Long a voice of democratic reform in Thailand—an enterprise that has earned him death threats, arrest, and exile—Sivaraksa advocates a Buddhism engaged with the social, economic, and environmental problems of the day. He argues that the Buddhist notion of mindfulness is the key to overcoming the consumerism, militarism, and compartmentalization he believes characterizes the West and is beginning to encroach upon the East.
Aware that explicitly religious language is regarded with suspicion by many social reformers, Sivaraksa defends what he calls “Buddhism with a small b.” Stripped of “ritual, myth, and culture,” small-b Buddhism seeks to show that traditional Buddhist ideals such as mindfulness—“especially the breathing which brings us back to what is happening in the present moment. With what is wondrous, refreshing and healing both within and around us”—compassion, and a sense of the deep interconnectedness of all creation are also invaluable when invoked in political and economic contexts. They encourage a nonviolent approach to problem solving that’s quite contrary to the usual adversarial way in which governments tackle issues.
For Sivaraksa, nonviolence is an active rather than passive way of life. The key is compassion. To see and empathize with the suffering of any sentient being is to be moved to do something to help alleviate its pain. Sometimes relief isn’t possible. But frequently it is, and in those cases, to do nothing is to silently acquiesce to and collaborate in the damage that’s inflicted on the victim. Passivity in the face of suffering, in other words, can be an often overlooked form of violence. Similarly, a consumer-driven indifference to wasteful modes of production, exploitative uses of human labor, and unsustainable wreckage of the environment, is a type of passivity that in fact is violent. Buddhism with a small b seeks to awaken people to this fact.
Sivaraksa has received international recognition for his efforts, as he says, “to continually plant seeds of joy, peace and understanding in order to facilitate the ongoing work of transformation in the depths of our consciousness.” One of his many honors was a 1995 Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Peace Prize.
7 March
Stanley Kubrick
26 July 1928—7 March 1999
Satirizing Nuclear Madness
Herman Kahn’s 1960 On Thermonuclear War wasn’t exactly a best seller, but it did ratchet up the Cold War a degree or two. Kahn, a RAND military strategist, argued that a thermonuclear war was winnable. True, the killing power of such a conflict would be so great that its destructiveness, Kahn argued, would have to be measured in terms of “megadeath.” But eventually one side would emerge victorious from the rubble.
Four years after Kahn’s book, and two years after the world nearly tested Kahn’s theory in the Cuban Missile Crisis, reclusive film director Stanley Kubrick made a movie that showed just how dangerous and ridiculous the idea of a winnable nuclear war was. The film carried the bizarre title of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Of Kubrick’s thirteen films, three (counting Strangelove) were stridently anti-war—the other two were Paths of Glory in 1957 and Full Metal Jacket in 1987—but Strangelove was the best. Although the Cold War gave rise to an entire genre of apocalyptic films about nuclear war, Kubrick’s stands out as the only one that uses satire and dark humor to protest nuclear proliferation. Kubrick himself described it as a “nightmare comedy.” In terms of writing, directing, cinematography, and acting, it’s a genuine tour de force.
The plot turns on a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union engineered by General Jack D. Ripper, an insane Cold Warrior. (Kubrick’s insinuation is that all Cold Warriors are insane.) He sends nuclear bomb–laden B52s to Russia, deceptively telling the pilots that the Soviet Union and the United States are at war, and refuses to surrender the radio codes needed to order the pilots to abort the mission. His justification for launching the strike comes straight from Kahn: although the nuclear war that’s bound to ensue will kill thousands of millions of Russians and Americans, it’s winnable if the U.S. hits first.
The film shifts back and forth between Ripper’s headquarters at the fictional Burpelson Air Base and an operations room, presumably at the Pentagon, where the U.S. president, an ex-Nazi named Dr. Strangelove (both played by Peter Sellers), and a cabal of generals and advisors gather to figure out how to deal with the rogue General Ripper’s nuclear launch. Along the way, the Soviet ambassador to the United States reveals that his country’s scientists have invented a Doomsday machine, fifty fail-safe nuclear bombs buried around the world that will automatically detonate if the Soviet Union is attacked. But there’s no calling the American pilots back. They drop their payloads on Russia, and the film ends with nuclear mushrooms from the Doomsday machine blossoming all over the world. Kubrick’s message was clear: there may be survivors in a nuclear standoff, but they won’t be human. The idea of a winnable nuclear war is as absurd as it is terrifying.
8 March
Maria Skobtsova
8 December 1891—31 March 1945
The Giving of One’s Soul
Like so many other Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution, Maria Skobtsova made her way to Paris. The disruption of her old life and the additional blow of the death of one of her three children provoked a profound spiritual crisis in the woman known in Russia as a poet and political activist. She began a search for a more “purified” way of life that eventually led her, in 1932, to monastic vows in the Orthodox Church.
But as a nun, she refused to live a cloistered life. Instead, she ministered to the poverty-stricken and spiritually despairing refugees in Paris. She rented a large house and opened it up to the hungry and the homeless, reserving for herself only a cot in the basement. Her goal, she said, was to discern and revere the living God in every person she encountered, no matter how broken they were or how great the cost of serving them was. “I think service to the world is simply the giving of one’s own soul in order to save others.”
Hitler launched his signature blitzkrieg attack against France in May 1940. Five weeks later, the Nazis were in Paris and the persecution of Jews began. With no hesitation, Skobtsova began defying the Nazis by offering shelter and assistance to Jews on the run. She worked closely with an Orthodox priest, Father Dimitri Klepinin, who gladly issued baptismal papers to Jews who requested them. Together, the two of them moved fleeing Jews along escape routes to Switzerland. On more than one occasion, they smuggled Jewish children to safety by hiding them in trash bins and bribing garbage collectors to take them out of the city.
In 1942, French Jews were ordered to wear the infamous yellow star. Skobtsova immediately protested and called Christians to display solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters. “If we were true Christians,” she said, “we would all wear the Star.” Although she hated war, seeing it as “the brutalization of nations, the lowering of the cultural level, the loss of creative ability, the decadence of souls” that “throws the whole of mankind back,” she also believed that it offered a profound opportunity to serve and sacrifice for war’s victims.
For Skobtsova, the sacrifice came in February 1943 when she, Father Dimitri, and her son Yura, a collaborator in their aid to the Jews, were arrested by the Gestapo. They were interrogated and tortured. Skobtsova was eventually sent to Ravensbrück and Dimitri and Yura to Buchenwald. All three of them perished in the camps, Skobtsova surviving until 31 March 1945. She was sent to the gas chamber just days before the camp was liberated. During her two years at Ravensbrück, she ministered to her fellow prisoners, and there is testimony that she died taking the place of another prisoner who had been “selected” for the gas chamber. If so, Skobtsova’s manner of dying, like her manner of living, exemplified her dedication to serving others.
9 March
Tom Fox