{"id":170604,"date":"2016-11-19T15:54:24","date_gmt":"2016-11-19T10:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=170604"},"modified":"2016-11-23T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T06:52:08","slug":"buddhism-sri-lankan-trump-supporters-the-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/buddhism-sri-lankan-trump-supporters-the-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed\/","title":{"rendered":"Buddhism, Sri Lankan Trump Supporters & The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Thisuri Wanniarachchi<\/span><\/a> \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Thisuri<\/a>

Thisuri Wanniarachchi<\/p><\/div>\n

To all genuine followers of Buddhism, and everyone else who believes in equality, the US election was a punch in the gut. A man who ran on a campaign of racism, taking American jobs away from immigrants and foreign nationals, a man who took pride in not paying his share of taxes and swore to implement a regressive tax policy, cutting taxes for the rich, putting the burden of funding government on the poor, a man who was caught on tape talking about raping women, became the leader of the free world. In the first 24 hours following the election results alone, 8 American transexual youth committed suicide. People console themselves saying he\u2019s not going to be as bad as he seems, but, within days of his election Trump appointed a white nationalist as his chief of staff. Since the election, in many states across the United States, Nazi swastikas were graffitied on walls, muslim, black, Asian, brown and LGBTQ citizens were harassed, and assaulted. In cities big and small all around the world, from New York to London to Tokyo, white supremacists have sprung up, racist hate crime reports have risen. On one hand this is going to be a painful four years for Americans and political minorities around the world. On the other hand, however, this may be the only way for those blinded by privilege and believe that racism, and misogyny don\u2019t exist in today’s world, to get a front row seat to watch these issues unveil themselves on the centre stage of global politics.<\/p>\n

The mind-numbing question remains: how is it that we saw quite a few Sri Lankans supporting Trump? It\u2019s easy to come to the usual conclusions: these are people let down by our antiquated education system, people with little to no exposure to progressive politics, perhaps out of ignorance they found Trump to be entertaining. There\u2019s the obvious factor of sexism; nothing scares chauvinist men, and women raised to be subservient to men more than living in a world in which the most powerful nations are run by women. And then there\u2019s the extremely flawless, rational theory of our fellow Sinhala aunties and uncles: \u201cHillary took money from those with ties to the LTTE,\u201d so even if Hitler were to rise from the dead and run against her, so be it, they\u2019d still want her to lose. There is also the rational counterargument that we Sri Lankans lost our right to point our fingers to those supporting terrorism the moment we let our state kill thousands of our own civilians, celebrated it, and live in denial that it ever happened. But of course, no ordinary Sri Lankan would have the backbone to open that can of worms. (Appachchi taught us well.) For most Sri Lankans it was either one or all of those factors above that convinced them to support Trump. On a surface level, the explanations above make sense; it seems that Sri Lankan Trump supporters didn\u2019t have the intellectual capacity to grasp the fact that we too are brown and fall under the same category of people Trump and his campaign claimed to be unworthy of equal rights as white men. As tragic as that is, it leads us to my next point. I do not believe that Sri Lankans supporting Trump is a phenomenon that merely resembles the level of ignorance in our society and how much more we need to reform our education system to educate our children about our history of colonial oppression, colourism and the baggage it has left us with. I believe this phenomenon resembles a much a deeper issue pertaining to a slave mindset nourished in Sri Lankans by decades of political, religious and chauvinist propaganda that convinced us that bigotry is a form of patriotism, and made us victim to authoritarian leaders who claimed to be socialists, time and time again.<\/p>\n

The Contamination of Theravada Buddhism\"buddhist_monks_protest\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSri Lanka is a Buddhist nation\u201d I hear this on the news everyday. It\u2019s a tagline in our political speeches. Is Sri Lanka really a Buddhist nation? Somedays, I truly wish it was.<\/p>\n

Is Sri Lanka really home to a population of people that embody true buddhist values and logic? Or are we a nation constitutionally bound to protect a doctrine that is easily manipulated and misinterpreted by clergy and others with political agendas? The answer to both questions above is \u201cno,\u201d but, we are incredibly closer to the latter than the first.<\/p>\n

Buddhism, to me, is a very personal thing. It is a spiritual way of life that helps us through difficult times. It guides us when making important decisions and questions our conscience when we are faced with tough choices. In this world full of hate and inexplicable injustice nothing can calm your soul than the buddhist philosophy of compassion. Buddhism teaches us integrity: to be a thathaavaadhi, yathaakari, yathaavaadhi thathakaari individual,(one who says what one does and does what one says) to stay above the fray like a lotus in a pond, to surround ourselves with the right mentors and friends, ( asewanaacha baalanam, pandithanancha sevana,) to keep up with the times and improve our capacity of the Dhamma: Kalena Dhamma Sakachcha\/Savannahcha (some tend to interpret this as merely listening to\/ discussing the dhamma at the appropriate time, but I\u2019d take it a step further to say the Buddha was intelligent enough to believe the world was bound to evolve and Buddhism should too, and that this clause meant that we should discuss the dhamma as it related to the respective time). In a country such as ours in which mental health is very much reliant upon home remedies, with a culture in which western medicine, psychiatry and personal therapy are almost unheard of when dealing with times of grave loss, trauma and other common causes of mental instability, religion is what most people resort to, for solace and strength. If you think about it, the true role of religion\/ faith in holding people together, internally and externally, the grip it possesses in helping people in their most difficult times, and guiding them to aspire to be better versions of themselves in good times, is truly powerful.<\/p>\n

In a nation that survived a 30 year war and two brutal insurgencies, we are a traumatized population. Religion played a huge role in helping our population grieve, endure and move on. The temples, churches, kovils and mosques often provided solace to mothers, fathers, and widows who lost their loved ones at war. During the black July, as some Sri Lankan families saw their homes being burnt down by their fellow citizens, they still believed that God-willing, life could get better, that they would find safety sooner or later if not in their motherland, in a land far away. On some of the footage in No Fire Zone you can see mothers, fathers and children praying to God, as shells poured over from the sky. In 2004 as the tsunami hit us hard, we resorted to places of worship, for strength; in times of inexplicable pain and violence, to many, religion was the only thing that made sense. Millions take their newborn children to the place of faith they feel connected to, to pass on the power and blessings of their faiths to their children. Religion is an intergenerational companion. Whether you believe in a religious faith or not, it is undeniable that the effect religions have on many people\u2019s lives is truly remarkable. I\u2019m not saying that religion is the only element in society that can have this effect on people, but in Sri Lankan society, this energy of faith is noticeably a powerful one. Buddhism, as the religion practiced by a larger group of the population, is no different. The power of millions of people\u2019s faith in compassion, kindness, empathy and equanimity should amount to something: something worth saving.<\/p>\n

For the longest time, however, Buddhism in Sri Lanka has been becoming increasingly politicized, taking away its power as a personal faith to one that is authoritarian, bigoted, and sometimes violent. Why is that?<\/p>\n

1. For many decades the Buddhism curricula taught in Sri Lankan schools discriminate within the Triple Gem: we teach our children about the Buddha, and the Sangha but barely touch on the Dhamma.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Think about it: we learn more about Prince Sidhuhath\u2019s life, his royalty, his journey to enlightenment, the royal stories of Buddha\u2019s time: how the kings lived by the rules of the sangha, and the importance of royal\/state patronage for the Sangha than we do about the actual Dhamma (which is the core of the philosophy of Buddhism). We also come across recurring lessons on the acceptance of social hierarchy: how those who had done good deeds in their previous lives were born to higher classes\/castes and those who had sinned were born to lower classes\/castes. How craftily they sew in such divisive messages into a beautiful philosophy of equality is astonishing.<\/p>\n

This fact is not a coincidence. This is a carefully orchestrated pedagogy of a vulnerable and oppressed community, to manipulate their views on the world, politics and themselves; it has normalized classism, state patronage of bigotry, and made it impossible for Sri Lanka to maintain the required democratic distance between the temple and the state.<\/p>\n

We are not alone; the only other nation in the world to follow the version of Theravada Buddhism closest to ours, Thailand, has done the exact same. They have used Buddhism as a tool to create a nation claiming to be a democracy with a population that obeys its monarchy, normalizes and accepts social hierarchies.<\/p>\n

2. Donald Trump, Adolph Hitler, Ferdinand Marcos, and other leaders who came to power through racist ideologies tapped into an inner pride in majoritarian societies that gave them a sense of privileged security. They convinced their followers that bigotry was a form of patriotism. In Sri Lanka, a large group of nationwide Buddhist monks are doing the same.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There used to be a time when the temple was the cornerstone of our society. When a roof of a muslim home blew away in the rain, that family could find a home in the temple, all villagers regardless of their race and religion would come together and rebuild that home. We stuck to our original principles of: compassion, kindness and equanimity. But today that Buddhism no longer exists. Overtime, politician after politician, textbook after textbook have run the propaganda that sometimes blatantly stated and often subtly dog-whistled rhetoric that made the Sinhalese believe that they were the more superior Sri Lankans. When Trump did the exact same with the white Americans, it helped so many Sri Lankans validate these thoughts of racial-purity that had grown in them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou Tamil Dog, I Will Kill You<\/span><\/a>\u201d earlier this week a Buddhist monk told a Grama Sevaka in Batticaloa. In the video footage of it, he seemed genuinely insecure, he claimed that the Sinhalese put up with the LTTE shooting at them, but now the Tamils are going to courts against the Sinhalese. When a population lives in privilege for so long and that privilege is normalized, another community\u2019s demand for equal rights as them becomes a threat to their privilege and is misunderstood as oppression<\/strong>.<\/p>\n