The Hateful Monk
The contrast between the monastery’s inner calm and this exterior display of violence is a fitting inversion of Ma Soe Yein’s most infamous resident, Ashin Wirathu, the subject of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary, The Venerable W. On the outside, Wirathu is composed and polite, with large brown eyes and a sweet, impish grin. His voice is smooth and its cadence measured. Yet beneath this civil disguise seethes an interminable hatred toward the 4 percent of Myanmar’s population that is Muslim (the wall of carnage stands outside his residence). Wirathu is responsible for inciting some of the worst acts of ethnic violence in the country’s recent history, and was described by Time as “The Face of Buddhist Terror.”
The film charts Wirathu’s rise from provincial irrelevance in Kyaukse to nationwide rabble-rouser. It centers on the crucial moments of his budding ethno-nationalism, such as in 1997, when he says his eyes were “finally opened” to the “Muslims’ intentions” after reading a pamphlet entitled In Fear of Our Race Disappearing, which appeared in print by an unknown author; or 2003, when he delivered a chilling sermon—caught on camera—against Muslim “kalars” (kalar is the equivalent of “nigger”). “I can’t stand what they do to us,” he says to rapturous applause. “As soon as I give the signal, get ready to follow me…I need to plan the operation well, like the CIA or Mossad, for it to be effective…I will make sure they will have no place to live.” One month later, in Kyaukse, eleven Muslims were killed, and two mosques and twenty-six houses were burned to the ground. Wirathu was arrested by the military junta for inciting violence, and spent nine years in Mandalay’s Obo prison.
Wirathu was freed as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners in 2012, and he quickly went on to revitalize the 969 Movement—a grassroots organization founded earlier that year by Wirathu and Ashin Sada Ma, a monk from Moulmein, and committed to preventing what it sees as Islam’s infiltration of, and dominance over, Buddhist Myanmar. Since 2014, Wirathu has operated under the auspices of the Ma Ba Tha, or Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion. Like 969, many members of the Ma Ba Tha spread propaganda about how Muslims steal Buddhist women and outbreed Buddhist men. “The features of the African catfish,” Wirathu tells Schroeder near the beginning of the film, “are that they grow very fast, they breed very fast, and they’re violent…The Muslims are exactly like these fish.”
W. is tougher viewing than its predecessors. Archival material and scenes Schroeder filmed undercover are spliced with footage from YouTube and Facebook captured on camera phones and personal video recorders. Most of this documents atrocities committed in Rakhine state in 2012—when clashes between ethnic Arakanese and Rohingya Muslims forced 125,000 of the latter into displacement camps—and anti-Muslim riots in central and eastern Myanmar in 2013. There are graphic images of burning homes, men beaten to death with wooden clubs, and people left to burn alive. All the while state police stand back and let it happen—Amartya Sen has called the violence committed against the Rohingya a “slow genocide.”
Using video uploaded to YouTube and Facebook helps convey one of Schroeder’s most important points about Wirathu. What was frightening about Idi Amin was his combination of absolute power and volatility, a man whose dormant rage erupted without warning. With Jacques Vergès, it was his gifts of seduction and dexterity of logic that made him something like Woland from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—a Devil with impeccable tailoring. What’s disturbing about Wirathu is how, as one anti-Wirathu monk puts it, he wants people to “experience his words before accepting them.” The aim of his public sermonizing is to transform the impressionable into unthinking agents of his intolerance, which accounts not only for his call-and-response style of preaching, and the fact that, as the film shows, he regularly instructs children, but also for his extensive use of Twitter and Facebook, and the Islamophobic DVDs he produces and distributes throughout the country. Like his favorite politician, Donald Trump—the only presidential candidate, he says in the film, who will prevent Islam’s global domination—Wirathu both channels and reflects the ways in which social media has transformed hate into a thoughtless pastime. His evil, an attempt to deepen and normalize the mores of racial enmity, might be encapsulated by a line from Byron, which serves as an epigraph to the film: “Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;/ men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”
The state of race relations in Myanmar is far more complex than Schroeder’s film allows. It is not uncommon to hear members of the Bamar majority say they “hate Islam” but, when pressed, admit they have no issue with Muslims living in their towns. One of the film’s other blind spots is the military. Aside from a brief glance at the mass population shifts between Rakhine and Bangladesh in the late 1970s, there is very little on how the army had been inciting ethnic violence in places like Rakhine long before Wirathu appeared, nor is there any mention of a popular theory that Wirathu is paid, or at least encouraged, by senior generals, some of whom are often photographed at his monastery. In this lack of a deeper historical setting, and the argument that the film could have gone further to expose the involvement of the military in ethnic violence, Schroeder’s film resembles Joshua Oppenheimer’s harrowing documentary The Act of Killing (2012), which examines former members of the Indonesian death-squads responsible for the mass killing of communists between 1965-1966.
A greater problem with The Venerable W., and the “Trilogy of Evil” as a whole, is how Schroeder assumes evil to be a given in the world. He is the filmmaker’s Kołakowski, someone who believes evil isn’t rooted in social circumstance, but is a permanent feature of the human condition. Only the concept of “evil” can capture the immoral extremities reached by figures like Amin, Vergès, and Wirathu. But there is little sense in W., or in the other two films, of evil’s potential origins, or how Wirathu’s ideas may have formed and why they are admired in places like Maungdaw in Rakhine, where there has been historical tension between Muslims and Buddhists, but less so in Yangon or Mandalay, where there has not. Imploring us to think of evil without considering what it means does little to illuminate the darker side of human behavior. As the American clergyman William Sloane Coffin put it: “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, and nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W. is playing at Telluride Film Festival (September 1 through 4), October 13 and 14 at the New York Film Festival, and October 13 and 15 at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
