Back in 2023 I wrote a post about another post I wrote in 2015 on the topic of forgiveness. As a prime example, I referred to the case of a repentant former Nazi. (Let's be precise: the man had abandoned his dead-end path of his own volition and atoned for his past through public confession and self-condemnation. Such gestures are extremely rare in the judgemental, regardless of their imagined justification for their bigotry, but many in the Internet community chose instead to proceed as if he'd been caught out being an active Nazi by upright citizens who had brought his case to public scrutiny.)
In 2022, person or persons unknown outed my article as "hateful", or at least hate-adjacent, whereupon Google fenced it off from search engine indexing and slapped a locked gate on visitors already possessing the link, requiring a second Google sign-in to read it.
This is effectively a take-down, with the added benefit to the taker-down that the piece wasn't literally taken down, perhaps to puncture potential lawsuits.
The whole experience was Orwell-grade surrealism, but I have more important practice, so I posted my mystifiction over it and moved on.
And now it's happened again.
This situation too involves a Nazi reference, but this time the questionable motivation is Facebook's.
Now in the dock: last week's post, consisting of photographic testimony to Nazi vandalism and a call to arms (or at least a proper Zen hell-no) from Canadian literary lion Félix Leclerc.
Facebook's swift condemnation of my anti-Nazism began the instant I posted the link to its server. Within seconds I was informed that it contained offensive content and so had been removed.
This all happened so fast I suspected malfunction, and reposted.
And seconds later, got zapped again.
Given the speed of the response, it's likely that some artificial stupidity-powered hate detector simply saw the swastika and panicked. The boilerplate notice – identical both times – contained a link to something or someone higher up for reconsideration. I immediately complied, certain this possibly human judge would see without difficulty that:
1. The photo documents a criminal act and couldn't possibly be taken for glorification of Nazis or their ambitions, and:
2. The Leclerc quotation below it reflects both the author's and the poster's combative attitude toward totalitarianism and ideologised narcissism.
The next day I received a response, informing me in the same Hal-esque tones that my monkeyshines would remain barred from the service. It too offered further escalation, though frankly, given that my trust in humanity and its instances was exhausted decades ago, I'm just not that invested in it.
Speculation on the origin of such eerie hostility is pointless; the space in which these ghostly arbitrators spin being so far removed from objective reality as to render any attempt to fathom it a waste of time and effort more productively spent on the cushion.
So at the risk of further discipline, let me make my position on the Nazi issue crystal-clear to anyone who might have been disturbed by last week's meditation:
• Nazis are a thing again, and they can be neither ignored nor placated without sacrificing our integrity.
• The global Zen sangha is therefore called to confront them with greater honesty and courage than we did last time.
Because that brought irredeemable shame upon us.
(Photo of 1878 Japanese painting of Fudo Myō-ō, possibly by Kano, courtesy of the Library of Congress and Rawpixel.com.)
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Ernest Hemingway
(Photo of welded saw blades courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
I've been a huge Dickens fanboy since a Christmas in high school when I decided to read his most famous story. You know, from an actual book. The kind with no battery.
That was the initial infection. By the end of my undergraduate years I'd read every novel, travelogue, and short story Dickens ever wrote. Followed, in the throes of detox, by several biographies and critical essays, including Orwell's succinct and brilliant analysis of Dickens' place in British culture.
But since those student days I've wanted to write a sequel – more properly, a conclusion – to his most famous work. Because the man left A Christmas Carol unfinished.
In it, as you will recall, bitter old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts – or one ghost and three bodhisattvas – who convince him to lay off being a bitter old miser. (Note that in so doing, Dickens invents psychoanalysis fifty years before the fact. Further proof of his visionary genius.)
The story closes on that catharsis, as Scrooge becomes slightly foolish and a lot nicer to those in his circle, and, we're assured, faithfully keeps Christmas to the end of his days.
And there Charles Dickens abandons his greatest novel, leaving us with nothing more than this uplifting but ultimately anæmic introduction.
And they call Edwin Drood a tragedy!
Because what Dickens takes to his own grave is the story of how Scrooge's overdue rejection of the scarcity model went on to raise a swelling wave of economic and social development, the force of which was still carrying, not just Tim Cratchit, but indeed Tim's great-grandchildren, generations thence.
The belief that greed and stinginess are good business was coin of the realm in Dickens' day, as it remains in ours. But there's no evidence that this pat excuse for egotism is exact.
Fact is, having this reality abruptly kicked up his backside by his business partner and three unrelenting enforcers, my man Ben (who was, lest we forget, uncommon sharp) re-entered the world on the day after New Year's and started ploughing wealth into the neighbourhood: creating infrastructure, developing resources, improving standards, and generating something vastly more valuable than simple jobs: opportunity.
And that's not all. He also straight-up turned Queen's Evidence, plying his legendary flint and synoptic command of commercial law to defend the exploited from the predators he used to ride with. Soon those former homies just stood down when they learned Scrooge and Marley Ltd had the account; you don't win against those odds. Because S&M (you thought that name was a coincidence?) will bulldog you on every point until you never even recoup your losses, let alone profit.
And the ironic part is that Scrooge actually got richer for all of this. Probably a lot richer. Because a lot of competent people who'd only served to keep him in gruel prior to that haunted Christmas Eve were paying their rent and thinking bigger.
If the Ghosts of Christmas had thought it through, they would have added some economics to that field trip through his life. Asked him how his amiable and generous old employer Feziwig got so prosperous; shown him what a waste of earning potential were all those ruined present lives; and especially, how rich he totally wasn't by the hour of his death. Scrooge dies in the same crappy flat, surrounded by the same paltry rubbish. If he'd made more money, it hadn't accomplished anything. Not even for him.
In the end, it's just a total waste to have a guy like Scrooge simply stand down.
Because if it's true that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging, it is as well that in that moment you find yourself standing beside (or beneath) a pile of soil, holding a shovel.
My thoughts this holiday season; may they be worth the penny.
Wishing us every one the happiest of Yules, and a fruitful new year.
(1915 Arthur Rankham illustration of Jacob Marley auditing Scrooge ["Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"] courtesy of William Pearl and Wikimedia Commons.)
An old friend last week posted a link to The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture: How Not To Do Social Change, David Brook's timely and incisive denunciation of our current lynch-mob fad. (The link goes to the original NYT post, which may not be available to all. Sadly I was unable to find an unregulated source.)
In it, Brooks relates a recent NPR segment on two members of the punk scene who were tarred and feathered (virtually, so far), then shunned, utterly and irrevocably, by their erstwhile comrades.
The first target, best friend of one Emily, was accused of "sending […] an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph" to a woman Emily apparently didn't know. Emily instantly turned on him, intentionally busted up the man's circle of friends, and effectively destroyed his life. She's had no further contact with this professed "best friend" since.
And then Emily herself was called out, in her case as a one-time cyber bully, having among other things posted a piling-on emoji to an Internet thread mocking a classmate. More than ten years previous. When she was in high school.
She instantly came in for the Adulterer's Special in her own right and was shunned in turn, as deeply and implacably as her apparently irredeemable former friend, by the same crowd she too regarded and depended upon as family.
At this point some may repress a smirk, but it turns out putting folks' eyes out ain't all that tidy, droogies. Witness:
"[Emily's accuser said the act of denouncing her] gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. 'No, I don’t care,” he replied. […] I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don’t care if she’s dead, alive, whatever.'"
Let's be clear. In this man's view, death is a reasonable punishment for flippancy. I think the moral here is, vet your allies carefully.
In further justification of his aggression, this individual declares that he was physically and emotionally abused in the past. In response to which my Zen training has taught me to ask: "By her?"
I'll warrant the reply to that one is less erotic.
Although by Emily's figuring she made moral progress between her bitchy teenage years and conscientious adulthood, let's note that her actions at both ages were identical: flush a pariah and move in for the kill.
Perhaps most frightening of all, she even condones her own attackers' behaviour, accepting the Gandhic hotbox she helped build as a righteous reaction to her ostensibly inexpungeable crimes. In other words, it seems she has gained little insight from all of this. She's suffered, deeply and grievously, for nothing.
Which is my definition of hell.
As for her tormentor's delusions, let's crack those right now: victims of injustice are more responsible for their actions, not less. Far from green-lighting cruelty, survival obliges you to stand firmly and publicly against the megalomania and mindless brutality that brutalised you. Particularly when it metasticises into an untargetted orgy.
Some commenters to the article claimed that vigilantism is righteous because duly constituted authority has long ignored, condescended to, even criminalised the victims of social crimes. Basically, "bullies must be bullied because bullies won't bully the bullies who bully the bullies I bully."
Now there's a koan. But the Buddha already solved this one for us, 2500 years ago:
"Blood stains cannot be removed by more blood. Resentment cannot be removed by more resentment."
That there's a paucity of justice in this lazy world is woefully clear. That we can secure it by further injustice is the con of a grifter.
Due process and calm analysis – of everything, including intent and context – are the right and left hands of justice. And empathy is its brain. If after patient and thorough investigation a case turns up weak, the accused is usually innocent, at very least of the precise charge or degree. As unsatisfying as that is to those who burn for payback, there is no other route to a just society.
If justice is truly your goal, you have to get off the sofa and build a system that values and compels it. Which is exceedingly difficult to do. But anything less just triples the injustice.
Bottom line: the karmic benchmark here remains the same it's always been: "Am I different from my enemies? Do I eliminate suffering, or create it?"
It's a tough inquisition, and one I freely own I fail on a regular basis.
But it simply will not do to skip it.
(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
I was leafing through the Seattle Daily Times for 26 November 1963 when I happened upon a fascinating crumb of history.
Readers of a certain age will recognise this date as one of a particularly dark and troubling string: four days before, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a sniper, in the urban core of Dallas, as massive crowds looked on.
I was too little to remember, but the hushed recollections of elders would be a counterpoint of my youth. A pall settled on everything for weeks. Months.
Forever, to be honest.
But what intrigues me today, reading the press of the time, is how steadfastly the American people manned their stations. This was the height of the Cold War, when paranoia and drunken raving about alleged enemies were standard, even among the otherwise level-headed. And the assassin was one of the dozen-odd non-imaginary Marxists in the US: a fair-dinkum Communist Party member who'd once repudiated his country and applied for Soviet citizenship. What are the odds?
Yet even the Seattle Times – a firmly, sometimes cartoonishly, right-wing organ in those days – ran no fist-shaking diatribes, no calls to abandon civil rights or judicial sovereignty, no petitions to torture suspected terrorists, as too great a threat to entrust to America's ill-conceived, chuckleheaded law.
The contrast with today is jarring. But it gets even better.
Floating mid-page, among pieces on the subsequent sensational murder of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, and the presidential funeral the day after that, is the following headline:
Tacoma Ultra-Rightist Quits Post Over Kennedy Slaying
Say what?
Check it out, brothers and sisters:
TACOMA (AP) A Tacoma leader of an ultra-conservative organization resigned today because of President Kennedy's assassination. He said all extremists must share the blame.
J. (Bud) Nelson said he had written Frederick R. Kluge of Burley, head of the state organization:
"Though it was a left-wing Communist who wantonly assassinated our President... I feel that every radical, left and right, had his hand on the rifle butt and finger on that trigger.
"We are all guilty (morally) of fomenting hatreds of one sort or another, thus guilty of a common act of cruelty.
"Therefore I have no choice but to hereby tender my official resignation from the Washington Council, Citizen's Councils of America. And I pray to my God that he forgive me for harboring any prejudices that I might have harbored."
Nelson, who announced formation of the Tacoma chapter a few months ago, said that henceforth he would devote his energies to fighting "those who oppose our great American ideals of freedom for all – no matter the race, color or creed – and justice for all."
Jizo H. Bodhisattva!
For those too young to have to know, Citizen's Councils of America were the political wing of the Ku Klux Klan. Originally a loose affiliation of White Citizens Councils set up to orchestrate violence against black citizens and their white supporters in Southern states, by the late 50s they'd modified their name and struck out to organise bigots across the nation.
"Ultra-conservative" is a euphemism in this context; this-here is a sho' nuff Axis of Evil.
So Mr. Nelson hadn't just bumbled into this group; this guy had a major hate on, and had pulled others like him into what must have been one of the state's largest CCA chapters.
And yet he was a man of conscience. He had, somewhere inside, that inquisitor that demands an unblinking account of one's own responsibility for suffering. It's the genetic origin of decency, and under adequate pressure it asserted itself, trumping such powerful attachments as peer pressure and fear of admitting error.
This doesn't happen every day. In this case, it's almost miraculous.
I did my best to follow up on the story, but only succeeded in verifying the man's existence. He vanishes from the news thereafter, and apparently from politics as well. There are no further memberships, no board minutes, no letters to the editor, that the Internet recalls. If he later reverted to his rightwing predilections, or continued on the path of enlightenment, he did so privately, without attempting to enlist others.
But my God, what a moment. Few have the courage to examine themselves as he did, or to atone so publicly.
I could have known Bud Nelson; he lived twenty minutes from where I grew up. He's gone now, so I'll never get to ask him what that moment was like, or what it came to mean to him over the years.
But one way or the other, his story is yet more proof that it does happen. However rarely, some people undergo a crisis of conscience, and come out the other side redeemed.
It's not just me.
This week I'm seconding a motion by The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman to see Columbus Day repurposed as Bartolomé de las Casas Day. Las Casas, originally a conquistador, repented of his horrific sins, became a Dominican friar, and evangelised Mesoamerican First Nations during the period of contact. Unfortunately for Power, he turned out to be a Christian Claude Anshin Thomas, decrying the mind-numbing brutality and utter lack of respect for human life that characterised the European invasion of the Americas. Worse yet he documented them, first in Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (also available in English) and then the more comprehensive Historia de Las Indias.
In the sordid history of colonialism, Las Casas stands out as one of the few Christians who practiced what he preached. (Literally.) He's a favourite of mine because he experienced (and again, documented) personal spiritual growth over his lifetime; convictions he adopted early on – such as supporting the African slave trade by way of avoiding the enslavement of his own flock – he soundly and publicly rejected after further meditation. I've found that this capacity to delve and change, even if it means admitting transgression, is the highest morality, and those who practice it are the most trustworthy of people.
Rather than repeat Matthew's case here, I'll just link to his own excellent and highly readable proposition. As a history nerd I can tell you that his characterisations of Christopher Columbus, the other conquistadores, and the good friar himself are historically accurate, as is his description of how Columbus Day became a thing in the United States and many Latin American countries. (Thanksgiving immunised us against it in Canada; one of the things I give thanks for on this day.)
Therefore, in emulation of Seattle and Minneapolis (though I don't much care for "Indigenous Peoples Day"; Las Casas Day is short, inclusive, and to the point), I encourage all jurisdictions to convert this holiday into a tribute to the courage and conviction of a man who stood against the tide and practiced his true religion in the face of overwhelming opposition.
May we follow in his footsteps.
(Photo of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, by Felix Parra, courtesy of Alejandro Linares Garcia and the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.)
I'm not sure he'd appreciate the label, but Claude AnShin Thomas is the most prominent hermit of our generation. Though an ordained priest in Bernie Glassman's Zen Peacemaker lineage, his practice is in the tradition of Bashō. In his own words:
"I made the decision to take the vows of a mendicant monk primarily because I wanted to live more directly as the Buddha had. […] Also, in witnessing the evolution of Zen Buddhist orders in the United States, I wanted to evoke the more ancient traditions of those who embarked on this spiritual path and to live my commitment more visibly."
AnShin specialises in walking ango – long voyages on foot, without money, living off the Dharma and the compassion of others. He calls them peace pilgrimages, and to date he's walked from Auschwitz to Vietnam; across the US and Europe; in Latin America; and even the Middle East. He also leads street retreats, a unique Peacemaker practice wherein Zen students take the Buddha at his word and become Homeless Brothers in the urban core of a large city for a specified period of time.
Where, you wonder, does a guy get gravel like that? Well…
In At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, AnShin describes his military service in Vietnam, where he clocked 625 combat hours in US Army helicopters, many behind an M60 machine gun. By his own recollection, he was in combat virtually every day from September 1966 to November 1967. He was, in short, the classic "badass American fighting man" so beloved of Hollywood.
Except it wasn't as fun.
He came home, like all war veterans, to a society desperate never to hear about those not-fun parts, or to pay for the care he now required for life. The tale that ensues has been told a hundred times, and each time is the first.
Re-reading At Hell's Gate (one of my all-time favourite Zen books) I was struck again by the sense that the author would rather not be writing it at all. There's a reticence in AnShin's prose, a tone of compelled confession, that suggests modesty, circumspection, and discomfort with the writer's art, at which he clearly doesn't feel proficient. Which is exactly why he is. You're not reading a writer; you're reading a veteran, in much more than just the military sense.
Interspersed among terse, almost telegraphic accounts of his past is some of the best how-to on practical meditation I've found. His themes are universally relevant: depression and despair; atonement and redemption; suffering and transcendence. All from a guy who speaks with thunderous authority.
His eremitical bona fides are equally evident. He writes:
"Anyone can come with me on a pilgrimage. It's not necessary for a person to become a student of mine or to spend time with me to learn this practice. It is open."
In these angos – which he defines as "just walking" – he's revived a practice largely abandoned in the era of institutional Zen:
"There is no escape from the nature of your suffering in this practice. When you walk, you are constantly confronted with your self, your attachments, your resistance. You are confronted with what you cling to for the illusion of security."
Should anyone require more evidence of AnShin's hermitude, his Further Reading section includes Zen at War, The Cloud of Unknowing (a classic of Christian contemplation), and the Gnostic Gospels, though none of them are cited in the text.
My lone criticism of At Hell's Gate is its light treatment of those incredible pilgrimages. In fact, I wish AnShin would write a whole 'nother book just about them. I appreciate his desire to avoid the odour of self-glorification; first-person journalism is a hard beat for a non-narcissist. And as a mendicant, he likely doesn't have time or space to sit down and write. But it's badly needed. I hope AnShin's sangha convince him someday to transmit and preserve these vital experiences, for the benefit of future generations. After all, where would we be if Bashō had remained silent?
Nevertheless, the book we already have is all by itself a repository of rare and hard-earned wisdom, a chronicle of unusual violence and damage, leading to unusual insight. The man himself puts it best:
"Everyone has their Vietnam. Everyone has their war. May we embark together on a pilgrimage of ending these wars and truly live in peace."
If you're suffering – whether firearms were involved or just plain-old heartbreak – read this book.
Back in 2023 I wrote a post about another post I wrote in 2015 on the topic of forgiveness. As a prime example, I referred to the case of a repentant former Nazi. (Let's be precise: the man had abandoned his dead-end path of his own volition and atoned for his past through public confession and self-condemnation. Such gestures are extremely rare in the judgemental, regardless of their imagined justification for their bigotry, but many in the Internet community chose instead to proceed as if he'd been caught out being an active Nazi by upright citizens who had brought his case to public scrutiny.)
