Dalai Lama is "personification of evil"

[wondering]

ozmirage, I appreciate your view. Once seen in print, or video, it is so easy to be swayed regardless of who or what is shown. And determining the facts is often next to impossible. I try to observe but withhold judgement since it is the only moral choice for me.

[Isserley]

He did aplogize for telling kid to "Suck my Tongue"
"His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement said.
Those gestures and touches are serious red flags, and anyone with minimal experience/instinct in gestural/non-verbal language will recognize them as inappropriate.
And if it was a joke (as he states) it is a very sick one.

[Wind]

Well this is disappointing and disturbing. I used to think the critique against him was mostly just nonsense and CCP propaganda.

Can this be explained and how? I don't really get how this would be a joke either. Did anyone laugh about it really?

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/s...17236750794754

https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/s...23867328954368

https://fortune.com/longform/dalai-l...ordinary-life/

Behind the scenes of the Dalai Lama’s early history with the CIA
Touted to be the "first definitive biography" of the acclaimed Tibetan scholar, author Alexander Norman had one source: the Dalai Lama himself.

When Chairman Mao announced the “liberation” of Tibet as a top priority for the newly founded People’s Republic of China, the Dalai Lama was not yet 15 years old (although, counting by Tibet’s lunar calendar, he thought himself that age). The first troop incursions occurred at the end of 1949.

A year later, the Tibetan army was completely routed after a short campaign by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Following this, on Nov. 17, 1950, the Dalai Lama was proclaimed temporal leader of his country. A further six months on and the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet was signed by a delegation of Tibetan negotiators in Beijing. Up to that point, the only window on the outside world the Dalai Lama had had was a series of roughly weekly meetings over a period of around six months with the Austrian adventurer and alpinist Heinrich Harrer.

It is thus a remarkable irony that the Dalai Lama’s introduction to the modern world came from a former member of Hitler’s SS. It was Harrer who subsequently put the Dalai Lama’s brother in touch with officials at the U.S. embassy in India and who hatched a plot with the CIA to spirit the Dalai Lama out of Tibet if he would first publicly repudiate the agreement. This the Dalai Lama declined to do—on the grounds that it was not clear that America would give wholehearted support to Tibet if he did. It was nonetheless at this moment that the agency began to take a close interest in Tibet.

What follows is an excerpt from my book, THE DALAI LAMA: An Extraordinary Life (HMH Books & Media).

Dalai-Lama-Book-Cover
“The Dalai Lama: An Extraordinary Life” by Alexander Norman.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Word of the Precious Protector’s escape spread swiftly around the world, but for want of information, the many news agencies taking an interest in the story were compelled to hold their breath. Ten days after the Dalai Lama disappeared from Lhasa, the Indian president sent an urgent letter to Nehru asking for a report. The prime minister replied, saying, “We do not yet know where the Dalai Lama is.” He was being decidedly economical with the truth. Thanks to the presence of the American-trained radio operators among the escapees, Washington—with the help of Geshe Wangyal—was able to monitor the party’s progress almost the entire way along its route. Nehru, second only to President Eisenhower, was informed the day before writing to the Indian president that the escape party had arrived safely at the border. But it would not do to broadcast the government’s intelligence capability owing to its links with the CIA.

As for the press, there were slim pickings for the hundreds of reporters who converged on the remote tea-growing settlement of Tezpur in far northeastern India. It was here, after resting a week in a remote town close to where he crossed the border, that the Dalai Lama was welcomed by the mayor and a large crowd of well-wishers immediately prior to entraining for Mussoorie, a further two days’ journey to the west. There were no interviews, not even for old friends like Heinrich Harrer, who had made a special journey. All that was to be granted him and others was a short, moderately worded statement from the Dalai Lama (the text agreed to in advance with the Indian government) explaining briefly the circumstances leading up to his request for political asylum and thanking the people and government of India “for their spontaneous and generous welcome.” Following lunch with local dignitaries, the Dalai Lama and his entourage left for the station without further word. Despite the Tibetan leader’s temperate language, his words were immediately denounced by the Chinese. “The so-called statement of the Dalai Lama is a crude document, lame in reasoning, full of lies and loopholes,” thundered the People’s Daily.

Two days after leaving Tezpur, the Precious Protector reached Mussoorie, where Nehru had arranged for the Tibetan leader to stay at Birla House, the splendid country retreat of a family of wealthy industrialists close to the prime minister. On arrival, as indeed he had been all along the way, he was given an exuberant welcome by the local people.

Almost the Dalai Lama’s first act on arrival was to preside over the requisite rituals “to invoke the commitment of the Dharma Protectors who had vowed to guard the teachings of the Buddha, in order to quickly pacify these troubling times in the world at large and specifically in Tibet.” The deities had not been able to save Tibet, but at least they had kept the Dalai Lama safe. The very next day, Nehru himself arrived. At first, the Indian prime minister had granted asylum only to the Tibetan leader and his immediate entourage, unaware—as was the Dalai Lama at the time—that there would be a mass exodus of refugees from Lhasa and its environs following in the Precious Protector’s wake. But when reports reached Nehru of the fighting in Lhasa, he relented. Now all were welcome, provided they gave up their arms.

For Nehru, the whole affair was deeply troubling. As he explained to the Dalai Lama, his “being in India [kept] alive the question of Tibet in the world,” which for China was “immediately one of irritation and suspicion.” On the one hand, he had hoped that with the mutual accord treaty signed in 1954, there might be permanently friendly relations between China and India. The presence of the Dalai Lama and his followers threatened this. On the other hand, he clearly felt some responsibility for having insisted on the Precious Protector’s return to Tibet three years earlier. In their four hours of talks, Nehru assured the Tibetan leader of his welcome, but at the same time emphasized that the Indian government would not support his claim to Tibetan independence. The prime minister’s plain speaking on the subject caused the Dalai Lama later to recall that Nehru could be something of a bully. For his part, though, it is clear the prime minister found the young Tibetan leader exasperatingly naive. When the Dalai Lama told him of his determination both to win back independence for Tibet and to avoid any further bloodshed, Nehru exploded, “his lower lip quivering with anger…‘That is not possible!’”

The 24-year-old Dalai Lama may have been politically naive, but he was well aware that he and his fellow refugees faced a decidedly uncertain future. Many Tibetans, including senior members of the Dalai Lama’s entourage, assumed it was simply a matter of time before their return would be negotiated. America and the other great powers would surely support Tibet as soon as they understood the reality of the situation. The Dalai Lama himself had no such illusions. Furthermore, it soon became clear that, while Mussoorie was a congenial place to stay, it was remote both physically and psychologically from the political hub of New Delhi. That the resort retained—as it does to this day—an air of colonial gentility, with several once grand hotels and a number of prestigious English-style private schools, was small recompense.

There were some advantages to these new circumstances, however. Left entirely to their own devices, and having few demands on their time, to their satisfaction the monastic element within the Dalai Lama’s household was able, as Trijang Rinpoché later wrote, to “focus…on religious practice” and “observe the discipline of renunciates.”

While life in Mussoorie settled soon enough into quiet routine, one of the most trying aspects of exile quickly became apparent. Information about what was happening at home, still more so of what had become of individual people, was almost impossible to come by. The Chinese said only what they wanted to say and refused entry to all foreigners. And such news as did reach the Precious Protector’s ears was uniformly bad. The refugees who followed in his wake brought with them shocking tales of Chinese brutality. But then as the springtime heat gave way to the summer’s monsoon rain, another, more pressing problem made itself felt. Most of those arriving had nothing but the heavy clothing suitable to the Tibetan climate and were completely ignorant of conditions in India. Worse, they had little resistance to the tropical illnesses that quickly broke out among them. During a visit to Delhi in June 1959, the Dalai Lama therefore urged the Indian government to move them to camps on higher ground.

By this time a number of international relief agencies were working with the refugees, who continued to arrive in large numbers until, by the end of the year, they were estimated to total around 80,000, including many children. In the beginning they were placed in camps close to the border, where the agencies, notable among them the Save the Children Fund and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, first encountered them. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s American friends had also not been slow to act. That summer the CIA was instrumental in obtaining for the Dalai Lama both the recently instituted Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership and, somewhat improbably, the Admiral Richard E. Byrd Memorial Award for International Rescue. The one commemorated a Philippine politician, the other an American explorer. But together these awards went a good way toward meeting the need for funds for the time being. The agency was also responsible for an investigation of the legal status of Tibet, undertaken by the International Commission of Jurists, whose personnel arrived among the refugees during the summer. The commission subsequently published a report, based on interviews and bolstered by historical research, which argued that Tibet had been, de facto, an independent sovereign state from the moment when the Great Thirteenth expelled the Qing garrison from Lhasa in 1912. This would form the basis of the legal case for subsequent appeals to the United Nations.

It seems certain that the CIA, acting in concert with sympathetic members of the Indian government, also had a hand in the new statement the Dalai Lama released at this time. Speaking of the “tyranny and oppression” of the Chinese authorities, the Precious Protector said that he would welcome “change and progress,” but that the Chinese had “put every obstacle in the way of carrying out…reform.” Instead, “forced labour and compulsory exactions, a systematic persecution of the people, plunder and confiscation of property belonging to individuals and monasteries and execution of leading men” were “the glorious achievements of the Chinese rule in Tibet.”

The public repudiation of the Seventeen Point Agreement that followed (and here one might be forgiven for supposing that the 24-year-old leader had been writing political speeches all his life) was precisely the justification the CIA needed for its continued support of the resistance movement. But while the Dalai Lama’s clearly ghostwritten speech was enough for Washington, the Tibetan resistance still hoped for something more. To this end, Gonpo Tashi, the rebel leader, paid an early visit to Mussoorie. There he learned that although the Precious Protector supported the aims of the movement—a Tibet free of Chinese interference—and was full of admiration for the bravery and determination of the rebels, and accepted that there were times when the Buddhadharma must be defended by all means, including violence, giving his support was a step he could not in good conscience take. Besides, the government in exile’s impending appeal to the United Nations—which the Dalai Lama was determined to lodge in spite of Nehru’s stated opposition—would lose much of its force if Tibet could not present itself as a peaceful victim of China’s aggression.

This was a huge personal disappointment to Gonpo Tashi, described by his CIA handler, Roger McCarthy, as “one of the most impressive figures I…ever met.” Nonetheless, the Tibetan rebel leader played a leading role in planning a major operation scheduled for the coming winter.

In September, 18 men (the first batch from Camp Hale) were parachuted into Pemba, a district approximately 200 miles northeast of Lhasa, where the rebels were jointly led by a layman and a young reincarnate lama. The agents were accompanied by an extremely generous supply of war matériel: 126 pallets of arms and armaments, together with first aid and food supplies, dropped in three separate sorties. Altogether this was adequate to equip something like 5,000 men.

Though properly armed for the first time, the rebels proved unable to capitalize on the munificence of their backers. While the CIA envisaged a classic, highly mobile guerrilla operation, with the rebel force taking to the hills and coming down in small numbers to attack the Chinese at moments and in places of weakness before disappearing back to the mountain trails they knew so well, the reality was very different. The Tibetans’ modus operandi was, as it had always been, to fight in large, loose, mainly mounted formations. This could be effective when they had numerical superiority on open ground but was much less so in the face of even small numbers of a well-armed enemy properly dug in. More significant still was the Tibetan fighters’ vulnerability to air strikes. The result was a foregone conclusion.

Recounting the CIA’s reaction to the debacle years later, Roger McCarthy, the director of operations, recalled: “At first we didn’t believe the reports coming in. We thought it was an exaggeration, an error. But it wasn’t.” The Chinese attacked the rebel encampment— home not just to the soldiers but also to their wives and children— with aircraft and long-range artillery. “It was genocide, pure and simple.”

One might have expected the experience at Pemba to cause the Americans to lose faith in the ability of Tibetans to wage effective war against the Chinese. That it did not suggests the CIA hoped that, with more rigorous training in guerrilla tactics, Chushi Gangdruk could yet become a serious threat to the Chinese. The Tibetans knew their terrain and could survive the harshest conditions; they just needed to learn to fight in small detachments. This now became the focus of their training in the United States.

While the CIA was hopeful of modernizing Tibetan tactics through its training program, the agency also supported a more traditional force that had gathered at Mustang, a remote ethnically Tibetan province in northern Nepal. With arms and funding channeled through India, several thousand men gathered here to form what was intended as a reinvasion force. To keep morale up and to test the force’s readiness to fight, the Mustang guerrillas launched periodic raids into southern Tibet—scoring, on occasion, what has been described as “one of the greatest intelligence hauls in the history of the agency.” This was the acquisition, following a raid on a transport convoy, of a blue satchel containing detailed information about PLA troop dispositions and intentions, along with the first confirmed reports of famine and unrest in China during the Great Leap Forward. This was at a time when almost nothing was known either about the internal workings of the Chinese military or about conditions in China itself.

It remains open to speculation how fully aware the Dalai Lama was of the enormous scale of the operations both in Pemba and in Mustang, but there is room for supposing that he did indeed have a clear idea of what was going on, even if he did not know every detail. From the memoir of John Kenneth Knaus, the CIA’s director of operations in India, who met the Dalai Lama in 1964, it is evident that the Tibetan leader knew exactly who Knaus was. It is also clear that the Dalai Lama was profoundly ambivalent about the whole business. One side of him, the merely human, wished Knaus and his team every success. The other side, the religious, forbade him to do so. Knaus recalled how, as a result, the Precious Protector imposed “a remarkably effective, though invisible, barrier between us” when the American entered the audience chamber.

For the Dalai Lama, perhaps the only positive thing to emerge from the CIA program was its effect on people’s thinking. Knaus reports him allowing that “Tibet had been made up of many tribes who would not cooperate with one another. Now our common enemy—the Communists—had united us…as never before.”

[Ravenlocke]

Former serfs tell the horrifying serfdom history in Tibet in this documentary

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=36JqvTdg2fo

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/LogKa11/status/1645383226179952644

https://twitter.com/LogKa11/status/1645384417253138434

https://twitter.com/LogKa11/status/1645785525448757248

https://twitter.com/LogKa11/status/1645785530502909959

https://twitter.com/LogKa11/status/1645787280051937281

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/historic_ly/stat...93971253329920

Tibet, China, and the Violent Reaction of a Wealthy Elite
Too many westerners supplant their fantasy instead of dealing with reality in Tibet

Earlier this year, the Dalai Lama, in a BBC interview, said, "Receive them, help them, educate them... but ultimately they should develop their own country. I think Europe belongs to the Europeans.” One can't dismiss his remarks as a mere slip of the tongue. In a 2016 interview with the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he exclaimed, "For example, Germany cannot become an Arab nation."

Oddly enough, too many western journalists seemed surprised that the Dalai Lama holds reactionary views. However, for anyone paying attention, this isn't new. The Dalai Lama once urged the British government to forgive Pinochet and to spare him from being tried for his crimes against humanity because of his age. He has also praised India's far-right Hindu-nationalist leader Modi for his "work."

The Dalai Lama came into the American popular consciousness thanks to Hollywood. During the 1993 Academy Awards, Richard Gere went off-topic in the middle of his speech and appealed to the former chairman of China, Deng Xiaoping, to "Free Tibet." It is unclear why Richard Gere appealed to Mr. Deng, who had not held the position of premiere since 1989. Despite this, it became very fashionable for Hollywood celebrities to call for a “Free Tibet." How did Mr. Gere come to take up this cause? No doubt he was influenced by Western fantasies about Tibet, such as the 1973 film "Lost Horizon," based on the book “Return to Shangri-la.” Today, we will look at the reality of Tibet.

Tibet was a hard-to-reach area with rough, mountainous terrain, it is sparsely populated. According to population estimates, in 1950, around 1.2 million people were living in Tibet. It was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and before the advent of modern technology and infrastructure, it was hard to access.

Although historians differ on the exact details, it appears that the earliest Buddhist scriptures that were translated into Tibetan appeared around the year 600 AD under King Songstan Gampo. But Buddhism remained a minor religion during this time. We have records of Chinese missionaries who arrived in Tibet to spread Buddhism around the year 800. However, Buddhism was adopted as the official state religion only upon the Mongolian conquest of Tibet.

In the year 1240, Mongolian general Doorda Darkhan invaded Tibet with 3,000 troops. Tibet's army could not match the superior numbers and weaponry of the Mongolian army. There were 500 casualties on each side. Tibet became a de facto protectorate of the Mongol Empire. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who ordered General Darkhan to conquer Tibet, created the position of Grand Lama to oversee the development of monasteries and other religious institutions in Tibet. In parallel, the Mongols appointed Mongolian administrators known as "Khans" to supervise the government and administration of Tibet. Tibet would remain a protectorate of the Mongol Empire for another 400 years.

While it is easy to imagine the Lama as some kind of otherworldly spiritual figure who benevolently ruled over Tibet, the reality is at odds with this picture. Near the end of the Mongolian empire, the fifth Dalai Lama faced a rebellion from the Tsang province. He ordered the Mongolian army under his control to exact harsh retribution against the rebels. He said:

For the band of enemies who have despoiled the duties entrusted to them:Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut;Make the female lines like brooks that have dried in up winter;Make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks; Make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire;Make their dominion like a lamp whose oil has been exhausted;In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.

Yes, this does sound more like the leader of ISIS than the western orientalist imagination of Buddhism. When faced with any threat to his worldly powers, the fifth Dalai Lama behaved just like the tyrants of all other societies.

With the Mongolian empire waning in the 1700s, the Qing Dynasty took advantage and conquered Tibet, replacing the old Mongolian protectorate. Until then, the rules of succession for the Dalai Lama were murky and confusing. But to maintain control and ensure loyalty, the Qing dynasty got rid of the old grand Lama and installed their own Lama. They renamed the position ‘The Dalai (Ocean) Lama’. To solidify control, in 1792, the Qing Dynasty, adopted a new system of installing a successor to the Dalai Lama that would be done at random. The Qing dynasty protected Tibet from foreign invasions, and the day-to-day administration was left to the Lamas.

In the 1800s, the British unsuccessfully tried to conquer Tibet twice. After the second British invasion under Col. Youngblood, foreigners were banned from Tibet without special permission.

In the early 1900s, Russia, Japan, the USA and Germany all led expeditions to Tibet. Difficult to access, it took 14 days by Yak to reach the capital on a single dirt road from Northern India. Often these explorers wrote about their adventures in a mix of reality and adventurism to sell their books, adding to the mythological version of Tibet.

Tibet Before CCP & The Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama was an absolute ruler. He was guided by a cabinet of nobles and monks called a Kashag. Inequality was written in the law. Society was divided into three classes and nine ranks, with the Dalai Lama at the top. Children of nobles were automatically placed at the fourth-highest ranks at birth. Meanwhile, children of serfs had to be registered and as the property of their parents' feudal estate.


A serf registering her newborn baby with the feudal lord

The Dalai Lama, in his book, My Land and My People, said, "Outside the monasteries, our system was feudal." He was right. Lamaism provided both the religious and governmental aspects of life in Tibet. This system evolved into a hierarchical feudal system that stayed in place until 1959.

In Old Tibet, feudal estates came in two forms: monasteries and large private landed estates. Monasteries were not just a place of worship. Monasteries were all-encompassing enterprises (think Walmart) with large farms, tended by serfs who were listed as property on the land deeds. Many monasteries also maintained their private mercenary forces called the fighting monks. Not unlike drug lords, two dueling monasteries would engage in turf-wars.

An example of a monastery

The bigger monasteries in Tibet were, in fact, entire towns — with large plots of agricultural lands, pastoral lands, thousands of serfs, market centers, banking and lending institutions, military warehouses for the armies raised from among the monastic population. This last was important since the entire monasteries would be turned into military forces if the need arose. They were also centers for publishing, art galleries, and even governmental administrative bureaus in the more remote areas. In nomadic areas, they served important functions, supplying essential skilled crafts and providing a place where the nomads could store their valuables and have a neutral ground in times of conflict.

Serfs carrying goods up and down the Potala Palace

The land that wasn't gobbled up by the monasteries remained at the hands of a few private aristocrats. The aristocrats and the monasteries together built a usurious system to exploit the serfs at every turn.

In the 1940s, only 200 families owned 95% of all land in Tibet, and 95% of its people were illiterate. Child labor was rampant, and malnutrition was common. The average life expectancy for serfs in Tibet was 36 years. When the serfs were "taxed," they had to provide various forms of forced labor. Some serfs owed all their daytime labor to the lords, others owed five days a week of unpaid labor, and some were at the disposal of the lord's every whim.

The accounting books of a typical aristocratic manor from 1951 shows the depths of the forced labor inflicted upon the serfs. The Darongqang manor owned 81 serfs, who were assigned a total of 21,266 days of corvee labor. They worked 11,826 days for the manor and 9,440 days for the feudal government led by the Dalai Lama. The average corvee labor of each serf amounted to 262.5 days per year, or 72% of their annual labor. On top of the forced labor, when the serfs grew any crops on their land, the lords also appropriated a portion of them. Having no worldly possessions, the serfs had to rent both instruments and farm animals at usurious rates in order to work on their share of crops.

In 1959, Journalist, Anna Louise Strong, interviewed a former serf name Diedji. Diedji said:

We worked for the lord all the daylight hours and all the days in the year. I first cleaned floors and furniture in the manor and then I worked in the fields in sowing and harvest, and helped to level the ground by dragging wooden plates from my shoulders. I also tended seventeen yaks and cows and milked them when they were fresh. I carried butter and cheese on my back to the lord's house in Lhasa. In slack time I spun wool.

For this work, the lord gave us every month two kes of tsamba for each of us (fifty pounds of barley flour) and every year enough pulu for a suit of clothes, and also a pair of boots. The children got nothing; we fed them from our own tsamba. When our son became a shepherd he also got two kes of tsamba. He was promised clothes, but he never got them. Before he was a shepherd, he worked on the manor and was promised one and a half ke of tsamba but never got it. So since we did not have enough food, we had to go in debt."

The justice system was unforgiving and cruel. In 1928, National Geographic featured a photo of two men with amputations.


Often serfs were severely whipped for minor transgressions, and some monasteries operated private jails where serfs were tortured. CIA documents from 1950 confirm this [1]!


The serfs were not allowed to move freely about the country and needed the permission of the lord or a government official. In fact, in the book Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Heirrer complains about not having the pass to travel to the capital. I also found a document from the OSS, which is a precursor to the CIA that confirms the restrictions on serfs.

American Position on Sovereignty

The American position on Tibet's sovereignty changed depending on how they felt about the current government of China. During World War II, the US government claimed China held sovereignty over Tibet. In 1948, when Tibetans claimed autonomy, the US state department accused them of having "ill-faith." Tibetan officials even possessed Chinese passports.


However, all of this changed in 1949 after the Communists took control of China. The State Department wrestled with the question of whether or not they should strategically recognize an independent Tibet. They reasoned that it would be advantageous because “Tibet will be one of the few remaining non-Communist bastions in Continental Asia." As the People’s Liberation Army victory became imminent, the US government decided that they supported an “independent Tibet.”

Tibet and CCP

In August 1950, the PLA crossed over into Tibet. Within the first few months, nearly 20,000 Tibetans joined the PLA to fight against the local ruling class. As the PLA marched further into Tibet, they started distributing free food to the hungry serfs, which earned them popular support and aid.

The PLA could have invaded Lhasa in October 1950, but they stopped their advancing troops and sent an envoy to the Dalai Lama asking him to negotiate an agreement. The Dalai Lama, with the advice and consent of the British, agreed to send delegates to negotiate. The PLA soldiers were redeployed to build a road from Beijing to the capital city of Lhasa, Tibet.

In May 1951, the Tibetan delegates did end up signing an agreement that was quite favorable to the aristocrats. Point 4 of the agreement said, "The central authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet. The central authorities also will not alter the established status, functions, and powers of the Dalai Lama. Officials of various ranks shall hold office as usual."

First page of the 1951 agreement between CCP and the Dalai Lama

While the rest of China had immediate land redistributions, Chairman Mao made a concession, and the agreement said, “In matters relating to various reforms in Tibet, there will be no compulsion on the part of the central authorities. The local government of Tibet shall carry out reforms of its own accord, and, when the people raise demands for reform, they shall be settled by means of consultation with the leading personnel of Tibet."

In the next few years, CCP's government did, indeed, build infrastructure projects. The PLA built roads that allowed trucks to travel within the interior. One vehicle, in two days, could carry what sixty yaks took twelve days to transport. Tibetans received more food, and the price of goods dropped by two-thirds in two years. Tibet got electricity. As the New York Times reported, Tibet got its first radio broadcasts. The CCP government also set up a state-bank in Tibet. Peasants received non-usurious loans and very low-interest rates, which made them less dependent on the feudal estates. According to the CIA, PLA also canceled the extremely onerous taxes for the peasants for three years.

They built new schools. According to Dawa Norbu, serfs were given $1 to $1.50 to have their children attend schools, giving serfs more leverage to bargain against the elite class. Even American diplomats like Robert Ford, in their internal documents, wrote in 1955:

There was no sacking of monasteries at this time. On the contrary, the Chinese took great care not to cause offense through ignorance. They soon had the monks thanking the gods for their deliverance. The Chinese had made it clear they had no quarrel with the Tibetan religion.

The Chinese government allocated the U.S. $500,000 to renovate the Buddhist temple in Beijing; additional funds were granted to Tibetan Muslims for a Haj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, in 1957.

Even a small loss in power created a violent reaction amongst wealthy elite. Much like other counter-revolutionary forces like the contras in Nicaragua, the Kaibeles in Guatemala, OUN in Ukraine, the Cuban exiles, the wealthy landed class felt entitled to exploit the workers in Tibet. They directed their anger towards the Tibetan peasants who they felt "betrayed" them to the PLA. They engaged in contra-style terrorism against any Tibetan who they felt "collaborated" with the PLA. For example, in 1951, the lamaist rebels killed a Chinese actress and also attacked many PLA troops.

According to declassified CIA documents, from 1952-1958, the CIA trained rebels, mostly from the upper classes, in Colorado to "launch an effective resistance movement." The US also airdropped an overwhelming number of arms, including machine-guns, bombs, grenades, and mortars during this time, most of which was stored in the biggest monasteries.

In 1952, a monk with a mercenary army petitioned the Chinese government against these reforms. A CIA internal document also stated that the monks would take up arms if China redistributed the large land estates in the monasteries.

In 1955, the PLA finally began to ask the elites in Tibet to create a commission for land redistribution. Contrary to their 1951 promise, the elites took up arms after seeing the possibility of losing their lands and serfs. In 1955, Galoin Surkang Wangqen Geleg, of the Tibetan local government, secretly plotted an armed rebellion in Xikang. In 1956, the rebels went to a PLA office building and massacred local staff and peasants, killing over 200 people.

While US Media only paid attention to the elites, the serfs in Tibet felt differently. On July 25, 1956, at least 65 peasants, who couldn't read, put their fingerprints on a letter as a signature and sent a letter to the Dalai Lama asking him to redistribute land. They said, “We are all peasants. We are more anxious for democratic reform than anyone else.”

Serfs carried heavy loads by themselves.

In May 1957, a rebel militia called "Four Rivers and Six Ranges" engaged in violence in the Qamdo, Dengqen, Heihe, and Shannon regions. They burned food warehouses, blew up communication lines, and attacked anyone who they thought collaborated with the PLA. A merchant named Dongda Bazha in Nedong County was captured with his wife because he refused to take part in the rebellion. The wife was gang-raped while Bazha had his throat slit.

However, the "grand finale" was in 1959. All parties agree that the CCP invited the Dalai Lama to an event on March 10, 1959. However, the Dalai Lama alleged that it was a plot to lure him out of Tibet to kidnap him. The CCP denied it. On March 17, no one knows how, but a single shell from a PLA artillery weapon landed in the yards of the Dalai Lama's summer palace, the Potala. His close advisors and his oracle convinced him that he should leave for India and he set out on his journey.

According to the CIA trained fighter, to stop the PLA from "catching" the Dalai Lama, these fighters were ordered to stop the PLA from entering Norbulinka. Ironically, their fear that the PLA would capture the Dalai Lama was unfounded. A few days earlier, Chairman Mao had written to the PLA stationed near Tibet: “If the Dalai Lama and his entourage flee Lhasa, our troops should not try to stop them. Whether they are heading to southern Tibet or India, just let them go."

However, the elites had hired armed insurgents estimated at 20,000. The number of PLA troops in the area was about 5,000. Despite the support of both the landed elites and the US government, they were unable to organize a sufficient army of local Tibetans to fight on their side, so they hired mercenaries from Nepal, India, and even Thailand. For the next few days, heavy artillery was fired from both sides and no one knows how many were killed. During this time, the Potala Palace was destroyed. The west likes to claim that this was "religious persecution," but the rebels were storing their weapons in monasteries, as reported by New York Times on March 27, 1959.

The Dalai Lama, with his CIA-trained crew, fled to India, while the CIA filmed him. He broke the agreement and freed the CCP from their part of the local rule. And serfdom was abolished on March 29, 1959. Here is a video of serfs celebrating their new found freedom.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xsoc4-QnplY

CCP redistributed lands. Malnutrition then decreased as well as unemployment. Nowadays, people don’t live in shacks and are no longer subject to the draconian whims of the Tibetan lords. Ordinary Tibetans have high-speed rail and also airports.

As with Tibet, the language of colonialism and freedom can be abused by unscrupulous people. Instead of relying on our stereotypes or the media, we must always ask, "Who needs the freedom?" and "from whom?" When we obfuscate class politics, we may end up accidentally supporting the oppressor while demonizing the liberator.

[Ravenlocke]

Tibet: The Truth (A Political History)

Video of serfs celebrating their new found freedom

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xsoc4-QnplY

[Ravenlocke]

Traveling on the La Lin railway in Tibet , which was implemented June 2021. Beautiful scenic ride and in English.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=94zNd4iZMpk

[rgray222]

Posted by Ravenlocke (here)
China doesn't SPIN NEWS like we do. Their silence is too often mistaken as an admission of guilt. Don't be another uninformed drone. Do everyone a favor and learn truths before forming opinions.

I just don't get people turning a blind eye to the realities of this world. Of course, China spins the news as badly as the USA and Russia combined. Anyone who doesn't think that China has a massive active propaganda machine in place is not seeing the world realistically.

Most people think that China is a reluctant participant in the one world government initiatives but the truth is they are behind the scenes manipulating events and using the news as a weapon. Make no mistake about it, China is aggressively driving the bus toward global governance because they have more to gain than any other country on the planet.

Many many western politicians and most of the mainstream media (regardless of what is written) want to see the USA lose its globally dominant position and support the rise of China. I just want people to look at the world realistically. Trump recognized this reality about China, this is one of the main reasons he was and is hated with such ferocity.

[onawah]

This is not in defense of what what the Dalia Lama did, but that's ridiculous!

Posted by Ravenlocke (here)
Tibet: The Truth (A Political History)
China doesn't SPIN NEWS like we do. Their silence is too often mistaken as admission of guilt.

The CCP censors anything they don't want anyone else to know. For an example of how they SPIN, see what I just posted today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I73_JPlZzig&t=0s
And much more about what the CCP is really like from 2 guys who spent years travelling all over China: https://www.youtube.com/@TheChinaShow
Much more on this thread: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...rmoil+in+china

Posted by Ravenlocke (here)
[B]
The media screams:
"They killed innocent monks!" - but those "innocent" monks and other young hooligans killed innocent Chinese before a single shot was fired on them.

If Tibetans killed Chinese,it was because their country was being invaded!

[Wind]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
I just don't get people turning a blind eye to the realities of this world. Of course, China spins the news as badly as the USA and Russia combined. Anyone who doesn't think that China has a massive active propaganda machine in place is not seeing the world realistically.

It's quite telling to see CCP propaganda being propagated like that here too. Don't believe everything you read.

[Ravenlocke]

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...993-story.html

CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ‘60s, Files Show


SEPT. 15, 1998 12 AM PT

WASHINGTON — 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, according to newly released U.S. intelligence documents.
The money for the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama was part of the CIA’s worldwide effort during the height of the Cold War to undermine Communist governments, particularly in the Soviet Union and China. In fact, the U.S. government committee that approved the Tibetan operations also authorized the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

The documents, published last month by the State Department, illustrate the historical background of the situation in Tibet today, in which China continues to accuse the Dalai Lama of being an agent of foreign forces seeking to separate Tibet from China.

The CIA’s program encompassed support of Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal, a covert military training site in Colorado, “Tibet Houses” established to promote Tibetan causes in New York and Geneva, education for Tibetan operatives at Cornell University and supplies for reconnaissance teams.

“The purpose of the program . . . is to keep the political concept of an autonomous Tibet alive within Tibet and among foreign nations, principally India, and to build a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Communist China,” explains one memo written by top U.S. intelligence officials.

Relationship Was Mutually Beneficial

The declassified historical documents provide the first inside details of the CIA’s decade-long covert program to support the Tibetan independence movement. At the time of the intelligence operation, the CIA was seeking to weaken Mao Tse-tung’s hold over China. And the Tibetan exiles were looking for help to keep their movement alive after the Dalai Lama and his supporters fled Tibet following an unsuccessful 1959 revolt against Chinese rule.

Tibetan exiles and the Dalai Lama have acknowledged for many years that they once received support from U.S. intelligence. But until now, Washington has refused to release any information about the CIA’s Tibetan operations.

The U.S. intelligence support for the Tibetans ended in the early 1970s after the Nixon administration’s diplomatic opening to China, according to the Dalai Lama’s writings, former CIA officials and independent scholars.

The Dalai Lama wrote in his autobiography that the cutoff in the 1970s showed that the assistance from the Americans “had been a reflection of their anti-Communist policies rather than genuine support for the restoration of Tibetan independence.”

The newly published files show that the collaboration between U.S. intelligence and the Tibetans was less than ideal. “The Tibetans by nature did not appear to be congenitally inclined toward conspiratorial proficiency,” a top CIA official says ruefully in one memo.

The budget figures for the CIA’s Tibetan program are contained in a memo dated Jan. 9, 1964. It was evidently written to help justify continued funding for the clandestine intelligence operation.

“Support of 2,100 Tibetan guerrillas based in Nepal: $500,000,” the document says. “Subsidy to the Dalai Lama: $180,000.” After listing several other costs, it concludes: “Total: $1,735,000.” The files show that this budget request was approved soon afterward.

A later document indicates that these annual expenses continued at the same level for four more years, until 1968. At that point, the CIA scrubbed its training programs for Tibetans inside the United States and cut the budget for the entire program to just below $1.2 million a year.

In his 1990 autobiography, “Freedom in Exile,” the Dalai Lama explained that his two brothers made contact with the CIA during a trip to India in 1956. The CIA agreed to help, “not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilize all Communist governments,” the Dalai Lama wrote.

“Naturally, my brothers judged it wise to keep this information from me. They knew what my reaction would have been.”

The Dalai Lama also wrote regretfully in his book that the CIA had trained and equipped Tibetan guerrillas who conducted raids into Tibet from a base camp in Nepal.

The effect of these operations “only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet. Worse, these activities gave the Chinese government the opportunity to blame the efforts of those seeking to regain Tibetan independence on the activities of foreign powers--whereas, of course, it was an entirely Tibetan initiative.”

Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s personal representative in Washington, said last week that he had no knowledge of the CIA’s $180,000-a-year subsidy or how the money was spent.

“I have no clue whatsoever,” Gyari said. Speaking more generally of the CIA’s past support for the Tibetans, Gyari acknowledged: “It is an open secret. We do not deny it.”

Agency Has Resisted Release of Details

The CIA has long resisted efforts to disclose information about its Tibetan operations.

In 1993, then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey promised to declassify and release the records of six CIA covert operations during the Cold War, involving France, Italy, Indonesia, Laos, North Korea and Tibet. But this year, CIA Director George J. Tenet said the agency did not have the money or personnel to do this for the foreseeable future.

The Tibet documents were released not by the CIA but by the State Department, which has responsibility for regularly publishing documents that show the history of U.S. foreign policy.

Warren W. Smith Jr., author of a recent book on the history of Tibet, said he believes that the newly published documents are the first to describe the CIA’s Tibetan operations.

Until now, information about the CIA plans has come from “[Tibetan] exiles and a few old CIA agents,” Smith said. “None of the agents involved would know detailed information about things like the budget.”

The CIA was not the only intelligence service to support the Tibetans. India also helped, and, according to Smith’s book, Indian intelligence officials even organized a Tibetan unit within the Indian army.

The newly published documents show, however, that Tibetan leaders sometimes complained to Washington that they weren’t getting sufficient backing from India.

The documents provide no details about the $180,000-a-year subsidy to the Dalai Lama. But they suggest that the money was used to pay for the staff and other costs of supporting his activities on behalf of the Tibetan people.

The same 1964 memo speaks of “continuing the support subsidy to the Dalai Lama’s entourage at Dharamsala,” the city in northern India that has served as the Dalai Lama’s headquarters and the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Eisenhower Team Gave Initial Approval

A brief internal history of the CIA’s Tibet operations shows that the Eisenhower administration first formally approved covert support to the Tibetan resistance in September 1958, at a time when the Tibetans were conducting guerrilla raids against Chinese army units.

The U.S. intelligence operations were overseen in Washington by the executive branch’s top-secret “303 Committee.” On May 20, 1959, only a few weeks after the unsuccessful Tibetan revolt, the 303 Committee approved the first covert support specifically for the Dalai Lama, who had just arrived in India. These covert CIA programs were re-approved several times during the 1960s.

In 1964, the CIA decided that one of the main problems facing the Tibetans was “a lack of trained officers equipped with linguistic and administrative abilities.” As a result, it decided to educate 20 Tibetans. “Cornell University has tentatively agreed to provide facilities for their education,” the CIA explains in one memo.

The Cornell program did not last long. In 1967, after Ramparts magazine disclosed that the CIA had been secretly funding the activities of the National Student Assn. in the United States, the CIA restricted its activities on U.S. university campuses.

The files show that the Tibetans were keeping close track of U.S. policy toward China. In fact, they sometimes had a better sense of what the U.S. was about to do about China than did the rest of the world.

On Dec. 6, 1968, a month after Richard Nixon was elected president but before he took office, the Dalai Lama’s brother told a senior State Department official that the Tibetan exiles were afraid “of an accommodation the United States might make with the Chinese Communists.”

Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow told him not to worry. Rostow said that “we [the United States] would not make any accommodation with the Chinese Communists at the expense of Tibet.”

Over the next four years, the Nixon administration carried out its opening to China, and the CIA’s Tibetan operations were shut down.

Now, more than a quarter of a century later, the U.S. government is providing some financial support for Tibetans, but openly and through other channels.

In recent years, Congress has approved about $2 million annually in funding for Tibetan exiles in India. Congress has also urged the administration to spend another $2 million for democracy activities among the Tibetans.

[Ravenlocke]

https://medium.com/illumination-cura...y-70eeeee88a16

The Truth about Tibet and Her Liberation from Slavery
Commemorating 28 March — Tibetan Serf Emancipation Day

PROLOGUE

Tibet before 1959 was a feudal serf society. The serfs had no freedom, no land, and were often hungry. The democratic reform abolished serfdom and enabled millions of serfs to master their own life.

The impoverished population in the region dropped from 590,000 in 2015 to 150,000 in 2018. The net annual income of rural residents has reached 10,330 yuan (US$1,540) per person by 2017, a 13.6-percent increase year-on-year. The region’s GDP more than doubled in six years to 131 billion yuan (US$19.5 billion) in 2017, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) eradicated absolute poverty in 2019. China has lifted all of its citizens out of poverty by 2020.

THE TIBET THE WORLD ACTUALLY KNEW

Many prefer not to talk about the Tibet under the Dalai Lamas. Belied by the enchanting charismatic smile and wonderfully pleasant personality of the 14th Dalai Lama, and under his and his predecessors’ direct political, social and religious leadership, was the darkest corner of China and possibly the world.

Before 1959, Tibet was a feudal serfdom created by the integration of religion, politics and the dictatorship of monks and aristocrats, and one even darker and more backward than medieval Europe. The 14th Dalai Lama, like other Dalai Lamas before him, ruled over a Tibetan society which had integrated religion with politics as a feudal serfdom under a theocracy ruled by a combined dictatorship of monks and aristocrats.

The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan system tolerated no democracy, freedom or human rights in any form. In fact, the Tibetan serf slavery system was the darkest human slavery system in the history of mankind, and which spanned many centuries longer than the 400+ years of black slavery in the USA. The Tibetan conditions were also more debasing and dehumanizing than medieval Europe in the latter’s darkest periods.

Similar as in medieval Europe, Tibetan aristocrats and High-Level Tibetan Buddhist monks and Officials in the Potala Palace, which is the Chief Residence of the Dalai Lama, who totaled less than 5% of Tibetans, owned more than 95% of Tibet’s livestock, farmland, pastures, forests, mountains and rivers. All the food harvests belonged to them, and they allowed farmers only barely self-sufficient quantity for self-consumption only and none for trade or commercial exchange.

In the Dalai Lama’s Tibet, more than 90% of the people were peasants and serfs indebted generationally for many life-times. They also had to pay exorbitant taxes and levies by performing forced heavy labor. Poverty is therefore entrenched and deepened over every generation. People are considered debt collaterals and therefore commodities to be traded. In fact, family members, sons and daughters are routinely traded or abused due to no other reason save being “reincarnated in a lower human form than monks and nuns”.

Unlike medieval Europe which was not under a completely theocratic system, the cocktail of religion and politics in the Dalai Lama’s Tibet was the guarantee of its feudal serf system. When their traditional indigenous animist and shamanistic belief systems lost out to the new progressive but agnostic Buddhism in the 8th Century AD, many Tibetans quickly embraced Buddhism and thus believe in an afterlife. Gradually, the monks of a revised “Tibetan” Buddhism, with the Dalai Lama as its Head, quickly became the overlords and made their Tibetan Buddhist believers their serfs — never mind that this was not in accordance with Buddha’s original Buddhist scriptural teachings or principles! Tibetan Buddhists are expected to work ungrudgingly for their spiritual masters, to whom they owe a blind devotion.

And as political theocracy evolved in Tibet through the dictatorship of monks and nobles, the emergent religious authority came to dominate Tibetan’s daily life with administrative power, and concurrent coercion by meting out rewards and punishments for their after-life with religious privileges. One is either doomed to the frightening karma of “endless reincarnation as any living creature” or, the “Dalai Lama can help to secure one’s rebirth as a human being in a high position, or, better still, as a monk or nun”.

Tibetan feudal serfdom combined and reinforced by its peculiar Buddhist Theocracy was a deadly social ideology that totally controlled and shackled the minds of the largely superstitious masses. It debased human dignity by expropriating personal freedom and deprived him/her the freedom of thought necessary to penetrate delusional religious truths for a better and trueful enlightenment impact. There was no escape — social, economic, mental and spiritual — for any Tibetan from the dark karmic curse of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan kingdom.

Accordance to Karl Marx, serfdom was one of the major slavery systems in human history and the essential representation of the feudal exploitation system. Karl Marx further pointed out that “Liberty in any form is all about bringing back to people the relationship between their world and themselves.” For Marx, the answer is Education.

Education is the most powerful human weapon to counter that insidious religious ideological control of people’s beliefs and thought. Education was the decisive social tool that broke medieval Europe out of its Dark Age. The Church’s monopoly of education was unable to withstand the proliferation of secular schools resulting from the economic prosperity of the 13th century.

The Renaissance broke forth in Italy in the late 14th century and reached Central Europe (Eastern Germany, Bohemia, and Poland) by the beginning of the 16th century. The Enlightenment period also started in the late 17th century and the same happened for the Scientific Revolution. The Enlightenment liberated the human mind and produced such innovative and unorthodox ideas and knowledge called “Science” and prodded its scientists towards new spheres of knowledge and means to acquire it. Science proved and gave the opportunity for the Enlightenment to thrive. Concurrently, the Catholic Church divided and reformed. The first large Protestant movement was the Hussite Revolution in Bohemia (1419–34). The Reformation gathered momentum and flourished after Luther’s theses in Saxony in the early 16th century.

In the 400 years as Europe freed itself of feudal servitude and superstitions, it eventually invented the steam engine to drive the industrial revolution and itself into the modernity of 20th century.

Tibet, located on the highest plateau of the world, was however oblivious of how the world had actually moved ahead towards the social realisation of Enlightenment; when in fact a similar reference could be repeatedly found in the original Buddhist scriptures.

In the Dalai Lama’s Tibet, education and the right to education were monopolised by the ruling class of monks and nobles. The only way to get access to education was to enter the monasteries to “read scriptures”. Parents eagerly enrolled their children into the monasteries since education was easily available to any children to become monks. They soon realized that they had merely changed their children’s status from a “serf” of the ruling lords to a “serf” of the monasteries. There is no escaping from ubiquitous servitude to the Potala Palace should one desire to be educated.

The complete domination of Theocracy in Tibetan life has also retarded the development of traditional Tibetan history and culture, when compared to the other 53+ tribes in China.

Tibetan serfdom under the Dalai Lama is the single most responsible factor for the persistent abject poverty of the Tibetan people, causing them to lag way behind other parts of China.

This should not have happened if the Tibetan people were free and encouraged so that their human-ness, enterprise and creativity can be brought into full deployment like the rest of the world.

Recalling that it was progressive, agnostic Buddhism that overwhelmed the traditional indigenous animist and shamanistic belief systems of the Tibetans 1,800 years ago, before it was hijacked by the variant Tibetan Buddhism which enslaved common Tibetans in a Feudal Theocratic Serfdom, it is therefore not ironic that the Dalai Lama’s Theocratic Tibet should finally be liberated from the legacy of its dark pasts by an atheistic Communist Party of China in 1959, and who had thereafter invested hugely on Tibetan education, commercial and social development in a manner never before done nor contemplated by all the Dalai Lamas combined in the previous 550 years.

March 28 is Tibetan “Serfs Emancipation Day”, a day celebrating the emancipation of serfs in Tibet by more than 3 million people of all ethnic groups in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China.

On this day in 1959, a democratic reform was carried out, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China．

Tibet is part of China since the early Yuan Dynasty (1270–1354) and continued through the rule of the Qing dynasty in 1720 into Modern China in 1911. On 28 March 1959, the Tibetan self-government status was dissolved by China which effectively marked an end to serfdom and the abolition of the hierarchic social system characterized by theocracy, with the Dalai Lama as the core of the leadership. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government had fled to India, 3 days earlier, in hope to reach out to the international community. The holiday is a reminder of the feudal system that existed in Tibet before her liberation by the Chinese.

As the world today ponders over the future of Tibet, the author cautions against seeing the Dalai Lama’s Tibet as a romantic “Shangri-La”, portrayed in the movie “Lost Horizon”. Ancient Tibet under the rule of all the Dalai Lamas was very far from being “Shangri-La”. It was darker than darkest medieval Europe.

The clamour by the 14th Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile for an “Independent Tibet with Democracy” sounds very strange, and hollow when it had enslaved 90% of Tibetans as serfs for centuries. Indeed, the unpleasant truth for many “democracy” advocates is that Tibetans today under the Chinese have never been freer than they, their forefathers and ancestors have ever been under all the Dalai Lamas.

His charmed wisdom notwithstanding, neither the 14th Dalai Lama nor his “government-in-exile” has any experience in either democracy or independence. They are therefore not relevant to Tibet’s future.

Whatever Tibet’s future solution options are, one thing is certain. There is no role for a theocracy nor should any allowance be made for Tibetan Buddhism other than to treat it on equal footing with any other religious beliefs whilst respecting the inherent right of Tibetans to their personal freedom of religion. The future is a secular Tibet as she regains her place among equals with other Chinese Provinces.

Tibet’s own future does not crisscross with or into its past. Tibetans have chosen paths never before travelled, through their vast and beautiful mountain valleys to reach their true Shangri-La, where they have discovered a wonderful place of sanctuary, true enlightenment, and personal development with the freedom to choose and believe in an even better future for their children and grandchildren.

[Acknowledgment and gratitude to my Bhutanese friend Jigme Thinley who in 1983 first shared with me the Tibetan slavery conditions. They were subsequently validated by many other friends and sources in the region who also confirmed my research and empowered here a true picture of Tibetan struggles with serf slavery.]

[Ravenlocke]

https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth


Updated and expanded version from January 2007.

For a snapshot of the situation as of 2019, Shashi Kei’s Why are Tibetans leaving India when the Dalai Lama is still there? [1]

Contents

For Lords and Lamas
Secularization vs. Spirituality
Exit Feudal Theocracy
References

For Lords and Lamas

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

A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. [2]

In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices. The brawls damaged the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, “it would use worshippers’ donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars.” [3]

As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest’s sway. The Tacchu monks accused Komatsu of selling writings and drawings under the temple’s name for his own gain. They also were appalled by the frequency with which he was seen in the company of women. Komatsu in turn sought to isolate and punish monks who were critical of his leadership. The conflict lasted some five years and made it into the courts. [4]

But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La. The Dalai Lama himself stated that “the pervasive influence of Buddhism” in Tibet, “amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” [5]

A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” [6] In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet.

His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers. [7]

For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks… In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.” [8]

In 1792, many Kagyu monasteries were confiscated and their monks were forcibly converted to the Gelug sect (the Dalai Lama’s denomination). The Gelug school, known also as the “Yellow Hats,” showed little tolerance or willingness to mix their teachings with other Buddhist sects. In the words of one of their traditional prayers:

Praise to you, violent god of the Yellow Hat teachings
who reduces to particles of dust
great beings, high officials and ordinary people
who pollute and corrupt the Gelug doctrine. [9]

An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be. [10] This grim history remains largely unvisited by present-day followers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” [11]

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]

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

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]

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

The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. [22]

Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [24]

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away. [25]

Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. […] The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.” [26] As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri-La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.

Secularization vs. Spirituality

What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also granted a direct role in internal administration “to promote social reforms.” Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in an attempt to effect reconstruction. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants. “Contrary to popular belief in the West,” claims one observer, the Chinese “took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion.” [27]

Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China. [28] The approval of the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was first installed in Lhasa, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts. [29] [30] Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet. [31]

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed. [30] “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane. [32] In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.” [33] Eventually the resistance crumbled.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa. [34]

Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in Hitler’s SS) wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the Tibetans who resisted the Chinese “were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived.” They also had to live in a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants — all of which Harrer treats as sure evidence of the dreadful nature of the Chinese occupation. [35]

By 1961, Chinese occupation authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production. [36] [37]

Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But monks who had been conscripted as children into the religious orders were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals. [38]

Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.” [39] The official 1953 census — six years before the Chinese crackdown — recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000. [40] Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves — of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.” [41]

In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration. Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate private plots, sell their harvest surpluses, decide for themselves what crops to grow, and keep yaks and sheep. Communication with the outside world was again permitted, and frontier controls were eased to permit some Tibetans to visit exiled relatives in India and Nepal. [42] By the 1980s many of the principal lamas had begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile communities abroad, “restoring their monasteries in Tibet and helping to revitalize Buddhism there.” [43]

As of 2007 Tibetan Buddhism was still practiced widely and tolerated by officialdom. Religious pilgrimages and other standard forms of worship were allowed but within limits. All monks and nuns had to sign a loyalty pledge that they would not use their religious position to foment secession or dissent. And displaying photos of the Dalai Lama was declared illegal. [44]

In the 1990s, the Han, the ethnic group comprising over 95 percent of China’s immense population, began moving in substantial numbers into Tibet. On the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse, signs of Han colonization are readily visible. Chinese run the factories and many of the shops and vending stalls. Tall office buildings and large shopping centers have been built with funds that might have been better spent on water treatment plants and housing. Chinese cadres in Tibet too often view their Tibetan neighbors as backward and lazy, in need of economic development and “patriotic education.” During the 1990s Tibetan government employees suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies were purged from office, and campaigns were once again launched to discredit the Dalai Lama. Individual Tibetans reportedly were subjected to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor for carrying out separatist activities and engaging in “political subversion.” Some were held in administrative detention without adequate food, water, and blankets, subjected to threats, beatings, and other mistreatment. [45]

Tibetan history, culture, and certainly religion are slighted in schools. Teaching materials, though translated into Tibetan, focus mainly on Chinese history and culture. Chinese family planning regulations allow a three-child limit for Tibetan families. (There is only a one-child limit for Han families throughout China, and a two-child limit for rural Han families whose first child is a girl.) If a Tibetan couple goes over the three-child limit, the excess children can be denied subsidized daycare, health care, housing, and education. These penalties have been enforced irregularly and vary by district. [45] None of these child services, it should be noted, were available to Tibetans before the Chinese takeover.

For the rich lamas and secular lords, the Communist intervention was an unmitigated calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Many, however, escaped that fate. Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment. [46]

In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline “Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right.” [47] In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the Dalai Lama called upon the British government to release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Into the twenty-first century, via the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits that are more respectable sounding than the CIA, the U.S. Congress continued to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional millions for “democracy activities” within the Tibetan exile community. In addition to these funds, the Dalai Lama received money from financier George Soros. [48]

Whatever the Dalai Lama’s associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he did speak often of peace, love, and nonviolence. He himself really cannot be blamed for the abuses of Tibet’s ancien régime, having been but 25 years old when he fled into exile. In a 1994 interview, he went on record as favoring the building of schools and roads in his country. He said the corvée (forced unpaid serf labor) and certain taxes imposed on the peasants were “extremely bad.” And he disliked the way people were saddled with old debts sometimes passed down from generation to generation. [49] During the half century of living in the western world, he had embraced concepts such as human rights and religious freedom, ideas largely unknown in old Tibet. He even proposed democracy for Tibet, featuring a written constitution and a representative assembly. [39]

In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an unsettling effect on the exile community. It read in part: “Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability.” Marxism fosters “the equitable utilization of the means of production” and cares about “the fate of the working classes” and “the victims of … exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and … I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.” [50]

But he also sent a reassuring message to “those who live in abundance”: “It is a good thing to be rich… Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And to the poor he offers this admonition: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune… It is better to develop a positive attitude.” [51]

In 2005 the Dalai Lama signed a widely advertised statement along with ten other Nobel Laureates supporting the “inalienable and fundamental human right” of working people throughout the world to form labor unions to protect their interests, in accordance with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many countries “this fundamental right is poorly protected and in some it is explicitly banned or brutally suppressed,” the statement read. Burma, China, Colombia, Bosnia, and a few other countries were singled out as among the worst offenders. Even the United States “fails to adequately protect workers’ rights to form unions and bargain collectively. Millions of U.S. workers lack any legal protection to form unions…” [52]

The Dalai Lama also gave full support to removing the ingrained traditional obstacles that have kept Tibetan nuns from receiving an education. Upon arriving in exile, few nuns could read or write. In Tibet their activities had been devoted to daylong periods of prayer and chants. But in northern India they now began reading Buddhist philosophy and engaging in theological study and debate, activities that in old Tibet had been open only to monks. [53]

In November 2005 the Dalai Lama spoke at Stanford University on “The Heart of Nonviolence,” but stopped short of a blanket condemnation of all violence. Violent actions that are committed in order to reduce future suffering are not to be condemned, he said, citing World War II as an example of a worthy effort to protect democracy. What of the four years of carnage and mass destruction in Iraq, a war condemned by most of the world — even by a conservative pope — as a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity? The Dalai Lama was undecided: “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.” [54] Earlier he had voiced support for the U.S. military intervention against Yugoslavia and, later on, the U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan. [55] [56] [57]

Exit Feudal Theocracy

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

One is reminded of the idealized image of feudal Europe presented by latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants living in the secure embrace of their Church, under the more or less benign protection of their lords. [58] Again we are invited to accept a particular culture in its idealized form divorced from its murky material history. This means accepting it as presented by its favored class, by those who profited most from it. The Shangri-La image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic actuality than does the pastoral image of medieval Europe.

Seen in all its grim realities, old Tibet confirms the view I expressed in an earlier book, namely that culture is anything but neutral. Culture can operate as a legitimating cover for a host of grave injustices, benefiting a privileged portion of society at great cost to the rest. [59] In theocratic feudal Tibet, ruling interests manipulated the traditional culture to fortify their own wealth and power. The theocracy equated rebellious thought and action with satanic influence. It propagated the general presumption of landlord superiority and peasant unworthiness. The rich were represented as deserving their good life, and the lowly poor as deserving their mean existence, all codified in teachings about the karmic residue of virtue and vice accumulated from past lives, presented as part of God’s will.

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

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

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

…few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China’s land reform to the clans. Tibet’s former slaves say they, too, don’t want their former masters to return to power. “I’ve already lived that life once before,” said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, “I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.” [60]

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

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

The search for a tulku, Erik Curren reminds us, has not always been conducted in that purely spiritual mode portrayed in certain Hollywood films. “Sometimes monastic officials wanted a child from a powerful local noble family to give the cloister more political clout. Other times they wanted a child from a lower-class family who would have little leverage to influence the child’s upbringing.” On other occasions “a local warlord, the Chinese emperor or even the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa might [have tried] to impose its choice of tulku on a monastery for political reasons.” [61]

Such may have been the case in the selection of the 17th Karmapa, whose monastery-in-exile is situated in Rumtek, in the Indian state of Sikkim. In 1993 the monks of the Karma Kagyu tradition had a candidate of their own choice. The Dalai Lama, along with several dissenting Karma Kagyu leaders (and with the support of the Chinese government!) backed a different boy. The Kagyu monks charged that the Dalai Lama had overstepped his authority in attempting to select a leader for their sect. “Neither his political role nor his position as a lama in his own Gelugpa tradition entitled him to choose the Karmapa, who is a leader of a different tradition…” [62] As one of the Kagyu leaders insisted, “Dharma is about thinking for yourself. It is not about automatically following a teacher in all things, no matter how respected that teacher may be. More than anyone else, Buddhists should respect other people’s rights — their human rights and their religious freedom.” [63]

What followed was a dozen years of conflict in the Tibetan exile community, punctuated by intermittent riots, intimidation, physical attacks, blacklisting, police harassment, litigation, official corruption, and the looting and undermining of the Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek by supporters of the Gelugpa faction. All this has caused at least one western devotee to wonder if the years of exile were not hastening the moral corrosion of Tibetan Buddhism. [64]

What is clear is that not all Tibetan Buddhists accept the Dalai Lama as their theological and spiritual mentor. Though he is referred to as the “spiritual leader of Tibet,” many see this title as little more than a formality. It does not give him authority over the four religious schools of Tibet other than his own, “just as calling the U.S. president the ‘leader of the free world’ gives him no role in governing France or Germany.” [65]

Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].” [66]

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

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

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

They also receive a monthly payment from their order, along with contributions and dues from their American followers. Some devotees eagerly carry out chores for the monks, including grocery shopping and cleaning their apartments and toilets. These same holy men, Lewis remarks, “have no problem criticizing Americans for their ‘obsession with material things.’” [67] To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity.” [68]

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

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

Workers in China who try to organize labor unions in the corporate dominated “business zones” risk losing their jobs or getting beaten and imprisoned. Millions of business zone workers toil twelve-hour days at subsistence wages. With the health care system now being privatized, free or affordable medical treatment is no longer available for millions. Men have tramped into the cities in search of work, leaving an increasingly impoverished countryside populated by women, children, and the elderly. The suicide rate has increased dramatically, especially among women. [69]

China’s natural environment is sadly polluted. Most of its fabled rivers and many lakes are dead, producing massive fish die-offs from the billions of tons of industrial emissions and untreated human waste dumped into them. Toxic effluents, including pesticides and herbicides, seep into ground water or directly into irrigation canals. Cancer rates in villages situated along waterways have skyrocketed a thousand-fold. Hundreds of millions of urban residents breathe air rated as dangerously unhealthy, contaminated by industrial growth and the recent addition of millions of automobiles. An estimated 400,000 die prematurely every year from air pollution. Government environmental agencies have no enforcement power to stop polluters, and generally the government ignores or denies such problems, concentrating instead on industrial growth. [44]

China’s own scientific establishment reports that unless greenhouse gases are curbed, the nation will face massive crop failures along with catastrophic food and water shortages in the years ahead. In 2006-2007 severe drought was already afflicting southwest China. [70]

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

References

Mick Brown, The Dance of 17 Lives (Bloomsbury 2004).
Erik D. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press 2005)
Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (Monthly Review Press, 1964).
Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (University of California Press, 1995).
Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961).
A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet rev. ed. (Armonk, N.Y. and London: 1996).
Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985).
Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976).
Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998).
Gaby Naher, Wrestling the Dragon (Rider 2004).
Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959).
Lea Terhune, Karmapa of Tibet: The Politics of Reincarnation (Wisdom Publications, 2004)

[Icare]

I could seriously do without all the CCP propaganda, but I saw very similar pictures of people shackled and doing slave labour and skins that had been removed from people etc etc in that lecture at the University of Vienna that I mentioned earlier on in the thread.

So this doesn't shock me anymore (it obviously did when I first saw the documentation), but that short tongue-sucking clip disturbed me.

I think it's time we stopped venerating people, even deifying them. "His Holiness", yeah right.

And he obviously knew it wasn't acceptable. If it was merely a cultural thing, he would have felt no need to publicly apologize.

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status...28001975083008

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2...betans-leaving

After 60 years in India, why are Tibetans leaving?

Tibetans sought refuge in India from the Chinese invasion 60 years ago, but face economic uncertainty and mistreatment.

Mumbai, India – For many years, 34-year-old Kunsang Tenzing has been thinking about leaving India.

His family did years ago. Most of his closest friends have also moved.

Over the last seven years, the Tibetan refugee community in India has dropped by 44 percent, from around 150,000 in 2011 to 85,000, according to Indian government data.

Tibetan authorities say most are going to countries such as the United States, Canada, Germany and Switzerland.

Some are returning to Tibet.

Across 40 countries, the Tibetan diaspora stands at 150,000, Tibetan authorities say.

This month, the community celebrates 60 years in India after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in March, 1959.

If the emigration continues, what will remain of the community in India, the country where its spiritual leader the Dalai Lama sought refuge and made his home?

“It is very difficult to make money here. There are barely any jobs here,” Tenzing says.

Tibetans are not officially recognised as refugees in India. Instead, on paper, they are designated as “foreigners”.

Week in the Middle East


India has refused to sign the 1951 United Nations convention on refugees.

“As a result, Tibetans are not allowed government jobs. Sometimes, even universities don’t admit Tibetan students,” says Sonam Norbu Dagpo, the spokesman for the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the Tibetan government-in-exile, which is based in Dharamshala, India.

Dakpo says the number of incoming Tibetans fleeing Chinese rule has plummeted, from around 3,000 annually to about 100 last year.

Economic concerns are central; many Tibetans say that buying property and accessing bank credit are difficult, leaving them with few options.

In addition, India’s dithering over its support to the Tibetan cause makes people nervous.

Last year, the government issued a directive prohibiting bureaucrats and leaders from attending events organised by the CTA marking 60 years in India.

The directive came on the eve of an informal summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

An embarrassed CTA was forced to cancel eventsfeaturing the Dalai Lama and hold them outside New Delhi.

I

Yangzom Tsering, Tibetan in India

In the streets of McLeod Ganj, a small hill town in northern India which is the de-facto capital of the Tibetan community and the home of the Dalai Lama, almost everyone has a story of painful separation.

Yangzom Tsering, 29, was smuggled to India from Tibet by her relatives soon after her birth. Both her parents passed away soon after.

Tsering has always yearned to go back to Tibet to see her siblings who still live there.

“My brother kept telling me that I should come back home. I checked out all the options but it [going back to Tibet] was very difficult.”

Last year, his brother passed away.

Guilt-ridden, he now feels the need to take more responsibility for his family and plans to migrate to Canada.

“But it isn’t easy to go anywhere, being a refugee. No country wants us.”

An identity beyond politics

Tenzing is trying to capture the stories of people like him – refugees from Tibet escaping Chinese occupation, seeking a new life in India while trying to not lose hope.

“Stories of Tibetans” (SoT), a recent social media initiative, has managed to reach about 16,000 followers across several platforms.

SoT was designed to explore Tibetan identity away from the political struggle.

“There is so much more about us – our everyday lives, struggles, and joys and the ways in which the struggle has shaped us,” says Tenzing.

“We are changing very rapidly as a society and there is an urgent need to chronicle our current existence before it becomes extinct.”

One of the characters featured on the feed is 23-year-old Tenzin Chokyi’s, a cancer survivor.

Cancer is seldom discussed among Tibetans.

Chokyi only discovered her father had passed away due to cancer a month after he died in 2012.

“I wanted to change that,” says Chokyi.

Her post has been viewed more than 45,000 times.

“People wrote in saying they didn’t know cancer had entered the Tibetan community too.”

Tenzing recently highlighted the story of a 24-year-old anonymous Tibetan who walked alone to India because of an abusive father.

Another post focuses on a man who gets nostalgic about his friends who have emigrated, each time he sees the “hope” tattoo they had all got together.

Yeshi Choedon, a professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, believes that the initiative might serve as a vital collection of oral histories.

“Hardly anything about the Tibetan refugee community has been documented so far,” he says. “Most times, the focus is only on the political struggle. An initiative like this will enhance the understanding of the ordinary Tibetan, in exile.”

SoT is now branching into documentaries.

Its latest is the story of two Tibetan brothers who were reunited after a decade. They were separated when one brother managed to escape from Tibet to come to India, while the other was arrested in Tibet twice while attempting the journey.

Tenzing says his work in the community helps overcome his own loneliness.

“I need to give back to my community,” he says, “at least for a few more years. But after that, I might migrate too.”

[gini]

Posted by Ewan (here)
Well I can't speak for the Dalai but it is possible it is a cultural thing being seen through western eyes, and we've pretty much been programmed to view the world as a sick, corrupt place thanks to the dark hallways of our media moguls.

I remember seeing my wife's mother do this in Thailand with her grandson, (not my child, a cousin). I thought it very strange but I was clearly the only one who did. Fortunately I have a pretty good poker face and never caused a stir.

Speculating further there may even be a benefit to it from bacterial transfer to a developing immune system -and I'm not inventing excuses, just trying to look at it logically as to why it may have become a 'thing'. Isn't there an African culture that spits in the food being prepared for children? (Or did I just make that up?)

From The Independent today;"What is the Tibetan culture of tongue greetings?

Sticking out your tongue is traditionally a sign of respect or agreement and has also been used as a greeting in Tibetan culture, according to the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Perhaps the most famous Western cultural reference to this tradition comes in the film Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt, where Pitt’s character encounters a group of children who stick out their tongues at him. The film offers no further explanation of their actions.

According to Tibetan folklore, people in the Buddhist culture began sticking out their tongue to disassociate themselves from the 9th century Tibetan king Lang Darma, who was infamous for his cruelty and was said to have had a black tongue.

As Buddhists believe in reincarnation after death, the tradition is said to have emerged as a way for people to show they were not the king reincarnated and therefore not to be associated with his evil deeds.

However, there is no mention in either this folklore or the broader traditional greeting of sucking the tongue." -https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/dalai-lama-tongue-kiss-boy-tibet-b2317664.html

[Ravenlocke]

Rania of YT BreakThrough News talks w/ Prof. Ken Hammond who perfectly summarizes in 8+ minutes Tibet's past 80yr history & the situation present day

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PkqhZrKQcYE

[Iloveyou]

Video gone . . .

Posted by Iloveyou (here)
. . . video (by Stefan Molyneux, uploaded in February 2015) hasn't been posted yet, so here it is again in 2023.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dBH0ywUUx5k

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zkli7lNY8S8