10 June 2006
Death of a Killer
How should a Buddhist feel about the death of a person like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? The worldly attitude is to say good riddance. This man organised the killing of large numbers of mostly civilian people in Iraq and now he too has been violently destroyed by an American bomb. Many promient people have expressed satisfaction.
Buddhists, however, have a different attitude because they have a different background theory about how the world works. Just as physicists wil ltell us that the destruction of the physical body by fire does not actually eliminate the matter nor the energy that, when conjoined in a certain pattern, constituted that body, so Buddhists believe that the moral force of a life is not destroyed by the mere physical death of the person who embodied that force. Karma is the equivalent in the moral domain of the law of conservation of energy in the physical one. Zarqawi's karma continues. Whether it will reassemble into a recognisable human personality package is an open question, but destroying the evil doer does not eliminate the evil from our world.
When the Buddha meets a mass murderer he does everything he can to convert him into a harmless one, just as he does with anybody else. Buddhas are not gods. They are inspiring and persuasive, but they do not create the universe nor can they miraculously change a person against that person's will. They seek rather to rouse a new gathering of the person's faith.
Zarqawi did not have much of a life. Starting off as a small time criminal he got swept to prominence by being caught by a big wave. That wave was the need of the USA to find some shred of credibility to support their completely false pretention that there was a direct link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to shore up their case for the illegal invasion of Iraq. By naming Zarqawi as the link person (apparently without any evidence) at the United Nations, Colin Powell thrust Zarqawi into the limelight. Now, three years later they have killed him. This would all seem like a sick joke if so many other people had not also been killed along the way. As it is it is just to grievous for anybody to laugh.
The world will not be free of the karma of Zarqawi until all those who helped to make him into the symbol and the disaster that he was learn to be harmless ones and there is no immediate prospect of that. Zarqawi still walks this earth in the skins of all those who made him what he was. Some of them live in the Middle East and some in Western capitals. None of us is entirely innocent.
June 10, 2006 in Current Affairs, Death, Karma | Permalink
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It might be interesting to also consider the very strong possibility that the so-called life and death of "al-Zarqawi" was as much the result of projection and myth-making as that of a real person.
The forces managing the ongoing occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan are, among other things, carefully managing the legends and myths surrounding the violence there.
The myth-making list is long -- e.g., Saddam had WMDs and was linked with an (alleged) terrorist organization called "al-Qaeda"; this (alleged) organization, "al-Qaeda", together with Iranians and other terrorists, are fomenting the insurgency in Iraq; the torture and death of detainees at Abu Ghraib is/was due to "a few bad apples" run amok; the occupation is going well; most Iraqis want foreign troops to remain in their country to "protect" them; a free and democratically elected government has been established in Iraq; the United States and Britain will withdraw all troops when the Iraqi government's military forces are able to defend their country; the use of depleted uranium weapons will not significantly impact the health of Iraqis; we are battling the "terrorists" there so we will not have to battle them on the streets of America and Britain; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a key terrorist leader of the insurgency in Iraq and was responsible for a gruesome toll of torture, beheadings, death and destruction; and so on, ad nauseum.
But, how much of this reflects the truth of what is happening there and how much is the result of carefully crafted and self-serving myth-making on the part of the aggressor nations, so that their soldiers, the soldiers' families, and ordinary citizens are willing to accept the carnage and destruction going on there?
I would suggest that from the vantage point of the deep, foggy cavern of denial in which too many of the citizens of the United States and their leaders presently reside, these legends and myths, including that of al-Zarqawi, say far more about ourselves than about any perceived "terrorist" Other.
So, then, how to react to the death of such a "killer" as the so-called al-Zarqawi? Perhaps we first need, individually and as a nation, a bit of honest reflection on the actual causes and agencies of hatred, aggression and violence in the world and how we contribute to those causes. An examination within the mirror of our own minds and hearts of the fear, hatred and selfishness driving our own actions, attitudes and motives, as individuals and as a nation. A recognition that much of our fear of the Terrorist Other is simply a projection out into the world of our own hatred and aggression.
When we recognize the killer (and killer's accomplice) latent in each of us, then we may begin to understand how to approach and address the killer Other.
Posted by: James Parrott | 20 Oct 2006 20:26:50
