for better or worse
what would worse mean?
no tibetans?

johnnycivil @ 03/20/08 19:05:59

Faxanadu @ 03/20/08 22:04:36

Josh, thanks for this informed meditation on the (ongoing) crisis in Tibet. Having spent much of the last two years with Muslims of various militancy, once thing strikes me: the conviction of many followers of Islam that it is precisely this failure of the preceding prophets to provide their followers with a complete system – including provision for military response, or at least defense, when attacked.

I am also an advocate of non-violence in all instances except the last line of defense, but found the Dalai Lama’s response (and threats to “resign”) very telling… that as the leader of Buddhism on Earth, he does not have a practical solution to this crisis. You’re right. The onus is on China and, further, upon us, to hold their feet to the fire. But given the current state of affairs, and the lack of any real progress (except these protests!) over the past 15 years, obviously there needs to be a conversation amongst Buddhists about just what resistance means in the context of their religion. And, further, if they are going to instruct their followers on how to resist, then they should at least get their feet on the ground and join them, no matter what the risks.

silverback @ 03/21/08 00:51:57

I am also an advocate of non-violence in all instances except the last line of defense, but found the Dalai Lama’s response (and threats to “resign”) very telling… that as the leader of Buddhism on Earth, he does not have a practical solution to this crisis.

Raised in a devout household dedicated to the teachings and a way of life known as doukhoborism a somewhat botched version of Christianity which was persecuted to the point of nearly being decimated for it’s pacifists beliefs back in early Russia, this whole thing resonates with me in a rather peculiar way. As one article puts it.. These people, the Doukhobor, adopted the name, but gave their own interpretation to it , saying: “we are Spirit Wrestlers because we wrestle with and for the Spirit of God.” By this they meant that in struggling for a better life they would use only the spiritual power of love, rather than any form of violence or coercion.

Needless to say a rather strict regiment of adherence to traditions in a stifling rigid fashion didn’t go over to well with me along side what I perceived to be an ever changing world even as a child. With my family considered to be what you might call blue blood within the doukhobor hierarchy, the early signs of my digressions were seen as a significant problem and further complicated by the fact I was only child.

Other relatives of my mine were busy making plans in how to go about raising new generations destined to carry on the faith and traditions while I was making plans in ensuring my own blood line came to a griding halt.

In spite of my resistance and the fight I put up refusing to be brought back into the fold, a thorny issue which was never resolved right up until the death of my father, many of the “tenets“did nonetheless leave a lasting impression upon me. For instance this notable saying forever etched into my brain…

The welfare of the world is not worth the life of one child

when you “say it” it certainly sounds great not to mention rather noble if not even pretty damn righteous. The question is, or at least it was for me, is whether or not this was a legitimate basis to stake ones own life upon. For them the answer was an absolute yes, always, no exceptions… me I wasn’t so sure.

To quote wiki

To avoid the temptation to use the weapons they possessed, even in an emergency (say, to resist a robber), the Doukhobors of the three Governorates of Transcaucasia made the decision to destroy them. As the Doukhobors assembled to burn their weapons in the night of on June 28/29 (July 10/11, Gregorian Calendar) 1895, with the singing of psalms and spiritual songs, arrests and beatings by government\‘s Cossacks followed. Soon, Cossacks were billeted in many of the Large Party Doukhobors\’ villages, and over 4000 of their original residents were dispersed through villages in other parts of Georgia. Many of those died of starvation and exposure.

Possibly their highest development and achievement was manifested by the Doukhobors at the end of the 1800s. Inspired by the high ideals and dynamic leadership of Peter Vasilevich Verigin together with some brave individuals who were willing to take a conscientious stand on matters of belief and practice, the Doukhobors made a decisive move against militarism and all forms of violence. On Easter Sunday, Matvey Lebedev and ten of his officers serving in the reserve battalion at Elizavetpol began rejection of war by refusing to go to church parade and dropping their guns and their military insignias. “War”, they said, “was incompatible with Christianity, and Christ had commanded them “Resist not him that is evil. The men were arrested, beaten to submission, threatened with death, then seen to Siberian exile.

From the article cited earlier… The tsarist state and church authorities reacted strongly against the ban on killing; instead, they tortured and exiled these Russian dissidents, and took away their normal freedoms. Many people died, Suffering of such proportions attracted world wide attention, and with the help of humanitarians such as Lev N. Tolstoy and the Society of Friends (Quakers) one third of the persecuted Doukhobors were able to emigrate to Canada as \“as a home away from home, a haven, a refuge

I think the Tibetans are faced with many of the same internal conflicts the doukhobors were faced with while striving to remain true to their ideals in the face of what are certainly adverse and rather trying circumstances. In spite of my upbringing I do not see a practical solution to any of this either. I don’t believe there is one. If you are willing to go balls to walls with your beliefs in adhering to non violence at all costs then I believe you are forced to bear the brunt of the consequences that come along with that.

The doukhobors indeed survived. Suppose I’m proof of that. They continue to participate strongly in anti war efforts and the peace movement to this day their efforts bringing to them the “Order of Canada” awarded to them by the government of Canada in 1977.

Was it worth it ? I dunno. I don’t think it’s about that really. Solution implies a finish line of sorts. I don’t know if there is one. The Tibetans will go on. In what capacity, remains to be seen.

JustLurking @ 03/21/08 03:45:21

Insightful.

A religion has little need for an actual state and to strive for one generally leads to the perversion of the basic tenets of true belief.

Witness modern Israel, that touts itself as a democracy, but maintains it Jewish heritage and Zionist goals through violent occupation and subjugation bordering genocide of the Palestinians and covets their lands.

There are over a billion Catholics around the world, one in six of the entire global population, yet Vatican City is but .44 square kilometers, not quite 3/4’s the size of The Mall in Washington, D.C.

Somehow I doubt the cause of Catholics around the world or the influence of their Pope would be greater if The Holy See controlled all of the Italian Peninsula.

Peace,

GWHunta @ 03/21/08 11:26:36

I keep thinking about Seattle. It took some violence to get people to wake up to the issue. Similar here. As Josh writes, it appears that eggs needed to be broken for the world to take notice. Where do you go from here, is the question. I admit to not knowing. I frankly don’t know enough about internal Chinese politics to know what will is possible/what could work. You could argue that the Tibetans need a Malcolm/MLK one-two to put pressure on the Chinese. But of course, nothing will happen w/out intl. pressure (like with South Africa).

anthony @ 03/21/08 13:21:40

China is on the rise. These Summer Olympic games have been at the pinnacle of their national agenda and these protests are clearly feeding off the increased focus on the Chinese hosting these games in Beijing.

Another matter critical to China is their re-unification of Taiwan to the mainland and it is unlikely they could possibly yield to international pressure regarding Tibetan independence and insist the U.S. and the rest the West stick to their alleged One China Policy as arms continue to be sold to Taiwan.

It would seem a “stay the course policy” on Tibet after over half a century of “occupation” and Tibetan integration into the larger Chinese national scheme
would be a reasonable expectation for the issue, certainly until the question of re-unification of Taiwan to mainland China is settled.

Disruption of the Olympics as an international protest against a longstanding Chinese policy is likely to further radicalize Chinese nationalism and set the stage for a military solution for the re-unification of Taiwan to mainland and quite possibly direct military conflict between U.S. and Chinese military forces in the region.

Not what the Dalai Lama nor his movement has in mind.

Sometimes no Peace

GWHunta @ 03/21/08 13:49:03

Disruption of the Olympics as an international protest against a longstanding Chinese policy is likely to further radicalize Chinese nationalism and set the stage for a military solution for the re-unification of Taiwan to mainland and quite possibly direct military conflict between U.S. and Chinese military forces in the region.

You really believe that? No way that is happening. The U.S. would never go to war w/ the Chinese over some pissed off monks and Taiwanese.

anthony @ 03/21/08 14:13:34

Many military experts are apprehensive regarding the potential for military conflict and the forced annexation of Taiwan by mainland Chinese forces, but all predictions for when this might occur are set beyond the scheduled Olympics in Beijing and dependent upon diplomatic efforts for a peaceful re-unification.

I’m not saying that the U.S. is contemplating or would ever consider war with China over Tibet.

It would not.

Tibet is part of China and not recognized as an independent or occupied state by the U.S. or even the United Nations for that matter.

What I am saying is that the current popular “crisis” in the media regarding the ongoing protest of Chinese rule in what was formerly Tibet has the potential to cast a pall over the Olympic Games in Beijing and poison the international diplomatic atmosphere afterward with regard to a peaceful re-unification of Taiwan to mainland Chinese rule.

In the event of military conflict over the re-unification issue, even if said conflict was initiated by the Taiwanese government / military, U.S. naval forces in the region would be called upon to protect the Taiwanese from Chinese aggression and / or retaliation.

If these naval forces were fired upon, a “war” between China and the U.S. could ensue.

Nobody is likely to be going to war to return rule back over to Tibetan monks or to “free Tibet.”

Military conflict over Chinese insistence upon re-unification with Taiwan however remains a distinct possibility.

If this possibility is to be minimized, a diplomatic solution must be fostered and supported internationally and that wouldn’t be helped by an Olympic boycott over what was formerly Tibet.

Peace,

GWHunta @ 03/21/08 18:51:34

Tibet dominates Taiwan presidential campaign Taiwan’s presidential rivals pounded the campaign trail Wednesday just three days ahead of a crunch election that has been gate-crashed by China’s military crackdown in Tibet…

The unrest in the Himalayan region and China’s response has turned a harsh spotlight on Taiwan’s own fraught relations with Beijing, which still claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island.

The formulation of even the appearance of an interconnection of these separate issues in the international mindset is not a diplomatic goal of the mainland Chinese government.

GWHunta @ 03/21/08 19:06:18

The U.S. would never go to war w/ the Chinese over some pissed off monks and Taiwanese.

Over monks? No. Over Taiwan…? Eeeehhh… Study the great Greek Pelopponesion War. World War III could easily be sparked over a Taiwanese conflict. A military offensive on Taiwan would be seen as a direct threat to the America’s ability to maintain and enforce global hegemony. Or, put more succinctly, it would be a complete bitch-slap to American foreign policy.

If this possibility is to be minimized, a diplomatic solution must be fostered and supported internationally and that wouldn’t be helped by an Olympic boycott over what was formerly Tibet.

I don’t think so. International solution, yes. However a boycott wouldn’t really put a dent in Chinese superpower ambitions. They wouldn’t want to invade Taiwan because their sideshow was boycotted. In fact, faced with a strong enough international boycott (which I of course realize is not going to happen), they could possibly even be moved to a softer stance. The fact that they are unafraid of international outcry before the Olympics have even happened I find to be rather telling indeed.

This is not a new situation. Recall the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany…

Draconis @ 03/22/08 15:43:13

Caught some blurb over this in the paper today.. Seems we’re in trouble with China over it… There’s been some comment made about Canada being a very very bad beacon of democracy for criticizing China’s actions.. or something

I hope this doesn’t interrupt our supply of Ichiban noodles

JustLurking @ 03/22/08 19:40:33

Or accelerate the global dollar dump.

Sometimes no Piece

GWHunta @ 03/22/08 23:47:11

Dalai Lama: ‘‘I Am Prepared to Face China. I Will Go to Beijing:‘’ The Independent UK’s Andrew Buncombe says, ‘‘Almost half a century after he fled to India, the Dalai Lama has raised the extraordinary prospect of traveling to Beijing and holding face-to-talks with the Chinese regime in an effort to resolve Tibet’s most serious crisis for two decades.’‘

ShiftShapers @ 03/23/08 14:07:15

Tibetans Say Several Died in Latest Riots: John Ruwitch, Reuters: ‘‘Tibetans in China’s tense southwestern province of Sichuan said on Friday they believed police had killed several people in anti-Chinese riots there this week, disputing official claims none died.’‘

ShiftShapers @ 03/23/08 14:14:12

First, a correction is long overdue: the word “China” or “Chinese” cannot be found in “China’s” language or in “Chinese” rich history records. What? Are you kidding? NO, I AM NOT KIDDING!

1) “China” and “Chinese” were imposed /used by the Europeans. A simple explanation might be a convenient reference to the place where a bowl of porcelain was made. But, before the Europeans first lay their eyes on a china, be it a rice bowl or a tea cup, the peoples living in that place already had a name for their country. It is called Zhong Guo. Its literal translation is: the Middle Kingdom.

2) What about its peoples? How do they address each other? There are over fifty ethnicities living in Zhong Guo. The Tibetan people is one of them. The word “Tibet” or “Tibetan” was also imposed by the Europeans. But long before the Europeans (the English) landed on Tibet, Tibetans called themselves “ bod”.or “po” . This is the word still in use, referring to both as the place and the people.

3) So, the question like , “When did Chinese first invade Tibet?” is an oxymoron. The fallacy is comparable to a hypothetical question: “When did Native Americans invade Navajo or Apache tribal lands? “ In America, you have Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw, Sioux, Chippewa, Apache, etc. In Zhong Guo, they have Han, Hui, Mian, Zang, Zhuang, .. … about 50 plus ethnicities in all living on the land called the Middle Kingdom.

4) So, just like the Navajo people, who is an ethnic Native American, the Tibetan people is an ethnic Chinese. What? How could you say that Tibetan people is an ethnic Chinese, since their culture, clothing, food are so different ? Be calm, my friend. There are at least a dozen of other ethnic Chinese minorities whose culture, language, clothing and ways of religious worshiping are as exotic as , if not more than, that of Tibetans!

Then, what makes the Tibetan issue come to a head? A short answer is : the English and CIA’ s never-ending meddling. A long answer is: well, let’s do the long one:

5) As early as the seventh century, the ethnic Tibetan and ethnic Han Chinese established close ties through royal inter-marriages———-Han Emperor’s daughter married the head of Tibetan tribe. The alliances was cemented further into military and political bond by a mutual agreement or a bilateral practice: Han (or other ethnic Chinese, depending on which dynasty took control.) officials came to Tibetan tribal court to assist in administration and defense matters, whereas Tibetan court sent its officials to Han Chinese court. For a very long time, Central Chinese court subsidized the Tibetan court.

6) To be specific in one period: In the middle of the thirteenth century ( about 100 years after William the Conqueror invaded England), Tibet was formally incorporated into the Chinese territory of the Yuan Dynasty, Yuan Emperor Kublai entrusted to the Sakya Sect the power of administering the Tibet region, setting up the General Council (renamed Political Council in 1288) which was a central government organ exercising administrative power over the country’s Buddhist affairs and the Tibetan affairs. The Yuan government instituted the system of imperial preceptor, conferred titles on political and religious leaders, delimited administrative divisions, appointed local officials, took census, collated and stipulated revenue and taxes, dividing the Tibet region into thirteen Wan Hu (ten thousand households). The heads of Wan Hu were conferred upon and appointed directly by the Yuan Court. There were three Chief Military Commands of the Pacification Commissioners’ Offices which took charge of garrison troops and the administrative affairs of the various Wan Hu Offices in Tibet proper and other Tibetan areas. (The above was from historical records at the authoritative China’s websites)

7) This type of integrity has kept its steadfastness until the 19th century, when China’s Qing dynasty was vitally crippled by the opium trade imposed by the English. In 1888, The English invaded Bhutan and from there launched its first attack on Tibet. The invasion met Tibetans fierce resistance. (see http://scholar.ilib.cn/A-xzdxxb200403002… ) In 1904 the English army, headed by Francis Younghusband, launched its second invasion on Tibet. “Younghusband slaughtered 1,300 Tibetans in Gyangzê. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_You… On the Chinese records, British had slaughtered 5000 plus Tibetans at the end of the invasion. The Anglo-Tibetan Treaty of 1904 was forced upon the Tibetans. It was at the time when the Tibetans’ usual protector ——China’s Emperor could not protect himself from the uprisings inside; neither could he keep at bay the European powers from outside. (Qing Dynasty ended in 1911.)

8) But In 1906 the English made the Anglo-Chinese Convention with Qing Emperor. It confirmed the Anglo-Tibetan Treaty of 1904, Britain agreed “not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet” while China engaged “not to permit any other foreign state to interfere with the territory or internal administration of Tibet”. In the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, drafted by the British, Britain also recognized the “suzerainty of China over Thibet” and, in conformity with such admitted principle, engaged “not to enter into negotiations with Tibet except through the intermediary of the Chinese Government” (The above was from Wikipedia. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet#Sven_…

9) In 1914, China was in chaos. English seized chance to shovel “the Simla Convention“ down Tibetan and China’s throat. By this treaty the English would partition Tibet into two: Inner Tibet and Outer Tibet. But In the end, Tibetans by pressure signed the treaty, but China government refused to sign. Since then the World War I, the Invasion of China by Japan, World War II and China’s Civil War ensued. Tibet was in neglect.

10) In 1949, Peoples’ Republic of China was established. Mao Zedong declared that new China shall “abolish all unequal treaties forced upon the peoples of China by foreign powers” This certainly includes treaties coerced upon the ethnic Tibetans by the English.

11) In 1957, CIA was involved. It transported Dalai Lama’s followers to Saipan Island in the Pacific for five months training “in modern weapons and guerrilla tactics. They were also trained in espionage and codes, and in the operation of the hand-cranked radio transmitter/receiver.” “We only lived to kill Chinese,” recalled one Tibetan veteran. “Our hopes were high.” One of the trainees, Gyato Wangdu (who would later become the last commander of the Chushi Candrug), asked CIA operations officer Roger McCarthy for “a portable nuclear weapon of some kind…that the trainees might employ to destroy Chinese by the hundreds.” The CIA declined, but McCarthy noted that Wangdu “did take to demolition training with renewed enthusiasm” and became quite taken with bazookas and mortars. (The above was from WAR at the TOP of the WORLD. By: Bageant, Joe, Military History, 08897328, Feb2004, Vol. 20, Issue 6)

12) In 1959, Tibetan armed insurgents accelerated their attacks on ethnic Han and Peoples Liberation Army. They were supplied with arms and ammunitions air dropped by CIA Mao ordered more troops entering Tibet to quash. On or about March 10, 1959, Dalai Lama made the decision to flee. On March 17, he was smuggled out of Potala palace schemed by CIA, On March 30 he entered into India, starting his exile.

13) In 1972, Kissinger came to Beijing. China broke away from USSR and shifted to the US side. (China attended 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles while the USSR was boycotting it.) It was then that under Nixon’s order, CIA stopped training Tibetans guerrilla on its Colorado military base. But UK did not stop supporting the exile Tibetans. In 1987, “Free Tibet” was founded in UK. Now it branched out all over the world, with 30 branches in UK alone. It was properly then that Dalai Lama made a decision, or under the guidance of MI 6, to go for secession without armed rebellions. Very likely, the end of military support might be interpreted by CIA, or as a joint decision with MI 6, as the start of political support. That requires an image platform for Dalai Lama to leapfrog.

14) 1989 is the year that affords him one. Chinese student movements broke out in the Tiananmen Square. China political structure was shaken. The Tibetans in exiles seized this chance to instigate demonstrations inside Tibet. Had China government lost its control, Tibetan secession might have been done. Anyway, CIA and MI 6 secret campaign guaranteed him a Nobel Prize.

15) In the years ensued, Dalai Lama was elevated to the peak of a praise mountain piled up by Hollywood celebrities. Nobody in the west gave a dame to the Tibetan woman neglected at the very bottom of Tibetan theocratic hierarchy. Invitations, speeches, the spotlight by western politicians are made to wash away peoples’ memory that Dalai Lama was once an armed rebellion schemer, the participant and responsible for mass killings in Tibet. No matter, as long as he can be used to embarrass China or stir up a riot against other ethnic Chinese, he serves the west well.

ozmanx @ 03/23/08 17:14:40

LAWLZ!

Draconis @ 03/24/08 18:43:02

That was so translated from Chinese.

©©© ©©©©©©

Memnoch07 @ 03/24/08 22:27:18

Friendly Feudalism

(updated and expanded version, January 2007)

The Tibet Myth

By Michael Parenti

1. For Lords and Lamas

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor dogmatic—so say its adherents. For many of them Buddhism is less a theology and more a meditative and investigative discipline intended to promote an inner harmony and enlightenment while directing us to a path of right living. Generally, the spiritual focus is not only on oneself but on the welfare of others. One tries to put aside egoistic pursuits and gain a deeper understanding of one’s connection to all people and things. “Socially engaged Buddhism” tries to blend individual liberation with responsible social action in order to build an enlightened society.

A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. 1

In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices. The brawls damaged the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, “it would use worshippers’ donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars.” 2

As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest’s sway. The Tacchu monks accused Komatsu of selling writings and drawings under the temple’s name for his own gain. They also were appalled by the frequency with which he was seen in the company of women. Komatsu in turn sought to isolate and punish monks who were critical of his leadership. The conflict lasted some five years and made it into the courts. 3

But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La. The Dalai Lama himself stated that “the pervasive influence of Buddhism” in Tibet, “amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” 4

A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” 5 In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet. Here is a historical irony: the first Dalai Lama was installed by a Chinese army.

His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers. 6

For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks…. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.” 7

In 1792, many Kagyu monasteries were confiscated and their monks were forcibly converted to the Gelug sect (the Dalai Lama’s denomination). The Gelug school, known also as the “Yellow Hats,” showed little tolerance or willingness to mix their teachings with other Buddhist sects. In the words of one of their traditional prayers: “Praise to you, violent god of the Yellow Hat teachings/who reduces to particles of dust/ great beings, high officials and ordinary people/ who pollute and corrupt the Gelug doctrine.” 8 An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be. 9 This grim history remains largely unvisited by present-day followers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” 10

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” 11

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. 12 Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” 13 In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 14 The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. 15 The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land—or the monastery’s land—without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.16 Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. 17

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.”18 Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.19

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.20

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation—including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation—were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”21 Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 22

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.23

Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”24 As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.

II. Secularization vs. Spirituality

What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also granted a direct role in internal administration “to promote social reforms.” Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in an attempt to effect reconstruction. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants. “Contrary to popular belief in the West,” claims one observer, the Chinese “took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion.”25

Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China.26 The approval of the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was first installed in Lhasa, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.27 Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.28

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed.29 “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane.30 In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.”31 Eventually the resistance crumbled.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.32

Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in Hitler’s SS) wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the Tibetans who resisted the Chinese “were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived.” They also had to live in a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants—all of which Harrer treats as sure evidence of the dreadful nature of the Chinese occupation.33

By 1961, Chinese occupation authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes.. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.34

Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But monks who had been conscripted as children into the religious orders were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.35

Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.”36 The official 1953 census—six years before the Chinese crackdown—recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.37 Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves—of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”38

In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration. Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate private plots, sell their harvest surpluses, decide for themselves what crops to grow, and keep yaks and sheep. Communication with the outside world was again permitted, and frontier controls were eased to permit some Tibetans to visit exiled relatives in India and Nepal.39 By the 1980s many of the principal lamas had begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile communities abroad, “restoring their monasteries in Tibet and helping to revitalize Buddhism there.”40

As of 2007 Tibetan Buddhism was still practiced widely and tolerated by officialdom. Religious pilgrimages and other standard forms of worship were allowed but within limits. All monks and nuns had to sign a loyalty pledge that they would not use their religious position to foment secession or dissent. And displaying photos of the Dalai Lama was declared illegal.41

In the 1990s, the Han, the ethnic group comprising over 95 percent of China’s immense population, began moving in substantial numbers into Tibet. On the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse, signs of Han colonization are readily visible. Chinese run the factories and many of the shops and vending stalls. Tall office buildings and large shopping centers have been built with funds that might have been better spent on water treatment plants and housing. Chinese cadres in Tibet too often view their Tibetan neighbors as backward and lazy, in need of economic development and “patriotic education.” During the 1990s Tibetan government employees suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies were purged from office, and campaigns were once again launched to discredit the Dalai Lama. Individual Tibetans reportedly were subjected to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor for carrying out separatist activities and engaging in “political subversion.” Some were held in administrative detention without adequate food, water, and blankets, subjected to threats, beatings, and other mistreatment.42

Tibetan history, culture, and certainly religion are slighted in schools. Teaching materials, though translated into Tibetan, focus mainly on Chinese history and culture. Chinese family planning regulations allow a three-child limit for Tibetan families. (There is only a one-child limit for Han families throughout China, and a two-child limit for rural Han families whose first child is a girl.) If a Tibetan couple goes over the three-child limit, the excess children can be denied subsidized daycare, health care, housing, and education. These penalties have been enforced irregularly and vary by district.43 None of these child services, it should be noted, were available to Tibetans before the Chinese takeover.

For the rich lamas and secular lords, the Communist intervention was an unmitigated calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Many, however, escaped that fate. Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.44

In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline “Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right.”45 In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the Dalai Lama called upon the British government to release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Into the twenty-first century, via the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits that are more respectable sounding than the CIA, the U.S. Congress continued to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional millions for “democracy activities” within the Tibetan exile community. In addition to these funds, the Dalai Lama received money from financier George Soros.46

Whatever the Dalai Lama’s associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he did speak often of peace, love, and nonviolence. He himself really cannot be blamed for the abuses of Tibet’s ancien régime, having been but 25 years old when he fled into exile. In a 1994 interview, he went on record as favoring the building of schools and roads in his country. He said the corvée (forced unpaid serf labor) and certain taxes imposed on the peasants were “extremely bad.” And he disliked the way people were saddled with old debts sometimes passed down from generation to generation.47During the half century of living in the western world, he had embraced concepts such as human rights and religious freedom, ideas largely unknown in old Tibet. He even proposed democracy for Tibet, featuring a written constitution and a representative assembly.48

In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an unsettling effect on the exile community. It read in part: “Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability.” Marxism fosters “the equitable utilization of the means of production” and cares about “the fate of the working classes” and “the victims of . . . exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and . . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.49

But he also sent a reassuring message to “those who live in abundance”: “It is a good thing to be rich… Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And to the poor he offers this admonition: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune… It is better to develop a positive attitude.”50

In 2005 the Dalai Lama signed a widely advertised statement along with ten other Nobel Laureates supporting the “inalienable and fundamental human right” of working people throughout the world to form labor unions to protect their interests, in accordance with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many countries “this fundamental right is poorly protected and in some it is explicitly banned or brutally suppressed,” the statement read. Burma, China, Colombia, Bosnia, and a few other countries were singled out as among the worst offenders. Even the United States “fails to adequately protect workers’ rights to form unions and bargain collectively. Millions of U.S. workers lack any legal protection to form unions….”51

The Dalai Lama also gave full support to removing the ingrained traditional obstacles that have kept Tibetan nuns from receiving an education. Upon arriving in exile, few nuns could read or write. In Tibet their activities had been devoted to daylong periods of prayer and chants. But in northern India they now began reading Buddhist philosophy and engaging in theological study and debate, activities that in old Tibet had been open only to monks.52

In November 2005 the Dalai Lama spoke at Stanford University on “The Heart of Nonviolence,” but stopped short of a blanket condemnation of all violence. Violent actions that are committed in order to reduce future suffering are not to be condemned, he said, citing World War II as an example of a worthy effort to protect democracy. What of the four years of carnage and mass destruction in Iraq, a war condemned by most of the world—even by a conservative pope—as a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity? The Dalai Lama was undecided: “The Iraq war—it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”53 Earlier he had voiced support for the U.S. military intervention against Yugoslavia and, later on, the U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan.54

III. Exit Feudal Theocracy

As the Shangri-La myth would have it, in old Tibet the people lived in contented and tranquil symbiosis with their monastic and secular lords. Rich lamas and poor monks, wealthy landlords and impoverished serfs were all bonded together, mutually sustained by the comforting balm of a deeply spiritual and pacific culture.

One is reminded of the idealized image of feudal Europe presented by latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants living in the secure embrace of their Church, under the more or less benign protection of their lords.55 Again we are invited to accept a particular culture in its idealized form divorced from its murky material history. This means accepting it as presented by its favored class, by those who profited most from it. The Shangri-La image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic actuality than does the pastoral image of medieval Europe.

Seen in all its grim realities, old Tibet confirms the view I expressed in an earlier book, namely that culture is anything but neutral. Culture can operate as a legitimating cover for a host of grave injustices, benefiting a privileged portion of society at great cost to the rest.56 In theocratic feudal Tibet, ruling interests manipulated the traditional culture to fortify their own wealth and power. The theocracy equated rebellious thought and action with satanic influence. It propagated the general presumption of landlord superiority and peasant unworthiness. The rich were represented as deserving their good life, and the lowly poor as deserving their mean existence, all codified in teachings about the karmic residue of virtue and vice accumulated from past lives, presented as part of God’s will.

Were the more affluent lamas just hypocrites who preached one thing and secretly believed another? More likely they were genuinely attached to those beliefs that brought such good results for them. That their theology so perfectly supported their material privileges only strengthened the sincerity with which it was embraced.

It might be said that we denizens of the modern secular world cannot grasp the equations of happiness and pain, contentment and custom, that characterize more traditionally spiritual societies. This is probably true, and it may explain why some of us idealize such societies. But still, a gouged eye is a gouged eye; a flogging is a flogging; and the grinding exploitation of serfs and slaves is a brutal class injustice whatever its cultural wrapping. There is a difference between a spiritual bond and human bondage, even when both exist side by side

Many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their country, but it appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he represented. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that the Dalai Lama continues to be revered in Tibet, but

. . . few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China’s land reform to the clans. Tibet’s former slaves say they, too, don’t want their former masters to return to power. “I’ve already lived that life once before,” said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, “I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.”57

It should be noted that the Dalai Lama is not the only highly placed lama chosen in childhood as a reincarnation. One or another reincarnate lama or tulku—a spiritual teacher of special purity elected to be reborn again and again—can be found presiding over most major monasteries. The tulku system is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. Scores of Tibetan lamas claim to be reincarnate tulkus.

The very first tulku was a lama known as the Karmapa who appeared nearly three centuries before the first Dalai Lama. The Karmapa is leader of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition known as the Karma Kagyu. The rise of the Gelugpa sect headed by the Dalai Lama led to a politico-religious rivalry with the Kagyu that has lasted five hundred years and continues to play itself out within the Tibetan exile community today. That the Kagyu sect has grown famously, opening some six hundred new centers around the world in the last thirty-five years, has not helped the situation.

The search for a tulku, Erik Curren reminds us, has not always been conducted in that purely spiritual mode portrayed in certain Hollywood films. “Sometimes monastic officials wanted a child from a powerful local noble family to give the cloister more political clout. Other times they wanted a child from a lower-class family who would have little leverage to influence the child’s upbringing.” On other occasions “a local warlord, the Chinese emperor or even the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa might [have tried] to impose its choice of tulku on a monastery for political reasons.”58

Such may have been the case in the selection of the 17th Karmapa, whose monastery-in-exile is situated in Rumtek, in the Indian state of Sikkim. In 1993 the monks of the Karma Kagyu tradition had a candidate of their own choice. The Dalai Lama, along with several dissenting Karma Kagyu leaders (and with the support of the Chinese government!) backed a different boy. The Kagyu monks charged that the Dalai Lama had overstepped his authority in attempting to select a leader for their sect. “Neither his political role nor his position as a lama in his own Gelugpa tradition entitled him to choose the Karmapa, who is a leader of a different tradition…”59 As one of the Kagyu leaders insisted, “Dharma is about thinking for yourself. It is not about automatically following a teacher in all things, no matter how respected that teacher may be. More than anyone else, Buddhists should respect other people’s rights—their human rights and their religious freedom.”60

What followed was a dozen years of conflict in the Tibetan exile community, punctuated by intermittent riots, intimidation, physical attacks, blacklisting, police harassment, litigation, official corruption, and the looting and undermining of the Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek by supporters of the Gelugpa faction. All this has caused at least one western devotee to wonder if the years of exile were not hastening the moral corrosion of Tibetan Buddhism.61

What is clear is that not all Tibetan Buddhists accept the Dalai Lama as their theological and spiritual mentor. Though he is referred to as the “spiritual leader of Tibet,” many see this title as little more than a formality. It does not give him authority over the four religious schools of Tibet other than his own, “just as calling the U.S. president the ‘leader of the free world’ gives him no role in governing France or Germany.”62

Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].”63

The women interviewed by Lewis recounted stories of their grandmothers’ ordeals with monks who used them as “wisdom consorts.” By sleeping with the monks, the grandmothers were told, they gained “the means to enlightenment” — after all, the Buddha himself had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment.

The women also mentioned the “rampant” sex that the supposedly spiritual and abstemious monks practiced with each other in the Gelugpa sect. The women who were mothers spoke bitterly about the monastery’s confiscation of their young boys in Tibet. They claimed that when a boy cried for his mother, he would be told “Why do you cry for her, she gave you up—she’s just a woman.”

The monks who were granted political asylum in California applied for public assistance. Lewis, herself a devotee for a time, assisted with the paperwork. She observes that they continue to receive government checks amounting to $550 to $700 per month along with Medicare. In addition, the monks reside rent free in nicely furnished apartments. “They pay no utilities, have free access to the Internet on computers provided for them, along with fax machines, free cell and home phones and cable TV.”

They also receive a monthly payment from their order, along with contributions and dues from their American followers. Some devotees eagerly carry out chores for the monks, including grocery shopping and cleaning their apartments and toilets. These same holy men, Lewis remarks, “have no problem criticizing Americans for their ‘obsession with material things.’”64

To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity.”65

One common complaint among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet’s religious culture is being undermined by the Chinese occupation. To some extent this seems to be the case. Many of the monasteries are closed, and much of the theocracy seems to have passed into history. Whether Chinese rule has brought betterment or disaster is not the central issue here. The question is what kind of country was old Tibet. What I am disputing is the supposedly pristine spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. We can advocate religious freedom and independence for a new Tibet without having to embrace the mythology about old Tibet. Tibetan feudalism was cloaked in Buddhism, but the two are not to be equated. In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La.

Finally, let it be said that if Tibet’s future is to be positioned somewhere within China’s emerging free-market paradise, then this does not bode well for the Tibetans. China boasts a dazzling 8 percent economic growth rate and is emerging as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers. But with economic growth has come an ever deepening gulf between rich and poor. Most Chinese live close to the poverty level or well under it, while a small group of newly brooded capitalists profit hugely in collusion with shady officials. Regional bureaucrats milk the country dry, extorting graft from the populace and looting local treasuries. Land grabbing in cities and countryside by avaricious developers and corrupt officials at the expense of the populace are almost everyday occurrences. Tens of thousands of grassroot protests and disturbances have erupted across the country, usually to be met with unforgiving police force. Corruption is so prevalent, reaching into so many places, that even the normally complacent national leadership was forced to take notice and began moving against it in late 2006.

Workers in China who try to organize labor unions in the corporate dominated “business zones” risk losing their jobs or getting beaten and imprisoned. Millions of business zone workers toil twelve-hour days at subsistence wages. With the health care system now being privatized, free or affordable medical treatment is no longer available for millions. Men have tramped into the cities in search of work, leaving an increasingly impoverished countryside populated by women, children, and the elderly. The suicide rate has increased dramatically, especially among women.66

China’s natural environment is sadly polluted. Most of its fabled rivers and many lakes are dead, producing massive fish die-offs from the billions of tons of industrial emissions and untreated human waste dumped into them. Toxic effluents, including pesticides and herbicides, seep into ground water or directly into irrigation canals. Cancer rates in villages situated along waterways have skyrocketed a thousand-fold. Hundreds of millions of urban residents breathe air rated as dangerously unhealthy, contaminated by industrial growth and the recent addition of millions of automobiles. An estimated 400,000 die prematurely every year from air pollution. Government environmental agencies have no enforcement power to stop polluters, and generally the government ignores or denies such problems, concentrating instead on industrial growth.67

China’s own scientific establishment reports that unless greenhouse gases are curbed, the nation will face massive crop failures along with catastrophic food and water shortages in the years ahead. In 2006-2007 severe drought was already afflicting southwest China.68

If China is the great success story of speedy free market development, and is to be the model and inspiration for Tibet’s future, then old feudal Tibet indeed may start looking a lot better than it actually was.
Notes:

1. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, (University of California Press, 2000), 6, 112-113, 157.

2. Kyong-Hwa Seok, “Korean Monk Gangs Battle for Temple Turf,” San Francisco Examiner, 3 December 1998. 3. Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2006. 4. Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 205. 5. Erik D. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press 2005), 41. 6. Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (Monthly Review Press, 1964), 119, 123; and Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (University of California Press, 1995), 6-16. 7. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 50. 8. Stephen Bachelor, “Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 7, Spring 1998. Bachelor discusses the sectarian fanaticism and doctrinal clashes that ill fit the Western portrait of Buddhism as a non-dogmatic and tolerant tradition. 9. Dhoring Tenzin Paljor, Autobiography, cited in Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 8. 10. Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 64. 11. See Gary Wilson’s report in Worker’s World, 6 February 1997. 12. Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 62 and 174. 13. As skeptically noted by Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 9. 14. Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering, The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashì-Tsering (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). 15. Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 110. 16. Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5 and passim. 17. Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959), 15, 19-21, 24. 18. Quoted in Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25. 19. Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 31. 20. Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 175-176; and Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25-26. 21. Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 113. 22. A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet rev. ed. (Armonk, N.Y. and London: 1996), 9 and 7-33 for a general discussion of feudal Tibet; see also Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 241-249; Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 3-5; and Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, passim. 23. Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 91-96. 24. Waddell, Landon, O’Connor, and Chapman are quoted in Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 123-125. 25. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 52. 26. Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985), 29. 27. See Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and William Leary, “Secret Mission to Tibet,” Air & Space, December 1997/January 1998. 28. On the CIA’s links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). 29. Leary, “Secret Mission to Tibet.“� 30. Hugh Deane, “The Cold War in Tibet,“� CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987). 31. George Ginsburg and Michael Mathos Communist China and Tibet (1964), quoted in Deane, “The Cold War in Tibet.” Deane notes that author Bina Roy reached a similar conclusion. 32. See Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 248 and passim; and Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet, passim. 33. Harrer, Return to Tibet, 54. 34. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 36-38, 41, 57-58; London Times, 4 July 1966. 35. Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 29 and 47-48. 36. Tendzin Choegyal, “The Truth about Tibet,” Imprimis (publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan), April 1999. 37. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 52-53. 38. Elaine Kurtenbach, Associate Press report, 12 February 1998. 39. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 47-48. 40. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 8. 41. San Francisco Chonicle, 9 January 2007. 42. Report by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril (Berkeley Calif.: 2001), passim. 43. International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril, 66-68, 98. 44. im Mann, “CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ’60s, Files Show,“� Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998. 45. News & Observer, 6 September 1995, cited in Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 3. 46. Heather Cottin, “George Soros, Imperial Wizard,” CovertAction Quarterly no. 74 (Fall 2002). 47. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 51. 48. Tendzin Choegyal, “The Truth about Tibet.“� 49. The Dalai Lama in Marianne Dresser (ed.), Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1996) 50. These comments are from a book of the Dalai Lama’s writings quoted in Nikolai Thyssen, “Oceaner af onkel Tom,” Dagbladet Information, 29 December 2003, (translated for me by Julius Wilm). Thyssen’s review (in Danish) can be found at http://www.information.dk/Indgang/VisArkiv.dna?pArtNo=20031229154141.txt. 51. “A Global Call for Human Rights in the Workplace,“� New York Times, 6 December 2005. 52. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 2007. 53. San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 2005. 54. Times of India 13 October 2000; Samantha Conti’s report, Reuter, 17 June 1994; Amitabh Pal, “The Dalai Lama Interview,” Progressive, January 2006. 55. The Gelders draw this comparison, The Timely Rain, 64. 56. Michael Parenti, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006). 57. John Pomfret, “Tibet Caught in China’s Web,�” Washington Post, 23 July 1999. 58. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 3. 59. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 13 and 138. 60. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 21. 61. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, passim. For books that are favorable toward the Karmapa appointed by the Dalai Lama’s faction, see Lea Terhune, Karmapa of Tibet: The Politics of Reincarnation (Wisdom Publications, 2004); Gaby Naher, Wrestling the Dragon (Rider 2004); Mick Brown, The Dance of 17 Lives (Bloomsbury 2004). 62. Erik Curren, “Not So Easy to Say Who is Karmapa,” correspondence, 22 August 2005, www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=22.1577,0,0,1,0. 63. Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 15 July 2004. 64. Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 16 July 2004. 65. Ma Jian, Stick Out Your Tongue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). 66. See the PBS documentary, China from the Inside, January 2007, KQED.PBS.org/kqed/chinanside. 67. San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2007. 68. “China: Global Warming to Cause Food Shortages,“� People’s Weekly World, 13 January 2007

ozmanx @ 03/25/08 22:09:31

Mongol not chinese army
mongol not european or chinese name

red fascist bull

johnnycivil @ 03/25/08 23:08:45

Mikeal Parenti is a burned out far leftist, marxist, communist, anti-religion, anti-culture, old so called “scholar” I met him when i was in the 2nd year of college when he came to my college to discuss “democracy in America”. I actually was looking forward to the talk, which turned out to be a bitch session of Pope John paul (not that i’m arguing, the Pope to be the “good guy” i know well about the Jesuit priests and south America regarding the pope). Anyhow, it came down to Q&A when I decided to ask him about his “article” regarding My people and My history and then went on to debase his sources, mostly of whom were marxist westerners during the still colonization of India and asked if he had ever talked to a single Tibetan about their history, stepped away from the propaganda filled books, and talked to about 2000 Tibetans who leave HOME to escape into EXILE every year. The guy lost it, decided to turn to the audience for sympathy by calling on some horrible facts regarding torture or something (as if, no country uses torture methods). I was surprised by the old mans turn to looking at his audience to fight his battle, which they didn’t cause they had no clue about Tibet.

In order to understand our situation better. Look below.

FRIENDLY CHAUVINISM

“Beijing (as well as sympathetic Western scholars such as Michael Parenti, Tom Grunfeld and Anna Louise Strong) asserts that “pre-liberation” Tibet was a medieval, oppressive society consisting of “landowners, serfs and slaves.” Tashi Rabgay, a Tibetan scholar at Harvard, points out that these three alleged social classes are arbitrary and revisionist classifications that have no basis in reality. There were indeed indentured farmers in old Tibet. There were also merchants, nomads, traders, non-indentured farmers, hunters, bandits, monks, nuns, musicians, aristocrats and artists. Tibetan society was a vast, multifaceted affair, as real societies tend to be. To try to reduce it to three base experiences (and non-representative experiences at that) is to engage in the worst kind of revisionism.

No country is perfect and many Tibetans (including the Dalai Lama) admit that old Tibet had its flaws and inequities (setting aside whether things are better under Chinese occupation). But taking every real or imagined shortcoming that happened in a country over a 600-year period and labeling it the “way it was” is hardly legitimate history. Any society seen through this blurry lens would come up short. And in many ways, such as the elimination of the death penalty, Tibet was perhaps ahead of its time. The young 14th Dalai Lama had begun to promote land reform laws and other improvements, but China’s take-over halted these advances. It is instructive to note that today the Tibetan government-in-exile is a democracy while China and Tibet are under communist dictatorship.

The crucial subtext of Beijing’s condemnation of Tibet’s “feudal” past is a classic colonialist argument that the target’s alleged backwardness serves as a justification for invasion and occupation. These are the politics of the colonist, in which the “native” is dehumanized, robbed of agency, and debased in order to make occupation more palatable or even necessary and “civilizing.” China has no more right to occupy a “backward” Tibet than Britain had to carry the “white man’s burden” in India or Hong Kong.”

Lhadon Tethong.

I would personally like to thank the person ABOVE for RECOLONIZING us all over in the minds of others.

Freedomfighter59 @ 03/26/08 06:42:47

Mass Arrests in Tibet: Benjamin Kang Lim and Lindsay Beck of Reuters write: “Chinese authorities have launched mass arrests of Tibetans in Lhasa for interrogation about the fiercest anti-Chinese uprising for decades, a Beijing-based source told Reuters on Wednesday.” (TruthOut.org)

ShiftShapers @ 03/27/08 00:57:43

Lhadon – a friend of mine, sums it up perfectly here, imo:

The crucial subtext of Beijing’s condemnation of Tibet’s “feudal” past is a classic colonialist argument that the target’s alleged backwardness serves as a justification for invasion and occupation. These are the politics of the colonist, in which the “native” is dehumanized, robbed of agency, and debased in order to make occupation more palatable or even necessary and “civilizing.” China has no more right to occupy a “backward” Tibet than Britain had to carry the “white man’s burden” in India or Hong Kong.”

The revisionist “aren’t I cool, I’m a lefty white guy but I’m not down w/ the Dalai Lama” bullshit is colonialism mixed with the last remnants of Maoism. Scratch the surface of an anti-Tibetan westerner and you’ll likely either get someone who thought Mao was an awesome leader, or who thinks that the CIA has to be controlling everything, because you know the CIA controls everything, including bin Laden. No Arabs in caves could have attacked America.

Sure, Tibet was pretty backward back in the 50s relatively speaking. But Iraq was a pretty fucked up place in Feb. 2003 and Parenti didn’t support that “liberation” did he?

anthony @ 03/27/08 01:18:37

Anthony—Thanks for your words.

I would like to clarify I am not Lhadon, I quoted her to best describe the situation and Parenti in the words of a friend, Lhadon Tethong, the director of the Inernational Headquarters of Students for a Free Tibet.

Freedomfighter59 @ 03/27/08 05:40:31

i like parenti. don’t get me wrong, just becaust i like the guy doesn’t mean i’ll buy his arguments hook, line, and sinker. just that i’m willing to listen.

but as an anti-authoritarian who has traveled to Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj and communicated directly with many refugees and learned directly from many Tibetans, i can honestly say that the thing that always made me the most uncomfortable with Tibetan (and other forms of) Buddhism, and perhaps the only thing, is the hierarchical nature of the established structures. as far as the philosophical tradition itself, i love most of it, though i take issue with the hierarchy of beings as well, which places humans in an position of elevated status above other forms of life such as animals and plants. they also refuse to consider the possibility that plants have consciousness, just because Buddha said they don’t. that kind of rigidity. otherwise the debating nature of Tibetan Buddhism is wonderful.

i saw the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa (among others) while in McLeod Ganj & Dharamsala, and i must say that the young Karmapa seemed very bored and distant during the ceremony, whereas the Dalai Lama is always radiant and smiling.

i got to hang with the Ex-Prisoners Association folks as well as at the Tibetan medicine center. very cool.

so, anyways, it’s not revisionist to say that old Tibet wasn’t feudal? i mean, wasn’t it? this isn’t to excuse China’s actions in any way. i am ardently anti-Maoist as well as anti-Stalinist, and am well aware of these dynamics, so don’t try to pin that crap on me, please. fuck China. but also, fuck any system of authoritarian rule.

ShiftShapers @ 03/27/08 14:29:30

Lhasa Monks Accuse Beijing of Lying Over Unrest: Reuters reporter John Ruwitch writes, “Tibetan monks stormed a news briefing at a temple in Lhasa on Thursday, accusing Chinese authorities of lying about recent unrest and saying the Dalai Lama had nothing to do with the violence, foreign reporters said.” (TruthOut.org)

ShiftShapers @ 03/27/08 14:33:30

Shift – though i take issue with the hierarchy of beings as well, which places humans in an position of elevated status above other forms of life such as animals and plants…

I would totally pwn a carrot, Shift…

Truthcansuk @ 03/27/08 15:10:49

“they also refuse to consider the possibility that plants have consciousness”

Plants don’t have consciousness. They don’t have the right parts.

Science @ 03/27/08 16:32:49

that, i suppose, depends on how you are defining consciousness, Sci.

are you familiar with the below book?

ShiftShapers @ 03/27/08 17:36:42

I am. It was crap.

Truthcansuk @ 03/27/08 18:08:54

haha…

I am not sure what definition you want to use here.

Science @ 03/27/08 18:26:55

Tibet: Death toll reaches 130: TWO weeks of protests against China’s rule of Tibet have left about 130 people dead, an exiled Tibetan leader says as the unrest threatened to overshadow the lighting of the Olympic torch.

China accuses Dalai Lama of terrorism: China stepped into the news vacuum it created in Tibet to launch a barrage of criticism over the weekend aimed at the Dalai Lama, accusing him of colluding with Muslim terrorists to destabilize the country before the Olympics.

Protesters disrupt Olympic flame ceremony: Pro-Tibetan demonstrators disturb high security ceremony to light Olympic flame in Greece.

ShiftShapers @ 03/28/08 00:33:44

The revisionist “aren’t I cool, I’m a lefty white guy but I’m not down w/ the Dalai Lama” bullshit is colonialism mixed with the last remnants of Maoism.

LOL lefty white guy? Why white?
Maybe they see the Dalai Lama as a profiteering religious puppet. You know, realism.
I’m only guessing of course, I’m not a lefty white guy so I don’t know.

Scratch the surface of an anti-Tibetan westerner and you’ll likely either get someone who thought Mao was an awesome leader, or who thinks that the CIA has to be controlling everything, because you know the CIA controls everything, including bin Laden.

Google Tim Osman, fuckwit.
Stop trying to score cheap points on a subject you refuse to research and are too stupid to understand.

Now I bet you get all butthurt and ban me.

No Arabs in caves could have attacked America.

No Arabs in caves could have stopped American defenses from responding.
What a dribbling simpleton you are.

CylonCowboy @ 03/28/08 03:18:19

Why is Anti Dali-Lama automatically anti-Tibetan, can’t I be anti Mao and anti Dalai Lama?

Shifty why stop at Stalin? Lenin was the one who fucked the revolution first, don’t let him off the hook because he pales in comparison to his successor!

Disenchanted @ 03/28/08 03:53:08

But Iraq was a pretty fucked up place in Feb. 2003

As compared to Iraq in Feb. 2008 when 674 Iraqis were reportedly killed in the violence.*

Who’s the revisionist?

*This is not a definitive count.
Iraqi deaths based on news reports, actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.

GWHunta @ 03/28/08 04:23:30

Tibet is a tempest in a teapot as compared to what is happening today in Afghanistan and Iraq and even that will pale in comparison to what can happen in a war involving Iran and/or Pakistan.

Americans criticizing the Chinese on human rights in Tibet while Iraq bleeds out is ludicrous.

Sometimes no Peace

GWHunta @ 03/28/08 04:37:23

Bush Confronts China on Tibet Crackdown

GWHunta @ 03/28/08 04:51:13

Bush Says Taiwan Missile Fuse Shipment Was a ‘Mistake’

GWHunta @ 03/28/08 04:51:23

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD:..........................4002
Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation:.......2
Total:..................................................................................4004

A sure sign of an actual occupation is the homeward flow of dead and wounded.

The focus on a “Free Tibet” is international “smoke and mirrors.”

Sometimes no Peace

GWHunta @ 03/28/08 09:35:58

I am american (i guess) and i criticize Chin over human rights in China and Tibet and I criticize America for its role in Iraq, Columbia, etc, and the imprisonment of Peltier and Jamal and others… and it is not ludicrous…

free China free Tibet!

scum

johnnycivil @ 03/28/08 21:58:42

GWHunta

Nice way to compare deaths and what is ‘REAL’ occupation/colonialism.

It’s one thing to acknowledge the killings of innocence, its another to compare the killings of innocence.

No one said whats happening in Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, for that matter ALL OF AFRICA (being neo-colonized), Pakistan, Afganistan etc….is nothing compared to Tibet.

Fact of the matter is, all these countries are being occupied/colonized and many innocent people are being Killed and one needs to acknowledge that rather then compare it.

Also, Tibet isn’t some recent situation, my people have been colonized for 59years and they have risen peacefully with nothing but rocks while the Chinese military was toting their Ak’s shooting my people down for rising up against Opression.

The call for freedom is the same whether its Iraq or in Tibet, theres no justice is downplaying one movement for freedom for another’s. Cuz in the end, we are all fighting for freedom.

I hope everyone realizes that.

Freedomfighter59 @ 03/29/08 09:52:03

Well the A don’t mince his words.

Anthony: The revisionist” aren©t I cool, I©m a lefty white guy but I©m not down w/ the Dalai Lama© bullshit is colonialism mixed with the last remnants of Maoism.

Coming from someone that hardly said a word when Israel invaded and killed over a hundred people a couple of weeks ago, it’s fair to say that your comments mark you down as the worst sort of hypocrite

Scratch the surface of an anti-Tibetan westerner and you©ll likely either get someone who thought Mao was an awesome leader, or who thinks that the CIA has to be controlling everything, because you know the CIA controls everything, including bin Laden. No Arabs in caves could have attacked America.

What would we get when we scratch the surface of someone that spends so much time critizising China but hasn’t a word of critism for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians? Thirty peices of Silver, perhaps?

Paul_Connelly @ 03/29/08 13:09:09

GWHunta,
Nice way to compare deaths and what is ‘REAL’ occupation/colonialism.

Freedomfighter59,

I didn’t drag comparisons of Iraq circa 2003 and Tibet circa 1950 into this thread, anthony did.

Sure, Tibet was pretty backward back in the 50s relatively speaking. But Iraq was a pretty fucked up place in Feb. 2003 and Parenti didn’t support that “liberation” did he?
~a

Anthony—Thanks for your words.
~Freedomfighter59

I’m not of the opinion that Tibetans are without legitimate grievances. Who isn’t.

What I am saying is that on an objective scale of current international problems now facing the global population, China, the U.S. and the U.N., the “Free Tibet” movement is a smoke and mirrors sideshow.

Tibet has never been recognized, even prior to the 1950 “invasion” by the Chinese Army, as an independent country by the western powers, the U.S. government or the United Nations.

The problem as I see it in Tibet is primarily economic and one of unequal opportunity, the native Tibetans are second class citizens in their native land, while the Hans Chinese majority are reaping the gains of Tibetan development.

We truly are all one movement in facing down economic inequity and social injustice, which are global issues.

But the management of the current “crisis” in Tibet is an internal Chinese matter, not an international crisis or an illegal occupation or military actions running contrary to international law.

It would have been absolutely irresponsible of the Chinese government not to quell the rioting and make arrests of those responsible for and who are instigating the violence.

The high profile international coverage of this “crisis” within and outside Tibet is clearly linked to the approach of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The decisions made by Tibetan groups both inside and outside China as to timing the escalation of these protests was, beyond a reasonable doubt, impacted by the run-up to the games as well.

This is not what the Olympic Games are supposed to be about.

That said, whenever high profile politicians gather for an international event, such as the opening of these summer Olympic Games, it does indeed become political.

If France’s Sarkozy follows through on snubbing the Olympic Opening Ceremony over Tibet, shouldn’t Palestinians protest the fact that the Israeli team will be allowed to compete and that their dignitaries will be present for the opening ceremony?

Should the American Olympic team and George Bush be invited to participate in the opener?

How about the British?

The Afghans might want the Canadians banned as well.

The Russians must be oppressing somebody, no?

Tibet is part of China. Deal with that.

An international outcry over Tibet spoiling these games would poison the diplomatic atmosphere for resolving peacefully the reunification of mainland China and Taiwan, which could directly lead to war between the U.S. and China.

The literal fallout from such a war would be far worse for native Tibetans than any economic “oppression” they are suffering today.

Peace,

GWHunta @ 03/29/08 15:59:14

Tibet is not a part of China linguistically, ethnically, or historically; any more than it is a part of India (with which it shares linguistic roots and much else.)

If Tibet is China than so is Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Nepal, Assam/Arunachal Pradesh, Malaysia, Mongolia, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, and need I mention Taiwan?

I give China everything east and south of the great wall.

Frankly, coming to hell as we are, I can offer them that or severe culling.

Free Tibet is not the con. The international ‘smoke and mirrors” IS the Olympics, rube.

Fools think the west’s slave factory is heroic… poor Chinese slaves.
Even the rich cannot say a word…

traumatized

johnnycivil @ 03/29/08 16:48:33

Not that Iraq is not an insane hardening of our troops so they can handle china which has long hardened its troops and leaders on Tibetan flesh. Hu you say?

johnnycivil @ 03/29/08 16:51:44

What Does “Free Tibet” Mean for You?

The struggle to be free is one that is commendable and deserves our sympathy. At this time when the state is committing brutal violence against a people, solidarity and action is needed and in fact, around the world well-wishers have expressed their outrage at the situation in Tibet. Protest movements have been calling for “an end to cultural imperialism”, “freedom”, even for “crushing the oppressor” and are united in such slogans and demands. Yet what if Tibet were to gain independence from China?

*****

The question of national liberation is a complicated one. Discrimination, destruction of culture and community are forms of repression which are often seen in the contest of nation against nation instead of in the context of the ruling classes against the subjugated. Thus national liberation movements of all kinds tend to create the illusion of a mass common interest against an oppressor which is always external. “Self-determination” is too often a slogan which really means establishing the right of the elites of a given nation to exert power and influence, both economic and political, over those who would be subjects of a new nation state.

*****

It is no coincidence that the “struggle to be free” is supported selectively. Individuals or larger groups of society may give precedence to one struggle over another for various reasons and in Europe and North America one can observe the existence of “causes célèbres” which are given both support by famous and powerful persons and disproportionate media attention (when compared to other analogous struggles). Causes célèbres are able to attract and mobilize people, gather ardent supporters for the cause. But not all social struggles or even human tragedy can qualify as a cause célèbre.

Causes célèbres are easily mobilized around those national liberation movements which are also (not coincidentally) related to establishing independence from the superstates created by so-called “communist nations”. The brutal totalitarian nature of such states are joyously exposed with indignation by countries many of which even have equal atrocities on their account. Members of the American political establishment are quick to condemn human rights conditions in China and some even call for a boycott of the Olympics similar to that held in 1980, while Americans continue to kill civilians in wars for oil, support right-wing murderous paramilitaries, execute prisoners and financially support slave-like working conditions in factories around the world producing goods for American consumers. Few “concerned citizens of the world” were whipped into such a frenzy to demand a boycott of the Olympic Games in the US.

This is not to say that a reaction to the situation in Tibet is undue. Quite the contrary. However, I would like to pose a few questions for consideration.

The Tibetan situation is treated by many with, quite justifiably, a sense of urgency. In my city, at least three pickets have been held in the past week with large crowds in attendance and throughout the country, people mobilized instantly. We are being passionately implored to boycott the firm that is producing Olympic uniforms, to go to the Chinese embassy, to boycott Chinese goods and anybody who has been less than enthusiastic about this may be told they are supporting genocide. By comparison, many recent events have gone largely ignored in these parts, for example recent Turkish military actions against Kurds or, even more tragically, the ongoing and outrageous situation in Congo. How is it that over 5 million people have been killed in Congo over the last ten years and the great local activist masses have stayed passive, if not totally ignorant of the situation?

The answer is complex, and, unfortunately not very convenient. Tibetans can be easily portrayed as the ultimate victims. As some internet commenter argued, Tibetans are more deserving of our support (than Kurds) because they haven’t been violent. I was asked “how many people have they killed” (in comparison to Kurds).

I don’t think any historians are in a position to give an answer to this question. During the CIA-sponsored Tibetan resistance, surely tens of thousands of Chinese were killed, but supporters of the Tibet cause would argue that this was merely self-defense. Currently, some Tibetans have also taken part in random ethnic violence (in fact pogroms) which also tends to be justified by supporters of the cause as an appropriate reaction to Chinese settlement in Tibet. These types of episodes, if known at all, are easily juxtaposed by the dominant images of Buddhist monks, led by the Dalai Lama, as men of peace, a noble opposition to the violent and barbaric Chinese.

The creation of such images of peaceful, happy Tibetans is probably the result of a long-term PR campaign boosted by naive believers and well-wishers as well as government-sponsored propaganda. Few people care to know about the realities of the feudal system which existed in Tibet up until the second half of the twentieth century, nor do they wish to view “his holiness” the Dalai Lama as a human deity who lived in a huge palace, up-kept and served by serf labour, a person whose prime interest was to maintain social servility and Tibetan elites. The social composition of Tibetan society played no role when the CIA supported the Tibetan resistance; its support was absent when it needed China as an ally and came when its political priority became “fighting the spread of communism”.

The campaign to free Tibet which sprung up in the 1980s was largely kick-started through help from the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy. With such backing it had a good start to build grassroots movements and student groups which would later give it complete activist legitimacy. The Tibetans were a perfect subject that could be presented as the ideal victims: peace-loving, religious, wise, living in Shangri-La and viciously oppressed by the world’s worst human rights abusers. Celebrity Buddhists and New-Agers helped segue this issue into the mainstream. Thus gaining its legitimacy through the mainstream media and having become a cause célèbre, thousands of people interested in peace and social justice around the world have taken up the cause. Some may envision the development of some sort of bourgeois civil society after Tibetan is free, while others maintain some idolized vision of spiritual Tibet and appear at pickets donning orange robes and carrying portraits of the Dalai Lama. And while this cause is picked up by the thousands, hundreds of equally urgent struggles remain unknown or are dismissed as the actors in these struggles fail to present themselves as the perfect victims. They may have been defined and portrayed to the world through the lens of the capitalist-dominated press or otherwise did not inspire enough empathy to mobilize support.

*****

The struggle for a “Free Tibet” may begin with a struggle against the Chinese police state – but it certainly does not end there. Self-determination is usually a code word for national determination, but real self-determination begins with self-management.

Can the movement in Tibet be transformed from a national liberation struggle into a social revolution? We have no evidence of such revolutionary tendencies although the information we receive tends to be filtered through the ideological lens of the liberal establishment. Recent experience has tended to show that people can throw off the yoke of a totalitarian communist state but, without experience in grassroots self-organization, and operating largely in a vacuum, such countries can develop into more-or-less democratic market economies run by economic elites, or they can develop into autocracies or rather undemocratic regimes such as one finds in parts of Central Asia.

The struggle for freedom in Tibet is thus not just a struggle against the Chinese state, but also a struggle against all the powers which would enslave the average Tibetan upon gaining nominal independence. The feudal order represented by the mo