Here is a link to the full paper: http://mileswmathis.com/fakir.pdf
WAS THE FAKIR A FAKER? NOTES ON THE GANDHI PSYOP
Much has been written in recent years trying to tear down the mythological figure known as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. These anti-hagiographies appear to be aimed mainly at tarnishing his image, trying to show that Gandhi was not the great Mahatma he is made out to be. Some of this work focuses rather salaciously on his sleeping naked with his great-nieces in his later years or his alleged homosexual relationship with a German bodybuilder. Other work focuses attention on the hypocrisy and contradictory things he did or said, pointing to his racist attitudes towards South Africa’s black population; his active support of the British in the Boer War and the violent suppression of the Zulu uprising; his support in recruiting Indian troops for WWI; his belief in Aryan supremacy and letters to Hitler who he called his friend; his involvement in the cover-up of the death of an American who was killed in riots in India that Gandhi helped instigate. But my aim here is not to hop on the muckraking bandwagon and drag Gandhi’s name through the mud. Whereas these efforts appear to be aimed at showing that Gandhi was rather less than we thought, my goal here is to discover if Gandhi was rather more than we thought.
My initial suspicions came about after having read much of Miles’s work tearing down our false idols and showing us what a sham our history is. My son was planning to dress up as Gandhi, and I thought: isn’t it awfully convenient for the British that the man who is credited with liberating India preached non-violent resistance? We are told that was the secret of his success, but something just smelled fishy to me. After resisting my hunches for a couple of months, I finally gathered the courage (and the whisky) to take a deep breath and open up his Wikipedia page. When I came to this description of Gandhi’s time as a law student in London, I nearly spit out my whisky:
“Influenced by Henry Salt's writing, he joined the Vegetarian Society, was elected to its executive committee, and started a local Bayswater chapter. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to join them in reading the Bhagavad Gita both in translation as well as in the original.”
On the Wikipedia page on Theosophy it says: “In November 1889 [Blavatsky] was visited by the Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi, who was studying the Bhagavad Gita with the Keightels [ed: actually Keightleys]. He became an associate member of Blavatsky's Lodge in March 1891, and would emphasize the close connection between Theosophy and Hinduism throughout his life.”
In light of Miles’s research on the Theosophical Society, Gandhi’s connection to these key members of the Theosophical Society was enough to drag me down the rabbit hole, and it has turned out be quite a labyrinth. We’ll be tripping over Theosophy quite a bit as we explore this underground maze. I’m going to start this paper with the way I got in, looking at Gandhi’s family and upbringing. Then I’m going to talk about his time in London and his education there, branching out to discuss several intriguing connections. After that, we’ll go back to India to talk about the founding of the Indian National Congress (INC) and explore some more history about several key players and where they come from. Then we’ll take a closer look at the INC and Gandhi’s political campaigns and an even closer look at some photos of Gandhi, where we find some very, um, shall we say, bizarre things. It’s a long, winding paper, but I hope you’ll agree in the end that it was worth hanging in there.