Impact Of Gandhi On Civil Disobedience

Nations all around the world have fueled the rise of various leaders, some changing their nation and country for the better, while others dragged their country down and lead to the death of millions. Two examples of this are when Mohandas Gandhi had risen to fame in India, and when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. During the 1800’s in India, Britain had already set up colonized empires. Britain hoped to gain valuable resources such as iron and coal from imperialising India, as well as felt as it was their moral need to guide and culture the Indians, which is referred to as the ‘white man’s burden’. To help with this, the British created the British East India Company to deal with matters in India. The British believed Indian culture and
Gandhi began to preach these ideas, and began to gain favor with the Indian people, for violence would only create more violence and harsher rules from their imperialist rulers. This lead Gandhi to perform an act of civil disobedience by marching thousands of miles, with an equal amount of followers, to turn salt water into pure salt. Ignoring the tax and going around it resulted in Gandhi being arrested, but even then his followers continued to march to the ocean, continuing to follow Gandhi's teachings of civil disobedience. Because of this, British imperialists eventually lifted the tax on salt. The British could not harm the Indians in fear of a full fledged rebellion taking place, especially since the Indians were not acting out in a violent, but a peaceful manner. Mohandas Gandhi and his teachings not only helped to change the way the Indian people thought, of peaceful protest rather than violence, but also achieved a removal of the tariffs on
After World War One Germany was angry for their loss of the war, they needed a scapegoat, a place to project their anger onto and Hitler with his charismatic persona gave Germany just that. Hitler began his preaching of nazisim in jail after his failed attempt at overthrowing the Weimar republic. Hitler wrote his book Mein Kampf, preaching Nazi beliefs while in jail. The book contained his thoughts that the Jews had caused Germany to lose the war, and that they should pay for it. Germany, in search of their scapegoat, immediately clung on to this thought leading tensions to steadily rise. Hitler began to slowly alienate and dehumanize the Jews, causing his followers to do the same. Beginning with Jews being required to wear a star of david to help not only isolate them, but to make them stand out in a crowd, eventually lead to Jews not being able to teach or have relations with non-Jews, non-Jews were also refusing to service Jews in many establishments. The German people still not satisfied, one night groups of German citizens and Nazi police known as gestapo burned down hundreds of synagogues and broke into as well as destroyed Jewish establishments. The Jews were terrorized and beaten in the streets, this night was forever known as ‘the night of broken glass’. Eventually, Hitler proposed his solution to how the Jews could make up for their ‘wrong