the axe. Rothbard assassinated a dead man for “reasons of Party.” (My own keen analyst informs me that Rothbard searched for someone else to do the dirty work; but apparently unable to locate a good hit man, he did the job himself.”
