Pacifism and non-violence as a strategy can work within the structure of a democratic government with an open press. It can't work on an international stage where it cease to be pacifism and becomes appeasement, as Orwell would note.

Gandhi believed that all could be approach on an individual basis through his philosophy and changed; he also considered close friendship dangerous. Gandhi viewed close friendship as something that could lead to wrongdoing. Orwell writes, "If one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, on cannot give one's preference to any individual person." Of course, some would consider just an attitude as cold and callous. But then leader of mass movements, in particular religious movements, find themselves choosing between the greater good and their close friends or family. Under those circumstances, loyalties to close friends are to be abandoned. In the Bible, Jesus warns that family would rise against family because of faith. Gandhi understood that concept and believed it.

Orwell had an "aesthetic distaste for Gandhi" and questioned Gandhi saint hood; he did consider Gandhi a success as a politician. He freed India from British rule and after the Second World War, there were more than enough British who ready to grant India their independence. Much of this has to be credited to Gandhi, whose peaceful resistance made it easier for the British to let go. Gandhi may have failed in keeping South Central Asia from separating into a Muslim and Hindu sphere of influence, he was successful in freeing both Pakistan and India from British rule and did so without much bloodshed. Unfortunately, not even Gandhi could stop the sectarian violence between Hindu and Moslems after Independence and he became a casualty of it.

Gandhi genius was that he understood the British and their system of law. He knew that he could manipulate those laws and traditions to his benefit and he succeeded.

Orwell on Charles Dickens

Orwell wrote, "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing." Orwell noted that Dickens criticism of society "is almost exclusively moral." In Dickens writing, Charles Dickens does not write a thesis of what, if any, new system of government needed to be put in place to correct the deficiency of the society that he wrote about.

Dickens view of the French Revolution is indicative of this attitude. His book, A Tale of Two Cities, begins with the understanding that those who lost their head in the beginning had it coming. The French aristocracy deserved their fate for their past action and they dug their own graves, so to speak. Dickens view was that if the wicked noblemen behaved differently, then there would be no revolution. Dickens was not, however, a revolutionary for he viewed revolution as a monster that devoured its own. His intensity toward the guillotine portrays his own feelings that this revolution got out of control. On this point, Orwell writes, "The one thing that everyone who has read A Tales of Two Cities remembers the is the Reign of Terror. The book is dominated by the guillotine- tumbrels thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bounding into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch." While these scenes are only a small part of the book, the passion that went into these incidences shows Dickens fear of revolution.