The Bamiyan Buddhas and the WTC:

Two Perspectives

by Ingmar Lee

When those two colossal structures representing the apogee of the human odyssey were exploded and reduced to a smoldering 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 were the ultimate ways to achieve these transcendent ideals.

 

Nevertheless, since their construction, the Bamiyan Buddhas stoic and silent vigil has borne witness to humanitys 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 that 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 have visited an endless rain of terror on what is now known as Afghanistan. Afghans have endured successive brutal 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, while the Brits, having been themselves slaughtered and expelled from Afghanistan three times already, are back at it again with their American-led NATO “coalition” of idiots. And in an appalling example of grovelling stupidity, the Neo-Con Bush-lackey “Steve” Harper government of Canada now 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 first warmongering arrival 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, and as a result, Afghanistan became a breeding ground for revenge against obscene American injustice. The destruction of the Buddhas was the warning shot that presaged the most shocking retaliatory act of vengence ever seen.

Six months to the day, following the harbinger destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the massive pair of towering structures that epitomized the zenith of the American way, were exploded and reduced to smouldering wreckage.The World Trade Center 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 the diametrically antipodean perspective of 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 directly correlated to the abject poverty counterpart upon which it depends, and is perpetuated by its 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 catastrophic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the World Trade Centre are as intricately interrelated as the Yin and the Yang.

The litany of heinous crimes against humanity being committed by Bush America are far too numerous and well known to list here, but several of them stand out most significantly. The enormous debt of America to the world, now doubled by Bush to more than $8,000,000,000,000, has brought the USA economy to the brink of collapse, and its imminent crash means another unimaginable catastrophe for us all. That the destiny of our planet is in the hands of this criminal warmongering madman, who is given 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 altering the global 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 voracious 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 must be the unleashing of Depleted Uranium (DU) nuclear weaponry in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. 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 reproductive processes which will propagate through generations and alter the very flow of evolution. Even now, whereever DU has been used, unprecedented numbers of babies are being born with bizarre and appalling never-before-seen deformities.Those which are not stillborn will face unimaginably painful and horrific lives and will pass on their garbled genetic codes to their descendents.The enormity of Bush America’s global DU fallout surpasses the immense pollution of decades of atmospheric nuclear testing and is now being registered on geiger counters around the world which are clicking off the scale.

Never before has the fate of the world been in the hands of such a stupid and careless fool, ~this pathetic little man who is so obsessed with his petulant and futile Global War on Terror. The undeniable laws of cause and effect as expounded by the Buddha makes it so easy to understand the consequences of a person waking up to find their lives and loved ones destroyed by some push-button video-terminal imperialist warrior raining hell-fire from afar. With no available recourse through due process, when such injustice is done, revenge is the base, ignorant and inevitable reaction, and where there’s a human will, there’s a way. There is no amount of gross military power that can stop a person with such an insuperable motivation. Having stirred up a veritable hornets nest of outrage around the planet, Bush swats away at the buzzing insects with the macho brute force of his impotent volunteer military. But while sledgehammering away at hornets certainly wrecks the place, the wind from the swing simply blows them temporarily aside. While George Bush flails away uselessly, he does nothing but stoke innumerable more 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 a prolonged death of America and Bush is destroying it faster. The faster, the better. Yet it is only by the immediate destruction of the greed-fuelled Bush American empire, that offers the beings of this beautiful Earth any glimmer of hope for the future. If humanity can somehow survive Bush, perhaps they might then apply the Buddha’s great and enduring message which rings true for all time: that greed is the root cause of all suffering. This is alas, the antithesis of the George W. Bush version.