The
Bamiyan Buddhas
And The WTC: Two Perspectives Enlightenment vs. Entitlement
By Ingmar Lee
16 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
When
those two colossal structures representing the apogee of the human odyssey
were exploded and reduced to a smouldering wreckage, the march of evolution
reached an unequivocal turning point. The monumental structures that
had stood sentinel at the gateway to the world's pre-eminent civilization
symbolized the sublime consummate aspiration of the society that built
them: ~that the supreme human attainment must be founded on universal
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For 17 centuries
the Bamiyan Buddhas had done their peaceful sentry duty at the geopolitical
juncture where East met West. With an open palm radiating compassionate
loving kindness, they proclaimed that the observance of basic moral
precepts, freedom from attachment to material things, and quiet, equanimous
personal introspection was the ultimate way to achieve these transcendent
ideals. Nevertheless, since their construction, the Bamiyan Buddhas
have simultaneously stood a stoic and silent vigil over humanity's inexorable
slide into oblivion.Their destruction on March 11th, 2001 was a portentous
warning signal of the final winking out of the myriad evolutionary processes
that culminated with humans at the apex of a hierarchy of beings. The
trajectory of the human experience has now plummeted into a fathomless
nadir of greed, sloth, violence and corruption and has bottomed out
at Bush America.
The peaceful symbolism of
the great Bamiyan Buddhas was not recognized by the steady progression
of imperialist belligerents who visited an endless rain of terror on
what is now known as Afghanistan. Afghans have endured successive invasions
by legions of warmongers, the legacy of which has left their society
as fractured and unstable as the rugged geography of their land. The
ancient Aryans, Alexander, Genghis Khan, the British and the Russians
all came; maiming, killing, and stealing to conquer this mountainous
desert in order to forward their respective global domination schemes.
And each in their turn was repulsed by the inimitable determination
of fierce and courageous Afghan tribesmen. The Russians lost 15,000
soldiers before they limped away, but the Brits having been driven out
three times, are back again with their NATO "coalition" of
idiots, while the stupid Bush-lackey "Steve" Harper government
of Canada contributes 2300 troops to the slaughter.
In the repetitious staccatto
of its blood-spattered history, America looms largest and most hideous
in the annals of Afghanistan, with its surreptitious arrival on the
scene in 1979. For 10 years America vicariously faced off the Russians
in a vicious behind-the-scenes Superpower war, secretly building, financing
and training the mercenary army of their Taliban proxy, and providing
massive weapons shipments that terrorized the Afghan people and blasted
apart their bleak and beautiful land. When the Russians finally quit,
leaving millions of landmines strewn across the landscape in their wake,
the USA abandoned Afghanistan too, leaving the exhausted, injured, destitute
and ethnically disparate communities to themselves to try to repair
their devastated land. Such negligent abuse inevitably has revolting
consequences.
Six months to the day, following
the harbinger destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, another massive pair
of towering structures that epitomized the zenith of the American way,
were exploded and reduced to smouldering wreckage. The catastrophic
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the World Trade Centre are as
intricately interrelated as the Yin and the Yang. The World Trade Center
also represented a predominant ideal of that society: that the paramount
human rights were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, ~but exceptionally
however, for Americans. These mammoth temples of Mammon proclaimed this
edict from an entirely antipodean perspective from their Bamiyan counterparts:
that unrestricted growth, rampant consumption and personal enrichment
were the ways to achieve these lofty goals. For Bush America, the right
to life is to bear arms that maim and kill, freedom is for the exploitation
of others, and happiness is sought in hedonistic self gratification.
Bush America's globe-gobbling profligacy is correlated to the abject
poverty counterpart upon which it depends, and is perpetuated by its
enforced exceptionalist sense of entitlement. Such arrogance always
breeds resentment, and such violence always breeds vengeance, and predictably,
a small group of skillful warriors thus empowered arose from the desert
wastes of Afghanistan and in one fell swoop, felled the monstrous nerve-centre
of the American global domination project.
The litany of heinous crimes
against humanity being committed by Bush America are far too numerous
and well known to list here.That the destiny of our planet is in the
hands of this criminal warmongering madman with the means to annihilate
every living thing at his single command is an appalling testament to
the greed and stupidity of the American people who elected him. But
whether or not George W. Bush's hair-trigger finger ever pushes the
button that destroys our world, other earthshattering catastrophes originating
in Bush America threaten not only humanity, but all living things entirely.
Bush America leads the world in changing the climate, contaminating
and reducing biodiversity with GMO's, polluting the land air and water,
stripping away the forests, proliferating nuclear weapons and power,
and in blatant military aggression. Its Brobdingnagian ecological footprint
is crushing out the gossamer thin veil of the Earth's living blanket
which distinguishes our planet so magnificently from all of its lifeless
neighbours.
But away and beyond all this,
Bush's most stupendous criminal act against our biosphere has been the
unleashing of Depleted Uranium (DU) nuclear weaponry in Afghanistan
and Iraq. DU particles are circulating in the atmosphere and blanketting
the planet in a miasma of radiological poison which is permeating into
the DNA of all Earthly beings. Even now, genetic mutations are gestating
in the reproductive processes of beings, which will propagate through
generations and alter the very flow of evolution. Even now, whereever
DU has been used, an unprecedented number of babies are born with bizarre
and appalling never-before-seen deformities. Those which are not stillborn
will face unimaginably painful and horrific lives.The enormity of Bush
America's global DU fallout is now being discovered and geiger counters
around the world are clicking off the scale.
Never before has the fate
of the world been in the hands of such a stupid and careless man, ~a
pathetic little man who is so obsessed with his petulant Global War
on Terror. It's so easy to understand the sole motivation of a person
waking up to find their home and family destroyed by some push-button
video-terminal warrior raining hell-fire from afar. With no available
recourse through due process, when such injustice is done, revenge is
the base and ignorant reaction, and where there's a human will, there's
a way. There is no amount of military power that can stop a person with
such a motivation. George Bush is losing his GWOT while stoking innumerable
fires of vengeance.
Bush America presents the
greatest possible threat to the peace and welfare of all beings, but
paradoxically, George W. Bush may be our only salvation. If Bush had
not stolen his office from Mr. Kerry, the American status quo might
have been preserved a little longer. This Earth cannot survive the prolonged
death of America and Bush is destroying it faster. The enormous debt
of America to the world, now doubled by Bush to $8,000,000,000,000,
has brought their economy to the very brink of collapse, and its imminent
crash will be yet another catastrophe for us all. Yet it is only by
the immediate destruction of this greed-fuelled Bush American empire,
that the beings of this beautiful Earth are offered any glimmer of hope.
The Buddha's great and enduring message which rings true for all time,
is that greed is the root cause of all suffering. This is alas, the
antithesis of the George W. Bush version.
Ingmar Lee writes
from Pondicherry, India. He may be reached at [email protected]