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I’ve
been reading Anne Applebaum’s monumental Gulag:
A History, so when I perused Liam
Ó Ruairc’s apologetic for China’s
invasion, occupation, and repression of Tibet,
I found parallels between his denial of human rights
in the name of ideological progress with Stalinist
propaganda. A sample Gulag insight suffices:
“Anything was justified if it got gold out of
the ground.” (275)
Defending
secularism, I can sympathise with the overthrow of
feudalism. One need not be a Marxist to agree that
no one should have to toil for another’s luxury.
Yet, when Ó Ruairc, in language lifted out
of Maoist sloganeering, quotes a grateful laborer
freed from indenture upon monastic lands, this does
not vindicate his greater argument, that this end
justifies the means: the destruction of an entire
nation’s ancient culture, the mass rapes, tortures,
and killings of its clergy and the exile of many of
its natives, its vast prison camps across the western
wastes, and the sheer hypocrisy coming from a representative
of a faction that scrupulously seeks justice in the
name of Mumia, Palestinians, and Iraqis on its shortlist
of those sanctioned as worthy of radical solidarity.
Meanwhile Jewish, Arab, and Druze Israeli citizens,
Christian Sudanese, and Laotian Hmong, to name a few
victims ignored, receive contempt for being on the
incorrect side of the political divide, and, like
the victims in the gulags, languish punished for their
origins. Martin Amis, in his 2002 book, Koba the
Dread, asks why his father and his generation,
not to mention many of Martin’s own intellectual
colleagues today, are keen to rightfully uphold the
memory of those who suffered under fascism and imperialism,
but dismiss those who bled under communism. Too many
of us, he summarises, condemn Nazi evil and colonial
decimation, while we shrug that Lenin’s omelette
had to break its eggs, that at least the communists
were seeking equality and an end to class distinctions,
goals that Western liberals also agreed to, and therefore
we couldn’t condemn if the methods became, well,
a wee bit harsh or over-enthusiastic in the people’s
name.
Below
is the current entry for Tibet from Human Rights Watch,
an independent non-profit organization. Those who
support the advancement of the mechanical theory,
the collective good, and the promotion of the state
over the deviant individual, a glorious future free
of kulaks or slaves or servants can still respect
this group; they distribute Hellman-Hammett grants,
named in part after Lillian Hellman, the American
playwright who vociferously defended Stalin’s
gulags in the name of Lenin, Marx, and communist eradication
of religion, indigenous peoples, cultural treasures,
and, in the USSR as in China now, the elimination
of millions of dissidents. The camps, the torture,
the mass deportations of innocents, the transfer of
“settlers” into areas freed from serfdom
in the name of reform and equality: haven’t we
seen this in the Ulster Plantation? Didn’t Cromwell
justify his massacres in the name of liberation from
backward superstition? The churches and monasteries
destroyed, the murders of clergy and their followers,
perpetrated in the name of a purified litany free
of idol worship? No pope here, no lama there—no
“His Holiness.” Genocide, guns, imprisonment,
to Hell or Connaught then, to prison or Dharamsala
today?
For
China, the term "Tibet" is reserved for
the Tibetan Autonomous Region. However, many Tibetans
speak of a "greater Tibet," including
Tibetan areas in Qinghai, Yunnan, Gansu, and Sichuan.
More than 50 percent of ethnic Tibetans under Chinese
authority live in these regions. The Chinese leadership
continues to limit Tibetan religious and cultural
expression and seeks to curtail the Dalai Lama's
political and religious influence in all Tibetan
areas. Severely repressive measures limit any display
of support for an independent Tibet. The Chinese
government encourages migration of ethnic Chinese
to Tibetan areas.
In 2002 a Sichuan provincial court sentenced Tenzin
Delek Rinpoche, a locally prominent lama, to death
with a two-year suspended sentence for "causing
explosions [and] inciting the separation of the
state." His alleged co-conspirator, Lobsang
Dondrup, was executed in January 2003. Tenzin Delek's
arrest and conviction represented the culmination
of a decade-long effort by Chinese authorities to
curb his efforts to foster Tibetan Buddhism and
develop Tibetan social institutions. His case has
become a focal point for Tibetans struggling to
retain their cultural identity. Several of Tenzin
Delek's associates remain in prison. Close to a
hundred others were detained for periods ranging
from days to months, most for attempting to bring
information about the crackdown to the attention
of the foreign community. Credible sources report
that many of those held have been subject to serious
ill-treatment and torture. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/12/31/china7001.htm
Has
Ó Ruairc listened to any Tibetans freed by
their Marxist comrades? For decades, I have known
a woman who grew up, having escaped her Chinese liberators,
in the Indian refugee camps of Dharmasala. Perhaps
defenders of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat
condemn her with the same contempt a previous generation
of communist faithful spat at White Russians. It’s
easy to dehumanise those who don’t agree with
your view of history. Inconvenient that republicans
have so many unionists still sharing their nation.
Undoubtably all the rumours of prison camps, organs
harvested from those executed for sale on the Chinese
black market, and the continuing denial of free speech
through Internet access as we in the West know it
(Patriot Acts notwithstanding) are merely the spittle
of a traitorous bourgeoisie, the ousted kulaks, Buddhists
bitter at losing their revenue. Perhaps the Taliban’s
example should be emulated, and more idols in Tibet
dynamited in the name of an ideological devotion to
a purist, fundamentalist, and dynamic cult that promises
to awaken benighted spalpeens from their heathen hallucinations.
It’s
been preached by the Christians who built churches
over the ruins they made of “pagan” temples,
the Muslims who burned the library of Alexandria--finishing
off what the Christians had ransacked centuries before,
the Soviets who despoiled czarist-era treasures, the
Marxists who ruined Ethiopian churches, Nazis in Prague’s
Jewish quarter, and the Chinese regime’s predecessors
in their Cultural Revolution. Or in Ireland: the Catholics,
the Vikings, the Normans, the Planters, the settlers
brought by a foreign power to clear the land of its
impoverished papist labourers under a decadent lordly
clan in the name of a fierce devotion to a creed that
would eliminate hierarchy, distinction, and gilt in
the service of puritanical loyalty, agricultural efficiency,
and industrial expansion. Holiday Inn in Lhasa, why
not? What’s the Dalai Lama done for China’s
GNP after all? Globalisation scours the paint off
the Potola, and welcomes KFC. Cromwell, Mao, Stalin,
Bush, and Pol Pot would be proud of the gains for
the people’s struggle, happily they serve the
statist economy rather than a potentate’s whims.
No, a democratic Tibet (which the Dalai Lama seeks)
could never have happened any other way. 6000 monasteries
had to be destroyed. Millions of Jews died of the
common cold in the 1940s, and statistics prove that
millions of Tibetans still manage to avoid arrest.
Footage lies. The fact that millions of Chinese resettled
in Tibet merely shows the salubrious effects of the
Himalayan air for urban masses yearning to breathe
free. It worked for Mao in 1966, after all. The Dalai
Lama’s human rights campaign obviously must be
controlled by the CIA of the same nation that grants
Tibet’s new rulers--in the name of the capitalism
both superpowers exploit-- “most favoured nation”
status. Any dissenters are only deviationist class
enemies. Chinese apartheid enables Tibet’s freedom.
For
more information on Tibetan human rights issues:
http://www.tibet.org/Activism/Rights
http://www.tibet.com/Humanrights
http://www.tchrd.org
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