Saffron Curtain: How
Buddhism Was Weaponized During the Cold War
AMAR DIWAKAR March 23, 2018
New Republic
The U.S. tried to foment an
anti-communist Buddhist bloc in Southeast Asia—with deadly
consequences for the region’s politics today.
Of the world’s major
faiths, Buddhism is often characterized as being a religion of
peace, tolerance, and compassion. The Western encounter with
Buddhism has largely been distilled through yoga, the beatniks,
Hollywood, and Dalai Lama quotes shared on Facebook. But even a
cursory glance at the news that emanates from the Buddhist world
reveals a more sanguinary state of affairs.
In Myanmar,
ultra-nationalist monks have fueled a genocidal crusade against the
country’s Rohingya Muslim population. In Thailand, the government
has responded to a long-running Malay Muslim insurgency in its
southern provinces by fostering a Buddhist militarism, encouraging
monks in local temples to ally with the armed forces. And in Sri
Lanka, the Buddhist-majority Sinhalese were engaged in a bitter
civil war against the Hindu-minority Tamils for decades. More
recently, Buddhist nationalists there have stoked anti-Muslim
riots.
Still, Buddhism continues
to have an alien aura, as if it were an “entirely otherworldly
religion with a gnostic distaste for the worldly order,” as the
scholar Ian Harris has written. There is a tendency to frame the
rise of Buddhist nationalism as an anomalous phenomenon. In fact,
as the historian Eugene Ford shows in his book Cold War Monks:
Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia, the
Buddhist world was a laboratory of competing visions and ideologies
in the Cold War—an experiment that helped politicize Buddhism into
the often violent, reactionary force we see in Southeast Asia
today.
Buddhism and statecraft
have long been joined at the hip. The religion supplied the symbols
of kingship in courts, capitals, and urban centers from Burma (now
Myanmar) to Siam (Thailand) to Laos, as monastic orders and ruling
elites forged intimate ties. Following the seventeenth century,
European imperialism disrupted the symbiosis of religion and state
in places where colonial regimes were installed. By the early half
of the twentieth century, anti-colonial movements saw monks
participate in dissent, laying the foundations for the clergy to
enter secular affairs.
The exception was Thailand,
the only country in the region to avoid formal colonization. It was
a distinction that shaped its nationalist narrative, which
glorified the monarchy while sheltering its monks from the activism
of their counterparts in neighboring countries. However, during
World War II, imperial Japan’s occupation of Bangkok offered a
harbinger of the outside pressures that would be released upon
Buddhism in the postwar era. Tsusho Byoto, an obscure Japanese
scholar-monk, advocated a militarized conception of Zen in an
attempt to recruit the guarded Thai monastic order to the fascist
cause. While he ultimately failed, Byoto’s “vision of an
internationalized Thai monkhood would in many ways prove
prophetic,” Ford writes.
The
immediate postwar aftermath saw revolutionary
nationalist
movements proliferate from Indonesia to Vietnam, guided by an
anti-colonial ethos informed by Marxism. Colonial powers waged
costly and ultimately doomed counterrevolutionary wars to
reestablish control, which then dovetailed with the U.S.’s
anti-communist efforts as Europe withdrew from the
scene.
A military-strategic
alliance with the U.S. became the central pillar of Thailand’s
foreign relations after 1947, drawing the rest of Southeast Asia
into a turbulent geopolitical orbit. The partnership early on faced
two challenges: Thailand had to keep up the appearance that the
conservative monkhood was segregated from the political realm,
while adherence to the First Amendment prevented any direct U.S.
involvement in Thailand’s religious affairs. All this did was
compel Washington to operate clandestinely, as it began to shape a
pliable Buddhist bloc that would act as its proxy.
The gravitational forces of
the Cold War would cause the Buddhist clergy to become more
politicized and more internationalized than ever before. In 1953,
during the Eisenhower administration, Vice President Richard Nixon
undertook a formative trip across Asia. In Vietnam, Nixon visited
the front lines of the Indochina Wars to witness a French offensive
against Viet Minh insurgents. He was frustrated by France’s
patronizing attitude toward its Vietnamese allies, and disturbed by
a failure to establish a legitimate cause to counter the stirring
appeal of their anti-colonial adversaries.
The defeat of the French at
Dien Bien Phu in 1954 then made it clear that military action
itself was insufficient to combat communism in the region. Hearts
and minds—or, pagodas and temples—were going to be just as
essential. Religion, Ford says, “was a lever the United States
could use to wield influence of a nonmilitary or psychological
nature, not least by emphasizing to local populations the supposed
communist threat to their religious institutions.”
Coinciding with
Washington’s strategy at the time was the emergence of a
pan-Buddhist consciousness. Advancements in communication and
transportation had accelerated religious and cultural exchange and
deepened interconnectivity within the milieu of Theravada Buddhism,
the predominant strain of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. The 2,500th
anniversary of the Buddha’s death inspired the launch of the first
international Buddhist organization in 1950: the World Fellowship
of Buddhists. Coupled with the 1954 staging of the Great Buddhist
Synod in Burma, there were signs that the consolidation of a
Buddhist bloc was ripe for engagement.
The earliest of U.S.
efforts began in Burma between 1951 and 1952. Burma’s Prime
Minister U Nu had been battling a domestic communist insurgency
since 1948 and looked to incorporate “Burmese Buddhism” into an
anti-communist program. This was well received by Washington, as
conveyed by a 1951 State Department memo to its embassy in Rangoon.
The memo highlighted the rules of engagement as it applied to U.S.
funding of religious activities, which had to be undertaken through
private channels to obscure any official links.
The CIA deepened such
activity across the region. As early as 1948, it harvested
intelligence on Bangkok’s Vietnamese monasteries to monitor for
potential communist links. At the invitation of the U Nu
government, the Committee for a Free Asia—which was renamed the
Asia Foundation in 1954—became active in Burma in 1952, bankrolled
by the CIA through the National Committee for a Free Europe. (Much
of Ford’s archival sources come from the Asia Foundation.) The Asia
Foundation had extensive behind-the-scenes involvement in the Great
Buddhist Synod. By 1962, Ford notes, it had contributed over
$300,000 in the form of original printing equipment and technical
advice to make “Burma’s Buddha Sasana Press the world’s largest and
best equipped Buddhist publishing house.”
The Asia Foundation would
then expand its operations into neighboring Thailand, Cambodia, and
Laos. Harnessing the foundation’s platform and networks in the
region, Washington provided grants to Buddhist educational and
civic groups, and distributed anti-communist propaganda. It also
made sure to send (unofficial) delegations to Buddhist conferences
while sponsoring trips for senior members of the Buddhist community
to the U.S.
By 1957, White House
policy-makers had produced a general policy framework geared
towards the manipulation of Buddhist institutions and monks. The
draft was circulated within U.S. embassies across Southeast Asia,
and even a special “Buddhist Committee” was formed in the State
Department to assist its implementation. By emphasizing community
activism, Ford writes that the Asia Foundation’s “aim had been to
preserve the monkhood’s traditional abstention from politics by
providing alternative forms of civic engagement.” Much like Byoto,
the Asia Foundation resembled a foreign agent determined on
restructuring Thailand’s cloistered Buddhist
institutions.
As turmoil
enveloped Southeast Asia, however, the strategy
began to
unravel, as forces that were activated failed to align as
intended.
A coup d’état deposed
Burma’s U Nu in 1962, and the military junta engaged in a
protracted campaign against a local communist insurgency. The
repression of Buddhists under the U.S.-supported Catholic leader
Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam during the “Buddhist Crisis,” and the
self-immolation of the monk Quang Duc in 1963, hastened a political
crisis that culminated in a military coup, Diem’s assassination,
and the further spiraling of South Vietnam into chaos. In 1967, the
Asia Foundation’s CIA patronage was exposed in the antiwar journal
Ramparts. Eventually, despite U.S. military aid and religious
sponsorship, communists took power in Laos and Cambodia in 1975.
That same year, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong.
With the specter of
communism at its doorstep, the Thai conservative establishment
curbed the postwar experiment of civilian democratic rule in its
quest for stability. It achieved this by soliciting the services of
a notorious right-wing monk named Kittivudho, who to Ford
represented “both the activation and the internationalization of
Thai Buddhist conservatism.” By incentivizing the assassination of
leftists with accumulation of religious merit, Kittivudho fused
Buddhist doctrine with a virulent anti-communism. He lent
institutional support to right-wing paramilitary organizations and
vigilante groups, as the Thai government (with implicit support
from Washington) carried out a brutal crackdown on students, labor
activists, and farmers.
Cold War Monks
alerts readers
to the ways in which the volatile currents of the Cold War swept up
Southeast Asian Buddhism. What was an ultimately unsuccessful
effort to draw the monkhood out of its political quietism swiftly
mutated into an anti-progressive force, and continued to endure as
a dark cloud over the region’s politics in subsequent
decades.
This bloody legacy echoes
in the present. It can be detected in the violent response of Thai
monks to the Malay Muslim insurgency in the south, a campaign that
has many similarities with Myanmar’s clerical-led anti-Muslim 969
movement. Under the pressures exerted by globalization, Buddhism
continues to provide a source of legitimacy for nation-states
across the region. Its followers are susceptible to battle cries to
preserve the faith under the banner of a muscular Buddhist
nationalism.
The termination of the Cold
War did not erase the imprint of a more bellicose Buddhism. Only
instead of a godless communism, now it is a transnational militant
Islam that is envisioned as a threat to Buddhist identity and
tradition. This ideological shift just so happens to coincide with
the U.S.’s “war on terror,” which has been operationalized to
justify the bloody reprisals in Thailand and the pogroms in
Myanmar. And the monks are front and center of it all.