It Looks Like Japan Lied Its Way Into the Olympics

[Update, November 24, 2014:  Despite dire predictions, TEPCO has successfully removed 1331 spent fuel rods from the cooling pond at Number 4 reactor.  Removal of the 204 fresh fuel rods is underway.  On the other hand, Mainichi reports that the "freeze play" plan to freeze contaminated water to keep it from draining into a trench has failed.  Instead, TEPCO has received permission to place concrete in the bottom of the trench and hopes that will stop the flow.  Per the Guardian, TEPCO is still pursuing plans for a 1.5 kilometer ice wall to keep groundwater from entering the reactor building and becoming contaminated.  Fukushima generates 400 tons of contaminated groundwater per day, and 500,000 tons is now stored on site.  Total cleanup & compensation estimate now about US$85 billion.  CH 11/24/14]

[Correction: in the final round Tokyo was competing against Istanbul and Madrid, not Rio.  Heckuva choice for the IOC this time.]

In order to secure the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for Tokyo, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assured the IOC that the Fukushima situation was “under control”, per AFP:

"Let me assure you the situation is under control," [Abe] said.

"It has never done or will do any damage to Tokyo."

Abe replied decisively when pressed by veteran Norwegian IOC member Gerhard Heiberg over Fukushima.

"You should read past the headlines and look at the facts," he said.

"The contaminated water has been contained in an area of the harbour only 0.3 square kilometres big.

"There have been no health problems and nor will there be. I will be taking responsibility for all the programmes with regard to the plant and the leaks."

It looks like the key point, to paraphrase Bill Clinton is “what your definition of ‘situation’ is”.

If the “situation”  is currently officially stated radiological hazards to Tokyo and Olympic participants thanks to Fukushima, the answer is a qualified “yes”.

That is, if the Japanese government continues to give public credence to rather unfounded Tepco optimism that the Fukushima clusterfuck will simply maintain the current trend of dumping radioactive water into the ocean and the main danger to denizens of Tokyo involves getting radioactive sushi from some tuna caught out in the Pacific.

After Shinzo Abe came home from scoring the Olympics, he announced that the Japanese government would participate more actively in the faltering Tepco effort.  

At the same time, Abe took pains not to stint on the denialist BS that underpinned the Olympics bid, as if the main problem was not hundreds of tons of sizzling fuel rods and thousands of gallons of radioactive water, but “rumours”:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the scrapping of two Fukushima nuclear reactors that survived the 2011 tsunami, a write-off that threatens to complicate a turnaround plan the operator has presented to creditors.

He also said he stood by his commitments to the International Olympic Committee of insuring a safe 2020 Summer Games.

"I will work hard to counter rumours questioning the safety of the Fukushima plant," he said.

Some fact if not rumour-obsessed locals explicitly rebutted Abe’s contention that the situation was “under control”.  Per Mainichi Shimbun:

The town assembly of nuclear disaster-hit Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, passed a protest resolution against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sept. 20 for declaring the situation surrounding the radioactively contaminated water leaks at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant "under control."

The prime minister made the controversial comments during Tokyo's final presentation at the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s general meeting in Buenos Aires on Sept. 7, saying, "Some may have concerns about Fukushima. Let me assure you, the situation is under control." He also said the effect of the water leak has been "completely blocked" within the 0.3 square kilometers of the plant's harbor.

The Namie Town Assembly unanimously passed the Sept. 20 protest resolution stating that there is a "serious problem" with Abe's remarks as they "contradict reality." The protest also calls the situation at the plant, where some 300 metric tons of radioactively contaminated water is leaking into the ocean every day, "serious."

"The situation has never been 'under control,' nor is the contaminated water 'completely blocked,'" the protest read.

There is no guarantee that the current Fukushima clusterfuck will not get an upgrade.  Per anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman:

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

…

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.

The situation at Unit 4 does look pretty dire.  The cooling pond, on top of a damaged structure, contains a reactor load of rods (Unit 4's rods had been moved from the reactor to the pond as part of routine maintenance when the tsunami hit) that are usually gingerly manipulated under precisely controlled conditions by computer-driven cranes.  Conditions at Number 4 cooling pond are considerably less than optimal, as Reuters tells us, and the actual removal operation might play out like a frustrating encounter with one of those claw machines at Denny's.

Botching the removal could lead to a ghastly, if not apocalyptic nuclear accident.  The possibility that Tepco is driven to try to remove the rods, not because it is ready to, but because the whole building is subsiding in water-soaked soil and may come crashing down, also inspires the heebie-jeebies.

Wasserman expressed a vote of no confidence in Tepco and launched a petition drive to strip Japan of its control over the Fukushima clean up and turn the effort over to the international community through the United Nations.

At the time I thought, hmmm, that doesn’t seem particularly practical.

However, a radio report from ABC Australia also indicates that the Japanese government now thinks it may not have the capabilities to handle Fukushima by itself, despite Abe’s personal assurance to the IOC (which should remind us of the lack of legal enforceability of brave statements made by politicians on their own kick).  

Reportedly, Abe talked with French president Hollande at the UN this week and asked for French help to decommission two of the Fukushima units.

The broadcast also made the interesting point that Russia offered help shortly after the disaster, and also advised the Japanese government that Tepco’s strategy of cooling the hot, collapsed cores with water would a) not solve the problem and b) create a huge irradiated water mess.  The Japanese government apparently ignored the Russian approach and, guess what, the problem is not solved and there is a huge irradiated water mess.

Cynical observers will perhaps conclude that the Abe administration was aware of these major and currently insoluble issues from the git-go, but declined to involve itself in Tepco’s Fukushima work until after the Olympics bid was safely under its belt, allowing the Japanese government to base its presentation on Tepco’s sunny assurances rather than the somewhat grimmer reality prevailing at the site.

As for the Olympics bid itself, it looks like the Abe administration followed the Karl Rove formula for political jiu jitsu, namely attack your opponent’s strength and turn it into weakness (best typified by the Swift-boating of John Kerry’s war record during his presidential race against the service-dodging party-hearty history of George W. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard’s “champagne squadron” during the Vietnam War).

Refusing to regard the Fukushima situation as a liability, the Abe team turned on the waterworks to make the tsunami disaster the emotional centerpiece of its bid:

The effects of the tsunami and earthquake – killing over 18,000 people – was never far from the lips of the presentation team.

Princess Takamado – daughter-in-law of the Japanese Emperor – spoke in French expressing the gratitude Japan owed to the IOC in the way they had rallied round after the tsunami and how it had had an impact on the young living there.

“The Olympic bid has given the young people in the area affected something to dream for, the motivation to move forward with courage,” said the 60-year-old, who is the first member of Japan’s Royal Family to address the IOC.

“I know one of the IOC’s most important aspects is the legacy a Games leaves. The IOC will certainly remain in the heart of these young people.”

Mami Sato, two time Paralympian in the long jump, spoke movingly about her personal experience of when the disaster struck.

“I was not there at the time and I was really worried because I did not know if my family was still alive but luckily they were,” she said tearfully to the backdrop of a photo of her reunited with her parents.

Abe added: “Today, under the blue sky of Fukushima, there are young boys playing football and looking into the future and not the past.”

The Brazilians are probably kicking themselves for not packaging their massive anti-government demonstrations (and attacks on the economic wisdom of hosting the World Cup, something that undoubtedly gave their Olympics bid a black eye) as a non-stop carnival of Olympic-worthy youthful passion.  Also, no princess--even though there are not one but two family lines claiming the Brazilian imperial throne and there are plenty of princesses, including the quite attractive Paola Maria de Bourbon Orléans e Bragança Sapieha.  C’mon, people!

The Turks are probably kicking themselves for not packaging their sizable anti-government demonstrations as a non stop carnival of Olympic-worthy youthful passion by Istanbul's admittedly Olympics-hating young urban bourgeoisie.  And Erdogan could have flown to Rio to assure the IOC that the Kurdish unrest and Syrian debacle were all "under control".  Also, no princess--even though Europe is generously seeded with heirs to the house of Osman and attractive and articulate princesses like Princess Ayşe Gülnev Sultan

would have been available to lobby the royalty-besotted IOC. (Attaturk  did make a clean break with the imperial aspirations of the Ottomans and exiled the house of Osman; I guess Princess Takamado can say There, but for the grace of General MacArthur, go I!  However, the Erdogan government--while keeping one eye cocked at the disapproving Turkish army--is gingerly pursuing rapprochement with the house of Osman in order to burnish Turkey's claims to regional leadership.)

Madrid, for that matter, was unable to spin its substantial supply of existing Olympic-worthy venues and its desperate need for an economic kickstart into IOC support.  Spain had badly botched its anti-doping image management by short-circuiting a massive investigation into the blood-doping and medication-dispensing activities of one Dr. Eufamiano Fuentes.  A Spanish judge restricted Fuentes' testimony to his activities relating to traditional doping whipping-sport professional cycling, even when he offered in open court to name names in other sports as well.  The rumor is that Spain's massively popular and economically powerful football clubs leaned on the court to keep out of the public eye allegations that Fuentes was doping their athletes.

As for princesses, Spain, with a reigning royal family, is chock-a-block with in-country talent.  However, one of the byproducts of Spain's crushing economic crisis is growing disenchantment with the excesses and incapacities of the local aristocracy; the possible deposition of the royal family is now an item on the national agenda. But maybe Princess Leonor and Princess Sofia could have swayed the IOC with, perhaps, a little less hauteur than they displayed at Easter mass in 2010.

As to what’s really going on under the blue skies of Fukushima, this post-Olympics reportage gives a more honest picture (under the Irish Times’ typical feisty headline, Fukushima clean-up may be doomed):

Across much of Fukushima’s rolling green countryside they descend on homes like antibodies around a virus, men wielding low-tech tools against a very modern enemy: radiation. Power hoses, shovels and mechanical diggers are used to scour toxins that rained down from the sky 30 months ago. The job is exhausting, expensive and, say some, doomed to failure. 

Today, a sweating four-man crew wearing surgical masks and boiler suits clean the home of Hiroshi Saito (71) and his wife Terue (68). Their aim is to bring average radiation at this home down to 1.5 microsieverts an hour, still several times what it was before the incident but safe enough, perhaps, for Saito’s seven grandchildren to visit. “My youngest grandchild has never been here,” he says.

Saito’s house is outside the mandatory evacuation zone, from which 160,000 people decamped by government order and have yet to return.  Another 40,000 or so from Saito’s municipality, Minamisoma, voluntarily evacuated and have yet to return.  According to the article, one estimate for the total cleanup bill for Fukushima may reach $600 billion.

 And that’s only if things don’t get worse.

China Weighs in on the Iran/Turkey/Brazil Agreement

Update

If the U.S. can't sabotage the ITB agreement, it will do its best to ignore it.

According to the Guardian.

A new set of United Nations sanctions are almost certain to be imposed on Iran next month, after Russia and China today agreed to support punitive action against Tehran's military and financial institutions, according to a security council source.

The Russian and Chinese move came as a surprise to the US and Britain, who had been braced for several more weeks of negotiation. Moscow and Beijing have over the last few months been either lukewarm or downright opposed to the idea of sanctions. The Obama administration has been working for months try to bring China and Russia round.
...

A draft security council resolution was agreed early today by the five permanent members of the security council – the US, Britain, China, Russia and France. The resolution is to be sent to the other 10 members of the council later today.

Hmmm.

I would speculate that the United States was very anxious to get this draft circulated in order to counteract the news of the ITB agreement. So maybe some hurried caving in to Chinese reservations provoked the "surprise".

China, for its part, has frequently expressed its support for the "two-track" process, so I suppose it would be awkward for Beijing to hold up the drafting process if the draft reflected most of its stated concerns.

However, China knows perfectly well that watering down the UN sanctions doesn't solve the problem.

The United States has gone out of its way to telegraph its position that harsher national and EU sanctions are a certainty once an enabling UN resolution is out of the way, as the Washington Post tells us:

Diplomats said that some of the proposed language in the current resolution was added with the full knowledge that it would be removed by the Russians and Chinese -- but then could be revived in the European resolution. The individual country sanctions would come after the European Union has acted and would be led by the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other like-minded nations, diplomats said.

So, the United States strategy could be rephrased as "meaningless sanctions through the UN to enable meaningful national sanctions (without any meaningful Chinese input) down the road."

By spurning the ITB deal, the United States has committed itself to the sanctions route.

Given America's enthusiasm for playing geopolitical chicken with China on this issue, I think Beijing will probably blink, keep its head down, and perhaps even vote for UN sanctions despite the consequences.

Beijing might be thinking that national sanctions would simply drive Iran further into the PRC camp. However, given the Pandora's box element of runaway national sanctions, I doubt China's leaders welcome the unpredictable risk and confrontation they involve (a caution that it might be wise for the Obama administration to emulate).

It is more likely that China will encourage diplomacy over the next few weeks, console Turkey and Brazil (who are undoubtedly insulted at the United States' dismissive treatment of their initiative), and try to sort out the geopolitical wreckage to its advantage if and when sanctions do come down.

Original post below:

They like it.

In addition to having the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman speak positively of the agreement at the regular press conference, the MOFA drew special attention to it by extracting remarks Foreign Minister Yang Jiezhi made at to Chinese and Tunisian reporters (the president of Tunisia is visiting Beijing) and posting it as a separate statement on its Chinese language page.

Yang stated China had noted reports concerning the agreement negotiated between Iran, Turkey, and Brazil and "welcomed and appreciated" the diplomatic efforts of the involved parties.

In Chinese, the phrase is, "欢迎和赞赏".

欢迎--the well-known "huanying" or "welcome"--is pretty much meaningless diplomatic puffery.

赞赏 on the other hand, is quite a positive term. It means "appreciate and admire" and is just one degree short of "endorse".

Since China wasn't a party to the agreement, they wouldn't have been likely to use the term "endorse" in any case.

There was no mention of the process-related reservations and suspicions that all the other permanent Security Council members including Russia chose to voice.

The dominant theme for Yang's statement was the success of diplomacy, which, in this context, is an implied criticism of excessive reliance on sanctions.

He concluded his statement with the remark

中方愿意与有关各方一道为推动伊核问题的外交解决发挥建设性作用。

"The Chinese side is willing to work together with the concerned parties to play a constructive role in the diplomatic resolution of the Iran issue."

All in all, a strong Chinese statement of support and a sign that China is calling for more attention to the diplomacy side of dual track as the US labors to shift the focus back to the sanctions track.

Lost inTranslation

The United States Responds to the Turkey/Brazil/Iran Deal with Dismay, Denial, Deafness, Willful Misunderstanding, and the Occasional Malapropism

The deal for to provide fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, brokered by Turkey and Brazil, has been signed.

The deal threatens to derail the push for Iran sanctions, which is apparently the be-all and end-all of America's strategy.

No question what Turkey--a non-permanent member of the Security Council this year--thinks:

"This agreement should be regarded positively and there is no need for sanctions now that we [Turkey and Brazil] have made guarantees and the low-enriched uranium will remain in Turkey," [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu] said.

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler tells us that the deal will provide excuses for more Chinese mushiness on sanctions:

More important, the deal gives China -- a veto-holding member of the Security Council long reluctant to support new sanctions -- an excuse to delay or water down any new resolution.

Now the United States has to find a way to kill the deal.

More from Glenn Kessler:

The best hope for U.S. officials is Iranian intransigence. The Iranians could haggle over the details and implementation of the agreement until it collapses, much in the way it first agreed to a swap deal with the United States and its allies before backing away.

Iran now must present a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna explaining the details of the transaction, which U.S. officials privately hope will begin the process of unraveling it.

Stay classy, fellas.

The first line of opposition has already been drawn: It's a trap! The crafty Iranians have continued to enrich uranium since the deal was originally floated. So sending 1200 kg of LEU overseas leaves too much inside Iran and does not eliminate the dreaded bomb breakout scenario.

Second line of opposition is that Iran is continuing to enrich LEU to 20%.

As CNN spun the agreement on its its homepage: Iran to resume uranium enrichment, linking through to a story entitled Iran to resume uranium enrichment despite Turkey deal.

This does not appear to be quality reporting.

The original version of the article, which grew wings and circulated all the way to China (it was apparently also the basis for a report in the Chinese language media), implied that Iran had bookended announcement of the Turkey deal with an intentionally defiant statement that it would be enriching more LEU.

However, when CNN updated the story (including a passel of disparaging comments on the deal from the UK, France, and Israel) it transpired that what the Iran foreign ministry spokesman had really said was this:

"We are not planning on stopping our legal right to enrich uranium," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told CNN by telephone.

That's different. Iran's centrifuges might well be spinning, but sticking a thumb in the West's eye doesn't seem to have been Mehmanparast's intention.

As stated in the text of the agreement, Iran wanted to make clear that, by acceding to the TRR swap, it was not surrendering its right to enrich uranium to under 20%--the basic premise of its engagement with the IAEA and NPT regime, and a right that even the United States is, in principle, willing to acknowledge.

So, even as Iran attempts to present its most accommodating demeanour, it looks like some problematic reporting and, to be fair, a less-than-stellar use of the English language by Mehmanparast, combine to make the regime look intransigent and, indeed, willfully provocative.

Funny 'bout that.

China, which I suspect is rather gleeful about the deal, hasn't weighed in with any official comment or endorsement as of this writing.

A glitch in Xinhua's editing gives an idea of China's current effort to stay above the fray and keep up with the latest spin:

TEHRAN, May 17 (Xinhua) -- An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday his country will continue enriching uranium to 20 percent itself, despite a swap deal signed just hours ago in which Iran has agreed to ship some most of its low enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for 20 percent uranium needed for its Tehran reactor. [emph. added]

To console Xinhua with the knowledge that the decline of copyediting and authorial standards is not just a Chinese problem, Glenn Kessler wrote:

Brazil and Turkey, which were represented by their presidents in the talks, invested significant diplomatic cache in the negotiations.

Ahem.

One invests diplomatic capital to obtain an agreement. One garners diplomatic cachet from concluding an agreement. Cache, a collection of resources securely stored against a rainy day but by definition not yielding an investment return, resides, for the purposes of this sentence, in that dread limbo where Francophone ignorance, mispronunciation, and misapprehension reign and Spellcheck cannot go.

This deal represents bad news for the Obama administration.

Insisting on sanctions as a precondition for further Iran-related movement provided welcome domestic political cover for the administration.

If the UNSC sanctions drive sputters, then the U.S. either have to abandon the signature multi-lateralism of the Obama administration to pursue destabilizing and probably futile unilateral sanctions, or risk the wrath of the pro-Israel/security hardline/knee-jerk Republican bloc with inconclusive, moderate noodling on the issue.

And I don't even need to trot out my personal hobby horse--the theory that Iran sanctions was a precondition for Israel's entry into the non-proliferation regime and the success of the Obama administration's NPT Revcon-centric global security strategy--to observe that moderation by the U.S. would embarrass it in front of its European allies.

China Matters' favorite arms control wonk, Jeffrey Lewis, also went on record with his dismay with the announced deal:

The downside of not insisting is that the deal — which does nothing to constrain Iran’s program — creates a false sense that the problem is Iran’s break-out capability. In the Reuters story, Western officials claimed “Iran was trying to give the impression that it was the fuel deal which was at the center of problems with the West, rather than its nuclear ambitions as a whole.” Yeah, no kidding. As regular readers know, I have long argued that the problem is not Iran’s enrichment at Natanz, not even to 20 percent. The problem is Iran’s history of clandestine enrichment. Iran wants to change the narrative to focus on the West’s objections to its arguably legitimate activities. Why we keep helping them do that is beyond me.

My personal feeling is that the precondition to stopping Iran's clandestine enrichment is a) engagement and b) dealing with the Israel problem c) building a genuine security consensus both inside and outside of Iran on the issue.

If the U.S. had treated the TRR swap as a trust-building transaction instead of an opportunity to demand the incapacitation of part of Iran's nuclear program, and if the Israel double standard didn't exist, Turkey probably wouldn't have been so eager to defy the United States and broker the deal.

But whatever.

With this convergence of enlightened expert opinion, political necessity, and geopolitical calculation, the Obama administration might be quite ruthless in trying to derail the deal.

In addition to griping about the additional LEU in Iran, the U.S. could insist on an enrichment freeze. Or France--whose job is to actually fabricate the plates--could state that it couldn't bring itself to cooperate unless all the LEU went to Turkey.

The West can certainly scupper the deal--at the cost of humiliating and angering Brazil and Turkey. But can it garner Chinese support for sanctions--and acquiescence to whatever skullduggery it comes up to rescue them?

Benedict's Travels

The American media is waking up to the fact that the Eurocentric Pope Benedict has a Third World problem...

...and a Middle East problem.

...and an Asia problem.

...as China Matters readers already knew.


via Tapped’s Adele Stan, we learn that the Pope alienated some Brazilians:

HONEY, I SHRUNK THE CHURCH. It seems as if Pope Benedict XVI is really out to prove his philosophy that he's willing to accept a smaller, but more loyal flock for the Roman Catholic Church. Among the loyalty tests -- aside from the traditionally misogynist stands against women in the priesthood and reproductive rights for women -- one rarely discussed appears to have roiled to the surface: acceptance of Western civilization and culture as superior to all others.

Yesterday, as his Brazilian sojourn drew to a close... reports Raymond Colitt of Reuters, [Benedict said]:

[Brazil's indigenous people] had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.

... Particularly telling is reaction of Brazilian Indians who are Catholic, as well as the priests who minister to them. "The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible," Father Paulo Suess, who runs the Brazilian church's advocacy group for the indigenous, told Colitt. "I too was upset."

Thanks the convoluted character of Catholic doctrine and Benedict’s penchant for high-minded hairsplitting, it’s a bit difficult to tease out the Pope’s point.

The bottom line is that Benedict regards attempts to understand and acknowledge and reconcile what the indigenous people lost in that whole bloody genocide, forced conversion, and slavery fracas with the Conquistadors in South America as deluded carping by liberation-theology types who should be grateful that their once-pagan ancestors are not broiling in eternal hellfire.

So, thank you Christian Europe! for the wafers and wine that allowed this Godforsaken land to realize its destiny as a Christian continent.

An unsentimental farewell to whatever was going on here before the guns-germs-and-steel action!

And stop trying to put that pre-Columbian toothpaste back into the tube!

The Utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbus religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal Church, would not be a step forward: indeed, it would be a step back. In reality, it would be a retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the past." (quoted in comments to Stan's post)

That kind of condescending dismissal is at the heart of Benedict's thought--and his problems as Pope.

Pope Benedict is quite the expert on the futility of non-Catholic spiritual exercises, as is clear in my post from 2006 riffing on the Pope’s notorious remark equating Buddhism with masturbation.

The post provides background on the Pope's travails in Brazil by exploring his clash-of-civilizations view of European Catholicism as the bulwark of the true faith against assaults by secularists, Freudians, and those brown and yellow people whose traditional cultures and philosophies offer only barren ground for Christianity.

It provides an interesting perspective on why the guy who previously headed the Inquisition might be better equipped to shrink the church to a core of true believers, than grow it by addressing Catholicism’s philosophical and historical relationship to other faiths.

I recall some rough handling from a commenter or two in the Peking Duck thread. My response at the time is included at the end of the post.

Pope Benedict and the Buddhism/Masturbation Controversy
originally posted September 26, 2006

Pope Benedict’s recent scuffle with Islam, including his non-apology—characterized by Middle East observer Abu Aardvark as “that time-honored classic ‘I'm sorry that you got angry when I called you fat’” dodge--- has highlighted his confrontational stance toward other faiths.

A column by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian makes a case for his hostility toward Judaism and Buddhism as well.

In the process, Bunting retails the notorious statement made by Benedict while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, purportedly equating Buddhism with masturbation.

Buddhist Channel reported that the full quote, delivered in an interview with L’Expresse in 1997, went like this:

"If Buddhism is attractive, it's only because it suggests that by belonging to it you can touch the infinite, and you can have joy without concrete religious obligations,'' Ratzinger said. ``It's spiritually self-indulgent eroticism.''

Other outlets cut Cardinal Ratzinger some slack, opining that “auto-erotisme”, the term used in the original article, could more accurately translated at “self-love” or “narcissism”.

Actually, auto-eroticism is an English-language term coined by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe mental or physical sexual activity not directed toward a sexual partner. It was later picked up by Freud. Cardinal Ratzinger knows his Freud. He considers Freud an originator of the secular spirit he detests, and entitled one of his major pronouncements on the decadence of Europe “Europe and its Discontents”—a play on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.

In this case, I assume Cardinal Ratzinger employed auto-eroticism as a term of art, using a modern term for the sinful, non-reproductive sexuality abhorred by the church to condemn a kind of shallow spiritual gratification that he considers futile, degenerate, and dangerous to the soul.

So, although the Pope was not referring to Buddhists as masturbators, they can find little consolation in the awareness that what he really meant is that he was dismissing their spiritual exercises as pathetic and contemptible.

In any event, Benedict’s hostility toward non-Catholic faiths is a matter of public record. Religions that have felt the lash of his disapproval include Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Anglicanism.

In 2000, the National Catholic Reporter published a list of Cardinal Ratzinger’s greatest hits, including a money quote from the same L’Expresse interview:

"In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn't come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right."

Reportedly, at the time Cardinal Ratzinger was incensed that there were allegedly more Frenchmen studying to be Buddhist monks than Benedictine monks.

As the Catholic Church’s top doctrine cop—running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a.k.a. the Inquisition--he also ordered a German Benedictine monk, Willigis Jager, a.k.a Zen master Ko-un Roshi, to cease and desist from all public statements and activities promoting dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists.

Beyond strict demands for doctrinal conformity and acknowledgement of the Catholic Church’s unique role as interlocutor between humanity and the one true God, Pope Benedict’s worldview is apparently militantly Euro-centric. Europe, in the Pope’s view, is a creation of Catholicism and the implication is that Catholicism without Europe cannot survive.

There was speculation that Cardinal Ratzinger chose his papal title not to commemorate Pope Benedict XV, but to honor St. Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order and is credited with saving Catholicism from extinction in the European Dark Ages.

The Pope considers Europe to be Catholicism’s home turf, under assault from alien faiths and lazy tendencies toward syncretism (literally “Cretan towns forming an alliance” according to my Webster’s, but figuratively speaking a meaningless mishmash).

Islam at the gates of Europe is Pope Benedict’s particular bugbear.

The Pope’s perspective—in which Catholicism is inextricably bound to its European matrix—has a creepy clash-of-civilization vibe and his recent statements criticizing Islam were undoubtedly a conscious “stay outta my yard” challenge to the demographic, social, and political encroachment of Islam into Europe.

In the lament on decadent, faithless Europe that he coauthored—Without Roots—Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Hmmm…”a growing decline in its ethnicity”. I don’t think he’s referring to a shortage of good Vietnamese restaurants in Rome.

Pared to the bone, the Pope’s attitudes look a lot like racism cloaked in theology.

Reuters reported on an interview Cardinal Ratzinger gave to Le Figaro in 2004:

Joseph Ratzinger... has said Muslim but secular Turkey should seek its future in an association of Islamic nations rather than the EU, which has Christian roots. In an interview last year for France's Le Figaro Magazine, Ratzinger, then doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and that linking it to Europe would be a mistake.

If Pope Benedict is going to be busy re-fighting the crusades in Europe and the Middle East and reliving the glories of the Inquisition, he’s not going to have a lot of interest and energy in dealing with Buddhism except as a competitor for the hearts, minds, and souls of the parfit knights of his Caucasian Round Table.

Indeed, since he is wrapped up in his theory that European civilization is uniquely Catholic, he seems ready to write off the rest of the world—at least those parts with “great cultural protagonists”, as he termed them, such as East Asia and South Asia--as spheres that are innately Buddhist , Muslim, or Hindu.

It will be interesting to see how the Roman Catholic Church fares in China under Benedict’s reign.

Comments:

Some commenters on Peking Duck made the point that it’s understandable that the Pope should have the right to speak his mind. And if he believes that Buddhists are (doctrinal) jerk-offs, well, free speech doesn’t stop at the Inquisitor’s door.

A few thoughts.

The Pope believes his is the one true faith, qualitatively different from all others.

That’s his right, even his duty. It’s the cornerstone of his faith.

He can also trash other religions, not only as inferior in doctrine and rigor but also false paths to salvation.

No problem.

But he’s also the head of a religion that claims not only to profess the true Word of God, but also to serve as God’s instrument on earth, and provide the means of human salvation that is not only unique but universal (“Catholic).

It’s a test of his leadership—and God-given duties as Pope—to put points on the board for the Catholic Church worldwide, and not just in the European homeland.

Pope John Paul II, who shared many of Cardinal Ratzinger’s views including, presumably, revulsion at Buddhism, understood that his job was to condone inter-faith dialogue so that the Catholic Church could claim to encompass the good points of other religions and at the same time assert its superiority in the critical matters of revealed truth and salvation.

Benedict XVI, on the other hand, appears to have made the dubious decision that other religions have to be discredited en toto so that Catholicism is the last faith standing.

It’s an understandable position for an Inquisitor to take.

It’s the necessary stand for the leader of an embattled sect, which is how Pope Benedict sometimes appears to regard himself.

But it is not a viable position for the leader of a global church that considers itself not only unique in truth but infinite in its understanding and universal in its scope.

Tearing every other religion (and for good measure, secular humanism) to their foundations so that the deluded turn to the true faith would be a tough job even if the Savior appeared in person to do the job. For fallible men and a fragile church to attempt it by themselves is simply beyond their capacity.

So instead of engaging in a multi-millennial argument with Islam, Buddhism, and every other religion that won’t be decided until the true God shows up to settle accounts, I think the interests of the Catholic Church and the world would be better served if Pope Benedict decided his faith could be most effectively protected and propagated by looking for good in the hearts of Buddhists, Muslims -- instead of making remarks easily construed as deriding them and their religions.