Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”.
The Burmese Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of the legendary liberation movement leader Aung San. Following studies abroad, she returned home in 1988. From then on, she led the opposition to the military junta that had ruled Burma since 1962. She was one of the founders of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and was elected secretary general of the party. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, she opposed all use of violence and called on the military leaders to hand over power to a civilian government. The aim was to establish a democratic society in which the country’s ethnic groups could cooperate in harmony.
In the election in 1990, the NLD won a clear victory, but the generals prevented the legislative assembly from convening. Instead they continued to arrest members of the opposition and refused to release Suu Kyi from house arrest.
The Peace Prize had a significant impact in mobilizing world opinion in favor of Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause. However, she remained under house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 years from her arrest in July 1989 until her release on 13 November 2010, whereupon she was able to resume her political career and put her mark on the rapid democratization of Myanmar.
She is currently the de facto leader of Myanmar (although trying to puzzle out the tangle of factions running that country is not trivial), and representative of the Buddhist majority. A Buddhist majority which is currently active in perpetrating genocide. A Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have been living in Myanmar, and right now they’re being rounded up by the military and murdered.
“They’re killing children,” Matthew Smith, the chief executive of a human rights group called Fortify Rights, told me after interviewing refugees on the Bangladesh border. “In the least, we’re talking about crimes against humanity.”
“My two nephews, their heads were cut off,” one Rohingya survivor told Smith. “One was 6 years old and the other was 9.”
Other accounts describe soldiers throwing infants into a river to drown, and decapitating a grandmother. Hannah Beech, my Times colleague who has provided outstanding coverage from the border, put it this way: “I’ve covered refugee crises before, and this was by far the worst thing that I’ve ever seen.”
Even Buddhists. We tend to think of Buddhism as the nice peaceful religion (we conveniently ignore their history and the oppressive nature of Tibet), but this just goes to show that people with power can be horrible no matter what philosophy they pretend to have.
“We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.”
As usual, the problem isn’t the religion: it’s the conservatism. I noted in 2015:
Tribes. Inflamed by ideology. I can’t even swallow now.
Religion strikes again.
In Japan during WW2, Buddhist priests urged their followers to go to war, and specifically to fly in kamikaze attacks with a promise of guaranteed rebirth in the “pure land” where they were bound to become “enlightened”. There are other historical examples, of course. Buddhism overall is perhaps less violent than other religions but, as you point out, any system of beliefs is subject to manipulation to violent ends.
The minute you set someone else up as “holy” or an authority to be followed uncritically you are, as Alan Watts once said, giving them permission to steal your watch and sell it back to you.
If you’re Sam Harris, any violence promoted or committed by Muslims has everything to do with Islam and any violence promoted or committed by Buddhists has nothing to do with Buddhism. It’s a neat trick.
Noah Lugeons did a pretty good job of summarizing the atrocities of the “peaceful” Buddhist religion on his opening diatribe of the most recent ‘Scathing Atheist’ podcast, for those who don’t mind the obscenities. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-scathing-atheist/e/51399013?autoplay=true
This is a side effect of a religion that emphasizes reincarnation: atrocities can be justified as 1) it is their karma to have bad things happen to them and 2) we are doing them a spiritual solid by being the agents of that karma and thus helping them along the path of enlightenment.
This same reasoning is often found to justify doing nothing to fight poverty and disease in Buddhist majority countries: they deserve their life, and who are we to interfere with cosmic justice?
When I read things like this I can’t be help “When at last the world is overrun with inhabitants the last remedy of all is war. which provides for every man with victory or death.” It’s not nice, it breaks your heart but its inevitable.
insert “but think” after “help” in my above post. I get a malware problem on my end.
Rohingya refugees who left by boat haven’t fared much better, rejected by Indonesia and Australia (rumours of boats dragged out to international waters and abandoned) and those who haven’t drowned imprisoned in camps by Malaysia. And the rest of the world willingly turns a blind eye.
http://www.irinnews.org/news/2016/04/15/where-are-rohingya-boat-survivors-now
You’ve got an internal malware problem: invincible ignorance. This is absolutely fuck-all to do with the world being “overrun with inhabitants”. Myanmar is not particularly densely populated, nor is its population growing fast.
As an actual Buddhist, I find it odd how people give it a pass. Actual Buddhism is bloody difficult; it requires you to challenge your prejudices and your beliefs at every turn. It’s not for the faint hearted. It’s much easier to spout the ‘teachings” and let the priests worry about the rest. Not that they are necessarily better. You end up with a culture doing what they always did despite pretending to follow The Way.
@JoeBuddha #12 – I would think the problem is more about being raised in a majority religion. Christian converts in Myanmar have a lot of similarities to Buddhist converts in the US, while Burmese Buddhists have a lot of similarities to US Christians. Basically, if you were raised in a faith, and have the support and approval of your family, community, and larger social institutions, it is much easier to get away with being an awful person.
@Gregory #13
Precisely!
Religion is only the mechanism. The real issue is power. In Myanmar, the Buddhist have power; feeling threatened (or greedy), they are offering the Rohingya as ‘sacrifice’ to their majority population to satisfy the blood lust the elite have deliberately instigated. We saw this in S. Africa with apartheid, Israel with Palestinian rights, U.S. with civil rights and globally with corporate ownership conferring rights over essentially the health, life and liberty pf their workers. Aung San Suu Kyi should speak up; it’s a major failure of leadership to not take a stand. But regardless of Aung San Suu Kyi, concentrated powerful will always defend its hold on power and greedily grab for more power.
@KG
You quite clearly didn’t recognize my quote. I doubt you know the work it is taken from intimately. As such I think you might have missed my main point. I could have easily gone with (through this is more of a paraphrase) “So we find in the constitution of man three principle causes of war…One makes man invade for gain, the second for safety and the last for reputation.” to make the point I was making. That being this violence has nothing to do with Buddhism, but caused by the human nature as such. War is inevitable. All the ways we have every devised to prevent it were demonstrated to be for naught last US election. It is simply the case “that the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Mike Smith@15,
No, I didn’t recognise the quotation. That doesn’t make it any the less stupid.
Hobbes’s “remedy” was absolutism: that all should surrender their independence to a “sovereign”, who (or which) must be obeyed completely. Do you agree with him there, too?
What a provincial numpty you are! A single event in one country cannot possibly demonstrate a universal truth about “human nature” – appeal to which is the first refuge of the morally and intellectually lazy. Human nature obviously makes war possible. but you have given no reason at all to consider it inevitable.
Hobbes said that was the case in a state of nature, i.e. if there were no “civil society”. Which is not the case in Myanmar.
It’s not just the Rohingya, the Karen and Karenni people have also been brutally persecuted by the Burmese government. The official “four cuts policy”, which started in the 1970s but was re-launched in 2010 a program where the Burmese government has attempted to “assimilate” the ethnic groups and minorities of Burma by suppressing language, culture and religious beliefs. It’s as nastily genocidal as it gets and it’s been all but ignored by Aung San Suu Kyi.
This seems to be a remnant of US Cold War hysteria that has, somehow, spread to some on the left.
Since the Chinese annexed Tibet and the Chinese are BIG BAD COMMUNISTS then it follows that Tibet was a paradise before they annexed it. Many on the left have glommed on to this sentiment but skewered it by making the argument that Tibet was once a noble culture that was oppressed by ruthless fascists or something completely ignoring the fact the lamas used to rule Tibet like a feudal state.
Indeed. In a way the Chinese conquest of Tibet was the best thing that could happen to the current Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy, including the Dalai Lama. If China had let Tibet remain independent we’d probably consider the Dalai Lama a religious dictator running an authoritarian state. Instead he’s an international celebrity with a lot of support.