Sri Lanka: What Next?

In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have been decisively defeated, and their leader, Prabhakaran, is almost certainly dead. Modern warfare is a cruel and ugly business and the cost in civilian death and suffering is always huge, and this conflict was no exception. And like in all modern wars, crimes were committed by both sides.

As a pacifist I cannot but deplore the method, and make no excuses for any crimes against humanity, like the shelling of hospitals, that may have been committed by the Sri Lankan military. Nevertheless, the end of the Tamil Tigers is a positive good.

The Tamil minority does have legitimate grievances, but this in no way justified the activities of the Tigers. These were probably the most cruel and bloody-handed terrorist group anywhere. The Tigers pioneered the use of the suicide bomb, using most often very young women. They had no compunction about hitting purely civilian targets, even the Temple of the Tooth. They forcibly recruited child soldiers on a large scale. And they terrorized and intimidated their own people more than anyone else. Prabhakaran was a figure who could only be compared to Pol Pot, a fanatic, probably a psychotic, who demanded absolute obedience. One of the biggest obstacles to finding a peaceful solution has been the systematic assassination of moderate and democratic Tamil leaders on Prabhakaran orders.

All this is true. But the Sinhalese side is not without blame. While the roots of this ethnic conflict run very deep (it is mentioned in the Vissudhimagga,) and the British bear some blame for playing their usual divide-and-conquer games, the modern on again off again civil war can be traced to the policies of the 1956 Bandaranaike government. A left-leaning nationalist and populist comparable to Nasser of Egypt, Bandaranaike promoted a unitary Sinhalese and Buddhist state. The linguistic rights of the Tamils were abolished; they were expected to conform to the majority culture.

This strain of aggressive cultural nationalism has persisted to the present day.Sometimes it wears the mantle of protecting Buddhism, but it is not in accord with the Buddha's teaching to oppress others. In no way is ethnic or religious chauvinism compatible with the Dhamma.

All this is past history. What is important is what happens now, and in the future. In the immediate term there is a humanitarian crisis pending in the north with up to a quarter million displaced persons living in make-shift camps who are in urgent need of food and medicine.

In the longer term, the only hope for peace and prosperity is for both sides to transcend ethnic tribal feelings and ancient grudges, to sit down to together and work out an equitable political solution. It may mean guaranteed minority rights within a unitary state, or a federal solution with a semi-autonomous Tamil province. The details are for the Sri Lankans to work out. It may actually be possible now that the Tigers are out of the way, provided that the Sinhalese side does not succumb to a triumphalist mood.

Gaza Continued

How do we hold in our hearts and minds the reality that is Gaza, the terrible crimes of Operation Cast Lead? If we aspire to follow the teachings of the Buddha the starting point, and ending point, must be the maxim, "Hatred is not overcome by hatred. Hatred is only overcome by love, that is a law eternal, spoken by all the Buddhas" (Dhammapada)

It does not help anyone to view the indisputable war crimes of the IDF and to fall into anger and ill-will. Tribalism is the problem here, and reflecting back with anti-Jewish tribalism, as the poster "anonymous" has here is to take the poison into our own being.

The path of peace is not a path of surrender or weakness. Look again at the Palestinian woman in the video, facing off the soldier. There is no hatred in her voice or her demeanour. She is making an honest attempt to confront the soldier at a human level. Yes, the soldier still fired his rifle but I think you can see a moment of doubt there. She may not have broken down his tribal mind-set, but she made a crack in it.

There are many points of conflict in the world; economic struggle for precious land and resources underlie most of them, and the blind ignorance of a tribal "us vs. them" mentality fuels the hearts of the combatants. We need to wake up from these nightmares and face our common humanity together.

The Middle East conflict is only one among many, but it commands our attention for all kinds of reasons; strategic, economic, historical, religious and cultural. Emotions run high and it is very difficult to keep a rational discussion going. Look around the internet and see how many comments fall into the mirror-image camps of the tribalists. One side denounces the "greedy murderous Zionists" and the other decries the "brutal terrorist fanatics." In reality, two groups of scared, ignorant humans just like the rest of us.

To think rationally about the problem is hard. We need to step back from all extremes and try and understand Israel and Palestine objectively. Maybe I might have an edge here, as a Buddhist I don't have a pony in the race between the competing deities.

The first thing that needs to be said is that in the broad picture, Israel is the oppressor. Israel has taken most of the Palestinian land and imposed a very harsh apartheid regime on the occupied territories. The settlements, more accurately colonies, in the West Bank are an intolerable violation of international law. So is the policy of collective punishment which resulted in the starvation blockade of Gaza.

Thinking historically, it seems to me that Israel represents an anachronism; a survival of nineteenth century colonialism into the twenty-first century. The closest historical analogy to the Israel treatment of the Palestinians is the way the Americans treated the natives. The Zionist movement grew up in an age of colonialism. What France did to Algeria, and Britain to Rhodesia, made the Zionist project respectable among nations. This behaviour is no longer tolerable.

There can be no peace in the Middle East without a just settlement for the Palestinians. How this can be accomplished is very hard to say, but it is certainly not to be found in check-points, apartheid walls and punitive campaigns. For a few years it looked like a two-state solution, essentially a reprise of the 1947 UN plan, was a viable option. But, foolishly perhaps, Israel has made that nearly impossible by stepping up the pace of colonization, leaving the Palestinians no room for a viable state.

Tariq Ali writing in the Guardian makes the case for the one-state solution; one state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan with all citizens equal regardless of ethnicity. This would not be easy either with the legacy of bitterness on both sides. It would be the end of the Jewish state but perhaps that is a good thing. States based on a single ethnic identity are a legacy of the past and a perpetuator of the tribal insanity. Who knows, given a generation or two perhaps the Jews and the Arabs could learn to live together and produce something new and valuable for the world.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, except that it is not to be found in piling up more bodies. If I could advise the Israeli leadership I would suggest that they open negotiations with all relevant parties on the other side, including Hamas, and begin by admitting the historical wrongs they have committed and asking in all humility for suggestions as to how to make things right. Start by recognizing that they will have to give some things up; land and money for starters, and perhaps even an exclusive Jewish state.

I have been critical of Israel here, mostly because in the big picture they are in the wrong, but it should be said in all fairness that the tribal stupidity is found on the other side as well. The Hamas tactic of firing rockets into Sederot is an example. These rockets have no value whatsoever towards the legitimate goals of the Palestinian people; they will not get them neither land nor peace. Even from a cynical military point of view they are useless, gnats biting on an elephant. The only motivation seems to be simple revenge.

If I could advise the Palestinian leadership I would say you need more people like the heroine in the video. Imagine tens of thousands of her, calmly facing down the Israeli guns and tanks, perhaps sitting down en masse and blocking the Jewish-only apartheid roads in the West Bank. This would take more courage than throwing rocks.

To paraphrase an old joke; if only the Jews and the Arabs could settle their differences like good Buddhists.

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NOTE ON COMMENTS

In general I do not like censorship and am happy to leave up comments with which I disagree. However, I think "anonymous" has crossed the line by promoting racism and violence. Those comments have been deleted.

Please feel free to disagree or agree for that matter, and to take any side. But please find someplace else to post hatred directed against any ethnic group.

Heartless in Gaza

I heard an interview on CBC this morning with a Canadian who is serving as a civilian helper for the Israeli army. I felt a great sadness hearing him say that he was happy about the "operation" in Gaza, calling it "payback" and being "glad to see the other side getting some too."

Where to start about the sick morality of war? The first thing that comes to mind listening to people like that is the stupid tribalism. Can't we get past that idiocy already? My race is smarter and cuter than your race. My god is bigger and meaner than your god. I've never understood that way of thinking. In high-school I wasn't able to summon up the proper "school spirit," not really caring whether we won the foot-ball game or not. It seemed stupid to me then, and it seems stupid to me now.

War is inherently wrong and it can only be justified in immediate self-defence, if even then. Every ordinary human, moral value is abandoned or reversed in war. Killing is good, lying is good, stealing is acceptable. Even rape is winked at.

From "A People's History of the American Revolution," here is a British officer writing to his father after a successful landing on Staten Island;

"The fair nymphs of this isle are in a wonderful tribulation, as the fresh meat our men have got here have made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most immediate risk of being ravished, and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don't bear them with the proper resignation, and of consequence we have the most entertaining courts-martial every day."

The current action in Gaza isn't even fit to be called a war, it is a plain massacre. We hear all the rote excuses from the Israeli military about not targeting civilians and blaming it all on Hamas for "hiding among the population." "We do everything we can to minimize collateral damage." But that isn't "collateral damage", that is a pile of corpses, many of them little children, and every one somebody's son, daughter, mother, father, brother, sister, lover. What do they expect dropping bombs and shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth?

And they lie, and lie again. The historical record is clear, Hamas didn't break the ceasefire, Israel did by invading Gaza back in November to destroy some tunnels, killing one hundred people in the process. Of course, the Hamas rockets are just as evil in intent if not (by a very long shot) in effect. Of course, but so what? And don't forget the bigger picture, most of the Gazans are descendants of refugees ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948.

While we are talking about lies and the historical record, Hamas didn't take power in a "coup" as lame duck Bush said; they won an election and resisted a Fatah coup. Yes, they don't recognize Israel but neither does Israel recognize the Palestinian right to a decent life either. Many Zionist apologists even deny that any such people as "Palestinians" even exist. One wonders in that case where the rockets are coming from?

This is not a war, this is a prolonged massacre after a year of deliberate and very cruel starvation blockade. In more civilized times, that alone was considered an act of war.

I believe that the fundamental moral error that lies behind war, and massacre, is the really evil idea that "the end justifies the means." This idea, whether stated implicitly or not, lies behind every invasion, bombing campaign, crusade and jihad in history. Sure, people are being killed by the thousands but it is necessary to spread democracy, the true religion, free-markets, socialism. As Madeleine Albright famously said about another starvation blockade, and the death of thousands of Iraqi children, "it's a price we are willing to pay."

The cowardly response of the so-called leaders of western countries is disgusting, if not surprising. Canada's Stephen Harper is predictably blaming the Palestinians for getting in the way of Israeli bombs and bullets. If the western countries would only speak the truth and call things by their right names, Israel would never dare to go on these killing campaigns.

But whatever Bush, Harper, Brown and the rest of the sorry crew say, slaughter of human beings en masse is a crime, even when it is done by those perceived as on the "home team."

Maybe it is the women who will save us. Here are a group of courageous Jewish women who have occupied the Toronto Israeli consulate in protest;



http://rabble.ca/multimedia/israeli-consulate-occupied-toronto

And here is one incredibly courageous woman in Palestine (wait for it, it's about one minute or so into the clip):




Every blessing on all those who non-violently resist the powerful.

War is Madness

The Buddha condemned war and described it as motivated "by sensual desire, just by sensual desire." In the suttas, war is pictured as "men strapping on shield and armour and hacking one another with swords, causing death and painful wounds." Ancient warfare was horrible enough, and more horrible in reality than epic movies would lead one to believe. Most wounds in battle were in the lower body, because of constraints of human anatomy and the need for mobility the region from the belly to the knees was always the least protected by armour.

But modern warfare is much, much worse. Modern states have much more lethal means at their disposal than swords and arrows. What is more, in operations conducted by the most sophisticated military powers, there is always a higher rate of casualties among civilians than among warriors, either of the attacking or the defending force.

Modern warfare is nasty, cruel and cowardly. Pilots sitting safely in their cockpits, flying high enough to avoid ground-fire, are also too high to visually ascertain whether a target is civilian or military. The risk of war is not eliminated, it is simply transferred in a craven way from the warrior to the innocent. Aerial bombardment is a morally depraved tactic, no better or worse than terrorism. In fact, it is best called state terrorism. And they aren't "collateral damage," they are victims of war-crimes.

In recent years the biggest perpetrators of such crimes against humanity have been the Americans and their regional allies the Israelis. Are these nations somehow morally worse than any others? If only it were so, then it would be a special case. They are neither better nor worse than any others, in spite of their claims for exceptional status. They are merely the dogs currently on top in the scramble for scraps. They are killing the most civilians not because they are in any way worse than other nations, but only because they can.



In a recent action in Baghran province in Afghanistan;

United States Air Force (USAF) announced, "An Air Force B-1B Lancer dropped guided bomb unit-31s on enemies hiding in a tree line near Baghran. The bomb drop was reported to have good effects."

Of course, "deeply regretted by coalition authorities," there were some not so good effects;

On that fateful afternoon of August 2nd, hundreds of people had gathered for the traditional weekly market (or 'mela') in Bughni (or Bagh-e-Nahi) where local people trade everything from carpets, foods, clothes, to cows. Market day there falls on Thursday, the start of Afghanistan's weekend. Then, suddenly, the U.S. Boeing-made GBU-31, GPS-guided 2,000 pound bombs fell from the blue sky.

Panic erupted. Many villagers said they lost fathers, brothers, and children in the inferno.

This is by no means an unusual incident in any of the current theatres of war. In last year's invasion of Lebanon;

[Israel fired] at least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported so far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180. Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure closer to 3 million.

Hezbollah too was guilty of war-crimes, cited by Human Rights Watch, such as loading rockets with ball-bearings. If the Israeli assault was a hundred times more murderous, it was only because they had the superior killing technology. There are no good guys in any of these awful wars.

In fact, a huge part of the problem is the simplistic tribal mentality that divides the world into "good-guys" (us and people who look and think like us) and "bad-guys" (people who live over there, eat weird food and worship weirder gods) This simplistic mentality makes it possible for the elites to justify their resource-wars as moral crusades. But no amount of lip-stick can hide the ugliness of that particular pig.

As a species, we ought to have grown out of this baboonish territoriality long ago. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who pointed out that war was the single most entropic activity of the human species. In other words, it is destruction, death and chaos. We can no longer afford to be killing each other, we have pressing issues to attend to if civilization is to continue.

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POST-SCRIPT

Looking for signs of sanity is hard, but finding public voices that are stark raving mad is easy. Here are two of the scariest articles I've seen in ages. Scary because there are people out there who think like that;

This guy wants to nuke Iran, and sees "no moral dilemma."

And these guys want Bush to be President-for-Life (after killing all the Iraqis)

But some other folks, bless them, are trying. Here's the kind of thing that might actually be very helpful in letting us learn to see each other as human beings;

The Peace-Maker Game, a Middle East simulation available in English, Hebrew and Arabic versions. I guess you would call it a First Person Don't Shoot 'Em

Onward Christian Soldiers

I've defined "spirituality" as the quest for the noumenous and/or the trascendental, and "religion" as the institutionalized or organized expression of spirituality. Some people may find that oxymoronic, like trying to "catch a snark with a railway share," (Hunting of the Snark) but it's a definition I can work with.

There are some abuses of religion that divorce it from spirituality altogether. These may be superstitious and commercial, like the medieval sale of indulgences (recently secularized and updated as "carbon credits") or like the mass market for amulets in Thailand. But I can't get too upset about that, it's almost like the Nigerian scam letters, if you're foolish and greedy enough to believe in it, you're not a very sympathetic victim. The worst harm comes from the disrepute it brings to genuine expressions of religion, but I hope most people can discern the difference.

A much graver offence against the spirit of religion is when it religious rhetoric is used to justify war. No major religion has completely escaped this blemish; Buddhists sometimes boast that we've never had a war fought in our name, but that claim is historically dubious to say the least. We should face up honestly to the misuse of Buddhism by some Zen priests in 1930's Japan and by some Theravada monks in contemporary Sri Lanka. If we're not honest about that, we can't fairly point the finger when adherents of other relgions go down the same dark path.

A very dangerous aspect of the manifestation of Holy War is going on in Iraq. We hear a lot about Islamic extremists, but less about their mirror image found in the American forces. There are many stories coming out about the penetration of extreme dominionist christians in the US armed forces. Dominionists are a very polticized wing of the fundamentalist movement, who believe that America should be transformed into a theocratic state. It appears that the Air Force may be particularly full of these people. (See this article from the progressive Jewish site, Tikkun.) There is also the scary rise of the mercenary army Blackwater, which is run by Dominionists.

Now the Army has authorized a tour of US Forces in Iraq by the "Left-Behind" group to promote and distribute a video game based on a post-raptured New York where Christian soldiers seek to convert the heathens and kill those who can't be saved any other way. "Left-Behind" refers to a series of novels based on the Book of Revelations. The writing is pedestrian, the theology absurd and there is lots of righteous killing of the unsaved throughout. But they sell really well. They've already made a film, and now fans can download the game and destroy the ungodly hordes in comfort of their own homes.

Or they can go to Iraq and do it for real.

Remembrance Day

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, marking the date of the Armistice that ended World War One (aka the Great War) which occurred at 11 AM on Nov. 11, 1918. It's traditionally a day to remember the war dead, marked with a minute of silence at 11 o'clock.

It's a good thing for a culture to remember, but I think the memory tends to be selective. If we really remembered the Great War, we'd never fight another one. Sadly, the official and popular commerations of this day tend to glorify militarism, feeding the cult of "noble war."

There was nothing noble about the Great War. It was a horrific blood-bath fought in appalling conditions mostly by very young men, teenagers for the most part. And it was fought basically for nothing. Certainly, for the young boys here in Canada there was no conceivable connection. What did some Saskatchewan farm-boy know or care about the legal status of Bosnia-Herzogovina or the ultimatum to Serbia? Canadians were fighting someone else's imperial battles (and we still are.)

Do we never learn? Wave a coloured bit of cloth around, yell about "national honour" (or these days, "national security") jump up and down and "support the troops" and Johnny is marching off again to the Somme, to Normandy beach, to Diem Ben Phu, to Fallujah, to Kandahar.

War is the biggest single dynamo of greed, hatred and delusion. Greed; wars are started by greedy men who want more land, water, oil or markets. As the Buddha said, "men strap on armour and hack and hew one another just for sensual desires." If there is an exception to this rule, a war that wasn't really about gross material gain, I don't know about it. (Maybe the Aztec "flower wars?") Hatred; in war-time hate is the new love. It becomes acceptable, nay mandatory, to hate the enemy; the inhuman boche, jap, gook, hajj. There all the same, kill 'em all and let god (insert deity of choice) sort them out. And Delusion? Without ignorance and delusion war would be impossible. War isn't honourable or noble or heroic. It's mud and blood and filth. It's smashed cities, hunger, disease and misery. These days it's also hideously malformed babies because of depleted uranium.

War is also the single most entropic activity undertaken by human beings. I can't remember who first pointed this out, but it's true. War finds order and leaves disorder.

War never really solves anything either, except in the very short term. Every war seems to set the ground for the next one. The Franco-Prussian War made the Great War almost inevitable, which in turn set the ground for the Second World War. This last is often used by opponents of pacifism as the great counter-example; we needed war to stop Hitler. What this overlooks is that we needed war to create Hitler in the first place. And in the end it solved nothing; it left half of Europe under an equally harsh dictatorship and set up the conditions for the so-called Cold War that kept getting hot in places like Vietnam and the Middle-East.

I'm not really hopeful we'll ever get over our fascination with war. As a species we're as pugnacious and as territorial as baboons, and we have a lot better toys. And the supply of adolescents drunk on patriotism doesn't seem to be running short.

And this is samsara, after all, things are supposed to be broken here.

So tomorrow, remember. Remember it all.