![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnny9fingers posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
talkpoliticswww.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/un-myanmars-treatment-of-rohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing
When even Aung San Suu Kyi can't or won't speak out against this some folk wonder why some of us get a bit picky about even casual stereotyping. Personally, I monitor my own responses to things, trying to make sure they fit in with my values, not my prejudices. It doesn't always work, obviously, because apart from being a self-righteous prig, I'm also human; frail in courage, and aware of my frailty.
Good ol' Desmond Tutu, an honourable and decent chap, with a track record of burying his personal prejudices in favour of his values and beliefs, has actually written to Aung San Suu Kyi urging her to remember her heroism, and rekindle it in the cause of justice.
Now, the matter may appear to be complicated by the fact that the Rohingya are Muslim, and a number of generations previous hailed from Bengal. And the people of Myanmar are Buddhists, that most peaceful of religions. Also, the Bengalis were invited to what was then Burma by the British Empire, as the Empire also relocated many thousands of Indians throughout the world. (Which may be why the Indians were expelled from various countries in Africa, as the African nations adopted the fasces of nationalism in their quest for national identity. Such governments evidently so worried about Indian domination of business and commerce, that mere decades down the line they were happy to sell their natural resources to China for infrastructure development. It's almost like the British building the railways in India, but cleverer.)
Be that as it may, what do the panel think about those nice peaceful Buddhists committing acts of ethnic cleansing against those awful Muslim chaps? And is it time to round up all the Nobel peace prize winners and jail them, just on sus, of course, having profiled the observable criminal acts committed by some of the winners since Kissinger? Of course these are the exceptions; most peace prizes going to spectacularly great-souled folk like Malala Yousafzai or Desmond Tutu. But until recently I would have tried to shoehorn Aung San Suu Kyi into that group.
And in some respects this is why we monitor ourselves and each other as part of a community; to prevent ourselves from succumbing to our baser natures. Else we would rend and slash and slay our way though our short lives on our path to painful death.
Other people may be hell, as Sartre opined, but they sure as hell civilise us.
When even Aung San Suu Kyi can't or won't speak out against this some folk wonder why some of us get a bit picky about even casual stereotyping. Personally, I monitor my own responses to things, trying to make sure they fit in with my values, not my prejudices. It doesn't always work, obviously, because apart from being a self-righteous prig, I'm also human; frail in courage, and aware of my frailty.
Good ol' Desmond Tutu, an honourable and decent chap, with a track record of burying his personal prejudices in favour of his values and beliefs, has actually written to Aung San Suu Kyi urging her to remember her heroism, and rekindle it in the cause of justice.
Now, the matter may appear to be complicated by the fact that the Rohingya are Muslim, and a number of generations previous hailed from Bengal. And the people of Myanmar are Buddhists, that most peaceful of religions. Also, the Bengalis were invited to what was then Burma by the British Empire, as the Empire also relocated many thousands of Indians throughout the world. (Which may be why the Indians were expelled from various countries in Africa, as the African nations adopted the fasces of nationalism in their quest for national identity. Such governments evidently so worried about Indian domination of business and commerce, that mere decades down the line they were happy to sell their natural resources to China for infrastructure development. It's almost like the British building the railways in India, but cleverer.)
Be that as it may, what do the panel think about those nice peaceful Buddhists committing acts of ethnic cleansing against those awful Muslim chaps? And is it time to round up all the Nobel peace prize winners and jail them, just on sus, of course, having profiled the observable criminal acts committed by some of the winners since Kissinger? Of course these are the exceptions; most peace prizes going to spectacularly great-souled folk like Malala Yousafzai or Desmond Tutu. But until recently I would have tried to shoehorn Aung San Suu Kyi into that group.
And in some respects this is why we monitor ourselves and each other as part of a community; to prevent ourselves from succumbing to our baser natures. Else we would rend and slash and slay our way though our short lives on our path to painful death.
Other people may be hell, as Sartre opined, but they sure as hell civilise us.
(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 11:20 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 11:33 (UTC)In my cynical moments I'd think that even if Aung had been all we hoped for, the next one or the next but one down the line would have trashed her legacy.
It's a morally crippled and painful foxtrot: two steps forward, two steps back...
(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 13:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 15:09 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 21:05 (UTC)Edit: tried to embed video, failed. Here's a link: MASSIVE SURPRISE ATTACK against the BUDDHISTS IN MAUNGDAW on June 8, 2012
(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 21:27 (UTC)I wonder which version of Islam you think is the worst?
The Protestant one, or the Catholic one?The Shia? Or the Sunni? Or maybe the Ismaili? That Aga Khan chap has to be a bit dodgy with a name like that.(no subject)
Date: 11/9/17 21:49 (UTC)As Buddhism is far less dogmatically authoritarian than Abrahamism, it is also far more syncretic. Denominations differ philosophically rather than territorially. The Dalai Lama is a Mahayana Buddhist, while Myanmar is Theravada Buddhist. Put simply, Mahayana is more supernatural and tangible, while Theravada is more philosophical and abstract. Personally, Theravada speaks to me more than Mahayana does.
The phrase "Remember Buddha" says a lot and a little at once. I'm guessing that the Dalai Lama chose those words because he wishes to feed the good in people by focusing on what really matters despite philosophical differences, while respecting that the Buddhists he is addressing are of a different denomination, and acknowledging that the situation is complex. It is a fact that Islam glorifies violence and thereby leads Muslims to initiate violence, but for the Dalai Lama to say so from his position of influence and responsibility is likely to create more violence both by enraging Muslims by telling the truth (they really hate that), and by making the Buddhist side of the conflict feel more justified in doing their own violence.
"I wonder which version of Islam you think is the worst?
The Protestant one, or the Catholic one?The Shia? Or the Sunni? Or maybe the Ismaili? That Aga Khan chap has to be a bit dodgy with a name like that."I'm not sure what you mean here. I'm picking up on some kind of snark or sarcasm I think, so I'm not sure how to interpret it. I am not a fan of Abrahamism as a whole and I'm not really interested in pitting denominations and sub-denominations aginst one another. Abrahamists do enough of that themselves.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 06:29 (UTC)Snark is dead right. I stopped short of outright insult on the basis you may have been exaggerating in your need to defend Buddhism and make your point.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 17:17 (UTC)Myanmar is Theravada Buddhist, which is traditional and thus sticks closely to the Buddha's original teachings, and so is even less likely to incorporate any alleged violent doctrines than Mahayana and other Buddhisms. Why haven't you bothered substantiating your claim that Myanmar's particular subsect of Islam has demonstrably (by being peaceful, forward looking and assimilative) divorced itself from its own religion's foundational teachings? It's a pretty extraordinary claim.
Though all of that said, my predominant concern is to establish that a hostile political atmosphere in any particular region can easily overtake that area's religious traditions. In order to determine whether violence follows from the teachings of the area's religion, one must look at the religion's content. I have not yet been shown in this thread (below) how an alleged genocide in Myanmar (or any genocide) follows from or represents Buddhist teachings. A few examples of correlation do not establish causation.
Snark can't be "right." It's not a truth claim. When executed myopically, as yours was, it simply makes the writing unclear. And it seems you've done it again:
"dismissing them as Abrahamic factions. Er..."
First, yes: Islam, Christianity and Judaism are Abrahamic. They are the three Abrahamic religions. This is a fact. You've added a snarky "Er..." on the end without making it clear what you mean by it, which just makes you look stupid. It's as though you've pulled the pin from a rhetorical grenade and then put it into your own pocket instead of throwing it at me.
.
(no subject)
Date: 13/9/17 10:39 (UTC)I'm going to play the long game here. I'll just wait for the other UN agencies and the few newspapers of record which are left to decide whether its all a false-flag operation by the Rohingyas, burning their own villages and fleeing a non-existent persecution, just to highlight their plight, or whether some other agency has, er, encouraged them to become refugees.
The facts will out, no matter what our respective beliefs.
(no subject)
Date: 13/9/17 17:00 (UTC)Whatever agencies "decide," one can't come to a well-rounded conclusion of one's own without examining the evidence and reasoning given by those agencies in addition to other sources -- and still we don't know that the facts will out. Truth is the first casualty of war. The truth may never be properly separated from propaganda, as opponents in violent conflicts will naturally strive to appear perfectly blameless in self preservation, especially when the wealthier nations of the world are watching.
More important is to be foward looking, to find ways for populations to establish mutually acceptable nonviolent boundaries.
.
(no subject)
Date: 14/9/17 08:53 (UTC)Weirdly enough, folk aren't criticising the rest of Buddhism or Buddhist nations for much at all. Just the situation in Myanmar. But in contrast to the world's bogeyman, aka Islam, Buddhism's followers are known as a generally fair and peaceful religion in the modern era; somewhat like Ismaili Muslims. And yes, other Muslims are doing pretty horrible things in the name of their particular variation of Islam. After all, non Ismaili Shias run Iran. And Sunni thinking appears to the West as barbaric and antediluvian. Nevertheless...
But there is just the small issue of what's going on in Myanmar to deal with. And no matter how philosophically-inclined a version of Buddhist thinking the Myanmar majority espouse, they're still in the dock for their actions. Ethic cleansing and its associated sins like genocide are an abomination no matter who carries them out upon whom: the Jews of the Pentateuch on their traditional foes, the Turks on the Armenians, the Nazis on the Jews, or even the Myanmar majority on the Rohingya.
And as far as I'm concerned, the opening two sentences of your first comment on here has set the tone for this exchange.
"Islam is a religion of invasion and domination through war. It systematically induces adherents to treat Muslims and non-Muslims alike with contempt and cruelty. I'm not surprised that even the Buddhists can be driven to violence by Islam."
Islam may have started there, like Judaism (but unlike Christianity, which began as a pacifist religion of the slave class) but that is not where it is now necessarily. And as Halialkers has shown, various strands of Buddhist thought have been militaristic and given to violence in some form or other, historically speaking. Even Christianity, that religion of slaves, went through a militaristic and ultra-violent millennium with but few dissenters (Quakers, Amish, and other minor Protestant sects).
But as you said, Abrahamic sects are one thing, strands of Buddhist thought are something else entirely.
Facts first, old thing. First establish our facts, then work from there. I rather would like to be able to excuse Aung Sun Suu Kyi's selective myopia over this, as I had a lot of respect for her. But as of now I find myself unable to do so.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is happening, and folk are being driven off their lands after systematically being denied rights in the country of their birth because of their ethnicity. Even this latter case is cause of concern if not outrage, and in this latter case, it is incontestable that the Rohingya were and are being denied basic rights on the grounds of ethnicity.. The context of this is telling.
(no subject)
Date: 14/9/17 18:04 (UTC)Your next two paragraphs have not added much if any substance to the conversation. You continue to neglect to provide the evidence of this specific Islamic sect's Mohammed-defying peacefulness, which I asked for several comments ago. I have not given you any reason to think that I don't believe all people are responsible for their own actions, or that I don't think genocide is bad.
I stand by my opening two sentences. I have gone on to explain and defend them, as well as to show willingness to accept evidenced exceptions to the trend I described. "Tone" is of little interest to me. That you mention it tells me you have chosen to hold on to a grudge against me and there's nothing I could do about it if I wanted to.
Of course religions evolve. I wrote about that at length. What Halialkers did was dump some links to long and unindexed texts about sects of Buddhism, Gish Gallop style, without giving any indication of having read them. Halialkers did not show how alleged initiations of violence followed from or reflected the teachings of the religion/Buddha.
As I have already said, all three of Halialkers' examples are also of Mayayana Buddhism (the great vehicle), which is not the Buddhism of Myanmar. Myanmar professes Theravada (the small vehicle), which adheres more closely to the Buddha's original teachings, which means that 1) Myanmar Buddhists are particularly unlikely to initiate violent conflict, and 2) any violent initiations that do come from the Myanmar government are not easily linked meaningfully to Buddhism.
The Buddhism of Myanmar is easy to establish with a search. Your assertion that the Islam of Myanmar is similarly peaceful is not so easy to substantiate with a search, because the sect is small, several branches removed from its origins, and allegedly divorced from its predominant prophet (as far as I can tell so far). But you have not been willing to substantiate your claim with a source.
On Wikipedia, the Buddhism in Myanmar page is very different in structure from the Islam in Myanmar page. The Buddhist page is about beliefs, practices and history, while the Islam page is about politics and warfare. As Islam's founding prophet was a warlord, I can't presume to know how much of the conflict results from Islam and how much from persecution of Muslims. Also on that page, the Rohingya are listed among several other Muslim groups, but when I follow their link, I get a page all about race on which the word 'Ismaili' does not appear. Wikipedia looks like a dead end and I don't know where else to go.
The facts of the political situation in Myanmar and the facts of the doctrines and histories of the sects of Islam and Buddhism are all facts. Are you sure you're interested in the facts? I ask because immediately after praising facts you dropped a name and an opinion without sharing the facts from which you derived that opinion.
I do not know for certain that an ethnic cleansing is happening. If one is happening it should be stopped. I do not know that the denial of Rohingya rights is grounded solely in ethnicity. I recognize that the causes of all situations that escalate to genocide are often complex and should be studied in full to prevent future conflicts/genocides.
I'm going to end my participation in this conversation now. I don't think that discussing the issues further with such a disingenuous and unhelpful party, who seems more interested in moral lecturing and namedropping than exploration, will teach me anything. I hope that one day you will decide to prioritize being smart over looking smart.
If you decide to take the last word, please provide sources -- preferably the same sources that informed you -- showing that the Rohingya are Ismaili Muslims, and that they and their sect's Aga Khan are "forward looking, assimilative and peaceful."
(no subject)
Date: 17/9/17 10:22 (UTC)However, I do appreciate your continued discussion. Victim blaming and general whataboutery, even from educated folk, give good example of how these things actually take place, how they are excused, and how folk will argue the finest inconsequential point rather than face up to what is happening.
Please continue.
in conclusion
Date: 18/9/17 05:15 (UTC)You refuse to provide the simple evidence I asked for, claiming the reason is because such evidence doesn't support a separate point that I am only undecided about, not contesting. Next, you use the phrases "victim blaming" and "whataboutery" to conflate inquiry with justification in an attempt to villify me for asking questions. So no, I don't think I will continue. You are far too anti-intellectual and dishonest.
.
(no subject)
Date: 13/9/17 10:43 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:20 (UTC)https://www.samurai-archives.com/ikk.html
Nobunaga didn't give a fuck about honor, he just burned shit down to avoid fighting if he didn't have to.
Then there's the Shaolin monastery.
http://www.chinwoomen.com/books/shaolin.html
Buddhism is no more alien to violence than 'I say love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' Christianity is.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:22 (UTC)https://tibarmy.hypotheses.org/
You can no more divorce this from the history of Buddhism than you can the military knightly monastic orders from Christianity. Or Hong Xiuquan.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:44 (UTC)However, Mayanmar predominantly follows Theravada, which is philosophical and abstract rather than literalist, magical or utopian. It's relatively difficult for philosophical beliefs like this to inspire or justify violence.
All three examples you gave of Buddhist violence were committed by sects of the Mahayana denomination of Buddhism which, like Christianity, tends toward magical utopian literalism. I am not aware of any Christian analogue to Theravada Buddhism, though there are Western analogues, like Stoicism for example. (Edit: the lectures of Jordan B Peterson might be tilting Christianity in a Theravada-like direction, but this branch is in its infancy and could easily fizzle out.)
You may have a case that Mahayana is no more alien to violence than Christianity (though because the teachings and histories are so different and because specific paramaters have not been established, that is only a 'maybe'), but you haven't made a case that the same is true of Theravada, the Buddhism of Mayanmar.
I'm also not entirely sure that a genocide is occurring in the first place. As yet in my research (and I am still researching), the sources claiming the Buddhists are committing genocide against Muslims have a deep conflict of interest.
.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 06:43 (UTC)As is the human rights of the Rohingya have been ignored for decades; they have no citizenship after generations of living in Myanmar, and are no better off than migrant workers in Saudi, despite having been in Myanmar for generations.
Even secular/Episcopalian xenophobic Britain ain't that bad to folk born here.
Shameful is as shameful does.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 17:36 (UTC)I agree that the Rohingya should be treated humanely. But it also may be the case that they can not be made to get along with others. I have seen demands for full and immediate assimilation, but I don't think this is reasonable to expect of populations that are so hostile to one another. Healthy boundaries are needed.
This reddit user seems quite embroiled in the conflict, though I haven't read closely yet. (Edit after reading more closely: this user 'fearnote' has made stronger and more falsifiable arguments against the Rohingya's claims than I've yet seen made in support of them.)
.
(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 23:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/9/17 02:05 (UTC)Imperial Japan was just as addicted to warlike Buddhism as Sengoku era Japan was.