Buddhist monks vs. Trump’s fake “Board of Peace”

In late October, a group of 19 Buddhist monks left Fort Worth, Texas, beginning a hike that would last 108 days and cross seven states, attracting millions of online fans and the adoption of a dog named Aloka. They walked in single file, many of them barefoot, carrying flowers, handing out bracelets and picking up new followers along the way. In Texas, two monks were struck by a car, and one of them lost a leg to amputation. Along the way they were met by thousands of admirers, who mostly greeted them with reverent silence rather than cheers or applause. After some 2,300 miles later, the walk ended this week in Washington, D.C., accompanied by images of worn shoes and battered, bloodied feet. The purpose of this pilgrimage was to raise awareness for peace.

“My hope is, when this walk ends, the people we met will continue practicing mindfulness and find peace,” the Venerable Bhikkhu Paññākāra, a Vietnamese-American monk who led the march, said while passing through North Carolina. When they arrived in Washington on Tuesday, they were met with a large media presence as around 3,500 people packed into an arena to hear them speak. But this mission was “not to bring you any peace,” Paññākāra said, “but to raise the awareness of peace so that you can unlock that box and free it.”

There are good reasons why this apparently simple exercise attracted so much attention. Peace seems to be in short supply these days, or at least it’s drowned out by the relentless torrent of live-streamed genocides and airstrikes and militant police crackdowns. What’s more, the definition of peace is actively being corrupted and perverted by some of the world’s richest and most powerful, many of whom are implicated in an international sex trafficking scandal.

While a feel-good story about traveling monks in orange robes may top headlines due to its outward gentleness and relative novelty (in fact, there have been numerous peace walks before this one) less attention has been paid to Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, an enterprise officially joined this week by the Israeli government, although most Western-style democracies have declined the invitation.

It almost feels like a waste of space unpacking the nihilistic hypocrisy inherent in Trump’s initiative, which requires sinister redefinition of “peace.” But it’s critical that such acts of propaganda don’t go unchecked, if only to maintain our sanity. It’s also important to understand this effort in the broader context of the “forever war,” how it has come home to us and, more important, what can be done about it.

The notion of the Board of Peace apparently arose during negotiations for the Gaza peace plan, intended to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Israel’s disproportionate response has been labeled a genocide by many reputable organizations. As recently observed by Amnesty International and Genocide Watch, the crisis in Gaza has not ended just because fewer bombs are being dropped. The overall pressure on Palestinians has not eased, Gaza residents still cannot return to a normal life, and the apparent result, if not the explicit goal, is ethnic cleansing.

This is one of the eight wars Trump has repeatedly claimed to have “ended,” though it can hardly be said that tensions between Palestinians and Israelis have reduced. Israel has violated the ceasefire almost daily since it was negotiated Oct. 10, by some counts as much as 1,600 times. Hamas has also been accused of violating the ceasefire. The war has so far killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Israelis. But Trump isn’t thinking about the casualties or the starving civilians, none of whom were consulted for his self-described “master plan,” which is largely focused on real estate development, especially industrial parks and beach resorts straight out of a Dubai wet dream. “There is no Plan B,” Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said when he presented the plan, awash with AI-generated images, at the World Economic Forum in January. It doesn’t even feel like a Plan A.

As for the other wars Trump has taken credit for ending: Yeah, not really. Some of them weren’t exactly wars to begin with. The 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year may be the strongest contender, in the sense that Trump ended it after unnecessarily blundering into it, thereby destroying any chance of nuclear diplomacy. This week the Pentagon prepared to send a second aircraft carrier within striking distance of Iran, so we’ll see how much “peace” the U.S. drops on that country this year.

As for other conflicts claimed by Trump — including those between Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, and Cambodia and Thailand — Trump is exaggerating his peripheral involvement, and it’s debatable whether any of those has achieved anything more than a temporary truce. He’s been little more than an emcee for negotiations, but wants us to think he invented armistice.

Several countries involved in these conflicts have joined Trump’s Board of Peace, including Kosovo, Egypt, Armenia and Pakistan. Reuters notes that few of these 20 or so nations are democracies. The Board of Peace is mutating into something like a low-rent version of the U.N. Security Council — which Trump openly wants to disembowel. In his invented version, Trump will serve as unelected head into the indefinite future, even after he leaves the Oval Office (assuming that happens). The board also features many Trump toadies, including Kushner, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff.

“Today’s ceremony marking the establishment of the so-called global ‘Board of Peace’ lays bare a brazen disregard for international law and human rights,” Amnesty International posted in January. “It is a slap in the face of decades of efforts to strengthen global governance through adherence to universal values and greater equality between member states and derails legitimate efforts to address the current system’s limitations and gaps.”

Unsurprisingly, the most important aspect of this twisted model U.N. is the money. To secure membership, nations are expected to cough up $1 billion in dues. Would this represent yet another blatant bribery scheme by the Trump enterprise? Is Bad Bunny from Puerto Rico?

So what does any of this have to do with peace? You’ll be surprised to learn: absolutely nothing. Look no further than Trump’s threatened invasions of Greenland or the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (a stunt that killed at least 57 people) or the Cuban blockade or whatever it is this week — they all betray the president’s real goal: monopolizing violence. Because like other abusive bullies, he sees violence as acceptable as long as he controls and authorizes it.

Trump even wants to distort the ideology of peace and shift the meaning of the word. Extorting a re-gifted Nobel Peace Prize from its actual recipient or staging the award of a blatantly phony “FIFA Peace Prize” is about muddying the definition of what peace is, and what international awards supposedly recognize.

Many people in our troubled country are apparently so eager for peace that they’ll join barefoot monks in colorful robes in walking halfway across the continent. In that spirit, we need to reject blatantly false, uber-Orwellian attempts to subvert its meaning. Whatever one makes of Trump’s foreign policy, “peace” is not a useful description for what’s happening in American cities being terrorized by DHS and ICE.

Painful as that is, we really shouldn’t be surprised. The ramped-up militarization of American policing and the creation of ICE and other agencies of domestic control was always going to lead in this direction. If the name “Department of Homeland Security” has now been normalized, it still sounds a lot like “Committee for State Security,” the usual translation of the KGB’s official name. We don’t need to argue that the U.S. has become a Soviet-style police state; ICE and the Border Patrol remain well within the most oppressive traditions of American law enforcement.

Cities like Minneapolis, Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles have come under attack from paramilitary forces costumed in tactical combat gear, a sentence that would sound unbelievable if it didn’t sound so familiar. Isn’t this the same model we exported elsewhere under other “peaceful” presidents? Trump has bombed quite a few foreign nations in the past year, as well as during his first term, but none of that was a major departure from the actions of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

It was under former President George W. Bush that the U.S. turned to nearly endless warfare, ostensibly in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps as many as a million Iraqis were killed over the ensuing 20 years, in just one theater of the Global War on Terror. That open-ended conflict was not substantially curtailed by Obama, an actual Nobel Peace Prize laureate. To be fair, it was only after receiving that award that Obama began his “Terror Tuesday” routine, personally selecting targets for drone strikes. He was forced to apologize for the 2015 strike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that was operated by Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. In a world where one peace prize recipient must express regret for bombing another, irony has been destroyed.

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Do Americans really want peace? If so, we must drop the act. The U.S. is not the final arbiter of peace, especially not our presidents. At the very least, the U.S. owes some restitution to the numerous nations we have tried to reshape with bombs and bullets, rather than shaking them down to join a private Pax-a-Lago. First of all, perhaps, we should bring peace to our own cities, starting with abolishing the agencies that are waging domestic warfare and ripping families and communities apart. We have brought this on ourselves, and must own it. It’s no coincidence that a third of ICE employees are military veterans. In many ways, their job in nation building was not that different from what they’re doing domestically, establishing and managing concentration camps in service to Stephen Miller’s dreams of ethnic cleansing.

It’s also true that if we want peace, we can’t just call out Donald Trump’s hypocrisy, but also our own. As Paññākāra noted, true peace comes from within.

For most of my adult life, I have felt like that kind of “within” talk is fortune-cookie horoscope speak, signifying nothing. But the more I try to practice living a peaceful life on my own terms — and I fall well short of perfection — the more I value the realization that peace really does come from within. Where else would it come from?

I’m also struck by images of Paññākāra on his long walk from Fort Worth to Washington, his robe bearing rows and rows of police and military badges. That undeniably made me uncomfortable and seems to have rankled some Buddhists as well, with one writing on Reddit: “Placing military insignia at the very front of a peace walk raises questions for me about whether this unintentionally reinforces attachment to state power or narrows our ability to perceive structural violence.”

Why carry the symbols of the very groups who wield guns and batons? Such agencies have only rarely worked for peace, especially of late. The answer, it seems, is that this peace walk was granted numerous police escorts, likely to prevent any further injuries on the road. The monks accumulated these pins and badges as gestures of kindness — a reminder that anyone and everyone, up to and including Donald Trump, is capable of moments of genuine peace. The inverse is also true: I am not a white supremacist, a police officer or a military operative. I have never dropped bombs or tear-gassed anyone. But I am certainly capable of violence, as we all are. We’re all connected to systems that are destructive of peace in so many ways, from how we generate commerce. to how we eat, how we pay taxes and how we communicate.

The goal of ICE is to dehumanize people. As satisfying or convenient as it may be in the short term to describe ICE officers as inhuman monsters, that will ultimately backfire. Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two Americans executed by federal agents, seemed to understand this: Good’s last words were “I’m not mad at you, dude,” and Pretti was shot while trying to help someone he didn’t know off the ground. Thich Nhat Hanh, another Vietnamese monk, famously wrote:

We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds — our prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.

Unless you’re easily manipulated by AI-generated pitch decks and able to ignore the torrent of violence unleashed both within America and around the world, you already understand that Donald Trump isn’t pushing peace. Let’s hope that we can knock over that house of cards with peace walks and other forms of calm, resolute resistance. But then what? How do we rebuild a nation, a world, so badly ruined? Can any of us ever pay more than lip service to peace? The task is less monumental than it seems. We start within ourselves. We unlock that box and set peace free.

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