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| - "The Last Article" is a short alternate history story by Harry Turtledove (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1988; reprinted in There Will Be War VII: Call to Battle! (edited by Jerry Pournelle, 1988), the Turtledove collection Kaleidoscope (1990), in The Best Military Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, (Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, eds., 2001), and in the omnibus volume 3xT (2004). It was also translated into German and reprinted in the anthology Hiroshima soll leben! (Hiroshima Shall Live!, Karl Michael Armer, 1990).
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abstract
| - "The Last Article" is a short alternate history story by Harry Turtledove (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1988; reprinted in There Will Be War VII: Call to Battle! (edited by Jerry Pournelle, 1988), the Turtledove collection Kaleidoscope (1990), in The Best Military Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, (Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, eds., 2001), and in the omnibus volume 3xT (2004). It was also translated into German and reprinted in the anthology Hiroshima soll leben! (Hiroshima Shall Live!, Karl Michael Armer, 1990). Set in 1947, "The Last Article" depicts the occupation of India by the Nazis following their victory in World War II. The point of divergence appears to be the success of Operation Sea Lion in 1940. Mohandas Gandhi continues to employ techniques of Satyagraha against the occupation forces led by Field Marshal Walther Model. While the techniques may have worked well against the British, the Germans respond with violence. Despite Jawaharlal Nehru's urging that Gandhi to change tactics, Gandhi does not comprehend the horrific violence the Nazis were willing to employ, and refuses. He is finally arrested and summarily executed by Model. The theme of this story is summed up at the end, as Gandhi realizes that his pacifism worked because the British were at least capable of being ethical, although they didn't always act ethically. The Nazis, on the hand, were by definition unethical, and so had to be met with force. The story title comes from a line in Gandhi's 1922 address to a British court. "Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed."
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