Genocidal Buddhists?: An Interview with Burmese Dissident Maung Zarni

 Tricycle

Alex Caring-Lobel

In 2007, inspiring images of Burmese Buddhist monks leading their compatriots in demonstrations of civil resistance flooded the Western media. Just five years after the series of protests curiously referred to as the “Saffron Revolution” (Burmese monks wear maroon robes, not saffron-colored ones), Buddhist-led violence erupted in the western Rakhine state. Following a monk-led campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority of Burma, recognized by the UN as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, reports of rioting, killing, and the blocking of humanitarian aid to the Rohingya surfaced here and there in the media, devoid of the enthusiasm that the Burmese monks attracted back in 2007. 

Last Wednesday evening, over a Skype call to Indonesia, I spoke with Maung Zarni, a Burmese democracy activist, research fellow at the London School of Economics, and author of “Buddhist Nationalism in Burma” in the current issue of Tricycle, to try and make sense of last year’s anti-Rohingya violence and its historical roots. At the time, news was just reaching him of the spread of anti-Muslim violence to central Burma, which was to be featured by the most prominent Western media outlets by Friday. While Burmese state media reports the “official” death toll for the riots at 32, the number cannot be corroborated by outside reporters, who had to be rescued by Burmese police. (One AP photographer was reportedly held at knifepoint by a monk after snapping several images of the violence.) Following the riots, every witness that the New Statesman interviewed said that the police stood by and did nothing to stop the violence—accounts redolent of Human Rights Watch’s accusations of military complicity in last year’s massacres in western Burma. “Many here believe that this was pre-planned and that the official story, that it began with a dispute in a gold shop, is just a cover for violence against Muslims,” journalist Assed Baig reported on the recent riots. The violence in central Burma, perpetrated by a different Buddhist group (“Burmese Buddhists” rather than Rakhine Buddhists) who targeted Muslims of Indian origin, not Rohingyas, demonstrates a pattern of violence that does not bode well for Burma’s Muslims. 

Burmese native Maung Zarni has lent his voice to the Rohingya and other minorities in the predominantly Buddhist nation, advocating for their human rights and distinguishing himself by examining the social and historical causes of the current conflict. 

In the current issue of Tricycle you make the case for characterizing the current conflict between the Buddhist and Rohingya peoples in Burma as genocide. But such a conflict has a precedent in 1942, when there were a series of massacres of Rohingya Muslims at the hands of Rakhine Buddhists. How is this particular case different?

In a rather bad way, the current Rohingya genocide in Burma is a case in which different forces in society and politics have converged to create, basically, a living hell for this particular group. These forces include historically grounded Burmese anti-Indian racism that isn’t just directed against Muslims, but rather against the people of the Indian subcontinent. That racism arose out of the context of British colonial rule of Burma, which created a racially and ethnically divided economy—a colonial political economy—where the British occupied the top echelon of administrative positions and economic control. For some time beginning in the 19th century, British Burma and British India shared a border of over 1,000 kilometers long. Burma was actually annexed by the British Empire as a province of India. The British subsidized the migration of Indian skilled laborers as well as unskilled migratory labor for the new cash economy that they were building in Burma—oil, rice, industrial farming, and other sectors. Those from the then British India occupied the middle layer—the technical and commercial positions in that economy. In that ethnically stratified colonial economy, the Burmese citizens found themselves, for the most part, at the bottom. That triggered a very strong strain of popular Burmese racism toward the Indians. Of course, the Burmese also reacted strongly against the white man that ruled them, that dominated them and controlled them, and thereby achieved independence. 

Then, as you mentioned, in 1942, there were clashes between Rakhine Buddhists, who worked with the Japanese during WWII against the British and the allies, whereas the Muslims, Hindus, and others in western Burma worked with the British. So there is a colonial background to this narrative, to this conflict and the racism behind it. 

What’s the perceived threat of the Rohingya? One prevalent fear has to do with Islamic marriage customs. In Islam, or at least its popular practice in Burma, a Muslim person cannot marry a non-Islamic spouse, who would have to convert. Until she converts to Islam, she will be barred from wifehood. And if she’s not considered a wife, she will not be entitled to property, inheritance, and control of the children. I think that that has been one of the major points of contention between Buddhist society and Islamic minorities in Burma, where Buddhists understand this as a structurally imposed conversion of Buddhist women to the Islamic faith. 

The overall perceived threat, however, is that the Rohingya are agents of Islamicization. If you look at the formerly Malay or Indonesian Buddhist world, they used to be Buddhist, Hindu countries, but they were completely Islamicized by Muslim traders and others. The logic here is to preempt the growth of the Islamic population so that Burma won’t be susceptible to a similar type of Islamicization. 

What’s the role of the Burmese state and military in the current conflict? This is the most important element. After the military proxy party lost by a landslide in the most recent elections, they decided that the time was right to drive out the Rohingya in order to both curry Buddhist majority favor and demonstrate their relevance in reformed Burma. But you know, it's not possible for any state in this day and age to destroy an entire population of 800,000 to one million. Not after Nazi Germany. Instead, the military has created a situation where there would be communal riots. In doing so, the military state has attempted to do what amounts to outsourcing genocide. 

Here, I think genocide needs to be understood not simply as an act of overt violence against a population. If you look at the policies toward the Rohingya by the Burmese state over the past 40 plus years, it involves attempts to control their birthrate. If you attempt to control a people through population policies or restricting their movement—in short, creating living conditions so unbearable that the population would rather flee, risking their lives at sea or crossing a border—that is genocide. It is not just about how many people were killed. Of course that’s included, but it's the intent, the intent of the policy. Also, the use of the term “communal violence” between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Muslim Rohingya in the media is completely misleading. Of course there is a communal branch to this violence, but that’s only a small part of the story. The larger part of the story is the centrality of the Burmese military and the generals who have attempted to eliminate this population through different strategies. 

Why hasn’t any organization called this conflict genocide? No government, no international body, with the exception of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), is prepared to use the word genocide. Because if you do, it automatically triggers a sequence of policy action that would require the UN to intervene. But the West is no longer interested in punishing or isolating the Burmese generals. It has a different agenda, where human rights are being placed on the back burner in favor of economic reforms, the commercialization of Burma, and the opening up of the country as a new market—a frontier market. This has to do with the rebalancing of Western, especially American, power in Asia—as Obama put it, the Asian “pivot.” 

When commercial priorities assume center stage, the structural violation of the human rights of the Rohingya becomes less important. That's why I call this “the genocide that cannot be called genocide for political reasons.” Not because it doesn't qualify as genocide, but because the West has no political will to see through the actions that using the word genocide would warrant. 

How do the religions of the Rakhine and Rohingya come into play? I think to say that the intent to kill and expel the Rohingya has no religious undertone would be to greatly underestimate the anti-Islamic popular racism of Burmese society. This is not simply about the Burmese military state; this involves the society at large. And of course, the Islamic world is going to react strongly against the killing and destruction of a particular Islamic community. So there is a very strong religious element here. 

Just yesterday there was the looting, destruction, ransacking of Muslim businesses and Muslim homes in the dry zone in central Burma, in a town called Meikhtila. They were looting and destroying in broad daylight, under the nose of the police and military authority. This has nothing to do with the Rohingyas or the alleged illegal migration; it has everything to do with the fact that these businesses belonged to Muslim merchants and businesspeople. The public itself is involved in attacking anything that has Muslim signs. The irony here is that the Muslims do not control the Burmese economy. If any one ethnic group controls the Burmese economy, it is the Chinese. 

The Saffron Revolution of 2007 was touted as a new paradigm for what’s called engaged Buddhism—Buddhism involved with politics, human rights, and social issues. Now, with these same monks taking to the streets and terrorizing a religious and ethnic minority, are we getting a wakeup call? It seems that Buddhists, or “engaged” Buddhists for that matter, don’t hold any kind of privileged position of righteousness—that they’re just as corruptible as anyone else. The key is not to romanticize Buddhism at the level of popular practice. If you look at some of the worst genocidal conflicts in recent history—in Sri Lanka, for example, a very deeply Buddhist society—you see how Buddhist leaders and communities behave. There was the mass killing of the non-Buddhists Tamils in Sri Lanka after their surrender. And look at what’s going on now in the Islamic south of Thailand by the Thai Buddhist society and military. Why is the West holding onto this romanticized, fetishized image of Buddhist societies as peaceful, “mindful” societies when some of the most violent societies in the world are Buddhist? 

In terms of engaged Buddhism, well, I think the term is a misnomer, because Buddhism is about engagement with reality, and that involves poverty, that involves violence, and that involves our own individual greed. There is a disconnect between what Buddhists say they are and what they really are. What they really are, what we Buddhists really are, is as imperfect, as flawed, as greedy, as jealous, as violent as anyone else.

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Buddhist Nationalism in Burma

Institutionalized racism against the Rohingya Muslims led Burma to genocide By Maung Zarni 

For those outside Burma, the broadcast images of the Theravada monks of the “Saffron Revolution” of 2007 are still fresh. Backed by the devout Buddhist population, these monks were seen chanting metta and the Lovingkindness Sutta on the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay, and Pakhoke-ku, calling for an improvement in public well-being in the face of the growing economic hardships afflicting Burma’s Buddhists. The barefooted monks’ brave protests against the rule of the country’s junta represented a fine example of engaged Buddhism, a version of Buddhist activism that resonates with the age-old Orientalist, decontextualized view of what Buddhists are like: lovable, smiley, hospitable people who lead their lives mindfully and have much to offer the non-Buddhist world in the ways of fostering peace. 

But in the past year, the world has been confronted with images of the same robed monks publicly demonstrating against Islamic nations’ distribution of aid to starving Muslim Rohingya, displaced into refugee camps in their own country following Rakhine Buddhist attacks. The rise of genocidal Buddhist racism against the Rohingya, a minority community of nearly one million people in the western Burmese province of Rakhine (also known as Arakan), is an international humanitarian crisis. The military-ruled state has been relentless in its attempts to erase Rohingya ethnic identity, which was officially recognized as a distinct ethnic group in 1954 by the democratic government of Prime Minister U Nu. Indeed, in the past months of violent conflict, beginning in June 2012, the Rohingya have suffered over 90 percent of the total death toll and property destruction, including the devastation of entire villages and city neighborhoods. Following the initial eruption of violence in western Burma, several waves of killing, arson, and rampage have been directed at the Rohingya, backed by Burma’s security forces. 

Over the course of the past few years an extremely potent and dangerous strain of racism has emerged among Burma’s Theravada Buddhists, who have participated in the destruction and expulsion of the entire population of Rohingya Muslims. The atrocities occurring in the name of Buddhist nationalism in Burma are impossible to reconcile with the ideal of metta. Buddhist Rakhine throw young Rohingya children into the flames of their own homes before the eyes of family members. On June 3, 10 out-of-province Muslim pilgrims were pulled off a bus in the Rakhine town of Taunggoke, about 200 miles west of the former capital, Rangoon, and beaten to death by a mob of more than 100 Buddhist men. The crime occurred in broad daylight and in full view of both the public and local law enforcement officials. 

One of the most shocking aspects of anti-Rohingya racism is that the overwhelming majority of Burmese, especially in the heartland of upper Burma, have never met a single Rohingya in person, as most Rohingya live in the Rakhine State of western Burma adjacent to Bangladesh. 

Physical appearance—aside from language, religion, culture, and class—is an integral marker in a community of nationalists. The importance of complexion is often overlooked when examining racism across Asia. Rohingya are categorically darker-skinned people—sometimes called by the slur “Bengali kalar.” Indeed, the lighter-skinned Buddhists of Burma are not alone in their fear of dark-skinned people and belief that the paler the skin, the more desirable, respectable, and protected one is. 

The virulent hatred and oppression directed at Muslims extends to any Buddhists who are considered to have helped them. In October 2012, local Rakhine Buddhist men were named, degraded, punished, and paraded around public places wearing handwritten signs that said, “I am a traitor.” Their crimes? Selling groceries to a Rohingya. 

The rose-tinted Orientalist take on Buddhism is so hegemonic that Westerners are often shocked when they hear of the atrocities carried out by militarized Buddhist masses and the political states that have adopted or manipulated Buddhism as part of the state ideological apparatus. Buddhism’s popular image as a peaceful, humanistic religious doctrine immune to dogma contradicts a long history of violent Buddhist empires—from Emperor Ashoka’s on the old Indian subcontinent to the Buddhist monarchies of precolonial Sri Lanka and Siam, and the Khmer and Burmese kingdoms—some of whom sanctioned war with recourse to the dharma. The oppression carried out under Burmese President Thein Sein and his Sri Lankan counterpart, President Rajapaksa, is just the latest from a long line of violent Buddhist regimes. 

Prejudice arises wherever communities of different faiths, classes, and ethnicities coexist and interact. But genocide is not an inevitable outcome of group prejudice; there have to be institutional mechanisms and an organized harnessing of forces, generally enacted by the state. Burma’s lay public and political society, while supposedly informed by the worldwide ideals of human rights and democracy that spread across formerly closed leftist polities, have evidently failed to undergo what Aung San Suu Kyi famously called “the revolution of the spirit.” Instead, they have chosen to pursue a destructive nationalism that is rooted in the fear of losing property, land, and racial and religious purity. 

The Burmese state has mobilized its society’s Islamaphobia through various institutional mechanisms, including the state media outlets and social media sites, the presidential office’s Facebook page among them. Burmese-language social media sites, which thrive out of the purview of international media watchdogs, are littered with hate speech. Postings of graphic images of Muslim victims, including Rohingyas, on Facebook—easily the most popular social media website in the newly opened Burma—have been greeted with approving responses from the country’s Buddhist netizens, both within the country and throughout the diaspora. The few Burmese and foreign human rights activists and journalists who dare to speak out against this rising tide of racist, fascist tendencies in Buddhist society have been increasingly subjected to slander, cyber-threats, and hate speech. Journalists have repeatedly expressed dismay over the volume of angry hate email they receive from Burmese citizens whenever stories are published condemning the recent violence. 

In a documentary first aired by Al Jazeera on December 9, 2012, Professor William Schabas, one of the world’s foremost experts on genocide and until recently the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, characterized the sectarian violence against the Rohingya as genocide. “We’re moving into a zone where the word can be used,” Schabas said “When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that. . . they no longer exist, denying their history, denying the legitimacy of the right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean that it’s not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide.”

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which entered into force on January 12, 1951, states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 

( a ) Killing members of the group; 

( b ) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 

( c ) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 

( d ) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 

( e ) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 

The ruling Burmese, both the Buddhist society and the Buddhist state, have committed the first four of these acts, though the state denies wrongdoing by their security forces during the nearly six months of violence in 2012 that left 167 Rohingya Muslims dead and 110,000 refugees. 

As for paragraph (e), malnourished, poorly educated Rohingya children have not been “forcibly transferred” to another group, but there have been instances of Rohingya children being brutally murdered—stabbed, drowned, burned alive—by the Buddhist Rakhine. 

During a public lecture in Brunei, Southeast Asia, on December 2, 2012, Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was asked by a student what the OIC—with its 57 member states representing, in theory, at least 1.5 billion Muslims—was doing to address the persecution of Muslim minorities around the world. In his response, Ihsanoglu described the Burmese democracy icon and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi as a human rights activist for Burma’s Buddhists. Suu Kyi, he said, is “only interested in the human rights of the Buddhists because they are human beings and the Muslims are not.” While the emotion behind the statement is understandable, there is a political calculus at play. Aung San Suu Kyi has little to gain from speaking out against the treatment of the Rohingya Muslims. She is no longer a political dissident, she’s a politician, and her eyes are fixed on a prize: winning the 2015 election with a majority Buddhist vote. 

Prior to his lecture in Brunei, Professor Ihsanoglu sent a letter to Suu Kyi on behalf of the OIC in which he pressed the National League for Democracy (NLD) leader to use her enormous awza, or earned societal influence, to help stem the tide of Buddhist racism against the Rohingya and the Muslim population at large. The letter was met with silence. In failing to decry the human rights abuses against the Rohingya, Burma’s iconic leader—who is seen in some Burmese Buddhist circles as bhodhi saddhava (“would-be Buddha”)—has failed to walk the walk of Buddhist humanism. 

On January 4, 2013, the 65th anniversary of Burma’s independence from British rule, Suu Kyi said in a speech at the NLD headquarters that Burma’s people need to rely on themselves if they want to realize their dream of a free and prosperous nation. “Don’t expect anyone to be your savior,” she warned. But as the Burmese magazine The Irrawaddy pointed out in a recent editorial, “Suu Kyi is right that Burma doesn’t need a savior; but it does need a leader.”

The current leaders of Burma’s 25-year-old human rights movement now speak the language of national security, absolutist sovereignty, and conditional human rights, echoing the language and sentiment of their former captors, the ruling military. The NLD and the democracy opposition have failed to see their own personal and ideological contradictions. Their embrace of conditional human rights and their absolutist reading of sovereignty indicates that they have talked the talk of Buddhism, with its ideal of universal lovingkindness, but have failed to walk the walk. Many student leaders and human rights activists of the 1988 uprisings who spent half their lives behind bars in the notorious military-run Insein Prison as “prisoners of conscience” are unprepared to extend such human rights ideals to the Rohingya Muslims, a population that the United Nations identifies as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. 

Buddhism, as a religious and philosophical system, has absolutely nothing to say about the political, economic, and cultural organizations that we call nation states. Buddhism is not about people imagining a national community predicated upon adversarial relations but rather about using one’s own intellectual faculties to see through the nonexistent core-essence of self. Yet in Burma, this humanistic philosophy has proven itself indisposed to guard against overarching societal prejudices and their ultranationalist proponents, those Burmese who vociferously profess their adherence to Buddhist faith, practice religious rituals and patronize Buddhist institutions, and then proceed to commit unspeakable atrocities against anyone they imagine to be an enemy of Buddhism, the Buddhist state, Buddhist wealth, Buddhist women, and Buddhist land. Instead of propagating the guiding societal principles of religious tolerance, nondiscrimination, and social inclusion among lay devotees, the influential Buddhist clergy themselves have, in their outspoken criticism and picketing against the Royingya, become an entire people’s most dangerous threat. 

Throughout the alien British rule from 1824 to 1948, the Buddhism of colonial Burma contributed to the formation of a common national identity, providing a basis for concerted anti-imperialist efforts among disparate social classes and ethnolinguistically diverse Buddhist communities with conflicting political interests. The current resurgence of racism is a direct result of a half century of despotic military rule. The careful construction of an iron cage—a monolithic constellation of values, an ad hoc ethos—locks in and naturalizes a singular view of what constitutes Burma’s national culture. The dominant population remains potently ethnonationalist, essentializing Buddhism as the core of an authentic Burmese national identity. 

For a minority of Burmese Buddhists, the combination of Buddhist nationalism and strong racial distinctions that served as an ideological springboard and a rallying cry against the British Raj is now scorned as a thing of the past. But for many Burmese Buddhists, the same ethnoreligious nationalism that once served the Burmese independence movement has provided an environment in which their racism can flourish. 

Buddhist-inspired social forces have proven to be a double-edged sword over the years. In the newly independent post–WWII Burma of the late 1940s, Marxist-inspired revolutionary nationalists led by the martyred Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi’s father) set out to forge a new multiculturalist, secular, and civic nationalism. In 1948, after Aung San was assassinated by a rival Burmese politician (and less than 90 days after the country’s newly acquired independence), Burma plunged into a long series of armed revolts against the central state. Aung San’s successors gradually abandoned any attempts to secularize Burmese nationalism along the lines of civic nationalism, which would have moved the Burmese away from the premodern provincialist blood- and faith-based view of national identity. 

Against this backdrop, the popular racism of the Buddhist majority presents itself as a potent social force that can be appropriated by Burma’s national security state to unify and rally anti-Muslim Burmese citizens. Burma’s state authorities, consisting predominantly of generals and ex-generals, are also generous patrons of Buddhist institutional activities such as dana and pagoda and temple building. These military leaders will continue to feed the masses their opiate—the pretension of Buddhism, with its effect of normalizing human suffering—to the masses, as long as the Buddhists believe that their faith, and not their political economy, promises better rebirth. As one regime official told me, “The bottom line is, we don’t want any more ‘Mus’ in our country, but we can’t possibly kill them all.” As a solution, the reformist state leadership has outsourced the job of cleansing its Golden Land to the Rakhine Buddhists. 

Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist and scholar. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and the founder of the Free Burma Coalition. 

Image 1: Jonathan Saruk/Getty images. Thousands of unregistered Rohingya Muslim refugees from Burma live next to the registered refugee camp at Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. 

Image 2: Thet Htoo/Zuma Press/Newscom. Rakhine men and a Buddhist monk hold handmade spears and watch as a fire burns in Sittwe, capital city of Rakhine State. Two weeks of clashes between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists left an official death toll at 50, with 58 injured and more than 2,500 houses burned down. 

Image 3: Soe Than Win/AFP/Getty/Newscom. Rakhine Buddhist monks pray in Langon, Burma, in June 2012. Several thousand monks took to the streets of Mandalay to protest against a world Islamic body’s efforts to help Muslim Rohingya in strife-hit Rakhine State. 

Image 4: Jonathan Saruk/Getty images. An unregistered Rohingya child draws on the wall of a classroom provided by the charity Islamic Relief at Leda Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. 

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Buddha Buzz: Dagger-Wielding Monks and Mindfulness in Service of the Bottom Line

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: 

Meikhtila, Burma, March 21, 2013 - Soe Zeya Tun / REUTERS

Meikhtila, Burma, March 21, 2013 - AP

Ariana Huffington

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