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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]

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