Mahatma Gandhi Was a Fool, Not A Hero

He urged the British to surrender, and suggested that the Czechs and even the Jews would have been better off committing heroic mass suicide.

Even as late as June 1946, when the extent of the Holocaust had emerged, Gandhi told biographer Louis Fisher: “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

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Gandhi’s funny sex ideas

When Gandhi was 16, he was having sex with his wife at the very moment his father died. The trauma seems to have led him to develop some odd ideas about sex. He thought married couples should only have sex three or four times … in total. In fact, Gandhi credited his spiritual powers to his ability to avoid ejaculation, and one morning he flipped out on discovering that he’d had a nocturnal emission.

Gandhi also had an unusual way of testing his celibacy. As an old man, he would ask the local hotties to spend the night lying naked beside him. His wife was no longer temptation enough, apparently, and he described her as looking like a “meek cow.”

Gandhi, family man

Gandhi’s opposition to modern technology, including modern medicine, took odds turns. He didn’t want his wife to take life-saving penicillin, because it would be administered with a hypodermic needle. He did, however, allow himself to be treated with quinine and even to be operated on for appendicitis.

He refused to allow his sons to get a formal education, and also tried to force his oddball sexual ideas on them. He so disapproved of the wife of his eldest son that the Mahatma disowned him. This son broke from the family and became an alcoholic. In rebellion against everything his father stood for, Harilal Gandhi even announced at one point that he had converted to Islam.

The Mahatma also had trouble with his second son, Manilal, who had an affair with a married woman. Dad made the matter a public scandal and pushed the woman involved to shave her head. Manilal was also briefly exiled from the family for lending money to fellow black sheep Harilal.

Gandhi and the bathroom

In the movie, Gandhi is seen fighting with his wife over her refusal to clean the latrine in the ashram.

This just scratches the surface of the one of the strangest elements of the Mahatma’s makeup … a fixation on bodily excretions that he pushed whenever he could on his family and disciples.

Gandhi seemed to be almost as interested in Indian sanitation as he was in Indian freedom. At his ashram, he designed latrines and ran latrine drills. “The bathroom is a temple,” he once said. “It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there.”

Gandhi also took a great deal of interest in the bowel movements of his friends, and life at the ashram was marked by daily enemas. He also experimented with diet, to see what effect different types of food had on excretions.

Weirdest of all, it seems he also made a habit of drinking his own urine.