the-last-testament-vol-1-22

Anand Nartan
Osho Times, Tokyo, Japan
Osho,
Buddha the Japanese seems quite conceivable, yet Zorba the Japanese quite inconceivable. Would you comment?
It is one of the most significant questions to ask. Buddha is not only conceivable in Japan, a Buddhist country; Buddha will be conceivable anywhere, even though the countries are not Buddhist. Perhaps Buddha is the only human being in the whole of history who is loved, respected by all, not only by Buddhists.
On the other hand, Zorba is inconceivable in every old culture, civilization, religion, because they have all condemned materialism and they have all raised spiritualism to its ultimate height. They have created a duality between matter and spirit, between the mundane and the sacred.
Zorba represents all that has been condemned for centuries upon centuries by all the religions. Buddha is certainly loved by Buddhists, but respected by non-Buddhists too. He represents something of the purity of the highest conceivable spirituality. That’s why I say the question is significant.
My whole effort is to bring Zorba and Buddha closer and closer – so close that both can exist in one human being without any contradiction, as complementaries, helping each other, not fighting with each other. Separately, both are missing much.
Buddha is absolutely bloodless, just a skeleton, because he has denied everything that life is. Life is love, life is laughter. Buddha has denied everything. He is just a skeleton. Zorba is full of life, love, laughter. Eat, drink and be merry is his whole religion. He does not know anything beyond eat, drink and be merry. He does not know… He has no question or curiosity about something that is higher – higher than the alcohol, higher than the woman or man, higher than this world, the visible world, the tangible world. Zorba has no quest; he is perfectly happy drinking, dancing, enjoying.
Buddha is missing the blood, the life, the love, the joy, the celebration. Buddha cannot dance. It will be simply inconceivable, Buddha dancing. Zorba cannot sit silently and meditate. That, too, is as inconceivable as Buddha dancing. Zorba is dancing, singing, drinking; he is making love to any woman who by chance meets him.
Zorba represents the materialist in its best form, Buddha represents the spiritualist in its best form. But you are both, spirit and body. Existence is both, matter and consciousness.
Therefore I say that spiritualists have been denying the very base of the temple. They accept the temple but they deny the foundation of the temple, and without the foundation no temple can stand. That’s why religions have failed.
Gautama the Buddha has failed – for the simple reason that he was trying to make a temple without any foundations going down into the earth. He was trying to grow roses, but he was not ready to accept the roots under the ground which live in darkness and, of course, are not as beautiful as the roses. But neither can the roses exist without the roots, nor can the roots afford to exist without the flowers. The roots without the flowers will be barren, and the flowers without the roots can only be of plastic.
So all the religions of the past have created a plastic humanity. Denying Zorba, they have denied all that is solid in you. And the materialists, communists, Marxists, and other brands of materialism – Epicurus in Greece, Charvaka in India – they are eating, drinking, womanizing, but at the very end they find nothing but frustration. Something is missing. They may have all the money, all the power, everything that a man can ask for, but still inside they are empty, hollow. They may be dancing, but their dance has nothing of divinity in it. Their dance is just an exercise of the body; there is no soul to it.
These are the two ways humanity has lived up to now – divided, split, schizophrenic. Both have to repress something. Buddha has to repress Zorba, Zorba has to repress Buddha. As far as I’m concerned, both are sick because both are half of one whole, which can be healthy only if both the parts meet and fill the gaps. Zorba can become the foundation, Buddha can become the temple.
I don’t see that there is any conflict between the rose and the roots. On the contrary, the roots are continuously sending food, water, nourishment, color, fragrance to the rose. The rose is on the receiving end. All that the rose gives to you comes from the roots. Cut the roots away and the rose dies, disappears. All fragrance, all life, all dance in the wind, the joy in the sun, simply wither away. Take the roses away and what meaning is left for the roots?
That’s why materialism is bound to come to a point where it feels meaningless, everything meaningless. It is the Zorba in the West which has come to its climax in the so-called philosophy of existentialism. Existentialism is the ultimate logical conclusion of Zorba. There is no meaning in life according to European existentialism. There is only anxiety, anguish, despair. Zorba had started with love, laughter, life, and it is strange that in the end the conclusion is that there is only one way to get rid of it all – this whole mess and madness – and that is suicide.
The whole of Western intelligence is in a great insane space, because they have accepted only the roots and now they are asking, “Where are the flowers?” They never allowed the flowers to grow. On the contrary, they went on cutting the branches, the leaves, the trunk of the tree, and now they are asking the roots, “What is the meaning of you? For what do you exist?”
And in the East, just the opposite has happened: only the spiritual is true and the material is illusory. All the spiritual masters in the East have been emphasizing only one thing, that the world in which you live is only a dream. It does not matter whether you are rich or poor – what does it matter if it is only a dream? Whether you are hungry, sick, old, healthy, it is only a dream. It is not the reality. The natural consequence was that in saving their spirit and their spirituality they have lost their roots. That’s why the East is poor. Gautam Buddha is responsible for it.
If you deny materialism, then how can science develop? If matter is illusory, then the whole of scientific endeavor is illusory – Hiroshima and Nagasaki have never happened, it was just the Japanese dreaming about it. If matter is illusory, then how can the atom be real, which is the constituent of matter? And if life is illusory, then why make so much fuss about life disappearing from the earth in a Third World War?
Because Gautam Buddha and people like him in other religions emphasized only the other world, this world was neglected, ignored. No science was developed – which could have been developed long before it started to develop in the West. The Western development of science is only of three hundred years; mathematics was discovered in India ten thousand years ago. But what happened? Guns and dynamite were discovered in China five thousand years ago, but then what went wrong? In three hundred years the West has developed nuclear weapons, and they have managed to reach the moon. What has the East been doing for ten thousand years?
You will be surprised to know that when Marco Polo came back from China, he brought many presents for the pope from the Chinese emperor. He was laughed at for everything that he brought – and he thought he was bringing something of immense value. For example, up to that time the West had no idea of printing machines, and he had brought printed books from China. The West had no idea of currency notes, but in China currency notes had been in use for three thousand years. What went wrong? People who invented mathematics, people who invented the printing press, people who invented guns and gunpowder…?
The whole responsibility goes to Gautam Buddha and his type of people. They emphasized that all this is illusory – don’t waste time. The small time that you have has not to be wasted in the desert of materialism. You should devote your whole life to the search for truth, for that which is far above what you see. Seek the invisible, the intangible. Seek the eternal, the immortal. Seek the immaterial.
Emphasis from people like Buddha who had charismatic personalities influenced the whole of civilization for centuries, and all progress stopped. India knew everything about mathematics, but could not produce an Albert Einstein. If things had moved rightly, India would have reached faraway stars by this time, not just the moon. The moon is very close. If Western science can reach the moon in three hundred years, India could have reached the farthest star in ten thousand years.
All the basic principles of mathematics were known but they were never applied. They remained theoretical, they remained undeveloped, because the genius of the country was attracted by Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Shankara, who were emphasizing that matter is illusory, that this life is just a dream, and the only use you can make of this life is to find that which remains forever. Naturally, the East has remained poor. Nobody else is responsible for it – it was bound to happen.
If I had been there at Buddha’s time, I would have predicted that what he was teaching would result in poverty, sickness and death to the same people who were influenced by him. And remember, when people are poor, hungry, dying, do you think they can meditate? With a hungry stomach, can you go on sitting silently and let the grass grow by itself? Basho’s stomach was full when he wrote those lines. He must have begged and eaten well. Then, sitting under a tree by the side of a pond, he could write beautiful poetry of tremendous significance.
We should not forget that Basho was not hungry. If he had been hungry, then there was no possibility of these beautiful lines coming out of him: “The ancient pond, the frog jumps in, the sound.” Or “the silence.” It is difficult to translate exactly the Japanese word, because Japanese has no alphabet. In India we have a word which is pronounced chapak – the sound of the frog. When a frog jumps into the pond, there is something like chapak.
But these beautiful statements are not out of a hungry stomach. The East went on becoming poorer and poorer, because without technology and science you cannot be rich. And if Ethiopia is dying today – almost one thousand people are dying per day, and in the last four years millions have died in Ethiopia – who is responsible for these people dying there? Why have they not been able to develop enough technology and science to create and produce wealth? Because wealth was condemned by their religious leaders. They listened to their religious leaders.
Wealth was condemned; children were declared to be gifts of God, so they went on producing only one thing – children. Now, no child brings with him a piece of land, seeds for the new crop, water to nourish the plants. God goes on sending children without any equipment to be here, and the religious leaders go on saying they are gifts of God – but they have proved to be the very curse against humanity.
The East was bound to remain poor because of Gautam Buddha. It was bound to remain unprogressive, backward, because of Gautam Buddha. And I love the man; you can understand my anguish that I have to say that Gautam Buddha is responsible for this whole misery. For twenty-five centuries, millions of people have suffered, have gone mad, have become perverted – and the man who is responsible for it, I love him.
I love Zorba too, but I know it is because of the materialists that we have suffered two world wars, and now the third is threatening to destroy the whole of humanity at any moment. Because of Zorbas, the West has remained superficial. Yes, its stomach is full – perhaps too full – but its being is empty. The house is really beautiful, a palace, but nobody lives there. It is empty. Yes, there are precious paintings on the walls and great sculptures in the garden; everything is immensely valuable, but nobody lives there. Nobody is there, because the materialist forgot completely to come back home. He went out and out and out, and went on searching farther and farther away from his home base. Now he has completely forgotten who he is, where he comes from. Now he is asking, “What is the meaning of my life? What I am searching for? Where am I going? What the hell am I doing here?” He is angry, angry at life itself.
In one of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov, there are three brothers. One brother is an atheist, one brother is a very pious, religious, innocent person, and the third brother simply does not care about either. The atheist says, “If I meet your God, Ivan…” – Ivan is the religious one – “if I meet that fellow anywhere, the first thing I am going to do is to return the ticket, and ask the gentleman, ‘Is it right to send me into the world without asking my permission? Who are you? What authority have you got to force me to live a life which is meaningless? And everything that is joyful, you and your representatives condemn it. You have done a great job of creation. You create us without asking us; that is the first crime you have committed. Then you give us instincts which we have not asked for, and send your prophets and messiahs who condemn those instincts saying that sex is sin, that attachment is sin, that possessions are sin. So what kind of game is going on? Are you some kind of sadist? Have you created us to suffer? Are you enjoying our suffering and misery?’”
That brother is speaking for the whole of the West. Everything is available, but what is the point? You will go on making love to this woman, to that man, but what is the point? After a few experiences you simply look silly. What are you doing? You may eat in this restaurant, in that restaurant – Japanese food, Chinese food, Italian spaghetti – but sooner or later you are bound to recognize what is going on. What is the point of it all? Why should I go on living tomorrow, because again tomorrow – spaghetti!
It is enough for any intelligent man – and the more intelligent a man is, the sooner he gets bored. Retarded people can go on living with a woman or with a man their whole life. But intelligent people, the greater their intelligence, the greater is their capacity to see that there are thousands of beautiful women – why remain with one? There are thousands of beautiful men, so why cling to one? There is no natural law that you have to remain clinging to one. Why create a bondage?
But even if a man goes on moving from one woman to another, soon he gets tired and finds out that he is in a vicious circle. Finally he finds, to his great surprise, that all women are exactly the same. What you call “making love” – whether you make love to Cleopatra or Mother Teresa, it is the same, the same stupid thing.
So the whole of the West has created the foundation of the temple, but a foundation is meaningless without a temple. They go on making foundations and then they are stuck. “What are we doing? For what are we making this foundation?” They don’t have any idea that a temple has to be created. They have denied that temple for centuries: there is no consciousness.
Karl Marx says that consciousness is only a by-product of matter. See the point: Shankara, Buddha and Mahavira say that matter is illusory, that consciousness is immortal reality. Charvaka, Epicurus and Karl Marx say just the opposite, that matter is the only reality and consciousness is only a by-product.
It is just like a clock on the wall that goes on ticking, giving you the time. If you bring an aboriginal into the room and show the clock moving, he will look all around and say, “Where is the spirit of the clock?” – because if it moves, there must be a mover hidden inside. But there is no mover; the movement is a by-product of a certain mechanism. You can take apart all the parts. Do you think the soul of the clock will go upwards to meet God? If it was a good clock, giving the right time all the time, it will go to God; if it was a bad clock, giving the wrong time all the time, it will go down into hell to suffer. But you know there is nobody who is going anywhere. You can put those parts together again, and the clock starts ticking. That ticking of the clock is just a by-product.
The West denied consciousness; the result is a tremendous feeling of despair. The East denied matter; the result is Ethiopia, India. Half a million people are going to die of poverty this year. Two million people will be barely able to survive. You cannot tell them that being barely able to survive will be life. And who knows about next year?
Right now, the world population is four billion. Every decade we are producing one billion people, so by the time this century ends we will be nearabout six billion people. Our resources are being exhausted. And this increase of population will be happening in the poor countries, not in the rich countries. The poor countries will become poorer, much poorer, and it will be impossible for the richer countries to give any help. And why should they give? The poor don’t give their meditation to the rich, they don’t give their experiences of ecstasy, blissfulness to the rich – why should the rich give the fruits of their technology to the poor? And they are going to be in difficulty themselves, because they are piling up nuclear weapons. This is where Zorba has brought them. Sooner or later, nuclear weapons are going to destroy the world. Yes, they will die with their stomachs full.
In fact, just in America half a million people suffer from obesity, fatness. They go on growing like monsters. They don’t have anything else to do except eat – eat more!
A small child, an American, was puzzled: why do the Ethiopians go on dying? He told his father that it seems so stupid that one thousand people are dying every day, starving. Why don’t they open their fridges? If there is nothing else available, they can eat cakes, biscuits.
Now, the American child cannot conceive of a home without a fridge. What a distance we have created amongst human beings! The Ethiopian has never seen a fridge and perhaps will never see one. There seems to be no way for Ethiopia to survive.
Zorba has brought half of the world to where they have everything. Only the man is missing, the spirit is missing – and with the spirit all meaning, all ecstasy, all joy, everything has gone down the drain. In the East they are poor, dying, sick, suffering in every possible way, and that is the consequence of what Buddha has been teaching these people.
I want East and West to disappear into each other. I want Zorba and Buddha to disappear into each other. Only then will we have a whole man – and the whole man is the need of the day.
It is because of this that I am going to be condemned from both sides. The religious people will condemn me as a materialist; and the materialists, the communists, are condemning me for diverting people’s minds toward meditation. That means the young generation is being diverted away from the revolution, that I am serving in some way the interests of capitalism.
I am the greatest danger to them, because I am attracting so many young people. If they had not come to me they would be communists. But now the situation has come to such a point that red no longer represents the communists, it represents me!
They are both angry: Zorba is angry, Buddha is angry. But I am not to be stopped by either. I am going to put both of them into a mixer and put the electricity on, so that when the juice comes out, you cannot find which is Buddha and which is Zorba! That is my sannyasin: one who will live with intensity and totality like Zorba. But that is not the end, that is only the beginning. He will go on searching, seeking for something higher to live, something better to live.
He will be in favor of science and technology. He will not deny this world; he will not call it a dream. It is true – as true as anything can be. Who can say roots are untrue? Just to prove that roses are true, have you to prove roots to be illusory? I don’t see the point. Roots are roots, and as roots they are real. Roses are roses, as roses they are real. The problem is that they are joined together and they depend on each other.
I have told you that juices are flowing continuously from the roots toward the flower. But it is not a one-way affair: the flower is taking the sun rays deep down to the roots. Because those roots are underground, they also need the life that sun rays give. Without those sun rays, those roots will die. The flower does not open for you to make a garland, it opens for the roots which are hidden. In fact it is an extension, a hand of the roots to catch hold of life and energy from the sun, the wind, the rain, and send it back to the roots which are hidden deep down. It is a two-way traffic.
And this is how it should be between Zorba and Buddha. If Buddha has eyes – and certainly he has eyes – but if he doesn’t have legs, what is he going to do with his eyes? The house is on fire: he can see it. He can see the way out, but he doesn’t have legs, he is crippled. And somebody is sitting by his side who is blind but has strong legs…
I am suggesting a simple thing: get introduced to each other! Tell each other what you have got and what you have not got. It is a simple thing to come to an understanding that the crippled man, who can see, sits on the shoulders of the strong man, who is blind but can walk. Now they are together, functioning as one unit. One sees and shows the way, and the other follows – that’s the only way to get out of the house which is on fire. And we are in a house which is on fire.
It is exactly the right moment for Zorba and Buddha to drop all their antagonism and become one. Yes, Zorba is blind, but he is a strong person. Buddha has eyes but he is fragile. He can sit under the bodhi tree, but if the jungle goes on fire, perhaps he will not be able to escape.
It had happened in Buddha’s life… I have been to that place near Bodhgaya, where Buddha became enlightened. There is a small river, Niranjana. Buddha was so weak because of fasting, meditating. He had devoted everything to meditation. He had forgotten his body, he had forgotten everything else. He went to take a bath in Niranjana. It is a small river – when I went there I could not believe it. Perhaps at that time it may have been a little bigger river – but the story is that he was so weak that the current of the river started carrying him away and he could not manage to stand against that small river’s current. He tried hard to somehow get out, and had to hang onto the root of a tree at the side of the river. He had to rest for some time to gather energy enough to get out of the river.
This situation, this story, is the story of the whole of the East. Yes, Buddha has got eyes. He can see as far as existence is – his vision is limitless. But he has done one wrong thing: he has gone against the body, against nature. His achievement is partial. And so is the achievement of Zorba partial.
Remember one thing: truth can only be whole. It is just like a circle. You cannot draw half a circle; that is not possible. Just the word circle means full circle. You cannot draw half a circle; that will be only an arc, not a circle. A circle has to be whole. And that’s the situation with truth: truth has to be whole. Half a truth is worse than a lie.
Buddha is half of the truth, and Zorba is half of the truth. It is going to be difficult to explain to Buddhists that I am making an effort to create a synthesis between Zorba and Buddha; they may feel offended. But that does not matter. Truth is on my side, and I am ready for an open discussion with both Buddha and Zorba. And my vision is clear that both are half and both have disturbed the whole of humanity.
Now it is time for Zorba the Buddha to appear. Perhaps I am the first Zorba the Buddha. I take the responsibility for bringing this new kind of animal into the world. My sannyasins have to be Zorba the Buddha. Nothing has to be sacrificed, and everything has to be experienced. From body to soul, from earth to sky, all is ours.
Osho,
The problems of South Africa are basically reflected in the government’s attitude toward the Japanese. We are acceptable in business, but culturally we are considered colored and have semi-human status. Is there any solution possible in South Africa?
South Africa is not a big problem. Like all problems, it is very simple – but the vested interests make everything complex. In South Africa only fifteen percent of the population is white, and that fifteen percent are invaders. Eighty-five percent of the people – the natives of the land – have been living in slavery for centuries. They are simply slaves, servants, working in the coal mines, gold mines, diamond mines. Those mines belong to them, but they get only a little bit of money to survive. And the fifteen percent, the white people, exploit their rich country, and have been doing so for three hundred years.
Now it has come to the point where something has to be done, but the problem is that these fifteen percent came three hundred years ago, and now they don’t have anywhere else to go. There are Dutch people, English people, Italians; there are others, but the majority is Dutch. Their own countries are not ready to accept them back, because no country wants its population to grow suddenly. Somehow, they are keeping things in balance. Neither do these people really want to go, because in their own countries they will be ordinary second-rate citizens – maybe clerks, waiters, porters – and in South Africa they are kings. All their investment is in South Africa. All the technology that they have brought, all the mechanization, is in the mines of South Africa, and they know how much more is still there to be exploited. They have only scratched the surface. So their greed, their fear of going back to their own countries where they will be almost foreigners.
They have started calling themselves Afrikaner, they don’t call themselves Dutch. No, they have become a new race, Afrikaner, and they call their language Afrikaans. They don’t want to leave. I can understand the human greed, and I can also understand their problem of who is going to accept them. Nobody is willing to accept them – but that does not mean they have to continue to exploit eighty-five percent of the people, their country, their land; nor that they have to go on being the ruling ones.
It is strange that in the twentieth century only this fifteen percent, the white people, have the voting right in South Africa. The majority of eighty-five percent has no voting right, so the question of their coming into power does not arise. They have nothing to do with power; they can’t even vote. It is inhuman.
I can see the difficulty of the white people; I can see the exploitation of the black people, but it cannot continue the way it has up to now. It has come to a point of explosion. Now there is emergency rule. The whole country is under military rule, and South Africa has one of the biggest armies in the world. No journalist is allowed in, so nobody knows how many people are being killed and burned every day.
My suggestion is simple: fifteen percent of the land should become a new country – Afrikaner. Fifteen percent of the wealth should go to the new country, Afrikaner; fifteen percent of the army should go to the new country, Afrikaner. Everything according to the percentage, with South Africa divided into two countries, Afrikaner and South Africa.
It is so simple, if people really want to solve the problem. The white people should remain there. They have been there for three hundred years, and their old countries are not going to accept them back. It is time enough. But they should get according to their percentage. If they don’t want to divide the country, then the eighty-five percent majority should be given the voting right. Naturally then the government will be of South Africans.
These are two clear alternatives. And I think the white people will prefer the first. They would have at least fifteen percent of the country – fifteen percent of its wealth, diamond mines, gold mines, and fifteen percent of the army – and they would be their own rulers. And eighty-five percent of the people would have eighty-five percent of the army, eighty-five percent of the wealth, eighty-five percent of the land, and would be their own kings. I don’t see a problem at all. They just have to sit with each other and find out the way to divide.
If they insist that they don’t want division, then they must give the eighty-five percent majority their voting rights. But then they will not have even the fifteen percent that was possible in the first place, because eighty-five percent of the people will throw them out of the government and then they will be at their service. They have served you for three hundred years – now you serve them. They have worked in your mines and died – now you work and die.
The whole world should insist that either of these two alternatives has to be accepted; otherwise the South African government will simply be rejected by all the governments of the world. They should be thrown out of the U.N.. They have no right to represent a country where eighty-five percent of the people are against them. They should not be given any support. All business from other countries should be completely stopped. The present government should be forced either to accept the first conclusion, or accept the second alternative.
And I think the first is perfectly beautiful. They don’t lose; they get as much as they deserve, fifteen percent. The South Africans don’t lose anything, they get as much as they deserve. One needs just the clarity to see. But this is the problem: even when things are very simple, millions of people have to die, innocent people have to suffer. The idiotic politicians and power-hungry people go on massacring poor innocent children, women, old people.
In South Africa now the army is given the power to shoot anybody they suspect. No inquiry is needed, no arrest warrant is needed, no court has to decide. The military itself has the power to shoot anybody, and suspicion is not something that you can later prove wrong or right. Whether it was wrong or right, it makes no difference – it was not a certainty, it was only a suspicion. So now they are killing anybody they want to kill. It is the responsibility of the whole world to reject South Africa as a member of civilized humanity, because what they are doing is barbarous.
But even countries like America that are supposed to be the most advanced, progressive, democratic countries do things which are inconceivable. In the Second World War, when Japanese armies attacked Pearl Harbor, one and a half million Japanese – who were living in America, who were American citizens, who had been living here for generations, and most of whom were born in America – were given fifteen days notice to sell their properties, land, everything, and move to a special place that the American government was providing for them. And the whole of America was kept in darkness. Even today that part is not mentioned in American history books about the Second World War.
In fact, all around the world, nobody knows what actually happened to those one and a half million Japanese-Americans. Fifteen days was such a short notice – how could you sell your businesses, your houses, your lands? And who is going to purchase? – because Americans knew that within fifteen days you will have to go, that the lands, the buildings, your car, your shop, your business, everything will be in their hands, free. Why purchase?
These one and a half million Japanese-Americans, who had earned all this with their own labor, with their own intelligence, were really rich people. The Japanese have the knack of becoming rich; they know how to create wealth. They had to leave, and they were not supposed to ask why or where they were going. Just one thing was told to them – that the government suspected that when America and Japan were at war, they might favor Japan. And in a democratic country, the government had not a single proof that a single Japanese in America supported Japan. Out of one and a half million people, they could not find a single proof that anyone was ready or willing to support Japan. They were ready to support and fight for America, because they considered America their country; but they were taken into isolation in the desert where they were told that they would be taken care of on a reservation, just like the Red Indians. But it was not a reservation. Now facts have become available: it was almost the same kind of concentration camp that Adolf Hitler had created in Germany for Jews.
After the Second World War, the people who had been running those concentration camps in Germany were punished. But America was not punished, and they had behaved in the same way with absolutely innocent Japanese who were not in favor of Japan. They were tortured, no medical facilities were given, their food was not up to standard, and they were crushed like sub-human beings.
When they were brought back after the war, their properties were not returned, and have not been returned even yet. And this is a democracy! During the whole period of wartime, America was not able to find any proof to support their actions. When they came back, their businesses were in American hands, their cars were in American hands, Americans had taken over everything without giving a single cent in compensation.
Now forty years have passed and they are still asking the American government, “Give us some compensation. It is your duty. You forced us, and we had not committed any crime, and you don’t have a single case against us.” And it is not a small thing – one and a half million people and their property – and the American government is silent.
That’s why I say that civilization has yet to come; it has not yet happened. There are only pretenders, hypocrites, but not truly democratic people anywhere. America is different from the Soviet Union only in hypocrisy. The Soviet Union is straightforward, a dictatorship. America is a dictatorship proclaiming itself as a democracy, and now we can say it from our own experience.
For four years we have been harassed by the American government – the state government, the federal government – without any legal reason on their part to support their acts against us. All their laws are in our favor and their constitution is in our favor, because from the very beginning I have made it clear to my people not to do anything knowingly or unknowingly against the American constitution: that it is the only constitution which at least accepts democracy, accepts freedom of speech, accepts respect for the individual – so don’t do anything.
We have not done anything against the constitution, but still we are being harassed in every possible way. They are taking advantage of all kinds of laws which have never been applied to anyone in the whole history of America. Suddenly those laws have become applicable to us – and those laws go against the American constitution. So now my new stand is that we will fight the American government in Oregon and, if needed, then the federal government – to save the American constitution. We are for the American constitution and its values and, even if we have to fight with the Americans themselves, we will fight to the very end. Because that constitution is the only hope for humanity someday to become democratic, someday to become really civilized and human.