Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
A Cautionary Tale for Americans
By Pankaj Mishra
The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia
by William Pfaff
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., $27.95
In the early 1920s, during the first of his long spells in prison, Mohandas Gandhi read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Many of his British friends had recommended it to him; they probably thought it a useful book for Gandhi to read while confronting a powerful empire. But Gandhi was only partly impressed by Gibbon. He admired Gibbon's marshaling of 'vast masses of facts.' But, as he put it, 'facts are after all opinions.' He claimed that his Indian ancestors had done well to ignore history and seek philosophical wisdom in the Mahabharata, the account of a terrible war that apparently occurred in India in the first century BC. For, as he wrote, 'that which is permanent and therefore necessary eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.'[1]
Review, 4153 words
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