[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy Vriens wrote:

> Is there a clean cut end to wars?

It seems there has never been a year in recorded history in which some armed
conflict wasn't occurring someplace. It sometimes looks like there are mere
periods of relative calm between major conflicts, and those periods we call
peace. That would be to view things through a very pessimistic cast.

OTOH it also seems that Japan and (West) Germany have experienced peace and
prosperity since 1945. That some of the preWar militaristic nationalistic
rumblings seem to be reemerging in Japan is a reason for concern. More
importantly, the people of Manchuria, China, Korea, Burma, the Philipines,
etc. have seen a marked improvement in their lives, though wars have not
disappeared from Asia by any means.

>Violence and ultraviolence can end an open conflict, but not the
> causes that led up to it.

That's still better than doing nothing at all.

> by destroying many lives, isn't that ironic? Apart from considering how
> "saved" a traumatised person or country is.

My wife is Japanese, and neither she nor her family nor her friends seem
very traumatized. Japan today is more traumatized by fifteen years of
recession than by any lingering WW II vestiges. The only remaining trauma of
WW II seems to be by Westerners who are guilty for winning, and
concentration camp survivors for surviving. The latter is unavoidable, the
former is absurd.

For a victor to be gloating and vindictive is not healty (the error of
Versailles). Some remorse and compassion for the other side is admirable,
but feeling guilty for winning is self-defeating and suicidal.

 > >  those under Japanese occupation in South-East Asia and the
> > Pacific islands who by that point in the war had not only been raped and
> > plundered and had no food, but were being eaten by the occupying
Japanese
> > troops

> There are desperate situations in which people do desperate things.
> Those actions should not be a guideline or a justification for actions
> of a democracy.

The issue is not to judge, but which actions brought that desparate
situation to an end. Interminable negotions about conditions of surrender
would have doomed many additional people.

> The bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained Uranium, the one used on
> Nagasaki contained Plutonium. Part of the reason for dropping two bombs
> was because the Americans wanted to see the effect of both designs."
> http://www.banthebomb.org/archives/magazine/hiroshim.htm (it's the first
> link I found, this is the information I was looking for, I don't know
> about the rest of this site).

I addressed this confused accusation of calculated sadism in a previous
message. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped because the Hiroshima bomb was
insufficient to compel surrender. The responsibility lies with the Japanese,
since they were warned that if they didn't surrender additional bombs would
be dropped. That, as a byproduct of trying out a new weapon, they were
curious about how it would perform in the field is natural -- to have done
otherwise would have been militarily irresponsible.

All these are species of the argument that this particular form of military
force was unnecessary. Once again, the gap between the two bombs is clear
evidence that it was not.

> No, violence doesn't have the same value for the one at the giving end
> and the one at the receiving end. But I don't want to be the object of
> any organised state violence, I don't want to be the victim of violence
> of whatever value,

No one does. That's why I suspect you have no immediate plans to attack
Pearl Harbor or take over the Sudetenland for Lebensraum.

> Dan, you tell me I am too simplistic and reductive, but read what you
> just wrote here: "Violence ultimately is *just* another form of
> impermanence". That is acceptable for a practising Buddhist, on a very
> personal practice level when confronted with it, but we can't use this
> reasoning to condone violence.

Eating is violence (even by vegans); breathing is violence (every inhale bri
ngs in thousands of microbes that die the moment the hit the lining of your
lungs); plowing the earth is violence; surgery is violence; heating food is
violence; even this relatively civilized discussion is violent. That's why
Buddha said *all* is suffering. So one tries to turn poison into medicine.
Medicine basically consists of toxic materials that one would not take if
one were not ill. It is poison judiciously applied. Sadly, the same can be
said for violence.

>
> But, when the life of individuals is at stake, they should never become
> abstractions, simple equations like if X < Y than X is acceptable.

On the contrary, that's precisely what ethics is. In the messy real world of
better/worse (not absolute good/bad) we have no alternative.

An example from _Jewish Literacy_ by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, pp. 557-58:

"The rabbis of the Talmud, for example, raise the following hypothetical
question: Two men are in the desert, and only one of them has water. If he
shares the water with his companion, he and his companion will both die; if
he keeps the water for himself, he will ive and only his companion will die.
What should he do?

"One rabbi, Bar Petura, rules that the man should split the water, even if
he dies as a result. Rabbi Akiva teaches, however, that the man with the
water has the right to drink it.

"The debate had long struck me as interesting but remote, until I hear Elie
Wiesel, the noted writer and Holocaust survivor, refer to it in a lecture he
delivered on Rabbi Akiva. 'Rabbi Akiva,' Wiesel said in reference to Akiva's
statement that the man with the water had the right to drink it, 'was very
hard, very hard on the survivor.'"

Ethical thought doesn't erase the human, it provides guidance; and even the
better course is sometimes very painful.

Dan