Gandhi

Gandhi was a smart well-meaning guy, a pacifist and a proponent of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience and pacifism certainly have their place and sometimes work. Dr. King and others used it more or less successfully in the civil rights movement. Sometimes though, you have to abandon civility.

Gandhi's advice to Britons in WWII:

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions...If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

uh-huh. Also right after WWII, he said of the European Jews:

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

To me Gandhi seems cold, someone who perhaps values ideas more than people. As far as civil disobedience does, it doesn’t always work unless ‘work’ means you’ve taken the supposed moral high ground completely disregarding the costs which could be your and your family's lives, then I reckon it always works. Realistically it only works if your oppressor has roughly the same moral code as you do and can eventually be reasoned with. Again, he was a good and very thoughtful man. It’s just that you can take any methodology/philosophy too far. Remember what George Carlin said: "Pacifism is a good idea but it can get you killed."