Kudos to Bhante Bodhi for writing about this truly insane conflict!
This sentiment reminds me of something anthropologist David Graeber said in The Utopia of Rules :
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
He gives an example in a different writing
The classic example is the well. There’s a town where water is monopolised and the mayor is in bed with the company that monopolises the water. If you were to protest in front of the mayor’s house, that’s protest, and if you were to blockade the mayor’s house, it’s civil disobedience, but it’s still not direct action. Direct action is when you just go and dig your own well, because that’s what people would normally do if they didn’t have water.
The very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative—all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition.
and the gains that creative forms of activism have made guided by this type of thinking here in recent decades.
When I think about Buddhists who sincerely do activism, some social or political action that does not contradict the eightfold path, some form of direct action should certainly be part of the conversation for them, which is why I mention it here. After all, what authority or good reason can the elements of the State or those state officials, who brutalise peaceful protesters using police violence at home and give precedence to carpet bombing civilians before allowing the military-industrial complex to take a backseat in govt. policy for once, have in the eyes of Buddhists who idolise principles of non-harming and the like?
Of course as you say, not all Buddhists need to have this type of socio-political consciousness. Since the context is here of the US, the fact that Buddhists in the US don’t get involved in the large domestic military industry, which by now has completely permeated american society with even “socially conscious” investors investing in military weaponry in a complete inversion of common sense notions of what it means to be socially conscious, following right livelihood is already a form of resistance against the different forms of violence and imperialism that Western nations like the US regularly conduct abroad.
Protest is good but I think the conversation has to become truly radical eventually. For example, I remember reading in an introduction to Gandhi’s writings on satyāgraha in english by the writer Bharatan Kumarappa on what a radical path to anti-war resistance entails :
In this respect Satyagraha or non-violent resistance, as conceived by Gandhiji, has an important lesson for pacifists and war-resisters of the West. Western pacifists have so far proved ineffective because they have thought that war can be resisted by mere propaganda, conscientious objection, and organization for settling disputes. Gandhiji showed that non-violence to be effective requires constructive effort in every sphere of life, individual, social, economic and political. These spheres have to be organized and refashioned in such a way that the people will have learnt to be non-violent in their daily lives, manage their affairs on a cooperative and non-violent basis, and thus have acquired sufficient strength and resourcefulness to be able to offer non-violent resistance against organized violence. The practice of non-violence in the political sphere is not, therefore, a mere matter of preaching or even of establishing arbitration courts or Leagues of Nations, but involves building up brick by brick with patience and industry a new non-violent social and economic order. It depends ultimately on banishing violence from the heart of the individual, and making of him a transformed disciplined person.
I’m not sure to what extent calling the USSR Marxist is correct. The point that you were making is of course different, but this stops people from engaging seriously and objectively with Marxist ideas, which also predate the USSR. I come across the “communism = bad” opinion so often in the US from people who have never read Marx. Usually, they want us to imagine a future which cannot be anything but the neoliberalism of today, one of the chief characteristics of which is conducting war for profit.
For states like the USSR, communism as prescribed by Marx which involved a “withering away of the state” was just some utopian notion that a vanguard party will eventually evolve their nation towards. They called their nation “socialist” and Lenin in fact disagreed with Marxists on how they should progress to that goal. From the wiki page for Marxism-Leninism
Importantly, Lenin declared that the development of socialism would not be able to be pursued in the manner originally thought by Marxists.
I quite like the idea of communism as laid out by Marx in the maxim
from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs
Then there are no communist forms of rule currently or historically except perhaps some indigenous communities which predate Marx and European colonialism. In fact from the little I know of Marx, he was inspired by such accounts of “primitive communism” as he called them. Based on this maxim, I would say that we are all “communists” at heart (atleast when we are with friends) :-D.
The way the mind defines things is important. The Dhammapada says the way the mind defines things is the forerunner of skillful & unskillful actions. Who is really the “civilian” or who really is the “terrorist” is important.