Krieg ist Terror
Buddhisten aeussern sich zum Krieg und zur Folter der USA im Irak
Die Wahrheit setzt sich letztlich immer durch. Trotz aller noch so aufwendigen Propaganda und Taeuschungsversuche - der Krieg der USA im Irak und Afghanistan hat vor aller Welt deutlich gemacht, was Krieg letztlich immer heisst: extremes Dukkha (Leiden), extreme Entfesselung der Ursachen des Leids - Gier, Hass und Verblendung - und extrem selbstzerstoerisches Karma. Nie kann Krieg den Terror bekaempfen, denn Krieg ist selbst Terror (gegen andere und gegen uns selbst), Krieg ist ein Zustand der systematischen Entmenschlichung, der Freigabe aller unheilsamen Triebe des Menschen. Nie kann Gewalt Gewalt ueberwinden!
Wenn es noch einer Bestaetigung der Aktualitaet der vor 2500 Jahren gelehrten Weisheit und Weitsicht des Buddha bedurfte - seiner grundsaetzlichen Ablehnung von Krieg, Gewalt und Gegengewalt - die weltpolitischen Ereignisse der juengsten Zeit haben sie uns auf eindringliche Weise vor Augen gefuehrt. Dabei gab es noch vor kurzem nicht wenige Buddhisten, die meinten, das Kriegfuehren heute wieder verteidigen, ja unterstuetzen zu muessen. Auf Buddhas Lehren konnten sie sich dabei nicht mit einem einzigen Wort stuetzen, sondern nur indem sie die Feindbilder und Argumentationen derer uebernahmen, die Kriege heute wieder fuehren wollen.
Es ist gut und ein Zeichen von zunehmender Wachheit, dass diese Taeuschungen heute so schnell und deutlich zusammenbrechen. Bei allem Schlimmen, was derzeit geschieht, die Tatsache, dass es bekannt wird, dass wir es wahrnehmen und davon betroffen sind, dass es nicht mehr einfach hingenommen wird, sondern viele dazu "Nein" sagen, macht grosse Hoffnung. Es fehlt aber noch der Schritt, dass die Einsichten so Vieler auch unsere gemeinsamen Handlungen leiten.
Hier Stimmen bekannter Buddhisten, die sich in den USA zum aktuellen Geschehen geaeussert haben.
This Is What War Looks Like
The abuse at Abu Ghraib prison is what happens when we abandon compassion and allow our animal nature to take over.
Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has been a spokesperson for peace and human rights since the 1960s, when his activism to end the Vietnam War inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been living in exile from his native Vietnam since 1966, and calls Plum Village, a meditation retreat center he founded in the south of France, his home. He conducts retreats throughout the world on "engaged Buddhism," nonviolence, and mindfulness, and has written more than 100 books. In an email interview with Beliefnet, he offered his thoughts on the prison abuse scandal.
What is the Buddhist perspective on the abuse of prisoners of war in Iraq?
Recent news about the abuse of prisoners of war provides us with the opportunity to look deeply into the nature of war. This is an opportunity for us to be more aware. This is not new; everywhere there is war, these kinds of things happen. Every one of us should know the way soldiers are trained in order to see the truth about war. Soldiers are trained to kill as many people as possible and as quickly as possible. Soldiers are told that if they don't kill, they will be killed by the so-called "enemy." They are taught that killing is good because the people they are trying to kill are dangerous to society.
Soldiers are trained to believe they must kill the other group because they are not human beings. If soldiers see their "enemies" as fellow human beings just like them, they would have no courage to kill them.
It is important not to blame and single out the U.S. in this kind of situation because any country would do the same thing under the same conditions. During the Vietnam War atrocities were committed by both sides.
The statement President Bush made that the U.S. just sent dedicated, devoted young men, not abusers to Iraq shocked me. Because committing acts of torture is just the result of the training that the soldiers have already undergone. The training already makes them lose all their humanity. The young men going to Iraq were already full of fear, wanting to protect themselves at all cost, being ready to kill at any moment.
In this state you can become extremely cruel. You may pour all of your hate and anger on prisoners of war by torturing and abusing them. The purpose of your violence is not only to extract information from them, but also to express your hate and fear. The prisoners of war are the victims, but the abusers, the torturers are also the victims. Their actions will continue to disturb them long after the abuse has ended.
Preparing for war and fighting a war means allowing our human nature to die and the animal nature in us to take over. We should never be tempted to resort to violence and war to solve conflict. Violence always leads to more violence.
There have been examples of individuals who were kind to prisoners. Assuming they have the same training and are operating in the same difficult conditions, what makes some people compassionate and others abusive?
Some people are able to remain compassionate because they are lucky to have received a spiritual heritage, kindness and goodness, that stayed at least partially intact despite their training. This heritage is transmitted by parents, teachers, and community. Their humanity is preserved to some extent even if they have been damaged during their training. So they are still able to be shocked by their fellow soldiers' acts of torture. But those with a poorer spiritual heritage, who come from a family or community without much understanding and compassion, lose all their humanity in the process of military training.
Is it ever possible to torture someone for a good cause? If a prisoner in custody did have information that could potentially prevent a terrorist attack, would coercion be appropriate? If no, what interrogation tactics would be appropriate and effective?
There is no 'good cause' for torture. As a torturer, you are the first to be a victim because you lose all your humanity. You do harm to yourself in the act of harming another. If you had a good cause to begin with, it is lost when you torture another human being. When we imagine situations when torture could be justified, we jump to conclusions too quickly and too easily. Torturing someone will not always give us the result we wish for. If the prisoner in custody does not tell us the information we want it is because they don't want their people, their fellow soldiers to be killed. They withhold information out of compassion, out of faithfulness to their cause. Sometimes they give out wrong information. And there are those who prefer to die rather than give in to the torture.
I am absolutely against torture. It is very easy to create a pretext for why it is necessary to torture a prisoner when we have fear and anger in us. When we have compassion, we can always find another way. When you torture a living being, you die as a human being because the other person's suffering is your own suffering. When you perform surgery on someone, you know the surgery will help him and that is why you can cut into his body. But when you cut into someone's body and mind to get information from them, you cut into your own life, you kill yourself as a person.
If military action is incompatible with mindfulness and compassion, how should people/nations defend themselves? (You have said that when we are mindful, "compassion becomes possible." Is a lack of mindfulness what our moral failings boil down to?)
There are many ways to defend ourselves: through diplomatic foreign policy, forming alliances with other countries, humanitarian assistance. These are all approaches motivated by the wisdom of inter-being, not just by political gain. In these kinds of approaches to resolving conflict, the army doesn't have to do much. They can serve the people, build bridges, roads, etc. This is not idealistic thinking, armies have worked this way in the past. With good foreign policy, the army will not have to fight.
The only really necessary and appropriate circumstance under which an army should resort to violence is to defend itself or an ally from invasion. And even in this case, much suffering will result.
What is upsetting to me is that former generations have committed the same mistakes and we don't learn from them. We haven't learned enough from the war in Vietnam. There were so many atrocities committed there. So many innocent people were tortured and killed by both sides because they were perceived to be 'communist', or 'anti-communist.'
Mindfulness has so many layers. When we kill because we think that the other person is evil, that we are killing for the sake of peace, that we are doing a good thing, this is not right mindfulness. If we are mindful, we will see not only the present situation, but also the root and the consequence of our act in that moment. Other insights should arise if we are truly mindful: "This person I want to kill is a living being. Is there any chance for him to behave better and change his present, harmful state of mind? Maybe I have a wrong perception and one day I will see that he is just a victim of misunderstanding, and not really the evil person I think he is." Mindfulness also helps a soldier to see that he or she may just be an instrument for killing used by his or her government.
A general who is mindful of his actions is capable of looking deeply. He may not need to use weapons. He will see that there are many ways to deter the opposite side and he will exhaust all other means before resorting to violence. And when nothing else works, he may use violence, but out of compassion, not out of anger.
There is a collective sense of shame among many Americans about the activities depicted in these photos. Buddhists believe individuals are responsible for their actions through karma, but is there any such thing as collective karma? At a national level?
An act of cruelty is born of many conditions coming together, without any separate, individual actor. When we hold retreats for war veterans I tell them they are the flame at the tip of the candle, they are the ones who feel the heat, but the whole candle is burning, not only the flame. All of us are responsible.
The very ideas of terrorism and imagined weapons of mass destruction are already collective karma in terms of thinking and speaking. The media helped the war happen by supporting these ideas through speech and writing. Thought, speech and action are all collective karma.
No one can say they are not responsible for this current situation even if we oppose our country's actions. We are still a member of our community, a citizen of our country. Maybe we have not done enough. We must ally ourselves with bodhisattvas, great, awakened beings, around us to transform our way of thinking and that of our society. Because wrong thinking is at the base of our present situation, thinking that has no wisdom or compassion. And we can do things every day, in every moment of our daily life to nourish the seeds of peace, compassion and understanding in us and in those around us. We can live in such a way that can heal our collective karma and ensure that these atrocities will not happen again in the future.
What is the chief lesson for us to learn from these terrible events?
Don't be tempted to use the army to solve conflicts. The only situation in which we use the army is to defend our country during an invasion. In the past, the U.S. was loved by many of us in the world because the U.S. represented freedom, democracy, peace, and care for other countries. The U.S. has lost this image and must rebuild it.
In the past, when I would go to the U.S. embassy for a visa, it was not heavily guarded. But now, all over the world, U.S. embassies are surrounded by heavily armed guards. Fear has overtaken the U.S. It is the primary motivation for many of the U.S. government's actions because we do not know how to protect ourselves with compassion. Students of political science must learn this in university so that they can bring real wisdom into politics. Compassion can go together with intelligence. Compassion is not stupid. Love is the same, real love is born from understanding.
Bad Karma
Torturers are planting horrible seeds in their own hearts and minds. Unfortunately, the same is true for nations.
Interview with Kenneth Kraft
As the Iraqi prison abuse scandal has unfolded, we began to wonder what the spiritual result might be - not just for the prisoners, but also for the soldiers who abused them. Would the soldiers themselves be spiritually degraded by the experience? What might a student of Eastern religion think about that? We asked Kenneth Kraft, a scholar in the new field of "engaged Buddhism" to discuss some of the fallout of the scandal - from a Buddhist point of view. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Let's start at the level of an American soldier in Iraq. I have been struck by the story of the young woman from West Virginia, Lynndie England, who appears in several of the Abu Ghraib pictures. She's 21. Why is her apparent normalcy so disturbing?
The Abu Ghraib photos point to something larger than the specific scenes caught on camera. One of the lessons of this tragedy, from a Buddhist standpoint, is that she is us. That could be my daughter or your niece or someone we might know. It's not as if there were just a few bad apples in a big barrel of good apples. In the frenzy of war, cruelty becomes acceptable behavior. As a nation, we are putting all these good apples - our soldiers - into a very rotten barrel.
Buddhism emphasizes the interconnectedness of the world, and this "interbeing" has no limit. Since I am part of the system that produced this war and these atrocities, then I too share the blame.
What else do the scenes from Abu Ghraib reveal?
They reveal an undeniable aspect of war that we would prefer to keep out of view. The death and mutilation going on in Iraq right now are much worse, and on a much larger scale, than what we're seeing in the photos. One of the oldest teachings in Buddhism is that violence begets violence. If you look at what has happened in the world since 9/11, the level of violence has increased dramatically. Now we are encountering the bounds of "an eye for an eye." As Gandhi said, that method will leave the whole world blind.
The prison guards are victims along with the prisoners. The guards have been overcome by fear and hatred to the point of losing touch with their own humanity. They are not in their right minds. They have stopped thinking of the prisoners as fellow human beings. Albert Schweitzer put it this way: "War makes us guilty of the crime of inhumanity."
Buddhism is known for advocating nonviolence. Is that realistic in this situation?
Nonviolence is indeed at the core of Buddhism. The first precept of moral behavior is "Do not kill. Cherish all life." Contemporary Buddhists believe that this principle is as applicable today as it was 2,500 years ago. Nonviolence has a force of its own, not to be underestimated.
Policy experts might say, "Nonviolence would never work in dealing with terrorists." Perhaps not. But imagine, just for a moment, that the United States built up its nonviolent capabilities on a scale comparable to our current investment in the military - with the necessary money and training, backed by a willingness to make sacrifices.... That would certainly yield a wider array of options.
Buddhism teaches that it is almost always possible to move in the direction of nonviolence, even though perfect nonviolence may be unattainable. This means that even in the midst of war, it is possible to honor the human rights of prisoners.
Does Buddhism have a "just-war" doctrine, as Christianity does?
Some Buddhists adhere to absolute pacifism; for them, all war is morally wrong. There are others who say that avoidance of war is always the ideal, but in some real-world situations the use of force may be required. Today's engaged Buddhists are working creatively on these questions. Whatever guidelines emerge, the starting point will remain the same: cause the least possible harm. Those who invoke just-war theory must also be willing to conclude that a particular war does not satisfy the necessary criteria, and therefore cannot be called just.
Is the notion of karma relevant here? Are we getting trapped in a vicious cycle of bad karma?
As you know, karma is about action and the consequences of action. All of our actions - and even our thoughts! - are continuously creating new karma. It's a dynamic process, unlike "fate." Buddhism holds that the laws of cause and effect apply in the realm of morality as well as the physical realm.
One traditional explanation uses seeds as a metaphor. We plant seeds of happiness in ourselves and others when we are kind, and we plant seeds of unhappiness when we treat others badly. Often the effects are not immediate. For example, in parent-child relationships, seeds planted in childhood may not blossom until much later in life.
To return to the Abu Ghraib abuses, torturers are planting horrible seeds in their own hearts and minds. Unfortunately, the same is true for nations. There's nothing mystical about it - we can see it happening right now. And "collective karma" can play out for generations.
Where does individual spiritual practice - or religious practice - fit in? The ability to act responsibly, to act ethically, is not simply a matter of having the "right" beliefs. Think of all the things that are being done in the name of God and Allah!
From a Buddhist perspective, there has to be some inner cultivation of character, a process that ideally continues throughout one's life. Buddhists make some radical claims in this area. For example, the Dalai Lama says, "Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way."
You have said that engaged Buddhists are trying to apply ancient teachings to present situations. How might Buddhism help us respond to the current crisis in Iraq?
A starting point is not to turn away from suffering. Our first impulse is usually to push bad news aside, to tell ourselves that it's not really our concern. We're afraid that if we were to let all the suffering in, it would overwhelm us. But Buddhism teaches that if you are able to stay open, even momentarily, what comes up is compassion. Not only do we feel horror at seeing these pictures, we can also feel sorry for the victims and the perpetrators. Feelings of empathy are reminders of our deep interconnectedness.
If Buddhists ran the world, how would they handle those who disrupt social harmony?
In other words, how would crime and punishment be handled in a Buddhist-inspired society? That's a good question. It's safe to assume that there are always going to be offenders and dangerous folks who need to be controlled. The current system relies on punitive justice, and it's not working very well. In contrast, transformative justice seeks to heal victims, heal offenders, and address the conditions that give rise to crime. Today, Buddhists are very involved in prison reform in the United States and elsewhere, so this is not just a hypothetical question.
Let's say that Buddhists were running a military prison in Iraq, and it was necessary to extract information from detainees to prevent more car bombs or other acts of violence. How would Buddhists handle the interrogation?
The Geneva Convention has explicit rules about the treatment of prisoners. The basic guideline is one that all religions would agree with: Don't treat a prisoner inhumanly. Don't deny his or her humanity. That approach may in fact be more effective in getting information.
Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Dalai Lama said, "The real antidote to terrorism in the long run is compassion, dialogue - peaceful means - even with terrorists." Is that hopelessly naïve, or is it a deeper kind of realism?
