Gandhi defeat Hitler? Don't think so.

I think you are wrong. I think bad behavior like Hitler's has a way of defeating itself. I think Mr. Gandhi's policy of no violence would have helped Hitler defeat himself. It would have sped up the fall of this awful person and left those alive with their honor and goodness.

It's an interesting question. Everyone's arguing that Hitler or Stalin wouldn't have been stopped but have you considered that their followers would have been?
Gandhi promoted the ideal that those committing the violence against the non-violent would eventually feel shamed by their actions and stop. He was proved correct.

The Nazis committed violence and had violence returned. This further strengthened their resolve to commit further violence. Gandhi saw this happening in India with the British and the Indian terrorists/freedom fighter. He broke the cycle and changed the world.

By saying it only worked in India because it was against the British but wouldn't have worked with the Germans or the Russians (or the Chinese or the Muslims or any race/culture you care to name) is ironically making you sink as low as the ethnic cleansers. You are in effect saying it only worked because the British are superior to those other races. This is definitely not what Gandhi was saying!

I don't think civil disobedience would always work, but I think it'd work more often than we give it credit for working. When dealing with big complex issues like this, there are no absolutes, and Hitler is not your average dictator in that he wanted to continually conquer more and more, many dictators simply aim to keep what they have.

I do think that America is war hungry, and that a large majority (not all) of our wars could have been easily avoided, and that people are far too eager for violence and especially to believe that violence is good because "bad people" are being killed. It's such a simplistic world view that often ends up making us more enemies. For example, most of the "bad guys" now were our allies in the 1980s when we were fighting the evil communists.

With Hitler, I do think he defeated himself by overreaching, but that the overreach was militarily, so yes, war does seem to have been justified, and also remember that World War II brought together the war of Japan against the Chinese. Massive crimes were happening on a massive scale. Still, if you know your history you know that the concentration camps were not widely talked about in the open, and many average German citizens were unaware of what was going on, partly because they didn't want to know. But had there been an "expose" of sorts, had footage and pictures of babies being burned alive and all those horrible things been released, I think Nazi Germany would have looked inward and that they potentially could have crumbled from inside. It's one thing to hate people and want to defeat them and crush them, it's another to know that you have those people locked up and are killing them in sadistic and unfair ways. No nation as a whole is so bloodthirsty that I think they would publicly and willing support that kind of sadism. A military, maybe (think Rape of Nanking), but an entire nation?

Just look at dictatorships today, the dictators rarely admit to the extent of their crimes and if they do they justify it by saying the victims were equally violent and thus "deserved it." No mass group of people likes the idea of helpless people being hurt and destroyed. Look at the US, we've killed a lot of people in Iraq. We point out the bad guys who deserved to go, and although we're aware that innocents and children and families have been hurt, we don't really talk about it because we want to believe that the ends justify the means and that more bad people are harmed than innocent. This is what the Nazis believed about the Jews. The Jews were dangerous to everyone else, so thus they had to go. But if people saw the footage of babies being burnt, saw it with their own eyes, and seeing just how helpless the people being slaughtered were and how sadistic the violence was, I think Hitler's Nazi empire would have crumbled from within.

Imagine if there was footage and proof of institutionalized, mass genocide committed by Americans toward Iraqis. America wouldn't be so split on the Iraq war politically anymore and we'd turn against our leaders who got us into that war and continued it. Of course, now that war is over, and it's like a dirty little secret nobody talks about because there wasn't obvious, clear victory. In short, we accept violence as a culture because we believe other people who have violent intentions are being put down. It's always explained as some sort of self-defense (ie Saddam had WMDs and was a threat to us). When that illusion is destroyed, I don't think any major nation could sustain itself, which is why the illusion is so important. Look at a civil war, too, like in Syria. Both sides claim the other is the aggressor, and that is what stokes the violence. "If I didn't do it to them, they woulda done it to me." If the people fighting for Assad believed him to be only a murderer and ruthless despot, they would stop fighting for him. But they believe him to be something else, so they fight on his behalf. The ends justify the means to them.

As a whole, the human race seems to be too quick to jump to a last resort (war) as the first and only proper action, and Gandhi proved that it can work other ways.

If you really believe that you are incredibly stupid. If you are joking it is in very poor taste.

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It could have worked, like someone else said, the Nazis would have felt shame to fight non-violent opponents since they were human too, the fact they fought more and more was because their enemies were reacting with violence as well, which made them think they were right all along.

As "bad" as the Nazis were, most of them thought they were doing the right thing, even Hitler. We gotta stop looking at them as if they were the bad guys, they were people like all of us fighting for what they believed.

Gandhi was right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA5O_0Ufjwc

His point was that if the German people had stood up to the National Socialists in the early to mid '30s and not followed like sheep, Hitler could have been defeated before it became a questions of armed conflict.

"Don't drink that @$$hole, you'll get malaria!..."