March 22, 2013
Alex Caring-Lobel
Tricycle
Just hours ago, Burmese President Thein Sein declared a state of
emergency in central Burma due to killing, destruction of property, and
general rioting in the streets of the town of Meikhtila. Violence
erupted following a dispute between a Muslim gold shop owner and Buddhist customers.
After four nearby gold shops were burnt to the ground, a 1,000-strong
mob of Buddhists ran riot through the Muslim neighborhood. The death
toll is currently being reported at at least 20, but this number will
likely rise. TIME reports:
Journalists attempting to report in the area have been threatened. A
photographer for the Associated Press reportedly had a foot-long dagger
placed against his neck by a monk who had his face covered. The
confrontation was defused when the photographer handed over his camera’s
memory card. Late on Friday, the Burmese government said that nine
reporters trapped amid the unrest had been rescued by local police and
evacuated from the area.
On social media, residents reported seeing bodies scattered by the side
of the road and women and children lying helpless, their homes
destroyed. U Aung, a Muslim lawyer living in Meikhtila, told TIME that
the violence was already spreading to nearby townships. “They are
burning mosques and houses and stealing Muslim property,” said
Aung.Tricycle readers will be familiar with the Buddhist-led violence
against the Rohingya Muslim minority in western Burma from the article "Buddhist Nationalism in Burma"
in the current issue. In the article, Burmese dissident and democracy
activist Maung Zarni makes a convincing argument for the
characterization of recent anti-Rohingya violence as genocide. Zarni
highlights the harnessing of the same sangha-led forces that occasioned
the "Saffron Revolution" (2007) to accomplish these ends.
Recent unrest in Meikhtila suggests two important things. First,
anti-Muslim violence and rioting has spread beyond the western Burmese
Rakhine state and into the heart of Burma. Second, since the violence
appears to be directed at Muslims of Indian origin—not Rohingya
Muslims—this would seem to corroborate Zarni's assertion of the
anti-Muslim, religious sentiment of these riots, repeatedly dismissed as
"sectarian violence" by many mainstream media outlets at the time of
the outbreak of violence last year. (TIME quotes Chris Lew, founder of
The Arakan Project: "the perception of last year's unrest as sectarian
rather than religious was inaccurate.") Zarni makes this contention in
his article for Tricycle and reiterated the point when I interviewed him
over Skype from Indonesia the day before the last. We also spoke about
his objection to the term "communal violence," which TIME has used in
the article quoted above, and the reasons why the conflict hasn't been
called a genocide. The anti-Muslim racism we're currently witnessing can
be tracked back to Burma's colonial past, which Zarni adumbrates in the
article and further elaborates in our interview. Zarni's article for
Tricycle can be found here and our interview will run on the Tricycle blog on Wednesday.
In other news, Ariana Huffington, chair, president, and editor-in-chief
of the Huffington Post, has authored an article on corporate mindfulness
on her site. Titled "Mindfulness, Meditation, Wellness and Their Connection to Corporate America's Bottom Line,"
the article peddles the benefits of corporate values and its platitudes
regarding "performance and productivity": "I do want to talk about
maximizing profits and beating expectations—by emphasizing the notion
that what's good for us as individuals is also good for corporate
America's bottom line." Most of the piece focuses on cutting healthcare
costs to corporations by promoting mindfulness meditation.
Ironically, the research touted here was conducted through a partnership
between healthcare behemoth Aetna and Duke University, in which yoga
and other mind-body therapies were made available to all Aetna employees
nationwide. Apparently, Aetna is not only too cheap to pay their
patrons' medical costs, they're also too cheap to pay those of their own
employees.
The one company that Ariana Huffington reports "gets it," is Google,
whose in-house mindfulness consultant Chade-Meng Tan ensures the
happiness of its employees through the stresses and invasiveness of
80-hour workweeks. In such a context, mindfulness reveals itself as the
most recent incarnation of industrial psychology, a field of knowledge
that has proven effective in pacifying workers and improving their
"performance and productivity," regardless of any inhumane workplace
conditions and expectations, or the deleterious effects of their work on
the world-at-large (such mindfulness practice has most famously been
taught to Monsanto workers).
Huffington ends the article, out of the blue, by quoting Institute for
Mindful Leadership founder Janice Marturano: "We have one life. What's
most important is that you be awake for it." More honest and in keeping
with the rest of the article might be, "We have one life. What's most
important is the bottom line."
Images:
Ariana Huffington
Source:Here
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