[Vision2020] Please don't buy this book!

[Nicholas Gier]

Greetings:

I will lecture on and sign copies of my book at BookPeople in Moscow at
11AM, tomorrow Sat. Oct. 18.

The editors at Lexington Books have been wonderful to work with (MS. in on
Jan. 15 and book in hand on Aug. 30!), but I was shocked at the hardback
price of $100.  I will be selling author's copies for $50, but I will also
be sending the PDF proofs for free to anyone who wants to read it.  A flyer
with pre-publication reviews is attached.

I've appended below my column for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.  A summary
of my book in 650 words!  That was a real challenge.

Here's to the danger of fusing religious and national identities,

Nick

*RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE IN INDIA, SRI LANKA, BURMA, TIBET, CHINA, AND JAPAN*

By Nick Gier, The Palouse Pundit

About 25 years ago I began a book project with the title “The Peace of the
East.” Just like the Jesus of the Gospels, the Buddha and his Hindu
counterparts taught an ethics of compassion and nonviolence. When I took my
first sabbatical to India in 1992, my thesis about peaceful Asians began to
crumble.

I was doing research for my book on Gandhi at Punjab University in
Chandigarh, and Sikh militants were still active in the province. However,
it was Hindu fundamentalists who caused the most violence in late 1992 and
early 1993.

On December 6, Hindu militants, using pick axes, sledge hammers, and bare
hands, destroyed the Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya. Hindus had long
held a deep-seated grievance at this site, because it was considered the
birth place of their god Rama. In the aftermath of this desecration, 2,000
people (mostly Muslims) died in cities across India.

Later I would read Brian Victoria’s book *Zen at War* and learn that
Japan’s Buddhists, after being persecuted by state-sanctioned Shintoists in
the 1890s, joined the imperial war effort with great enthusiasm.

In my research on Sri Lanka I discovered that Buddhist militants, after
actively promoting the war against the Hindu Tamils, are now turning their
ire against Christians and Muslims.  Over the past decade there have been
320 cases of arson against churches and homes, the burning of Bibles, and
physical assaults on Christians. During the last two years many Muslims
shops and mosques have been attacked by Buddhist mobs.

In addition to attacks on Muslims in India, Christians have also been
targets there. In August and September of 2008, as many as 40 Christians
were killed in riots that erupted after they were falsely implicated in the
death of a Hindu religious leader. The New York Times reported that “3,000
Christian homes were burned and over 130 churches destroyed.”

The greatest surprise of my research was hundreds of years of violence
among the sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The current Dalai Lama is the first
admit to this record of conflict, and he says that the Tibetan people are
paying off a huge karmic debt because of it.

The Venerable Wirathu, head of one of Burma’s largest monasteries, has
declared that “Muslims are like the African carp. They breed quickly and
they are very violent and they eat their own kind.” In a perverse
application of Buddhist ethics to Muslims, he stated: “You can be full of
kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog.”

Wirathu’s sermons have inspired armed Buddhists to kill Muslims and burn
their businesses and mosques. The Burmese government has denied citizenship
to those Muslims who are unable to offer the nearly impossible proof that
their ancestors were in the country before 1823. Hardest hit are the 1.4
million Rohingyas, who are not allowed to travel or marry, and incredibly
enough, not permitted to give birth to children.

Recent anti-Muslim attacks in Burma have now claimed the lives of at least
1,000 and have left 140,000 Muslims homeless. In the town of Meiktila a
Thai newspaper reports: “For three days, security forces let roaming gangs
of armed Buddhists burn down nearly 1,000 buildings, including mosques,
Muslim-owned businesses and houses.”

Regretfully, I have been forced to conclude that Buddhism is the Asian
religion that has the worst record of religiously motivated violence.
However, the world record for a single sect is held by the Taiping Rebels,
who, led by the Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, killed an estimated 20
million Chinese in their efforts to set up a Christian world empire.


           In exploring 11 thesis for the reasons for religious violence
(chap. 10) I found that the surest way to religious violence was for people
to fuse religious and national identity.  This of course has happened in
the Abrahamic religions, but also in India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Burma, the
Taiping Christians, and Japanese Shintoists and Buddhists.


Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31
years.
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