Dalai Lama and his actions and supporters

[James]

Don’t disrupt torch run, says chief priest

KUALA LUMPUR (Malaysia): Politics should be kept out of the coming Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
 In saying this yesterday, (Theravada) Buddhist Chief High Priest of Malaysia Venerable Reverend K. Sri Dhammaratana also urged Malaysians to refrain from interfering in the Olympic torch relay which is scheduled to take place here on Monday. (April 21)
 “My request to Malaysians of all races and religions is to remain calm and to have a positive attitude. Let’s make the Olympic Games successful in the name of international peace. We should let compassion be our guiding light and non-violence be our way of life,” he said.
 Taking a cue from the Dalai Lama, Sri Dhammaratana reiterated that there were different platforms for different issues.
 “Some people are trying to turn the Olympics into a political game but as far as I know it is an international sports meet. We must try to understand and be aware of what the Olympic Games is all about. It’s a gamean occasion celebrated together in the true spirit of sports.
 “While the torch is being carried in Malaysia, we should get together and radiate positive energy for the success of the games,” he said at the Maha Vihara temple in Brickfields yesterday.
 Sri Dhammaratana said a special prayer would be held on Sunday at 9am to pray for peace in Tibet and the success of the Olympic Games.
 “As a religious leader, I’m trying my best to influence the people to spread peace and pray with a sincere heart. I have invited Buddhist monks and other religious leaders in the country to join us in the simultaneous prayer.
 “It’s also part of our duty to influence the monks in Tibet, whether Chinese, Tibetan, Thai or Japanese, to carry the message of peace.” he said.
 He also said that those who had disrupted the relay in London, Paris and San Francisco had created an unhealthy environment.
 “This can be due to a lack of understanding and their emotions. Being human beings we are all different and our emotions sometimes rule our actions.”

[James]

MYTHS ABOUT TIBET?

Reassessing Tibet Policy

Written by A. Tom Grunfeld, Empire State College
Editors: Tom Barry (IRC) and Martha Honey (IPS)


Key Points

Tibet and China have been intertwined since the 7th century in one form or another.

The Dalai Lama, now almost 65 years old, feels the pressure of time in his hopes to preserve Tibetan culture in his lifetime, making talks with Beijing and a compromise solution urgent.

U.S. policy works against a solution to this dilemma because of its unrealistic portrayal of China.

The flight of the 17th Karmapa Lama from Tibet to India on the eve of the millenium catapulted Tibet back into world headlines. This has created an opportunity for both China and the U.S. to reassess their policies toward Tibet.


Tibet’s status has been intertwined with China since the 7th century through marriages, wars, and treaties. Mongol conquests in the 13th century made Tibet part of a Mongol-ruled Chinese state, and four centuries later the ethnic Manchu Q’ing dynasty further incorporated Tibet into China. In 1912 the 13th Dalai Lama unilaterally declared independence but two years later indicated his willingness to sign a treaty granting Chinese “suzerainty” over both “Inner Tibet” and “Outer Tibet,” establishing direct rule over the former and leaving the latter autonomous. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reestablished strong central government in 1949, Tibet was regarded as politically “integral” with China but in fact so autonomous that Beijing insisted on an incorporation “treaty” to preempt any claims of independence. Yet the CCP refrained from stamping out feudalism and theocratic rule. Twice in the 1950s, Mao Zedong assured the Dalai Lama that China would make no further inroads against de facto Tibetan autonomy. This policy, however, applied only to Outer Tibet, which was later renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Other ethnic Tibetan areas, known as Amdo and Kham (Inner Tibet), underwent political transformation.



This process of integration sparked rebellion, and minor insurrections in Kham/Sichuan turned into open revolt by 1956. Support soon came from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was eager to destabilize the communist government. China’s suppression of a 1959 revolt forced the Dalai Lama and 50-60,000 Tibetans into exile. Beijing then subjected the TAR to political and social integration, ending Lhasa’s autonomous rule. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, both Chinese and Tibetan, engaged in wholesale destruction of almost every religious building in Tibet, paralleling antireligious campaigns throughout China. From exile, the Dalai Lama oversaw refugee resettlement and guerrilla warfare—although he officially renounced all violence. CIA support encouraged insurgent Tibetans to continue their war for independence, but the CIA was more interested in harassing communist China than in promoting Tibetan independence. Following the 1971 visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.S. cut off its support to the Tibetan resistance. The Tibetan rebellion quickly dissipated; after 15 years, the Tibetans had been unable to create a sustainable, freestanding military force.



By the late 1970s, China began relaxing its grip on Tibet. In 1978 the Panchen Lama was released from detention, and he began championing the preservation of Tibetan culture. A new round of Dalai Lama-Beijing contacts resulted in several Tibetan-exile delegations visiting Tibet. After these talks faltered in the 1980s, the Dalai Lama decided to promote his cause internationally, believing that increased foreign pressure generated by his “Tibet Lobby” would force Beijing to renew serious negotiations. Rising international attention and continued unrest in Tibet sparked a policy debate within China. The moderates argued for more freedom for Tibetan cultural practices and the return of the Dalai Lama, while the hard-liners (many of them Tibetan governmental and party officials) urged ending ties to the Dalai Lama and repressing all expressions of Tibetan nationalism.



After the Panchen Lama’s sudden death in January 1989, the Dalai Lama was invited for religious funerary ceremonies in Beijing. Even though he was assured that there would be an opportunity for direct high-level talks, the Dalai Lama declined the invitation after his advisers objected to the continuing prohibition against his visiting Lhasa and pointed out that the international campaign was giving his cause increasing prominence. The decision not to go to Beijing and renew direct negotiations was probably the gravest error of his political life. He did, however, agree in 1992 with the Chinese leadership to recognize a 7-year-old boy from a nomad family as the reincarnation of the Karmapa Lama, and there was the suggestion that the Dalai Lama could assist in searching for the next Panchen Lama. But tensions escalated again in 1995 when the Dalai Lama (without first consulting Beijing) announced that a boy had been selected as the 11th Panchen Lama. The designee and his family were arrested, and Beijing enthroned its own candidate. Since then there has been no progress in Chinese-Dalai Lama relations.



U.S. policy has done little to help resolve the Tibet issue. Washington’s policy ignores Tibet’s complex history, is driven by domestic politics, and is inherently contradictory. While officially recognizing Tibet as part of China, the U.S. Congress and White House unofficially encourage the campaign for independence. "



"Problems with Current U.S. Policy
Key Problems
Internationalization of the Tibet issue has worsened the situation inside Tibet by strengthening hard-line elements.
The freedom to travel inside China has led to a huge influx of ethnic Chinese to urban centers in Tibet, and they now probably outnumber urban Tibetans.
China, unclear perhaps of how to deal with the Dalai Lama, has continued to erect roadblocks to serious negotiations.
In 1943, Washington declared that “...the Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed suzerainty over Tibet...This Government has at no time raised a question regarding ...these claims.” In line with the policy of its Nationalist Chinese allies (the defeated Guomindang army that fled to Taiwan), the U.S. later officially recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. This position remains U.S. policy, and it is also the policy of both China and Taiwan.

Not until the cold war did Tibet become of interest to the U.S. government, which initiated secret talks with Tibetan dissidents in 1950 on the premise that Tibetans were fighting communism, not Chinese rule. Washington promised covert aid to the Tibetan dissidents if the Dalai Lama would leave China and publicly denounce Beijing. At that time, the Dalai Lama refused to leave Tibet, and the CIA threw its covert support to a burgeoning guerrilla movement. In 1959 the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, and he immediately began receiving an annual U.S. stipend of $180,000 for himself and another $1,550,000 for his cause. Covert CIA funding presumably ended in 1971.

After 1971 U.S. interest in Tibet waned as relations with China warmed, but mounting pressure from the Tibet Lobby complicated the policy environment. In the late 1980s the Tibet Lobby found a receptive hearing with the U.S. Congress, whose members were angry at China over nuclear proliferation, trade imbalances, prison labor, and human rights. Hearings were held, and amendments were added to bills condemning “human rights violations” and calling Tibet an “occupied country.” In September 1987, when the Dalai Lama was in the U.S. promoting the Tibet Lobby, the first demonstrations in three decades broke out in Lhasa. Undoubtedly expressions of U.S. “support” helped spur on the demonstrators, as Tibetans wrongly interpreted congressional testimony and nonbinding congressional resolutions as evidence of a changing U.S. policy. But official U.S. policy remained unaltered.

Pursuant to its early alliance with the Nationalists/Taiwan and to its subsequent relations with Beijing, Washington never recognized Tibetan independence (or the Dalai Lama’s “government-in-exile,” despite covert CIA support). But the vociferous U.S. opposition to communist China together with the rising popularity of the Dalai Lama’s cause pressured the White House to open some space in its public diplomacy for the Tibetan issue, resulting in yet another irritant in Sino-U.S relations. Washington’s failure to articulate a consistent and definitive policy has displeased all sides: anti-China politicians, the Tibet Lobby, and the Chinese. Moreover, Washington’s ambivalence and equivocations have proved harmful to resident Tibetans.

During the 1980s, CCP moderates paved the way for increased usage of the Tibetan language, the reconstruction of religious buildings (with more temples in some regions now than before 1951), and the encouragement of Tibetan culture. But though CCP officials were willing to solidify these policies with the Tibetan pontiff, their inability to consummate a deal with Tibet’s other religious leadership, the continuing popular protests, and the escalating China-bashing in the U.S. strengthened the hand of CCP hard-liners.

U.S. public diplomacy skirts the independence issue, focusing on criticism of human rights abuses. Yet recent concessions and overtures to the Tibet Lobby are seen as evidence by CCP hard-line factions that Washington’s ultimate goal is to fracture China. Such initiatives as the establishment of Radio Free Asia (RFA), the 1998 appointment of a special coordinator for Tibet (a State Department employee who works part-time on Tibet and whom China will never allow into Tibet or to play any role in Chinese-Tibetan affairs), and invitations to the Dalai Lama to visit the White House have served to strengthen the anti-Dalai Lama, anti-U.S. positions of the hard-line CCP faction.

In recent years, this hard-line CCP faction has fostered increased repression in Tibet, outlawed pictures of the Dalai Lama, encouraged increased ethnic Chinese migration into Tibet, tightened security in monasteries, obstructed religious practices, and forced monks and Tibetan officials to undergo “patriotic” retraining. As a result, there has been rising animosity toward Chinese rule and increased expressions of Tibetan nationalism—including some terrorism, such as bombs in Lhasa. Indeed, these anti-Tibetan policies precipitated the flight of the 17th Karmapa, a 14-year-old boy, who had previously expressed loyalty to the Chinese state.

Restrictions on Tibetan culture, especially religion, were what led to the 1964 denunciation of Chinese rule by the Panchen Lama and his subsequent 14-year detention. Once more, repressive practices, which have been fueled in part by ill-considered U.S. practices, alienated a prominent cleric and precipitated his flight to India. In the offing, there remains the possibility that the CCP moderates can use this unfortunate development to illustrate the bankruptcy of the hard-line approach.



Toward a New Foreign Policy
Key Recommendations
The U.S. must recognize and acknowledge the major advances in personal freedoms that the vast majority of Chinese citizens now enjoy and must place human rights complaints in the larger context of current Chinese society.
Washington, and especially Congress, must end its knee-jerk China bashing and portrayal of China as a major threat to the U.S.
The U.S. must support and encourage those officials in China who recognize the problems that China has had with some of its ethnic minorities and are willing to work cooperatively to maintain the cultural integrity of the Tibetan people.
Tibetan Buddhism

There are four religious teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, and the distinctions between them can sometimes be confusing. The largest, and most recent, is the Gelug (Yellow Hat), of which the Dalai Lama is the leader. The others (sometimes referred to collectively as Red Hat), in order of their membership, are the Nyingma (the oldest), Kagyu (the order with the Karmapa Lama, also known as the Black Hat Lama, and the Sharmapa Lama, also known as the Red Hat Lama), and Sakya. There are also numerous suborders. Their theological similarities are greater than their differences.

There is no official hierarchy of lamas. The Dalai Lama is the head of only one school, but he is considered by almost all Tibetans to be their foremost spiritual leader, although that does not mean they will all automatically obey every one of his instructions. Moreover, until 1959, he was also the theocratic head of the Tibetan government.

The Panchen Lama heads a Gelug Monastery (Tashilhumpo) in Tibet's second largest city, Shigatse, and is generally considered the second most important Tibetan cleric. The Karmapa Lama is often considered the third most influential lama.

The departure of the Karmapa Lama should spur Washington to reevaluate the failures of its ambiguous policy approach. It is time—after a long history of CIA betrayal, congressional grandstanding, and White House pandering to China bashers—for the U.S. to implement policies that truly help resident Tibetans.

Sadly, the spiraling success of the international campaign for Tibet has led to a proportional deterioration in cultural conditions for the people of the TAR, since Tibet’s high profile has bolstered the authority of the Chinese hard-liners. Moreover, publicity from outside Tibet (especially Tibetan RFA broadcasts) persuades some Tibetans that the U.S. supports their cause and encourages them to continue their brave but futile struggles against Chinese rule.

Time is short. The Dalai Lama is 65; his death would rob Tibetans of the only person with sufficient authority to negotiate a deal with Beijing. In the absence of a negotiated solution, current Chinese policies are allowing a mass migration of sojourners into the TAR to the point where they may already outnumber the indigenous population in the urban areas, where they congregate. The Dalai Lama, like his predecessor, is willing, as he declared in April 1999, to “use my moral authority with the Tibetan people so they renounce their separatist ambitions.” He feels that autonomy would be the “best guarantee that Tibet’s culture will be preserved.”

China, including the TAR, has undergone dramatic changes. Tibet has roads, schools, hospitals, a burgeoning middle class, internet cafes, karaoke bars, discos, and some 100,000 tourists annually. Religion is widely practiced. There are thousands of Tibetan officials, CCP members, and military recruits in Tibet. Indeed, many of the most ardently anti-Dalai Lama officials are Tibetan. To be sure, restrictions on religious practice continue, institutional religion has eroded badly, the average income and literacy rate are the lowest in China, and animosity between ethnic groups is growing. There are as many as a thousand political prisoners, mostly clergy who peacefully demonstrated against Chinese rule. Clearly, the political conjuncture in Tibet is far more complex than either the Tibet Lobby or Chinese propaganda portrays.

Although it is important to condemn human rights abuses, Washington must also acknowledge the significant gains in personal freedoms for the vast majority of China's citizens. The Dalai Lama’s public pronouncements have become more conciliatory recently; an indication that he is reaching out to moderate officials, who while apparently not directing policy regarding Tibet, are still in the government. The U.S. must do the same: support the moderate elements in the Chinese government by portraying Tibet in a more realistic fashion, by inviting Tibetan officials to visit Washington, and by not pandering to the Tibet Lobby.

The events of the past decade have demonstrated that public diplomacy, international hoopla, and the involvement of the world’s governments, especially the United States, have worsened conditions for resident Tibetans. More realistic policies can help bring about a peaceful resolution of the Tibet issue, which is in the interests, and to the benefit, of Tibetans, Chinese, and, ultimately, the whole world.

A. Tom Grunfeld is a professor of history at SUNY/Empire State College. He is the author of The Making of Modern Tibet (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1996).

* A shorter and somewhat different version of this article appeared in Current History, September 1999.

Sources for More Information
Organizations

There are no neutral organizations pertaining to Tibet. The numerous organizations concerned with Tibet are openly anti-Chinese and serve largely as propaganda agencies for the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile. Human rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, focus attention on the individuals who are indeed victims of human rights abuses, but since this repression is highly selective and not universal, their reports distort the overall picture of what is going on inside Tibet."

The above should provide an outline of the problems and where some of the problems and misconceptions are arising from, i.e. the American Administration are not innocent in promoting dissent.

[James]

Don't praise hypocrisy

It is disappointing that the Star Two on April 15 reproduced a Los Angeles Times article which is a highly biased misrepresentation of the Tibetan situation. It is clear that the Dalai Lama is not a simple Buddhist monk as he has styled himself in the title of his book.

Unlike the Buddha, who gave up a kingdom for spiritual pursuits, the Dalai Lama wants to be the supreme leader running Tibet, deciding on their education, cultural practices and way of life. When he was in charge in the 1950s, slavery was prevalent in Tibet, with the rich noblemen and religious institutions owning all the wealth of the country. Serfs had no education and no future.

It is a wonder how those in the United States who champion liberty and human rights can support someone who wishes to rule over serfs, both as king and god. How can Americans whose Constitution clearly separates the powers of state from religion unashamedly support those who are pursuing the very opposite?

The picture of well-nourished monks and well-kept temples in Tibet are testimony of the support the Chinese government showers on the Tibetan population. A poor society like Tibet is not able to maintain institutions like the Potala and the very large number of monks requiring upkeep. Yet instead of pursuing meditation and goodness, these monks then lead a riot, attacking passers-by, burning shops and schools, and end up killing the innocent. Which part of the Buddhist scriptures are these monks following?

If the Dalai Lama is a man of peace, why does he not restrain his violent supporters and loudly condemn their actions? If he indeed accepts Chinese rule over Tibet, why does he keep meeting American and European politicians?

If he indeed supports the Beijing Olympics, why does he encourage demonstrations against the Olympic torch run? How can the press praise such hypocrisy?

Together with pictures of Tibetan temples and monks in China, pictures of riot police and a bloodied monk in Nepal are printed. Isn't this a crude attempt at misrepresenting the conduct of the Chinese police? After the looting and massacre in Lhasa, security officers seeking to restore peace and arrest the guilty are deemed to be conducting a crackdown.

On the other hand, in Los Angeles in 1995, after the Rodney King riots, the police department was said to be restoring order and normality! Is this fair and objective reporting?

Is is highly inappropriate to reproduce such a provocative article on Tibet just six days before the Olympic torch is due to pass through Kuala Lumpur. Tibetan demonstrators in London and Paris had physically attacked flame carriers, even targeting a young girl in a wheelchair. We should not make the task of our Malaysian security personnel and flame carriers more difficult.

Dr Ong Hean Teik,
Penang, Malaysia.

[James]

French senator Jean-Luc Mélenchon comments on Tibet issue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNqfFJRJj0o
	Small | Large

[James]

Published on Monday, April 14, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/14/8287/
?
The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations

by Floyd Rudmin

We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions.

When the Olympics come to London in 2012, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu will certainly lead the demonstrators protesting the “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” in Diego Garcia. The UN Secretary General, the President of France, the Chancellor of Germany, the new US President and the entire US Congress will certainly boycott the opening ceremonies.

The height of hypocrisy is this moral posturing about 100 dead in race riots in Lhasa, while the USA, UK and more than 40 nations in the Coalition of the Willing wage a war of aggression against Iraq. This is not “demographic aggression” but raw shock-and-awe aggression. A war crime. A war on civilians, including the intentional destruction of the water and sewage systems, and the electrical grid. More than one million Iraqis are now dead; five million made into refugees. The Western invaders may not be doing “cultural genocide” but they are doing cultural destruction on an immense scale, in the very cradle of Western Civilization. Why is the news filled with demonstrators about Tibet but not about Iraq?

And as everyone knows but few dare say, “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” can be applied most accurately to Israel’s settlement policies and systematic destruction of Palestinian communities. On this, the Dalai Lama seems silent. Demonstrators don’t wave flags for bulldozed homes, destroyed orchards, or dead Palestinian children.

The Chinese Context

The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks.

Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated.

Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.

Chinese currency carries five languages: Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uigur, and Zhuang. In comparison, Canadian currency carries English and French, but no Cree or Inuktitut. If the USA were as considerate of ethnic minorities as is China, then the greenback would be written in English, Spanish, Cherokee and Hawaiian.

In China, ethnic minorities begin their primary schooling in their own language, in a school administered by one of their own community. Chinese language instruction is not introduced until age 10 or later. This is in sharp contrast to a history of coerced linguistic assimilation in most Western nations. The Australian government recently apologized to the Aboriginal minority for taking children from their families, forcing them to speak English, beating them if they spoke their mother tongue. China has no need to make such apology to Tibetans or to other minorities.

China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished.

There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students.

China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.

Historical Claims

National boundaries are not natural. They all arise from history, and all history is disputable. Arguments and evidence can always be found to challenge a boundary. China has long claimed Tibet as part of its territory, though that has been hard to enforce during the past 200 years. The Dalai Lama does not dispute China’s claim to Tibet. The recent race riots in Tibet and the anti-Olympics demonstrations will not cause China to shrink itself and abandon part of its territory. Rioters and demonstrators know that.

Foreign governments promoting Tibet separatism and demonstrators demanding Tibet independence should look closer to home. Canadians can campaign for Québec libre. Americans can support separatists in Puerto Rico, Vermont, Texas, California, Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska. Brits can work for a free Wales, and Scotland for the Scots. French can help free Tahitians, New Caledonians, Corsicans, and the Basques. Spaniards can also back the Basques, or the Catalonians. Italians can help Sicilian separatists or the Northern League. Danes can free the Faeroe Islands. Poles can back Cashubians. Japanese can help Okinawan separatists, and Filipinos can help the Moros. Thai can promote Patanni independence; Indonesians can promote Acehnese independence. New Zealanders can leave the islands to the Maori; Australians can vacate Papua. Sri Lankans can help Tamil separatists; Indians can help Sikh separatists.

Nearly every nation has a separatist movement of some kind. There is no need to go to Tibet, to the top of the world, to promote ethnic separatism. China is not promoting separatism in other nations and does not appreciate other nations promoting separatism in China. The people most oppressed, most needing a nation of their own, are the Palestinians. There is a worthy project to promote and to demonstrate about.

Danger of Demonstrations

These demonstrations do not serve Tibetans, but rather use Tibetans for ulterior motives. Many Tibetans, therefore, oppose these demonstrations. Many Chinese remember their history and see the riots in Lhasa and subsequent demonstrations as another attempt by foreign powers to dismember and weaken China. There is grave danger that Chinese might come to fear Tibetans as traitors, resulting in wide spread anti-Tibetan feelings in China.

Fear that an ethnic minority serves foreign forces caused Canada, during World War 1, to imprison its Ukranian minority in concentration camps. For similar reasons, the Ottomans deported their Armenian minority and killed more than a million in death marches. The German Nazis saw the Jewish minority as traitors who caused defeat in World War 1; hence deportations in the 1930s and death camps in the 1940s. During World War 2, both Canada and the USA feared that their Japanese immigrant minorities were traitorous and deported them to concentration camps. Indonesians fearing their Chinese minority, deported 100,000 in 1959 and killed thousands more in 1965. Israel similarly fears its Arab minority, resulting in deportations and oppression.

Hopefully, the Chinese government and the Chinese people will see Tibetans as victims of foreign powers rather than agents of foreign powers. However, if China reacts like other nations have in history and starts systematic severe repression of Tibetans, then today’s demonstrators should remember their role in causing that to happen.

Conclusion

The demonstrators now disparaging China serve only to distract themselves and others from seeing and correcting the current failings of their own governments. If the demonstrators will take a moment to listen, they will hear the silence of their own hypocrisy.

The consequences of these demonstrations are 1) China will stiffen its resolve to find foreign influences inciting Tibetans to riot, and 2) the governments of the USA, UK, France and other Western nations will have less domestic criticism for a few weeks. That is all. These demonstrations can come to no good end.

Floyd Rudmin can be contacted by email?[email protected]

[James]

March 26, 2008
Why They Hate China
Well, you have to hate someone…
by Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12585

China’s continuing crackdown on Tibetan pro-independence protesters is a big, big issue here in San Francisco. Why, just the other day, I was coming out my front door, and there was one of my neighbors – a very nice woman in her fifties, albeit an archetypal limousine liberal, typical of the breed. So typical that she might almost be mistaken for a living, breathing, walking, talking cliché. She hates George W. Bush and the neocons because she’s against the (Iraq) war, but she’s eager to “liberate” Darfur – and, lately, Tibet. That morning, as she earnestly informed me, she was on her way to a meeting of the Board of Supervisors (our town council) to exhort them to vote for a resolution condemning the Chinese government’s actions and calling for “freedom” for Tibet. What she doesn’t realize, and doesn’t want to know, is that she and the neocons – the very ones who brought us the Iraq war – are united on the Tibet issue. I tried, in vain, to point this out to her, but she just shook her head, cut the conversation short, and was on her way…

As it turned out, the supervisors voted for a meaningless, toothless resolution, stripped of provocative rhetoric, much to the dismay of the far-lefties who argued for a stronger statement. The initiative for this effort was made by supervisor Chris Daly, an obnoxious left-liberal with delusions of grandeur, whose pose of self-righteousness is both grating and characteristic of his sort.

Prior to the vote on the Daly resolution, which was vociferously supported by the supposedly pacifistic supporters of the Dalai Lama, the Chinese consulate was… firebombed. This is what the War Party would like to do to China.

Fortunately, there are a number of restraining factors that get in the way: in the meantime, however, our preening politicians demagogue the China issue,and none so brazenly as Speaker of the House NancyPelosi, my congressional representative, who is merely Chris Daly writ large. Traveling all the way to India, at taxpayers’ expense, Madam Speaker visited with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala and announced that if Americans don’t speak out against Beijing’s repression in Tibet “we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.”

Pelosi is a longtime opponent of Beijing – not just the Chinese government, but China itself. Pelosi and the unions she depends on for political support despise all things Chinese for the simple reason that China, today, is more capitalist than the U.S. – in spite of the Chinese Communist Party’s ostensible commitment to Marxist ideology. Thinly veiled racist-chauvinist bilge is routinely directed at the Chinese people by union bosses and right-wing paleo-protectionists, who stupidly claim that the “chinks” (or, as John McCain would put it, the “gooks”) are stealing “American jobs” – as if Americans have a hereditary right to the very best salaries on earth, a “right” that doesn’t have to be earned by competitive business practices but is conferred on them by virtue of their nationality. Like hell it is.

Lucrative trade and cultural exchanges between China and California, as well as the fact that many Chinese in her congressional district have continuing ties to the mainland, have – so far – failed to deter Pelosi and her fellow Know-Nothings: politics, as they used to say during the Cultural Revolution in China, is in command.

These Sinophobic protests, engineered behind the scenes by leftist union bosses and God knows who else, are focused on the passing of the Olympic torch, which is slowly but surely making its way to Beijing, where the games are scheduled to be held Aug. 8-24. Here in the Bay Area, activists in the “Free Darfur” movement announced they were mounting demonstrations urging China to “extinguish the flames of genocide” in Darfur in San Francisco on April 9, the day the flame passes through the city.

The hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing is the focus of much pride in China, seen by the people as well as the ruling caste as symbolic of the nation’s arrival in modernity. As such, the worldwide protests and political posturing of preening politicians – from Pelosi to Nicolas Sarkozy – are bitterly resented and have been met with increasingly shrill denunciations by the Chinese state-controlled media – a sentiment that probably understates popular resentment of Western criticism in the Chinese “street.”

I know we are supposed to believe that the vast majority of the Chinese people are groaning under the weight of Commie oppression and sympathize (albeit silently) with the downtrodden Tibetans, but that is hardly the case. Indeed, the exact opposite is closer to the truth. Every time the West gets up on its high horse and lectures the Chinese government about its lack of “morality,” the tide of anti-Western Chinese nationalism rises higher.

We saw this when the U.S. “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during Clinton’s Balkan War of Aggression, and again when that American spy plane went down over Hainan island. In Beijing today, they are worried about the upcoming Olympic celebration, which will provide a platform for a wide variety of groups – including ultra-nationalist Chinese students, whose street antics have augured internal regime change in the past, and could do so again. “They are worried about a larger number of things and they are worried about keeping the lid on,” according to Arnold Howitt, a management specialist who oversees crisis-management training programs for Chinese government officials at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The same Associated Press article cites an unnamed “consultant” to the Games, who avers:

“‘Demonstrations of all kinds are a concern, including anti-American demonstrations,’ said the consultant, who works for Beijing’s Olympic organizers and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media.”

Any indications that Beijing is compromising Chinese pride and honor by appeasing the West are likely to be met by demonstrations that are both anti-American and anti-government – initiated, once again, by Chinese students, who have often been the agents of political transformation. Remember the Red Guards? Mao used them to initiate his own “Cultural Revolution,” but was forced to rein them in when they started talking about overthrowing the Chinese state.

The memory of that dark and chaotic era haunts China’s contemporary rulers, threatening to spoil their dream of a thoroughly modernized industrial powerhouse that is both the forge and the financial capital of the world economy. The Beijing Olympics represent the entry of China onto the world stage as a first-class power, right up there with its former adversaries: the U.S., Europe, and the former Soviet Union. A Chinese nationalist cannot be faulted for seeing the organized campaign to spoil that debut as a deliberate – and unforgivable – insult.

Viewed from this perspective – the perspective, that is, of the average citizen of China – the very idea of Tibetan independence might easily be seen as a rather obvious attempt to humiliate Beijing and remind it of its “proper” (i.e., subordinate) place in the global scheme of things.

After all, what if Chinese government leaders constantly reminded the world that the American Southwest was stolen from Mexico? Imagine the Chinese and Mexican ambassadors to the U.S. demanding independence, for, say, California – or better yet, its return to Mexican sovereignty! Shall the Olympics be forever barred from Puerto Rico, which was forcibly incorporated into the U.S. “commonwealth” in the invasion of 1898?

Of course not. Yet the Americans and their international amen corner are daring to criticize China for preserving its own unity and sovereignty. It’s a double standard made all the more insufferable by the self-righteous tone of the anti-China chorus, whose meistersingers are mainly concerned with celebrating their own moral purity.

Yes, Tibet was forcibly incorporated into the Communist empire of the Han, but this was just an episode in the long history of Sino-Tibetan relations – for the greater part of which the Tibetans held the upper hand. The Tibetan empire, at its height, extended from northern India to the Mongolian hinterlands and came at the expense of the conquered Chinese and Uighurs. It fell apart due to a ruinous civil war. A key factor in this complex narrative is that Mongol hegemony over China was greatly aided by the Tibetans, whose conversion of the Mongol nobility to Buddhism legitimized Mongol rule. Today, pro-Beijing historians point to this period as proof that Tibet has “always” been a part of China proper, yet the truth is that both were slaves to the Mongols – the Tibetans as their collaborators, the Chinese as their helots. (Underscoring Mongol contempt for their Chinese subjects was an edict forbidding intermarriage between Mongol and Chinese, although no such barrier to Mongol-Tibetan congress was imposed.) With Buddhism as the state religion, Tibetan priests, including the Dalai Lama, became the avatars of Mongol rule.

In short, the popular narrative of the pacifistic Buddhist Tibetans as the good guys and the Han Chinese as the bad-guy aggressors is the stuff of pure myth, pushed by union propagandists, lefty Hollywood do-gooders, and trendy sandal-wearing Western camp followers of the Dalai Lama, who has become a secularized yet “spiritual” substitute for Mother Theresa.

If the Chinese are wrong to hold on to their province of Tibet, then Lincoln was wrong to insist that the South stay in the Union – and we ought to immediately either grant the American Southwest (and California) independence, or else give it all back to the Mexicans.

The same goes for Taiwan – China’s rulers are no more likely to give up their claim to that island than Lincoln was inclined to let the Confederacy hold on in, say, Key West, Fla.

China is an adolescent giant: clumsy, unused to exerting its will beyond its borders, and wracked by self-doubt. Emerging into the company of world powers, it is thin-skinned – like any adolescent – and prone to wild mood gyrations. During the 1960s and ’70s, the Chinese were in a distinctly bad mood as they wrestled with the ghosts and demons unleashed by Mao. The triumph of the “modernizers” over the ultra-left Maoists in the 1980s signaled a new mood of optimism and inaugurated an era of unrivaled economic growth. The regime sanctified China’s journey down the “capitalist road” by citing the reformer Deng Tsiao-ping’s most famous “Communist” slogan: “To get rich is glorious!” Ayn Rand meets Chairman Mao (or, rather, Confucius) – and the result is capitalism-on-steroids.

That’s why, in spite of the sclerotic Marxoid ideology that still reins in and retards the natural entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people, China is moving forward by leaps and bounds. That’s also why comrade Pelosi and her union boss buddies have launched this odious Sinophobic hate campaign – because “their” jobs and sense of entitlement are going up in smoke. For decades, the U.S. government has preached the virtues of free enterprise and urged formerly Communist nations to adopt the free market – and now that the Chinese have taken them up on their offer, Western politicians are attacking them! The closer China has moved toward our own system – relaxing totalitarian controls over the economy and allowing a far greater degree of ideological diversity than was possible during the Maoist era – the more hostile the U.S. government has become. Nixon went to China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, where he sat next to Madam Mao during a command performance of The Red Detachment of Women. These days, however, as China stakes its claim to a proportionate share of the world market – and Chinese investors fund the U.S. debt
– the resentment and growing hostility of the Americans is all too palpable.

Why do politicians of Pelosi’s ilk join hands with neoconservatives in a concerted campaign to antagonize China, and even threaten sanctions and possible military action when the occasion gives rise to the opportunity?

To begin with, China’s is a success story, and there’s nothing that attracts opprobrium like success, unless it’s success of the wrong color – in this case, yellow. A crude racist collectivism of a specifically anti-Asian character has long been a tradition of the War Party in this country: see the anti-Japanese Dr. Seuss cartoons from the World War II era for a particularly vivid example. Yes, he was attacking the “Japs,” but to Americans, it’s all the same Yellow Peril.

This kind of sentiment is easily invoked in America, and don’t tell me Pelosi and her ideological confreres aren’t aware of it – yes, even in “liberal” San Francisco, where anti-Asian sentiment is part of the city’s history. Never mind the first black president, or the first female president – what I’m waiting for is the first chief executive of Asian-American descent. I’m not, however, holding my breath…

Relations with China are cloudy, at best, and those may very well be war clouds gathering on the horizon. The reason is that Sinophobia is a point of unity between the Left and the Right: the union of the Weekly Standard and the AFL-CIO, and perhaps even the majority of my paleoconservative friends, who quail before the rising Chinese giant and see it as a potential threat on account of its sheer scale – a third of the world’s population, and a land-mass that rivals our own. Surely such a stirring titan will knock us out of the way as he takes his place at the center of the world stage.

This reflects a fundamental error on the part of many conservatives, as well as liberals of the more statist persuasion. They fail to understand that there are no conflicts of interest among nations as long as their relations are governed by the market, that is by mutually beneficial trade agreements voluntarily entered into. Ludwig von Mises said it far better than I could ever manage, and I’ll leave my readers to Mises’ ministrations on this abstruse but important subject.

Suffice to say here that our relations with China on the economic front are a benefit to American consumers – that is, to all of us. They enable us to buy inexpensive quality products and keep the cost of living down. Protectionists who argue that “they” are “destroying American jobs” are simply arguing for higher prices – ordinarily not a very popular cause, and especially not these days.

Free trade is the economic precondition for a peaceful world and the logical corollary of a non-interventionist foreign policy. If goods don’t cross borders, then armies soon will – a historical truism noted by many before me, and with good reason. Let it be a warning to all those anti-free trade, antiwar types of the Right as well as the Left – you’ll soon be jumping on the War Party’s bandwagon when it comes China’s turn to play the role of global bogeyman. The way things are going, that day may come soon enough.

Finally, a word or two about this nonsensical demand, raised by the “Save Darfur” crowd, that China must somehow “extinguish the flames of genocide” supposedly carried out by the government of Sudan. What does China have to do with Sudan and its government? Well, you see, the Chinese have oil interests in the region, that is, they are engaged in competition with Western oil companies in opening up new fields – and, well, that just isn’t permissible.

The Chinese, we are told, have a moral responsibility to either pressure the Sudanese to let up on Darfur, or else abandon their Sudanese assets. As if Sudan were a Chinese colony, and the Sudanese authorities mere sock-puppets of Beijing. A more arrogant and self-serving argument would be hard to imagine. Presumably Western interests will fill the vacuum left by this spontaneous display of Chinese moral rectitude – and that alone should tell us everything we need to know about what’s behind the “Save Darfur” bloviators and their high-horse moralizing.

If our professional do-gooders of the “progressive” persuasion are so concerned about the fate of Darfur, let them campaign for the granting of mass asylum to the survivors of this latest African catastrophe. Give them sanctuary and green cards, but keep U.S. troops out of Africa, specifically out of Darfur – and get off Beijing’s back.

Like Russia, China is awakening from the long Leninist nightmare, albeit less traumatically, and with greater prospects for full recovery. However, it wouldn’t take much to push it back into a revival of neo-Maoism – or worse – and a new dark age triggered by an external threat. A resurgence of Chinese ultra-nationalism in response to Western pressure – and the specter of U.S.-sponsored separatism – does not augur well for the cause of world peace. As is so often the case, we are creating the very
enemies we fear, empowering and arming them ideologically. We are, in this sense,
our own worst enemies.

~ Justin Raimondo

[lobsangrampa]

The human realm is a place of suffering.

It will never change.

Be fortunate that you have access to the dharma.

[James]

Xuan Di April 14th, 2008 5:12 pm

I am a Chinese oversea student, belonging to a minority group, Hui. What the author (Floyd Rudmin) comments about the affirmative actions from the Chinese government are all what I have experienced. And last Saturday, I also got to know that in Tibet, the medical care is completely free for the Tibetan until 2003. And the medical insurance system is introduced since then. And it covers all residence in Tibet. This is a special affirmative action which is even not shared by the other minority groups, not to mention the Hans.

(detail about the insurance system: translated from
http://www.xzlwq.gov.cn/art/Article/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=323
Now for average resident in Tibet, they pay 60 RMB very year, and the government pay 140 RMB for their insurance. For preschooling children, students at any education level, they pay 30RMB, the rest covered by the government. Disabled, low income people, orphans and widow without children don’t need to pay for the insurance. Women above 60, men above 65 pay for the insurance only once, and then they will be covered for the rest of their lives.

Just for comparison: people from rural areas in the rest of China gets 20RMB from their provincial governments. People from urban areas in the rest of China covers their own insurance, either by the companies/institutes they work in or by themselves.)

In primary school education, Since 1984, children from rural areas go to schools for free, and their food and living costs are also covered by the government. This policy is also unique to Tibet, and in the rest of China, if a kid is from rural area, the benefit (s)he gets is just paying less than one with a urban hukou.

Not many Chinese knows about these affirmative actions, I am really joyfully surprised to hear a foreigner commenting on it.

The languages about the Tibetan riot from the comments on some Chinese websites by average citizens have been extremely strong. The author’s worry is justified, and I sincerely hope the resentment is temporary.

[James]

#
frudmin April 15th, 2008 3:27 am

I (Floyd Rudmin) have no conflicts of interest vis-a-vis China. Neither my department nor my faculty has any ties to Chinese universities that I am aware of, and I certainly have not participated in any China exchanges. I have been to China once, in 2004, for one week, in Beijing, for the International Congress of Psychology. I know one graduate student at the University of Nanjing, whom I met at a Theoretical Psychology conference in Toronto last year, whom I asked to fact-check my statements about currency, schooling, and university admissions. My topic of research is minority relations to the dominant majority. Two major papers and bibliography are online at:

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~culture/rudmin.htm
http://www.anthroglobe.info/

My motivation for writing against the current anti-China campaign is that these demonstrations cannot conceivably result in an independent Tibet (which not even the Dalai Lama is seeking) but could result in the complete destruction of Tibetans. History has shown that other nations have destroyed their minorities when they are perceived to be a threat. China is a very old nation, but it is also a brand new nation when it comes to the experience of mass nationalism. People are now playing with dynamite, in my opinion.

Claims that China has been doing “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” are simply not substantiated by the facts. China has about 5 million Tibetans and about 1000 million Han Chinese. If there were, in fact, a five decades policy to displace Tibetans and destroy their culture, that would have been complete by now. Complete.

Commentators in this discussion (www.commondreams.org) repeat over and over that China has been doing bad things to Tibetans. But what are the specifics? For example, we know that the Nazis fired all of the Jewish minority from their jobs, made them wear the Star of David, then deported them, then murdered them en mass. We know that the Ottomans forced the Armenians into death marches. We know that Americans used Blacks as slaves and made war on the Indian tribes. We know that Canadians forced Native Peoples into small reserves and tried to destroy their languages and religions. We know that Israelis take Palestinian land and destroy their homes and cut down their orchards. What are the specifics of the supposed cultural aggression against the Tibetans? Has China done any of these kinds of culture oppression to the Tibetans? Is China doing any of these things now?

As far as I can tell from my limited knowledge of this, the Buddhist monasteries were the feudal lords and landowners in Tibet, and with the arrival of communism, they lost that status, tried to rebel, fled to India, where they agreed to serve in US operations against China. In this, they are like the White Russians fleeing into diaspora following the 1917 communist revolution in Russia. Similarly, there is a diaspora of Cuban exiles from Castro’s 1959 revolution. And there is a diaspora of Iranian royalists following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. All revolutions result in a diaspora of the losers. The diaspora from the American Revolution were called Loyalists, and they moved to Canada. My ancestor, Asa Webster, was one of them, moving from New Hampshire to what is now Brockville, Ontario. In three or four generations, these kinds of exiles settle down, inter-marry, and forget their historic quarrels and claims.

Please look at the facts of reality and think before becoming politically passionate. Judge your actions not by your own good intentions but by the possible consequences of your actions. Put a priority on correcting the abuses of your own government for which you have moral responsibility.

[James]

http://lojongmindtraining.com/Editorial.aspx

Editorial on the Situation in Tibet

In view of the extremely one-sided media coverage of the present situation in Tibet, and since this site is visited by many Tibetan Buddhists supportive of Tibetan independence, I feel compelled to provide an alternative point of view. I do so as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner of many years' standing who has traveled extensively in Tibet and in the ethnically Tibetan areas of Western China, but who as a Tai Chi practitioner has also spent much time in China proper.

I try to avoid politics as much as possible on this site, for obvious reasons. If I address the subject here it is not because I believe politics and religion should mix, but precisely because they have unfortunately become mixed and I would feel derelict in my moral duty if I did not attempt to separate them.

Let me start by viewing the situation from the point of view of Tibetan Buddhism. The whole idea of Tibetan Buddhism, as it has been taught to me, is that freedom and compassion are what remain after we have released all attachment to illusions such as 'self', 'other', 'my religion', 'my culture', 'my ethnic/linguistic/socioeconomic group', and so on. Any Tibetan who believes that there is any fundamental distinction between him/herself and the Han Chinese or Muslim shopkeeper next door, let alone uses such a distinction to justify attacks on others, has completely missed the point and 'Brought the God down to the level of a Demon', as the proverbs say, and it is our responsibility as Western Buddhists to recognize this and point it out - just as it is the responsibility of all Jews to point out abuses of power by the State of Israel, for Christians to dissociate themselves from churches that abuse others in the name of Jesus, and for Moslems to dissociate themselves from those who use the name of Allah to justify violence. Anyone who does not wish exactly the same good for every single person currently residing in Tibet, regardless of ethnic background, native language, or religion, or at least strongly aspire to do so, is not a sincere Buddhist.

It may be objected that this is asking a lot of the Tibetans. It is asking a lot, just as it is asking a lot of Christians that they 'love their enemies', as Jesus Christ specifically and unambiguously commands. But unless we hold our co-religionists to these standards, religion is no longer a healing force, but simply a marker and amplifier of intercommunal strife that actually aggravates the world's problems. There are enough such markers already: let's not use religion as another hook to hang our self-righteousness on.

There have been many references to a 'lack of freedom of religion' in Tibet. Firstly, I have to say that at the time of my visit in 2006 the Tibetans seemed pefectly free to practice their religion - they did prostrations, recited mantras, circumambulated temples, attended large ceremonies and lectures on Buddhism, and so on. The numbers of monks allowed by the Chinese seemed entirely sufficient for the religious purposes of the monasteries, though perhaps not for the temporal power the monasteries were hoping to re-assume. But the most important point is: how can any external circumstance prevent you from practicing your religion? How could anyone prevent you from practicing Mind Training, for instance? The most they could do would be to make your practice more challenging, and hence more interesting, and thus of course do you a favor. The proverbs 'Be grateful to everyone' and 'Don't depend on external conditions' obviously apply here.
Moving on to secular political and human rights issues: the only eyewitness reports from Lhasa by a Western journalist talk of unprovoked, vicious, and deadly racist attacks by ethnic Tibetans, not only on innocent Han Chinese shopkeepers, but also on the Moslem Hui minority who for centuries have performed the thankless task of butchering meat for the Buddhists (who consider themselves too pure for the task, though they are perfectly content to eat the animals that others slaughter). These eyewitness accounts fault the Chinese authorities not for being too forceful in suppressing these riots, but for being too tentative in protecting their own citizens.

Those interested in impartial eyewitness accounts might also want to read this account by a Tibetan monk interviewed by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7308890.stm), who appears to be objective and animated by a spirit of compassion, and who reaches conclusions generally similar to mine.

The media coverage of this issue has been absolutely appalling - not since the start of Iraq War have I seen such hysterical cheerleading, often based on outright lies, in such a dubious cause. For instance:

    * photos and video supposed to represent 'police brutality' in Lhasa that were actually, and obviously, of Nepalese police beating demonstrators in Khatmandu.
    * photos supposed to be of Chinese soldiers about to put on monks' robes and instigate a riot were actually stills from a movie shoot in 2000 in which the army were doing the producers of the movie a favor by playing extras. This can be verified by the soldier's uniforms and the livery of the taxicabs, both of which match those in use in 2000 but not those in use today.
    * Much editorial comment is frankly racist in tone, seeing the Chinese as a 'threat' because of their economic success - as if that success were somehow their fault!
    * The mobs in the video footage at the top right of the page (

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOKwXvajsEQ&NR=1
	Small | Large

) are consistently referred to as 'peaceable protesters'. I dare you to look at the video and tell me that that is an appropriate description.

I have yet to see a single media retraction on any of these points.

The extent to which vicious racist propaganda has infected mainstream coverage of these issues may be judged from the following cartoon. Believe it or not, this is not from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a major and normally reputable newspaper in the Seattle metropolitan area, not from an extremist racist organization as might appear, and is here reproduced under the 'fair use' doctrine of U.S. copyright law for purposes of comment and criticism:

Obviously I feel disgusted by this cartoon both as a Buddhist and as a human being, and I hope you do too. My point is: if this is regarded as acceptable even in the mainstream, just how much hatred and blindness on this issue must we be harboring as a society?

   
Those with strong stomachs might also want to take a look at the YouTube footage of the riots, including:

    * footage of an elderly Chinese man being pulled off his motorcycle by Tibetan rioters and beaten to death with rocks

       
    * an interview with a girl whose mother and sisters were herded into an upstairs room and burned to death by a mob of Tibetans

       

, and then ask themselves who are the aggressors and who are the victims in this situation.

I found watching these videos extremely upsetting, but I think every Western Buddhist needs to view them, painful as that is, so as to understand that the view of Tibetan culture and religion on which we have been sold is a very partial one, and that there is an enormous dark side that we have not been shown and are unwilling to look at. Unless and until we have taken a good, hard, realistic look at this dark side, we mingle religion and politics at our peril. The Dalai Lama, by the way, claims that these videos (from Chinese Cable TV) are staged, but it is obvious from the scale of the riots, their viciousness, and the near-universal participation in them, that that is completely impossible. They are also confirmed in every particular by the eyewitness testimony of James Miles of the Economist, referred to above. One item to note is the participation of monks in throwing stones, kicking in doors, and looting, as shown in these videos. This is actually not out of line with the history of Tibetan monks, who frequently made war on other monks, nobles, or the common people in pre-Communist Tibet.

If we are not careful, we could fall into the same trap as the medieval Christians who admired St Francis of Asissi and ended up feeling that they therefore had to support the Spanish Inquisition, or Muslim converts who, admiring the Sufi poetry of Rumi and Rabiyah, ended up going to terrorist training camps.

The last major mistake of this order was after the Second World War, when the Allies, sympathizing with the suffering of the Jews, gave them their own country on the theory that they were a humble, modest, and compassionate people who had suffered much and wished nothing more than to live in peace and harmony with their neighbors. We know how that turned out - the oppressed actually typically make the most vicious oppressors.
Western media want to somehow make this the fault of the Chinese, and even to turn this into an argument for Tibetan autonomy, if not independence. If this is a sample of what the Tibetans would do with their desired 'autonomy', obviously it is an excellent thing that they do not have it. They need the Chinese to exercise more control, rather than less, over them, since their Buddhist religion apparently does not prevent them either from destroying property or from taking life.

In my travels in Tibet and Western China I met many Chinese tourists with a great interest in this 'peaceable' people with their deeply 'non-violent' religion living on the roof of the world. How do you think they feel now?

In my opinion the Chinese authorities, after admittedly committing many atrocities in Tibet, as in their own country, up to and including the end of the Cultural Revolution, are now doing a decent and fair job of governing it from the secular point of view. They have granted its people a lot of personal, economic, and religious freedom - as much as they believe to be compatible with political stability. I feel there has been insufficient appreciation of the extraordinarily difficult task they face - of maintaining a delicate balance between regional, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, and class interests, all in the middle of the most explosive growth and transformation this planet has ever seen. The task could be compared to that of repairing a delicate and priceless piece of embroidery while riding a galloping horse. Before these riots they might perhaps have been persuaded that it would be safe to grant the Tibetans even more freedom, but that case is completely impossible to make now. I am sure they are regretting giving Tibet as much freedom as they did, and I do not blame them.

The Tibetans involved in the riots have shown themselves to be racist, immature, and completely incapable of self-government - perhaps not surprisingly, in view of the oppressive, feudal, stagnant, insular, and theocratic rule that preceded the arrival of the Chinese. Why Westerners would support a return to a theocratic form of government in Tibet, when they so steadfastly oppose it elsewhere, is a mystery to me.

In fact, when I have longer conversations with people on the subject, what often comes to the surface is anti-Chinese racist attitudes that those same people would instantly regard as unacceptable if directed against, say, Blacks, Hispanics, or Asians.

If you have any comments on this editorial you may reach me through the Feedback Page.

Martin Mellish, Lojong Site Coordinator.

[James]

  Risky geopolitical game: Washington plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China

F. William Engdahl / Online Journal | April 14, 2008

Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset Chinese relations.

The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time publicly in Washington. The President of the United States is not unaware of the high stakes of such an insult to Beijing. Bush deepened the affront to America’s largest trading partner, China, by agreeing to attend as the US Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.
   
   
   

The immediate expressions of support for the crimson monks of Tibet from George Bush, Condi Rice, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel most recently took on dimensions of the absurd. Ms Merkel announced she would boycott attending the August Beijing Summer Olympics as her protest at the Beijing treatment of the Tibetan monks. What her press secretary omitted is that she had not even planned to go in the first place.

She was followed by an announcement that Poland’s prime minister, the pro-Washington Donald Tusk, would also stay away, along with pro-US Czech President Vaclav Klaus. It is unclear whether they also hadn’t planned to go in the first place but it made for dramatic press headlines.

The recent wave of violent protests and documented attacks by Tibetan monks against Han Chinese residents began on March 10, when several hundred monks marched on Lhasa to demand release of other monks allegedly detained for celebrating the award of the US Congress’ Gold Medal last October. The monks were joined by other monks marching to protest Beijing rule on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

The geopolitical game

As the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed to try to put the spotlight on Beijing’s human rights record on the eve of the coming Olympics. The Beijing Olympics are an event seen in China as a major acknowledgement of the arrival of a new prosperous China on the world stage.

The background actors in the Tibet “Crimson revolution” actions confirm that Washington has been working overtime in recent months to prepare another of its infamous Color Revolutions, these fanning public protests designed to inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing. The actors on the ground in and outside Tibet are the usual suspects, tied to the US State Department, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA’s Freedom House through its chairman, Bette Bao Lord and her role in the International Committee for Tibet, as well as the Trace Foundation financed by the wealth of George Soros through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the latest unrest to sabotage the Olympic Games “in order to achieve their unspeakable goal,” Tibetan independence.

Bush telephoned his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, to pressure for talks between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama. The White House said that Bush, “raised his concerns about the situation in Tibet and encouraged the Chinese government to engage in substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives and to allow access for journalists and diplomats.”

President Hu reportedly told Bush the Dalai Lama must “stop his sabotage” of the Olympics before Beijing takes a decision on talks with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

Dalai Lama’s odd friends

In the West, the image of the Dalai Lama has been so much promoted that in many circles he is deemed almost a god. While the spiritual life of the Dalai Lama is not our focus, it is relevant to note briefly the circles he has chosen to travel in most of his life.

The Dalai Lama travels in what can only be called rather conservative political circles. What is generally forgotten today is that during the 1930s the Nazis, including Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and other top Nazi Party leaders, regarded Tibet as the holy site of the survivors of the lost Atlantis, and the origin of the “Nordic pure race.”

When he was 11 and already designated Dalai Lama, he was befriended by Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Heinrich Himmler’s feared SS. Far from the innocent image of him in the popular Hollywood film with Brad Pitt, Harrer was an elite SS member at the time he met the 11-year-old Dalai Lama and became his tutor in “the world outside Tibet.” While only the Dalai Lama knows the contents of Harrer’s private lessons, the two remained friends until Harrer died at the ripe age of 93 in 2006. [1]

That sole friendship, of course, does not define a person’s character, but it is interesting in the context of later friends. In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, and former Beijing Envoy, CIA director and President George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama demanded the British government 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. The Dalai Lama had close ties to Miguel Serrano [2], head of Chile’s National Socialist Party, a proponent of something called esoteric Hitlerism. [3]

Leaving aside at this point the claim of the Dalai Lama to divinity, what is indisputable is that he has been surrounded and financed in significant part, since his flight into exile in India in 1959, by various US and Western intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs. It is the agenda of the Washington friends of the Dalai Lama that is relevant here.

The NED at work again . . .

As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, “during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.” The US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in the group. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA in 1951. It was later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet, according to Parenti. [4]

According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the late 1990s, “for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama.” [5]

With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India, where he lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars in backing today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding CIA front organization, funded by the US Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been instrumental in every US-backed Color Revolution destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global public relations campaigns to popularize their pet opposition candidates.

As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the US government is fanning the flames of destabilization against China by funding opposition protest organizations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s, on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting president of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [6]

American intelligence historian William Blum states, “The NED played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North’s shadowy ‘Project Democracy.” This network privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. In 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED ‘run Project Democracy.’” [7]

The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama, Tibet independence organization today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State Department officials, including Gare Smith and Julia Taft. [8]

Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450-foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.

The SFT was among five organizations which this past January proclaimed the start of a “Tibetan people’s uprising” on Jan 4 and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.

Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had “videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by BBC.” The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt organization whose main funding is from the NED. [9]

Among related projects, the US government-financed NED also supports the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama’s exile base at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet,” also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

In short, the US State Department and US intelligence community’s fingerprints are all over the upsurge of the Free Tibet movement and the anti-Han Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why, and especially why now?

Tibet’s raw minerals treasure

Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India, Washington’s newest anti-China ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world’s largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world’s lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet’s forests are the largest timber reserve at China’s disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region. [10]

On the Tibet Autonomous Region’s border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a “treasure basin.” The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.

And situated as it is, on the “roof of the world,” Tibet is perhaps the world’s most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia’s greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people.” He who controls Tibet’s water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.

But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential to act as a lever to destabilize and blackmail the Beijing Government.

Washington’s ‘nonviolence as a form of warfare’

The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of the pictures blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not even been of Chinese military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks. They have been shown to be, in most cases, either Reuters or AFP pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by Tibetan monks in paramilitary organizations. In some instances, German TV stations ran video of beatings that were not even from Tibet but rather by Nepalese police in Kathmandu. [11]

The Western media complicity simply further underlies that the actions around Tibet are part of a well-orchestrated destabilization effort on the part of Washington. What few people realize is that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also instrumental, along with Gene Sharp’s misnamed Albert Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert Helvey, in encouraging the student protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The Albert Einstein Institution, as it describes itself, specializes in “nonviolence as a form of warfare.” [12]

Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency stationed in Myanmar. Helvey trained, in Hong Kong, the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. He is now believed acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong in similar civil disobedience techniques. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with the Albert Einstein Institution and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation long before then. In its annual report for 2004, Helvey’s Albert Einstein Institution admitted to advising people in Tibet. [13]

With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the US Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime change and political destabilization. As one researcher of the phenomenon behind the wave of color revolutions, Jonathan Mowat, describes it, “ . . . What we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments ‘enabled’ by ‘real time’ intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of ‘intelligence helmet’ video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine’s civilian application.

“This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The ‘revolution’ in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places, (for example the RAND Corporation), for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.” [14]

Goal to control China

Washington policy has used and refined these techniques of “revolutionary nonviolence,” and NED operations embodied a series of ‘democratic’ or soft coup projects as part of a larger strategy which would seek to cut China off from access to its vital external oil and gas reserves.

The 1970s quote attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a proponent of British geopolitics in an American context comes to mind: “If you control the oil you control entire nations . . .”

The destabilization attempt by Washington using Tibet, no doubt with quiet “help” from its friends in British and other US-friendly intelligence services, is part of a clear pattern.

It includes Washington’s “Saffron revolution” attempts to destabilize Myanmar. It includes the ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur to block China’s access to strategically vital oil resources there and elsewhere in Africa. It includes attempts to foment problems in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and to disrupt China’s vital new energy pipeline projects to Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a region surrounded by major mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia controls pipeline and other ties between it and Western Europe, China, India and the Middle East, where China depends on uninterrupted oil flows from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.

Behind the strategy to encircle China

In this context, a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations analysis, in their Foreign Affairs magazine, by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the September/October 1997 issue, is worth quoting. Brzezinski, a protégé of David Rockefeller and a follower of the founder of British geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, is today the foreign policy adviser to presidential candidate Barack Obama. In 1997 he revealingly wrote: “Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world’s population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.

“Eurasia is the world’s axial super-continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy. . . .” [15] (emphasis mine-w.e.).

This statement, written well before the US-led bombing of the former Yugoslavia and the US military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or its support of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, puts Washington pronouncements about ‘ridding the world of tyranny’ and about spreading democracy, into a somewhat different context from the one usually mentioned by George W. Bush or others.

It’s about global hegemony, not democracy. It should be no surprise when powers such as China are not convinced that giving Washington such overwhelming power is in China’s national interest, any more than Russia thinks that it would be a step towards peace to let NATO gobble up Ukraine and Georgia and put US missiles on Russia’s doorstep “to defend against threat of Iranian nuclear attack on the United States.”

The US-led destabilization in Tibet is part of a strategic shift of great significance. It comes at a time when the US economy and the US dollar, still the world’s reserve currency, are in the worst crisis since the 1930s. It is significant that the US administration sends Wall Street banker, former Goldman Sachs chairman, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to Beijing in the midst of its efforts to embarrass Beijing in Tibet. Washington is literally playing with fire. China long ago surpassed Japan as the world’s largest holder of foreign currency reserves, now in the range of $1.5 trillion, most of which are invested in US Treasury debt instruments. Paulson knows well that Beijing could to decide it could bring the dollar to its knees by selling only a small portion of its US debt on the market.

[lodoe]

Hey friend,

I think you are drunk and innocent one. And you had proved that you are not followers of Dalai Lama but of Funky gurus. There will be more protest in Germany, India, Swiss, U.S.A etc in coming days. Please learn yourself well in fields of Mother Language Tibetan properly. Don't make your self idiot in front of us.

Shame on your behavior and your instructors.

Wake Wake. Pratice this for 100000 times: Free Tibet, Free Tibet & Save Tibet, Save Tibet from

yours discipliner

[a friend]

Deleted,

Calm down, man!
If you fear so much the humiliation you should create a group of "true Tibetans" and request the Dalai Lama to stop trying to humiliate the faithful good people that are followers of the holy Buddha Dorje Shugden.
You must know that these people for 12 years have been harassed, persecuted, humiliated, thrown out of everywhere by people like you, that love more one person, the Dalai Lama, than all your fellow Tibetans that are his victims. People that forgot to respect the holy Lamas that did everything for the Tibetans, everything, when you went into exile.

Did you know, poor victim yourself, that those that you and the Dalai Lama are insulting were the ones who created schools for your children, wrote the books for your children to learn in exile, were their school teachers? Did you know it? If you didn't, well now you know it. All these holy benefactors were faithful to Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche and the Holy Protector. And you are insulting the Deity like that? You don't have a heart? You don't have a mother or father? Would you treat them like that? Many many of the things that you enjoy now in India do not come "from the kindness of the Dalai Lama", they come from the love and hard work and the immeasurable kindness of the holy Lamas that worshipped the Protector. Most of them now went to Tushita, but they are seeing you man, listening to your terrible words of ingratitude!

So now stop it! Stop bringing shame on yourself! Stop creating such terrible karma!
And tell the Dalai Lama to stop showing a face of compassion to journalists and politicians and being the tormentor of his fellow Tibetans!

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

[James]

The Strange Tibetan Theocratic Model

Translated lundi 14 avril 2008, par Isabelle Metral
Are Western leaders truly defending human rights ?

Is it possible to criticize the Chinese government without embracing the Dalai Lama’s theocratic project ? For such is the impasse we are heading for as a result of the media-sustained agitation and brainwashing initiated by supporters of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. So history will have taught us nothing. So we have forgotten all about the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games to protest the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan in support of Babrak Karmal’s communist government. And how, when it came to condemning this campaign and discrediting communism, just anything went : the US then did not stop at arming and financing all those who fought against the communist government and the Soviets, first among whom the Taliban, then Al Qaeda.

The threat of an Olympics boycott commits us to the same preposterous logic. Apparently, solidarity with the religious Tibetan faction and Tibetan supporters of independence is a must. Never mind if China is severed of a quarter of its territory : that is not something that should make us pause. The feudal regime of the Tibetan monks and their exiled king, the 14th Dalai Lama, must be supported. And the Dalai Lama should be extravagantly recognized as a living God and absolute ruler over the Tibetan people. His grotesque claim to choose, with his higher clergy, the person in whom he professes he will be reincarnated should be assented…

Not content with all that silly stuff we should also negate the historical links between Tibet and China since the fourteenth century. Forget the fact that the independence movement was instigated in the twentieth century by Western powers at the height of their imperialist supremacy in order to carve China up. Keep mum about what “the 1959 Chinese crackdown” really cracked down upon : the Tibetan monks’ revolt against the abolition of serfdom and feudal taxes and codes, by virtue of which there was a scale of prices for diverse categories of human beings and the monasteries’ masters had the power of life and death over their serfs…

We are also expected to protest indignantly against the police suppressing the demonstrations in Lhassa, and make nothing of the fact that these started with a pogrom of Chinese shopkeepers. Waste no pity on those who were clubbed to death and burnt in their shops with their families by those who claim to support the Dalai Lama. Have no scruple about calling “genocide” the more than doubling of the Tibetan population since the 1950s. Bow low before the Tibetans’ so-called religious identity at a time when those populations have embarked on the secularizing process characteristic of all developing countries. Turn a blind eye to the strange social code that fidelity to tradition and Tibetan identity as preached by Tibetan monks entails : the condemnation of abortion and homosexuality (deemed unnatural by the Dalai Lama himself), of mixed marriages between Tibetans and Chinese, considered impure, the recruitment of children at a very early age by the monasteries… Say nothing about the recent campaign against the railway linking Beijing and Lassa, with arguments that were used in the nineteenth century, e.g. the condemnation of railways by Pope Gregory XVI as a devilish means to spread new ideas and subvert religious tradition.

How can one invoke human rights and accept the negation of the secularist separation of church and state ?

The present campaign in favour of an Olympics boycott therefore amounts to a manipulation ; it is a trap for the setting of which the rights of Tibetans and Chinese merely serve as a pretext. If the real aim was to put pressure on the Chinese government, why did Western leaders allow China to submit its application and why didn’t they say anything when it was elected to play host to the Games ? Why do they keep signing contracts worth billions of dollars ? Is China an eligible partner for the purchase of nuclear power stations or US Treasury bonds, but not for the organization of the Games ? And why choose to meet it on the ethnic field rather than the social field ? Is it not because Western powers would have a problem if social claims in China were met ?

All this hypocrisy binds the US and Europe to an aggressive escalation against China as a nation : the result will be a unanimous surge of national feeling across the country. The strategists behind this worldwide campaign have rested their hopes precisely on this. The fact it is headed by Robert Ménard [1] is a sure indication that US neo-conservatives are behind it. When all’s said and done, the sorcerer’s apprentices will be found to have once more befuddled us all.

Jean-Luc Mélanchon is a Socialist senator.

[1] Co-founder and general secretary (for life) of the French association Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF). Mélenchon remarks in his blog, now translated into English, that the RSF "has shrunken, becoming this one individual" whose defense of civil liberties depends, in an opportunistic way, on the government in question, "being incapable of even token criticism of the use of torture by the U.S., or of seeking legal aid for those detained in Guantanamo."

[James]

//www.german-foreign-policy.com/

Particularly Manipulative
2008/04/18
LHASA/BEIJING/BERLIN
(Own report) - The west's Tibet campaign is meeting its first signs of opposition in Germany. As the worldwide acts to sabotage the Olympic torch relay continues, German businesses are beginning to worry about their business prospects in China, amounting currently to a turnover in the billions. Policy advisors are warning that if the German government continues to apply "different standards (...) to different countries" it could cause a permanent loss of political credibility in Beijing. German correspondents agree that the presumptuous campaign orchestrated by western former colonial powers to humiliate China is weakening pro-western forces in the country. They report that in the People's Republic, the German media "is seen as particularly manipulative." Experts confirm the propagandist nature of German newscasts on Tibet. In a discussion with german-foreign-policy.com, the sinologist, Dr. Ingo Nentwig, whose work focuses on China's nationality policy, spoke of a blatant "disproportion in the media version." Sports associations and the Protestant Church are now joining the west's mass mobilization against China. They are calling on athletes and Protestant Olympic tourists to use their presence at the Olympic games to reinforce pressure on China.
Growth Market
Over the past few days, leading business representatives and business associations have been venting their resentment to the media about the west's Tibet campaign. With rising profits, the significance of German business with China has been growing steadily. Last year alone, exports to the People's Republic grew by 9.4% to a total of 54 Billion Euros. A rejection by Chinese consumers would signify as big a loss as that incurred from a loss of contracts with the Chinese government. Investment difficulties in China would also damage German enterprises. "Limitations in business relations would (...) sensitively affect the German economy in an important growth market" explained the chairman of the Asian-Pacific Committee of German Business (APA) Juergen Hambrecht.[1] Hambrecht is the CEO of the BASF Chemical Corporation, which is greatly profiting from the low wages and the advantageous Chinese framework for businesses. BASF has invested billions in China, which now ranks as its third largest market after Germany and the USA.
Loss of Credibility
German policy advisors are also warning. The Institute of Asian Studies at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg admonishes in a realistic appraisal of the situation that "China will not submit to brusque demands from other governments". One should be "wary of applying different standards for comparable situations to different countries" writes the think-tank, directly insinuating the Tibet campaign. By applying double standards "every position, even unambiguous, loses its credibility" [2] and destroys the basis for any subsequent negotiations. This is all the more serious, because the authors discern an explicit shift in the international balance of power - political and economic leverage is having less effect than previously on China. According to the IAS, "in questions concerning North Korea, the Iranian atomic program or protection of the global climate, nothing can be done without China."[3] "Punitive economic sanctions are more damaging to western national economies than to the Chinese."
Humiliations
Beijing-based correspondents confirm the basis for apprehension expressed by business and policy advisors. "Many Chinese, inside and outside of the People's Republic, feel internationally humiliated" writes a leading German daily about reactions to the western campaign. "Even those Chinese citizens, who otherwise express criticisms of the government, are united in rebuking western criticism."[4] Memories of operations by the 19th and 20th century colonial powers is very much alive in China today - they were successful in splitting China and pitting one region of the country against another with bloody consequences for the entire country. The current western humiliations are a reminder of the aggressions of that period, they weaken domestic pro-western forces and are paving the way for boycotting pro-Chinese forces. A China-based TV correspondent reported: "the majority of the population is confronting the rest of the world, above all the western media, with a defiant anger.[5]
Insulting
According to the correspondent, the "weeks of the western media barrage" is not only considered "insulting" in China, "the German media," whose newscasts are being carefully followed by a growing Chinese community in Germany, is "now seen as particularly manipulative."[6] "That should be taken seriously" says the journalist "because up to now, the foreign media has had a relatively high credibility in China. That has been completely turned around."[7]
Disproportionate
There is not only criticism of the evaluative character of reporting, even the factual allegations often are misleading or even false. Dr. Ingo Nentwig, Sinologist, ethnologist and an expert on Chinese nationality policy, sees the often used term "cultural genocide" in reference to the developments in Tibet as "totally inappropriate," or that Beijing seeks to "Sinize" Tibet "false." In his talk with german-foreign-policy.com, Nentwiig sets the record straight on common preconceptions of China and its nationality policy, sharply criticizing news reporting in Germany. "The proportionality in newscasts has disappeared."
Mass Mobilization
In defiance of all warnings and in spite of criticism from circles with interests in the area, Berlin is escalating the Tibet campaign. German politicians' most recent declarations call for a TV boycott of important Olympic ceremonies. Even sports associations and the German Protestant Church have begun a mass anti-Chinese mobilization for the games. An unspecified sports initiative is preparing armbands for participants to wear in the Olympics as a protest against their hosts. For the same purpose, the Protestant Church is distributing armbands to German Olympic tourists. The provocations against China are systematically promoting nationalist tensions and are beginning to take on the character of a mass movement.