[Buddha-l] Buddhist warfare

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 31, 2010, at 1:39 PM, JKirkpatrick wrote:

> Does this remark refer to Muslim attacks on Buddhists in
> Bangladesh, or general attacks on "unbelievers" of all types? If
> attacks on Buddhists, do you have a link to an article about
> this?

Some time ago, Amnesty International was running information on Buddhist persecution of Muslims in Myanmar. It was not clear whether the reported maltreatment of the people in question was religiously motivated or (as is so often the case in Myanmar) ethnic/linguistic tension. The Muslims allegedly being maltreated were Bangla; the people giving them a hard time were Buddhists of some ethnicity other than Baman, but I now forget which. What concerned AI was that the government, which tends to have a cozy relationship with the Buddhist establishment, was doing nothing to intervene and protect the non-Buddhist people reportedly being attacked.

There are so many dimensions involved in the tensions in that part of Asia that it is almost always a misleading over-simplification to isolate one factor, such as religion, as the cause of the tensions. What is usually going on is just that a bunch of really unhappy people are abusing other really unhappy people, because human beings seem to love to share their misery with as many other people as possible. Perhaps that dynamic works even in Bangladesh.

Richard