Myanmar's war on the Rohingya | Hacker News Reader

Myanmar's war on the Rohingya

nytimes.com

33 pointsramgorur14 comments

This quote got me:

> U Aung Win, the chairman of a Rakhine State investigation into the Oct. 9 attack, said soldiers would not rape Rohingya women because they “are very dirty.”

We need to be paying more attention to what's happening in Myanmar/Burma. The atrocities committed by the Burmese government are simply despicable. This is what I show people who claim that Buddhism is never violent. The fact of the matter is that as long as we are humans, we will always be violent. Religion has little to do with it.

Mods: could you please edit the capitalization in the title?

Yea, the Burmese govt has pushed crack & other drugs in their community to the point that change is given in clean syringes at shops. A few years back in Seattle I met a few of the youngsters that had been sent to the US to get educated and bring tech and skills back to the community, they were looking to build a meshnet to connect and empower the community to unite, sadly at the time hardware would have been a few tens of grand, which they were not having luck getting grants for.

I think it is quite sad that people are departing from the Buddha's words, especially in a country in which what is generally believed by Buddhists to be the Buddha's words is part of their Buddhist canon (the Pali texts).

If there are people who are interested what the Buddha and the texts have to say about violence or even killing (no killing of sentient beings is a specific precept undertaken by all lay Buddhists in the Theravada tradition), I would highly recommend this compilation and commentary:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/harris/wheel392.h...

I'm quite sad as well. I'm sure that the teachings of Buddha don't even come close to what is happening in Burma. All I want is for people to apply the same thinking to other religions as well, including Islam.

Unfortunately we have infinite capacity for rationalization of horrible deeds. The core teachings of my spiritual path condemn killing? Well, yes, in principle, but just look at how special my situation is. It certainly wasn't meant to be applied literally and in every possible circumstance...

Seems like the problem with Buddhism isn't with Buddha but with what people use his Buddhism for. It's no coincidence that western adoptees i.e. sometimes scale their disconnectedness not only towards "noise" but also towards any doubt about how their behavior is perceived by others. Don't even get me started on many nazi's keenness towards Buddhism.

> Mods: could you please edit the capitalization in the title?

Yes, and the punctuation as well. But this isn't an on-topic story for HN.

Interesting. May I ask why?

From the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

This is a sad old phenomenon, not an interesting new one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I see, thanks for clarifying.

> We need to be paying more attention to what's happening in Myanmar/Burma

Some people are and have been for a while now. Diversify your news sources to include Aljazeera for example. They cover these sort of events very well.

On a related note, I find it very sad that Suu Kyi has failed to condemn the repression of the Rohingya. Makes you wonder what quality of leader she really is.

> On a related note, I find it very sad that Suu Kyi has failed to condemn the repression of the Rohingya. Makes you wonder what quality of leader she really is.

It's because she is complicit in what the government is doing. What a waste of a Nobel Prize. Of course, nobody knew what would happen to Burma post-democracy.

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