May 18th, 2008
Natural disasters and man-made disasters
For anyone who’s not aware, Bahá’ís in Iran have been suffering a great deal of persecution from the government, simply for being Bahá’ís. Most recently we recieved the news that:
“Six Bahá’í leaders in Iran were arrested and taken to the notorious Evin prison yesterday in a sweep that is ominously similar to episodes in the 1980s when scores of Iranian Bahá’í leaders were summarily rounded up and killed.” - Bahá’í World News Service
My friend Rory has been gathering together a number of articles on the issue here and here, and pointed me in the direction of As if Natural Disasters were not Enough!, which mirrors just what I’ve been thinking these last few days. For the last few months I’ve been fairly out of touch with world news, but after the earthquake, I checked BBC News and was glad I hadn’t done it more often. It’s so depressing to see so many people inflicting pointless suffering on other human beings. It really hit home, seeing a story at the top of the Scottish news page that day about a murder in Orkney, where I come from (though reassuring that murders are so rare there that one that happened in 1994 is still news.) Natural disasters like the typhoon in Burma and the earthquake in China really put it in perspective. There are so many natural causes of death and suffering that we have little to no control over, why do we add more? Our petty causes of war and dissention shrink into obscurity in the face of massive natural disasters. Who cares if our skin colours, beliefs, customs are different? Earthquakes and typhoons don’t. They transcend national borders. It doesn’t matter what you look like, where you come from, how much money you make, if you’re in their path, you’re all in the same boat. I’d really like to see something positive come out of these horrific events, namely that more people will realise that we’re all the same. All human. And that our man-made divisions are actually non-existant.
A week ago, I was going to write about how some people here in China have reacted to the attack on the Olympic Torch in France, and other events (there have been protests here in Kunming against French supermarket Carrefour), but I just couldn’t get my head round the extent to which logic went out the window in the face of national pride, in some cases. A lot of people fail to see that the views or actions of a few individuals do not reflect the views of all those in the same non-existant category, eg. Not all French people hold the same opinions about China, and not all Chinese people hold the same opinions about France. I saw one reply to a blog post urging the boycott of Europe, listing, amongst other human-rights offences, the Holocaust. Do I even need to point out that the victims were also European? Apparently I do. But the fact that all those involved were European is insignificant. These categories don’t mean a thing. That’s a clear example that all Eurpeans don’t hold the same views, just because they’re European. I’m certain that not all Nazis or Jews hold the same opinions on everything. It’s like an international game of generalisation pingpong, but there can be no winners.
“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Anger breeds anger, and bitterness will destroy my family if I’m not careful - and I won’t allow that to happen.” - Margaret Mizen, mother of a 16-year old boy murdered in London earlier this month.
“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.” - ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
I’d strongly recommend reading ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Paris Talk, “The Pitiful Causes of War, and the Duty of Everyone to Strive for Peace”, which can be found online here. It’s amazing.
