[Vision2020] Please don't buy this book!

[lfalen]

Nick
I read your column in todays paper and the reviews you posted here. I would like to read your book but the price is too steep for me. Maybe in a year or two I can get it at a discounted price.
Roger





-----Original Message-----
Subject: [Vision2020] Please don't buy this book!
From: "Nicholas Gier" <ngier006 at gmail.com>
To: vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Date: 10/17/14 22:05:28

 Greetings:

I will lecture on and sign copies of my book at BookPeople in Moscow at 11AM, tomorrow Sat. Oct. 18.


The editors at Lexington Books have been wonderful to work with (MS. in on Jan. 15 and book in hand on Aug. 30!), but I was shocked at the hardback price of $100.  I will be selling author's copies for $50, but I will also be sending the PDF proofs for free to anyone who wants to read it.  A flyer with pre-publication reviews is attached.


 I've appended below my column for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.  A summary of my book in 650 words!  That was a real challenge.
 


Here's to the danger of fusing religious and national identities,


Nick


 RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE IN INDIA, SRI LANKA, BURMA, TIBET, CHINA, AND JAPAN
By Nick Gier, The Palouse Pundit
About 25 years ago I began a book project with the title "The Peace of the East." Just like the Jesus of the Gospels, the Buddha and his Hindu counterparts taught an ethics of compassion and nonviolence. When I took my first sabbatical to India in 1992, my thesis about peaceful Asians began to crumble. 
I was doing research for my book on Gandhi at Punjab University in Chandigarh, and Sikh militants were still active in the province. However, it was Hindu fundamentalists who caused the most violence in late 1992 and early 1993.
On December 6, Hindu militants, using pick axes, sledge hammers, and bare hands, destroyed the Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya. Hindus had long held a deep-seated grievance at this site, because it was considered the birth place of their god Rama. In the aftermath of this desecration, 2,000 people (mostly Muslims) died in cities across India.
Later I would read Brian Victoria's book Zen at War and learn that Japan's Buddhists, after being persecuted by state-sanctioned Shintoists in the 1890s, joined the imperial war effort with great enthusiasm.
In my research on Sri Lanka I discovered that Buddhist militants, after actively promoting the war against the Hindu Tamils, are now turning their ire against Christians and Muslims.  Over the past decade there have been 320 cases of arson against churches and homes, the burning of Bibles, and physical assaults on Christians. During the last two years many Muslims shops and mosques have been attacked by Buddhist mobs.
In addition to attacks on Muslims in India, Christians have also been targets there. In August and September of 2008, as many as 40 Christians were killed in riots that erupted after they were falsely implicated in the death of a Hindu religious leader. The New York Times reported that "3,000 Christian homes were burned and over 130 churches destroyed."
The greatest surprise of my research was hundreds of years of violence among the sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The current Dalai Lama is the first admit to this record of conflict, and he says that the Tibetan people are paying off a huge karmic debt because of it.
The Venerable Wirathu, head of one of Burma's largest monasteries, has declared that "Muslims are like the African carp. They breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind." In a perverse application of Buddhist ethics to Muslims, he stated: "You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog."
Wirathu's sermons have inspired armed Buddhists to kill Muslims and burn their businesses and mosques. The Burmese government has denied citizenship to those Muslims who are unable to offer the nearly impossible proof that their ancestors were in the country before 1823. Hardest hit are the 1.4 million Rohingyas, who are not allowed to travel or marry, and incredibly enough, not permitted to give birth to children.
Recent anti-Muslim attacks in Burma have now claimed the lives of at least 1,000 and have left 140,000 Muslims homeless. In the town of Meiktila a Thai newspaper reports: "For three days, security forces let roaming gangs of armed Buddhists burn down nearly 1,000 buildings, including mosques, Muslim-owned businesses and houses."
Regretfully, I have been forced to conclude that Buddhism is the Asian religion that has the worst record of religiously motivated violence. However, the world record for a single sect is held by the Taiping Rebels, who, led by the Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, killed an estimated 20 million Chinese in their efforts to set up a Christian world empire.


           In exploring 11 thesis for the reasons for religious violence (chap. 10) I found that the surest way to religious violence was for people to fuse religious and national identity.  This of course has happened in the Abrahamic religions, but also in India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Burma, the Taiping Christians, and Japanese Shintoists and Buddhists.


Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.
 


 
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