Burma and the Press

As of this writing (Thursday, September 27) a nonviolent movement is reaching its crisis in Burma. In 1988 over 3,000 students were killed — massacred would not be too strong a word — when they protested the military takeover of their country. Their courageous, charismatic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, though she had faced down rifle squads in at least one critical confrontation (superbly dramatized in Beyond Rangoon, with Patricia Arquette), and won an overwhelming electoral victory to boot, was not able to prevail over the regime, which has kept her under house arrest and basically pillaged the country for these nineteen years.

Commentators are noting, correctly, several features of the uprising today: it is a massive, disciplined outpouring — the photographs of tens of thousands of red-robed monks and nuns filling avenues for as far as the eye can see are nothing short of inspiring. It relies on the immense prestige of religious orders in that predominantly Buddhist country. And — among other differences between now and 1988 — the world is watching.

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The Sad-Go-Round of Sexual Exploitation

The latest issue of the New Internationalist — a journal I read and recommend — featured an exposé of one of the most tragic and demoralizing — and growing — crimes of our world: trafficking women and girls for various kinds of exploitation. If ‘globalization from above’ describes the cancerous corporate system that is pushing aside nations and peoples, and ‘globalization from below’ describes the way civic society and indigenous peoples are connecting into networks to build a more human- and life-friendly planet, what shall we call this? The U.S. Government estimates that as many as 800,000 people are ‘trafficked’ across international borders each year, from 127 countries.

It made heartbreaking reading.

Two approaches were cited as attempts to contain, or possibly reverse this practice, the ‘supply-side’ legal means of apprehending traffickers and ‘demand-side’ methods like educating girls who are at risk or placing beer mats in British pubs that have enticing sex-worker ads on one side but, when you turn them over, the harsh truths about how the woman you visit may have been coerced and basically deprived of her humanity, raped and beaten if she tries to escape.

Neither is working very well. As nonviolence people we would place much more hope in the demand-side methods, which are further ‘up-stream’ toward the real source of the violence. The parallel to drug trafficing is patent: would you rather try to eradicate coca crops (and anything else in your path) in Colombia or give people something to live for so they don’t take to drugs in the first place? Likewise, rousing people’s lust and then showing them the unpleasant flip side doesn’t strike me as all that different from rousing people’s lust culture-wide, which we do by endlessly advertising sex by itself, or to sell everything from clothes to cars, and then demonizing people who express it in ways that are harmful.

I am being very controversial, I know. Let me give a little background on this particular form of exploitation before I go on. The trafficking of human beings, aka slavery, has a deep past. Émile Benveniste, a brilliant philologist who wrote a ground-breaking work on ‘the vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions,’ showed that the earliest words for buying and selling in the IE vocabulary (the Indo-European languages were the ancestors of most languages spoken from Iran to Ireland, and now the world) implied the buying and selling of human beings — slaves. There was a special word in ancient Greek, aikhmalotēs, ‘spear-captured,’ to denote the status of women or men captured in war. As we all know, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the awareness of the horror of treating a human being as a thing to be bought and sold reached high enough levels that the practice was made illegal, by stages, in Europe and America. This means that quite apart from the sexual aspect (and not all women being trafficed end up in brothels — some are forced into general slavery), the world is going backwards morally by thousands of years.

I’ve already suggested where we might find the answer. The upstream answer, the compassionate and sensible but also very difficult answer, is to stop exploiting sex. At one point when modern feminism was developing women put bright yellow stickers on ads that used allure to sell things, saying This Exploits Women. It does. I was sorry they stopped. But until they start again, or some comparable campaigns are dreamed up, let’s remember that we can all do something. Ever since a New York bus rolled up in front of my face with a larger-than-life frontal-nudity ad I vowed I would never buy anything more from the company that paid for it, which was Calvin Klein. Literally and metaphorically, ‘don’t buy it.’ Live simply, have lots of close relationships, and discover that happiness cannot be bought because it doesn’t come from outside us in the first place.

This is Gandhi’s svadeshi: local action. It builds a platform from which we can in time mount campaigns, get laws passed, and let women and girls have their freedom and their life. Of course, this form of dehumanization is only one of many. If we want to get really upstream we will have to stop poverty, and commercialism. Those will be subjects of articles to follow.

Students of principled nonviolence have long upheld Aung San Suu Kyi, Buddhist and leader of Burma’s democracy movement, as a luminary of nonviolent social change. On Saturday, the Burmese military junta allowed 500 monks to visit Suu Kyi at her home-prison, yielding to the recent massive nonviolent demonstrations by monks, students, and civic leaders. It appears that the monks have set up a win-win situation, where the government is hesitating to act and crush the demonstrations (as they did in 1988) because it would likely cause the nonviolent uprising to spread all across the country in protest.  Marches have reached as high as 100,000 participants at time of this writing (Tuesday, Sept. 25).

Check out the story on Common Dreams:

“Burma ‘Reaches Tipping Point’ As Monks Take On the Military Junta
Monks stage more protests against its military rulers – despite threats of force”
by David Williams

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/25/4087/

Thousands of Monks Peacefully Confront Military in Burma

Students of principled nonviolence have long upheld Aung San Suu Kyi,

Buddhist and leader of Burma’s democracy movement, as a luminary of

nonviolent social change. On Saturday, the Burmese military junta

allowed 500 monks to visit Suu Kyi at her home-prison, yielding to the

recent massive nonviolent demonstrations by monks, students, and civic

leaders. It appears that the monks have set up a win-win situation,

where the government is hesitating to act and crush the demonstrations

(as they did in 1988) because it would likely cause the nonviolent

uprising to spread all across the country in protest. Marches have now attracted 100,000 participants.

Check out the story on Common Dreams:

“Burma ‘Reaches Tipping Point’ As Monks Take On the Military Junta

Monks stage more protests against its military rulers – despite

threats of force,” by David Williams: click here

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(We will be posting photos shortly)

The Network of Spiritual Progressives is a national interfaith organization dedicated to a fundamental shift from fear and domination to love and generosity in our institutions, public policies, and social practices. Our mission is to change the “bottom line” so that decisions are made not only based on the effect they will have on money and power, but also on the effect they will have on our ability to be loving, kind, generous, nonviolent, ecologically sensitive, and filled with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. For their website, click here.