May 19, 2004

AlterNet: Is Bush the Anti-Buddha?:

"When George W. Bush mouths the word 'compassion' chills dart up my spine. Anyone paying attention can easily see how the actions of the Bush regime reflect a distinct lack of empathy and understanding. This is an administration bent on blatant paybacks to friends and contributors at everyone else's expense. Its single truth: What is good for extractive profits is good for the country. Trees and caribou don't contribute cash so Bush's environmental policy opens majestic old growth forests for commercial logging and protected wilderness areas for domestic oil exploration. His foreign policy confuses justice with punishment, disagreement with treachery, and cultural differences with evil. He willingly risks escalating and perpetuating a continuous cycle of global violence.

Bush's regime is a disgraceful manifestation of the nefarious crony capitalism that the Presidents Roosevelt - Theodore and Franklin - used their administrations to combat...

Thai Buddhist professor Sulak Sivaraksa likens Bush to Hitler and Stalin, arguing that his declaration of an 'Axis of Evil,' Hitler's 'Final Solution,' and Stalin's pogrom of peasants were actually similar attempts "to perfect the world by destroying its [perceived] impurities... His is the zealotry and the extremism that Shakyamuni Buddha spent his life defining as the cause of suffering.

How does a student of the Dharma deal with the rising temptation to wish ill will on the perpetrators of such shocking and detestable undertakings? To the specter of four more years of Bush, what is an appropriate Buddhist response? "

Read more here.

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