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manur uvaca
alam vatsatirosena
tamo-dvarena papmana
yena punya-janan etan
avadhis tvam anagasah

"Lord Manu said: My dear son, please stop. It is not good to become unnecessarily angry-it is the path to hellish life. Now you are going beyond the limit by killing Yaksas who are actually not offenders."

nasmat-kulocitam tata
karmaitat sad-vigarhitam
vadho yad upadevanam
arabdhas te krtainasam

"My dear son, the killing of the sinless Yaksas which you have undertaken is not at all approved by authorities, and it does not befit our family, which is supposed to know the laws of religion and irreligion."
(Srimad Bhagavatam 4 Ch. 11 Text 7, 8)

Once again humanity is challenged by the anger, greed, pride and domination of a particular nation. Challenged with an army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the most sophisticated weapons of the iron age, they are preparing to attack a nation which has been hit by sufferings for a prolonged time already.

It is impossible for the laymen to know all the intricacies of politics. The media always give distorted information, so you never really know what is going on. Nevertheless, reading the instructions of Manu to his grandson Dhruva Maharaja, I think we can get a very clear guideline on what is the proper way of activity and what is inappropriate. To threaten and kill many innocent children, women and man is a very demoniac act which will lead you, and all those who are involved, to hellish conditions.

War is the most extreme situation of this painful material existence. There are reasons why a country, in order to defend their security and to stop injustice and irreligion, may give orders to fight and kill certain persons. That is approved in the Manu samhita. But it is never approved to torture innocent people. That is not only against the intuition we can feel in our heart, it is also totally disapproved by the religious scriptures in the world. If such undertakings are promoted, you can clearly understand that it must come from the influence of the demoniac people, who have no information of spiritual wisdom and who do not understand that every action will bring about an opposite reaction for all the guilty parties. For this reason Manu stopped his own grandson from the great mistake of killing the Yakshas.

Prejudice and generalization are not acceptable in the court of truth. They are simply symptoms of anger which leads a person to blindness. So if we use this anger against others, it simply means that we are in the mode of darkness. Political and economical decisions to chastise the innocent, to torture and kill people who are totally unrelated to a specific conflict, is simply dirty business.

Srila Prabhupada gives us the reason how it is possible that such things do go on. Since there is such an incredible amount of systematic violence against defenceless animals, and so many other violent crimes committed against unborn babies and other weak sectors of society who cannot defend themselves against the might of unjust rulers, we can understand that in many places of the world, if not to say all the places of the world, people are loading heaps of accumulated negative karmas upon themselves. And everybody who participates in this animal slaughter, even if by eating the flesh of those animals, invites disaster upon his own head and family. A saying goes that Gods mills grinds slowly but surely, so the karma does not always come immediately. Sometimes there is delay for many, many years before one has to pay the bill for all the crimes one has committed. So in this way sometimes wars are the instruments to deliver such sinful reactions. Leo Tolstoy wrote that as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will also be battlefields.

For a compassioned Vaishnava it is unbearable to see how such a wholesale slaughter is being planned in front of the entire world view, and therefore we beg that these observations, based on the enlightening instruction of the Srimad Bhagavatam, may be taken into careful consideration of all the parties involved. Whether the action of the false ego could be convinced to take another turn, and to avoid the war with Iraq, or any other war, is quite questionable. People with big false ego generally have a very reduced listening capacity, and only when they see everything broken to pieces they start questioning themselves if they maybe shouldn´t have done this. But then it is too late. Many people around the world raised their voice against the announced war against the nation of Iraq, even though I guess the majority of the world, including the majority of the muslim world, would like to see a political system in Iraq which gives more freedom to the people.

It is quite common in this world that criminals and abusers try to invoke religious sentiments in others in order to hide their own faults. It is quite easy to convince a group of people of a hostile attitude of those who follow a different religious system, or simply live in a way quite different than you. Any true believer of God knows that kindness and compassion are amongst the first considerations of developing a higher spiritual awareness. No religion subscribes to torturing innocent people. Therefore, those who utilize any type of religious sentiment in this connection are simply abusive.

As we know the media is very powerful. The propaganda minister of the fascistic regime of Hitler once said: a lie one thousand times repeated becomes a truth. This principle is being followed by all the big liars in the world. Therefore many times people simply don´t know anymore what is the truth. And sometimes people even think that religions and relgious people utilize violence and injustice to simply serve their selfish purposes. But nothing could be further from the truth. Even those who are atheists, or those who claim to be atheists, feel an intense need for rules and regulations. And those rules end up to be quite similar to the rules taught by religions traditions. Those who deny the need of rules altogether, subscribe to an animal anarchy which tells us that anything any person would like to do does not matter. It does not matter how many people will be tortured and killed to achieve the goal.

So really this subject here is not this religion or that religion or no religion. The subject here is the killing of the innocent. Animals in the slaughterhouses are innocent, and they suffer pain as much as a human when any limb is thorn from its body. All of us who want to avoid this war in Iraq or any other war should immediately start active and dynamic propaganda by words and actions against the killing of innocent animals and human beings. We are all brothers and sisters in this wolrd. We are all visiting the planet earth for a very short time. We all have a certain amount of pains and pleasures to experience in this short visit. And the human being specially will accumulate either positive or negative reactions for everything they will do in this lifetime. And after they leave this body, very soon we will get the just compensation for what have been our deeds in this lifetime. So it is in all of our interests that we do not commit any injustice to anyone and instead of creating hellish conditions in our greed to gain more power and money.

We should remember that in our next lifetime we will be subjected to the same injustices we are creating for others today. Let us all start to stop unnecessary violence wherever we can. And there is only one way to pressure those who are in the mode of anger and passion and that is called economic boycott, or not buying items produced by people with such mentality. But as you can see in the case of Saddam Husein, such measures may not become effective. And of course overall we can only pray that the global spiritual consciousness maybe risen by the increased chanting of the holy names of God in all traditions and that we may pray to the infinite that we all maybe forgiven for the sins we have committed in our past so that reactions for our sins do not have to come towards us anymore. And that mentality would bring about a change in the circumstances in the world without a doubt.

dambho darpo 'bhimanas ca
krodhah parusyam eva ca
ajnanam cabhijatasya
partha sampadam asurim

"Pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness and ignorance-these qualities belong to those of demoniac nature, O son of Prtha."
(Bhagavad Gita 16.4)

So please watch out all of you there who do so much nonsense with the idea of wanting to become more happy or wanting to bring more fortune to your own people because you have chosen the wrong way to accomplish this. Instead why don´t you try to show the virtues of your faith and the accomplishment of your character by increasing the positive relationships and maybe even the forgiving mentality in yourself. All glories to Svayambuva Manu and Srila Prabhupada, who were true messengers of truth, law, love and justice.