According to reports from the Associated Press, Wang Guangya, China’s representative at the UN, has warned that “If the situation in Myanmar takes a worse turn because of external intervention, it would be the people of Myanmar who will bear the brunt.” China was repeatedly discouraged sanctions by the international community, or any other actions by it in Myanmar, saying that the brutal repression by the military of anti-government protests there was a “basically internal” matter.
This, of course, was exactly the language used by so many over a half-century ago to justify ignoring Hitler’s crimes against Jews in the Third Reich. It was exactly the language used by Stalin to stop the international community from doing anything when he sent of thousands to labor camps in Siberia, never to be seen again. It is exactly the wording used by Saddam Hussein to demand that the world look the other way during the mass killings of Kurds in Northern Iraq.
It is the language used by every dictator in every oppressive regime everywhere in the world throughout history. It is the language used by husbands who beat wives, of mothers who harshly punish their children, of tribal fathers and brothers who kill their daughters and sisters for “dishonoring” the family by falling in love with a man from the wrong sect or culture or religion.
“It is an internal matter” is the universal escape clause, the excuse that gives cruelty a pass, the rationale for non-intervention.
But United Nations Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari was having none of it last week. When he learned that the Chinese were once again invoking the phrase in the Myanmar incidents, he said…

…“What happens inside Myanmar can have serious international repercussions.” And then he added, for emphasis:
“No country can afford to act in isolation from the standards to which all members of the international community are held.”
Of course, he is profoundly correct. And his clear, unyielding statement of what should be painfully obvious stands as a watermark in international diplomacy, answering the question I was asked in Hamburg.
“Yes, but as a practical political matter, how would ‘Oneness’ work?”, my questioner wanted to know. And here is how it would work: The Ibrahim Gambari’s of the world would be heard. The international community would cease giving tyrants a free pass. The blindfold of indifference would be replaced by the spotlight of disapproval. The impotence of political weakness would end — and the oppression and suffering of hundreds of thousands would end with it. The world would stand up and say “No more. No more! Just…stop it.” And the world would make the oppression stop, or would make the oppressors pay for it, with very real and very immediate consequences.
All political decisions affecting the lives of people everywhere would be guided by a simple measure: “If this same thing were being done to us, would we be okay with it?” This is the questioning form of the declarative sentence, “Do unto others as you would have it done unto you.”
The idea of Oneness, the spiritual and philosophical construct of a Basic Unity underlying all of life, can be transformed into a politically functional reality. The theoretical can become practical. The divine can become human.
I am convinced that there are entire civilizations in this universe where the Oneness of all of life is recognized, honored, and lived. I am convinced that it can be recognized, honored, and lived on this planet as well. It will become the Operative Reality when our religions begin telling us a new story; when the New Spirituality replaces yesterday’s God with Tomorrow’s God, and when we abandon our ancient cultural myth of Separation forever.
Then when petty tyrants tell the international community that their despotism is “an internal matter,” the people of the planet will collectively say, “Yes! It IS a matter of your internal reality. And we invite you to expand your internal reality, and to change it, so that our external world may live in peace and harmony at last. It is the political will of the world – a world that recognizes that we create and live a Combined Fate – that you stop it. Just…stop it. Or we shall employ ways of persuading you to do so. Our Oneness demands it. Our Oneness requires it. Our Oneness renders it imperative.”
(This is the last of a three-part series. The first two installments appeared in this space on Monday and Tuesday. NOTE: This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)