Misinformation and "The Movement": Comparisons to Buddhism, Fascism and Worse.
03 November 2016 [link youtube]
If you're interested in seeing the article alluded to around the seven minute mark, it's titled, "The Opposite of Buddhism" (and it's written in very plain English, as it was presented to a Cambodian audience); the particular (salacious) material alluded to is (mostly) in ยง8:
https://medium.com/@eiselmazard/the-opposite-of-buddhism-1-a192b6880f30
vegan / vegans / veganism / ecology / animal rights / activism
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the kind of misinformation I see
spreading within veganism today sometimes under the head of drama under this new sport we've made out of slandering people the kind of disinformation I see scares me because I see people playing the game who have lost the ability to distinguish between truth and fiction and there are people who lie maliciously who know that they're telling lies but there are also people who are not really aware that they're lying they've lost track at the dotted line or they've forgotten who made up what or that's just a personality type they can't swim in a sea of misinformation and keep their heads above water now some of you may know I used to be a scholar of Buddhism a long time ago there was one other guy I guess I'm not gonna name him but I could there was a guy who became not just a scholar of Buddhism but a professor he got his PhD and he became a University of professor of Buddhism and he had to resign his job he had to quit his job as a professor destroyed his career because he became sympathetic to so called revisionist historians of world war two in the Holocaust to be blunt he briefly endorsed Holocaust denial ISM this is a sad and interesting story for the following reason like many people involved in Buddhism I think he was a bit of a mystic in his inclination he said of himself in an interview that since his childhood he loved the feeling of unraveling a mystery of perhaps engaging in conspiracy theory thinking and probably that's somewhat of things that drew him into research on but his philosophy the feeling that you know like unraveling a yarn figuring out a puzzle or a mystery something intriguing about what made Buddhist philosophy difficult to understand now other people also told me by the way that his scholarship was garbage and I saw some warning signs not to but hey let's be generous that's not the point of this video whether or not he was a good scholar of Buddhism is is another question and whether or not that's the skill set or attitude that you need to be a good scholar put us up is another question but the same spirit of inquiry through him sincerely into the company of people who were trading in lies and half-truths and misinformation and so-called revisionist history in Holocaust denial ISM etc and he couldn't keep his head above water and briefly for a short period of his life he became a believer in these lies about world war two with the Holocaust Judaism anti-semitism etc but pretty quickly he also figured it out he figured out like you know some of the claims are archaeological some that I actually have to do with digging up human remains you don't have to be a genius to work your way through that web of lies and verify some of those facts and realize how wrong these things are so he did but too late his career as a scholar of Buddhism was forever destroyed and his career as a professor was destroyed and he went on to make some really bizarre and eccentric websites that I don't know I don't know what else he was capable of but I guess he went on from one crazy conspiracy theory to the next what I see going on now and veganism you know you think you can't be disappointed because your expectations are so low but I am disappointed and I am worried and I'm worried for this same reason I see people who are swimming and they don't know what's true and what's false anymore and they don't know who's intentionally playing a game who's making up stories and who's being sincere and who is just crazy and I don't know did other political movements in the history of the world have to deal with this problem maybe maybe to some extent did they have to deal with it so rapidly did they have to deal with it at this speed at this intensity I don't even feel the need to defend myself I guess most of this stuff like what is it in human nature or in these people's character that makes it entertaining for them to say that I don't have a university diploma like why would that lie even be entertaining or interesting I do have a university diploma and it's not something I brag about it's just not a great accomplishment it's nothing um I don't know I might be more proud that I won a three-legged race or something it's just not a big deal to me lies from the most banal I mean some of them some of them are mean-spirited but some of them are just meaningless I'm worried I'm worried about where that's going a few days ago one of my fellow vegans said to me very sincerely that this was the worst community she'd ever been involved in she used the word community I I avoid that word because I don't think we are community is you know and I had to say back well for me it's not I've seen worse and I alluded to my experience with ecological politics the green party with the Canadian left-wing in general I do not identify as left-wing but I know a lot about the left-wing and talked about Buddhism how bad does it get within Buddhism really bad most of you don't know this I've written one article about it most you won't believe me when I say this but the origins of the Nazi ideology are actually linked to put a scholarship there's one guy called max Muller who gets blamed for it he's partly to blame but it's kind of just an accident of history that he's ended up being that the famous name that all the plane gets hung on but really the invention of several crucial elements of Nazi ideology is linked to Western english-language Buddhist scholarship so from the very start you could say that fascism within European Buddhism it's it predates the Nazi Party this is not the only ugly ideologically loaded element of what goes on in Buddhism to give another very interesting example there is also a link right at the root right at its basis between tera vaada Buddhism and Satanism by which I mean British Satanism so I'm not talking about ancient Israel talking about modern England and the reinvention of Satanism or first invention of Satanism Satanism as a new religious movement is very directly linked to tear about a buddhism in england so the guy known as Aleister Crowley his best friend became a terabyte of Buddhist monk and Crowley's philosophy is in very large part an adaptation of tera vaada Buddhist philosophy I know it may come as a surprise but it's true so there are a lot of these kind of weird things and that's even if you're a legitimate scholar who knows about the legitimate history textual philosophy etc those links are there how bad does it get there was one guy I could name him he still has a YouTube channel he's still active I'm gonna choose not to name him there was one guy who let's say 10 years ago was a major well-known lecturer in Buddhism in Canada unfortunately you can figure out who I'm talking about but please don't please don't goof less and let's say five years ago I noticed in one of his videos and I avoid him I didn't want to talk to him because there was some slightly insane stuff in his approach to Buddhism and I just didn't have any reason to wouldn't be rewarding for me but I remember I picked out a few things he said and I could tell implicitly that he was influenced by fascism by Nazi ideology within the Buddhist world and when I heard that I thought I wanted to talk to him because I was interested then research in this area I was interested in knowing was he himself aware of it or was he one of these people like I've been describing was he just swimming in this biased literature was he swimming in this junk scholarship was he in a situation where he didn't know the difference between good scholarship and bad scholarship between truth and lies between biased and unbiased sources on this kind of philosophy philosophy history language etc Center that was what I want to know so I got in touch them and I talked to him at that time there was nothing on his YouTube channel or nothing in his web presence that openly identified him as a fascist or a Nazi it was a right-wing or even and he formerly was married to a woman who was not white who was a non-white person I don't think they had kids but you know obviously that's the sort of thing where I don't think he'd be allowed to be a member of most you know most of those kinds of political groups but anyway and like many Buddhist he lived in Asia etc etc in the years that followed after my conversation with him his web presence gradually transformed and he became more and more openly you know the most ridiculous kind of Piper fascists you know you can meet Buddhists who misrepresent Buddhism as supporting communism as supporting Bolshevism revolution total equality and ended slavery upliftment of women uplifting the poor uplifting the workers and you can meet Buddhists who interpret Buddhism as justifying slavery and fascism and racism and the caste system but what I hated dealing with in Buddhism was that miasma of people who didn't know the difference and couldn't know the difference between truth and fiction it's dangerous and you can't even debate with it and there's no clear way forward it's just sad and it's scary and it's demoralizing to deal with and I don't want veganism to end up in that same state you know we don't have 2500 years of superstition we barely have 25 years of rational secular discourse here and yet look at what we're becoming look what we've become you know I've seen a mythology develop around me and change within a few months I've seen people seriously argue that I never lived in Laos that I never lived in Cambodia that that was a false story made up about me by the CIA a backstory I've seen people seriously claim that I'm being employed by the meat and dairy industry to destroy veganism from within I've seen one mythology after another I've seen the mythology that I'm a millionaire I've seen the mythology that I'm poor that I'm broke that I'm somehow stealing money because I'm so poor in a space of months did other political movements have to deal with this maybe did they have to deal with it so rapidly and did they deal with it you know in terms of anti-semitism still to this day you'll find Russians especially Russians who passionately argue that Lenin the dictator important figure in his time of the Lenin and Lenin was secretly Jewish and that the whole history of communism can be explained by this hidden fact but there has to be some verifiable source there has to be some referent there has to be some way for the [ __ ] to stop there has to be some point at which people sit down and say no Lenin was not Jewish and this anti-semitic approach to history doesn't explain anything doesn't solve anything and you know obviously when you get into something like Buddhism what are you get into something like communism when you get into the realm of faith you lose all those moorings pretty quick so that's all I can share with you in this video I'm worried and I'm not worried for myself Who I am what I care about my passion comes across in these videos clearly enough no matter how many lies people tell about me I have total confidence in myself and my message what I don't have confidence in is the future of veganism in the next thirty years these are the raw materials we have to work with I once said to vegan cheetahs audience when I was in his chat room and a live chat for better or for worse you people are the future of veganism for better or for worse we have to take that opportunity seriously and in some ways in terms of the nonsense going on right now we have to take that warning seriously I don't want to think about how much worse it's gonna get
spreading within veganism today sometimes under the head of drama under this new sport we've made out of slandering people the kind of disinformation I see scares me because I see people playing the game who have lost the ability to distinguish between truth and fiction and there are people who lie maliciously who know that they're telling lies but there are also people who are not really aware that they're lying they've lost track at the dotted line or they've forgotten who made up what or that's just a personality type they can't swim in a sea of misinformation and keep their heads above water now some of you may know I used to be a scholar of Buddhism a long time ago there was one other guy I guess I'm not gonna name him but I could there was a guy who became not just a scholar of Buddhism but a professor he got his PhD and he became a University of professor of Buddhism and he had to resign his job he had to quit his job as a professor destroyed his career because he became sympathetic to so called revisionist historians of world war two in the Holocaust to be blunt he briefly endorsed Holocaust denial ISM this is a sad and interesting story for the following reason like many people involved in Buddhism I think he was a bit of a mystic in his inclination he said of himself in an interview that since his childhood he loved the feeling of unraveling a mystery of perhaps engaging in conspiracy theory thinking and probably that's somewhat of things that drew him into research on but his philosophy the feeling that you know like unraveling a yarn figuring out a puzzle or a mystery something intriguing about what made Buddhist philosophy difficult to understand now other people also told me by the way that his scholarship was garbage and I saw some warning signs not to but hey let's be generous that's not the point of this video whether or not he was a good scholar of Buddhism is is another question and whether or not that's the skill set or attitude that you need to be a good scholar put us up is another question but the same spirit of inquiry through him sincerely into the company of people who were trading in lies and half-truths and misinformation and so-called revisionist history in Holocaust denial ISM etc and he couldn't keep his head above water and briefly for a short period of his life he became a believer in these lies about world war two with the Holocaust Judaism anti-semitism etc but pretty quickly he also figured it out he figured out like you know some of the claims are archaeological some that I actually have to do with digging up human remains you don't have to be a genius to work your way through that web of lies and verify some of those facts and realize how wrong these things are so he did but too late his career as a scholar of Buddhism was forever destroyed and his career as a professor was destroyed and he went on to make some really bizarre and eccentric websites that I don't know I don't know what else he was capable of but I guess he went on from one crazy conspiracy theory to the next what I see going on now and veganism you know you think you can't be disappointed because your expectations are so low but I am disappointed and I am worried and I'm worried for this same reason I see people who are swimming and they don't know what's true and what's false anymore and they don't know who's intentionally playing a game who's making up stories and who's being sincere and who is just crazy and I don't know did other political movements in the history of the world have to deal with this problem maybe maybe to some extent did they have to deal with it so rapidly did they have to deal with it at this speed at this intensity I don't even feel the need to defend myself I guess most of this stuff like what is it in human nature or in these people's character that makes it entertaining for them to say that I don't have a university diploma like why would that lie even be entertaining or interesting I do have a university diploma and it's not something I brag about it's just not a great accomplishment it's nothing um I don't know I might be more proud that I won a three-legged race or something it's just not a big deal to me lies from the most banal I mean some of them some of them are mean-spirited but some of them are just meaningless I'm worried I'm worried about where that's going a few days ago one of my fellow vegans said to me very sincerely that this was the worst community she'd ever been involved in she used the word community I I avoid that word because I don't think we are community is you know and I had to say back well for me it's not I've seen worse and I alluded to my experience with ecological politics the green party with the Canadian left-wing in general I do not identify as left-wing but I know a lot about the left-wing and talked about Buddhism how bad does it get within Buddhism really bad most of you don't know this I've written one article about it most you won't believe me when I say this but the origins of the Nazi ideology are actually linked to put a scholarship there's one guy called max Muller who gets blamed for it he's partly to blame but it's kind of just an accident of history that he's ended up being that the famous name that all the plane gets hung on but really the invention of several crucial elements of Nazi ideology is linked to Western english-language Buddhist scholarship so from the very start you could say that fascism within European Buddhism it's it predates the Nazi Party this is not the only ugly ideologically loaded element of what goes on in Buddhism to give another very interesting example there is also a link right at the root right at its basis between tera vaada Buddhism and Satanism by which I mean British Satanism so I'm not talking about ancient Israel talking about modern England and the reinvention of Satanism or first invention of Satanism Satanism as a new religious movement is very directly linked to tear about a buddhism in england so the guy known as Aleister Crowley his best friend became a terabyte of Buddhist monk and Crowley's philosophy is in very large part an adaptation of tera vaada Buddhist philosophy I know it may come as a surprise but it's true so there are a lot of these kind of weird things and that's even if you're a legitimate scholar who knows about the legitimate history textual philosophy etc those links are there how bad does it get there was one guy I could name him he still has a YouTube channel he's still active I'm gonna choose not to name him there was one guy who let's say 10 years ago was a major well-known lecturer in Buddhism in Canada unfortunately you can figure out who I'm talking about but please don't please don't goof less and let's say five years ago I noticed in one of his videos and I avoid him I didn't want to talk to him because there was some slightly insane stuff in his approach to Buddhism and I just didn't have any reason to wouldn't be rewarding for me but I remember I picked out a few things he said and I could tell implicitly that he was influenced by fascism by Nazi ideology within the Buddhist world and when I heard that I thought I wanted to talk to him because I was interested then research in this area I was interested in knowing was he himself aware of it or was he one of these people like I've been describing was he just swimming in this biased literature was he swimming in this junk scholarship was he in a situation where he didn't know the difference between good scholarship and bad scholarship between truth and lies between biased and unbiased sources on this kind of philosophy philosophy history language etc Center that was what I want to know so I got in touch them and I talked to him at that time there was nothing on his YouTube channel or nothing in his web presence that openly identified him as a fascist or a Nazi it was a right-wing or even and he formerly was married to a woman who was not white who was a non-white person I don't think they had kids but you know obviously that's the sort of thing where I don't think he'd be allowed to be a member of most you know most of those kinds of political groups but anyway and like many Buddhist he lived in Asia etc etc in the years that followed after my conversation with him his web presence gradually transformed and he became more and more openly you know the most ridiculous kind of Piper fascists you know you can meet Buddhists who misrepresent Buddhism as supporting communism as supporting Bolshevism revolution total equality and ended slavery upliftment of women uplifting the poor uplifting the workers and you can meet Buddhists who interpret Buddhism as justifying slavery and fascism and racism and the caste system but what I hated dealing with in Buddhism was that miasma of people who didn't know the difference and couldn't know the difference between truth and fiction it's dangerous and you can't even debate with it and there's no clear way forward it's just sad and it's scary and it's demoralizing to deal with and I don't want veganism to end up in that same state you know we don't have 2500 years of superstition we barely have 25 years of rational secular discourse here and yet look at what we're becoming look what we've become you know I've seen a mythology develop around me and change within a few months I've seen people seriously argue that I never lived in Laos that I never lived in Cambodia that that was a false story made up about me by the CIA a backstory I've seen people seriously claim that I'm being employed by the meat and dairy industry to destroy veganism from within I've seen one mythology after another I've seen the mythology that I'm a millionaire I've seen the mythology that I'm poor that I'm broke that I'm somehow stealing money because I'm so poor in a space of months did other political movements have to deal with this maybe did they have to deal with it so rapidly and did they deal with it you know in terms of anti-semitism still to this day you'll find Russians especially Russians who passionately argue that Lenin the dictator important figure in his time of the Lenin and Lenin was secretly Jewish and that the whole history of communism can be explained by this hidden fact but there has to be some verifiable source there has to be some referent there has to be some way for the [ __ ] to stop there has to be some point at which people sit down and say no Lenin was not Jewish and this anti-semitic approach to history doesn't explain anything doesn't solve anything and you know obviously when you get into something like Buddhism what are you get into something like communism when you get into the realm of faith you lose all those moorings pretty quick so that's all I can share with you in this video I'm worried and I'm not worried for myself Who I am what I care about my passion comes across in these videos clearly enough no matter how many lies people tell about me I have total confidence in myself and my message what I don't have confidence in is the future of veganism in the next thirty years these are the raw materials we have to work with I once said to vegan cheetahs audience when I was in his chat room and a live chat for better or for worse you people are the future of veganism for better or for worse we have to take that opportunity seriously and in some ways in terms of the nonsense going on right now we have to take that warning seriously I don't want to think about how much worse it's gonna get