Question to Maoists regarding Tibet

[The American]

Since Tibet was annexed under Mao's regime, how do you feel about a notion of an autonomous fully independent Tibet, or is the position of the Maoists that they support the Chinese occupation?

[kasama-rl]

What you call "Chinese occupation" was (in fact) liberation for Tibet's serfs.
Tibet was autonomous but not independent under Mao. And the autonomous conditions meant that for the first ten years there was a development of internal forces for revolution, while not forcing changes in the social system. (Many people don't know that the Dalai Lama led Tibet for ten years under Mao, and that his government was part of the government of the Peoples Republic.)

As for independence: Tibet has never been independent and given the specific conditions of Tibet it was extremely unlikely that independence was an option in the 1950s.

it was a question (in 1949) of whether Tibet would be part of a revolutionary China or as some kind of forward base for the imperialist assault on revolutionary China.

[The American]

Doesn't mandatory liberation sound a bit counter productive?

[kasama-rl]

Well, it is not so simple: every revolution has hard core areas and peripheral areas. Places where the revolution is strong and where it is weak. But when you liberate an area for a new socialist country you will inevitably have elements of both (place where the rev has strong support and where it has weak support.)

In tibet (which was unbelievably isolated and backward) there were almost literally zero communists (a few tibetan nationals were in the liberation army, but not in Tibet).

And yes liberation has to be an act of the people -- so the Maoists held off liberatiion. and allowed the oppressive lamaist system to continue for ten years (within the PRC) until there was a force (among the serfs and their progressive allies) who could fight for something different. This happened when there were CIA back uprisings in the late 1950s and the Dalai Lama fled to India (under CIA proteciton). At that point there was an internal struggle in Tibet (with backing from the PLA).

[The American]

True, china gave tibet infrastructure and boosted its economy, but its obvious the tibetans don't want the chinese there, and to my knowledge there was a significant peasant revolt against the chinese invasion after they invaded.

Who are you to say the Tibetan culture is backward? Where is your reference point? The American cesspool we call culture? Chinese?
Backward and frontward are relative terms...I'm sure they would've called the West backward as well

[kasama-rl]

these are important questions you are raising.

first, backward isn't relative. Clearly some societies are more backward than others.

Societies with enslavement are more backward (historially) than societies where people are not bought and sold.

Serfdom in Tibet was one of the most oppressive and deeply impoverished systems on earth -- with terrible mortality rates (and a rapidly declining population). A third of boys were kidnapped for the monasteries (meaning that the society lost the productive labor of a huge proportion of its strongest workers) greatly increasing the decline and poverty.

Science was unknown. Even newspapers were unknown. And the world was dominated by a religious theocracy that excluded all other ideas and behaviors. (Practice of other religions was punished, especially the pre-buddhist Bon religion).

But no, these things are not relative: liberation and socialism are better than serfdom and isolation.

There was not some "chinese invasion" -- the Peoples Liberation Army entered all parts of China after defeating the reactionary government. Tibet had had Nationalist government representatives in Tibet during the revolution, and the Communist forces moved in when the Nationalists were defeated. Tibet was part of china, it had always been part of china (though that relationship had been weakened during the decades of civil war, as china fragmented).

There was a landlord led uprising against land reform in the Cham (outside Tibet proper). But never a peasant uprising in Tibet. In fact freed-serfs in Tibet played a major revolutionary role during the Cultural Revolution.

If you think it through, this argument about "backwards and fronwards are relative terms" is an argument against revolution. What is the point of making revolution and achieving socialism if there is really no way of knowing that socialism is better than capitalism. If they are all relative, why not just go with the status quo (which is what you are arguing for in Tibet).

If someone came to you and asked "How would you like to live in a country run by the most backward, superstitious, fundamentalist monks imaginable -- who would take most of the wealth in your country to pay for thousand to pray full-time while people starved? A society where medicine is opposed on religious grounds, and where even killing rabid dogs is forbidden because of religious laws?"

When you say 'It is obvious the Tibetans don't want them there" you are confusing different periods. The massive in-migration of Han people is unpopular in Tibet (for obvious reasons), but this was not a phenomenon in Socialist China (under Mao), it started after capitalism was restored, when Han chauvinism came into full control of policy. In the Maoist period, such questions were sharply divided by class -- the former ruling serf-owners and monastic heads opposed the revolution (obviously), and there was considerable support for social changes and development among the oppressed (though it was always a struggle and a complex one).

[pranabjyoti]

I just want to know who can be leader of a "free from Chinese occupation" Tibet? In my opinion, even a worse Chinese occupation is better than feudal lama monarchy.

[Anarchist Skinhead]

*looks around*

*notices pranabjyoti*

*runs away screaming*

[Kléber]

The US government once liberated the slaves, does that mean African-Americans are permanently indebted to Uncle Sam and lost their right to self-determination?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

On this basis, Maoists should support the 'liberation' of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military.

[Kléber]

Well the bonapartist PRC invasion did actually bring some social progress, abolishing slavery and serfdom, but today the Tibetan masses are clearly being oppressed by the Chinese bourgeoisie even if they are a minority within Tibet itself and are misrepresented by pro-imperialist reactionaries abroad.

[scarletghoul]

Ely's got it spot on.

Here's some pictures of the 'oriental paradise' mourned by so many western liberals:
http://shugdensociety.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/tibetan-serf.jpgEveryday Tibetan life under the Dalai Lama
http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/mediafile/200906/04/P200906041010584974843930.jpgThis man's arm was shot off for fun by his master.
http://vol-news.com/tibet%20history/skin%20of%20tibet.jpgHuman skins, most likely from serfs. Often this material was used to make drums and whatnot.

Or if thats not real enough, how about this video footage shot by the Lama's good friends from Nazi Germany bP_IohMUWaY

[RED DAVE]

Tibet has never been independent.That is a vicious lie to justify Maoist imperialism. Tibet has been independent for much of its historical existence.


During Tibet's history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tibet), starting from the 7th century, it has existed as a unified empire and as a region of separate self-governing territories, vassal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassal) states, and Chinese provinces. In the interregnums, various sects of Tibetan Buddhism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Buddhism), secular nobles, and foreign rulers have vied for power in Tibet. The latest religious struggle marked the ascendancy of the Dalai Lamas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama) to power in western Tibet in the 17th century, though his rule was often merely nominal with real power resting in the hands of various regents and viceroys. Today, most of cultural Tibet is ruled as autonomous areas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_area) in the People's Republic of China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

RED DAVE

[scarletghoul]

I have never seen a map of the world, including maps from the 19th or 18th centuries, which does not include Tibet as part of China (you can google if you like). Tibet as another country is a myth, despite what your amazing and indisputably authoritative source says.

[scarletghoul]

From Palingenisis -----

http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Contents.htm (http://www.iivs.de/%7Eiivs01311/SDLE/Contents.htm)

This is a great book explaining Tibetan Lamaism and just how fucking women-hating it is (its not Maoist or Christian either).

[Kléber]

I have never seen a map of the world, including maps from the 19th or 18th centuries, which does not include Tibet as part of China (you can google if you like). Tibet as another country is a myth, despite what your amazing and indisputably authoritative source says.
Tibet was independent for a thousand years before it was conquered by the Manchus. Are you saying that if a people are oppressed for a certain amount of time, they lose their right to independence?

The point is that the Tibetan people are currently oppressed on account of their nationality by the Chinese bourgeoisie, as the urban rebellion in Lhasa demonstrated. Hiding behind the red nomenclature and history of the otherwise capitalist PRC does not justify your repudiation of the Leninist principle of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.

[red cat]

The Tibetan masses have their right to declare themselves independent from China, but what the Dalai Lama and his hordes are aiming at is a restoration of the old regime which would probably be much worse than what Tibet is having now. It is not a demand from within the masses. What is going on in Tibet is a game between two imperialist powers, USA and China. The correct communist stand on this as of now should be to oppose both and raise the slogan of establishing genuine people's power in Tibet.

[DDR]

A free indepentent and socialist Tibet? Yes
A independent and feudal, lama's style, Tibet? Hell, no.

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/756/freetibetmaozedonga3090.th.jpg (http://img190.imageshack.us/i/freetibetmaozedonga3090.jpg/)

[gorillafuck]

Haha Maoists think they're arguing with Dalai Lama supporters:lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Kleber:


Well the bonapartist PRC invasion did actually bring some social progress, abolishing slavery and serfdom, but today the Tibetan masses are clearly being oppressed by the Chinese bourgeoisie even if they are a minority within Tibet itself and are misrepresented by pro-imperialist reactionaries abroad.

I hesitate to diagree with you, but this seems to suggest you think Stalinism is progressive!

Again, on this basis you could argue that since the US military got rid of the 'medieval' Taliban, it's a progressive force.

[L.A.P.]

I just want to know who can be leader of a "free from Chinese occupation" Tibet? In my opinion, even a worse Chinese occupation is better than feudal lama monarchy.

I thought we were against imperialism no matter what, if we use that line of logic then I could very well say that American occupation is better than a dynastic military dictatorship in regards to North Korea.

[Kléber]

I hesitate to diagree with you, but this seems to suggest you think Stalinism is progressive!
The Stalinist apparatus was not interested in progressing forward to socialism but it did, out of necessity, extend its frozen transitional social form to Tibet and abolish feudalism there. That doesn't necessarily make the PRC any more progressive than any bourgeois government that abolished slavery and serfdom. My point was not to glorify the annexation so much as to say that any progressive role the Chinese state once played in Tibet is long over and done with. (and no, that does not mean I support the Dalai Lama, nor US imperialist intrigues to carve up China)


Again, on this basis you could argue that since the US military got rid of the 'medieval' Taliban, it's a progressive force.The US didn't really get rid of the Taliban, but incorporated many of its fundamentalist rural notables into the quisling government, and allows them to continue oppressing women and raping children under the protection of the Coalition. Mao's party, in spite of everything wrong with it, did actually expropriate the slaveowners and landlords in Tibet.

[Aurora]

Kleber:

I hesitate to diagree with you, but this seems to suggest you think Stalinism is progressive!

Again, on this basis you could argue that since the US military got rid of the 'medieval' Taliban, it's a progressive force.

Stalinism is progressive compared to capitalism, i'd rather have a degenerated workers state than a bourgeois state, i don't expect you to agree as to you stalinism=capitalism

The US military hasn't got rid of the Taliban and cannot because capitalism is no longer progressive and is increasingly incapable of developing the productive forces in Afghanistan to such an extent that the Taliban ideology ceases to be.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Kleber:


The Stalinist apparatus was not interested in progressing forward to socialism but it did, out of necessity, extend its frozen transitional social form to Tibet and abolish feudalism there. That doesn't necessarily make the PRC any more progressive than any bourgeois government that abolished slavery and serfdom. My point was not to glorify the annexation so much as to say that any progressive role the Chinese state once played in Tibet is long over and done with. (and no, that does not mean I support the Dalai Lama, nor US imperialist intrigues to carve up China)

This is just another way of saying you do indeed think Stalinism is progressive. This differs from Pablosim in name only.


The US didn't really get rid of the Taliban, but incorporated many of its fundamentalist rural notables into the quisling government, and allows them to continue oppressing women and raping children under the protection of the Coalition. Mao's party, in spite of everything wrong with it, did actually expropriate the slaveowners and landlords in Tibet.

In that case, to be consistent, you must support their efforts to finish the job.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Anarion:


Stalinism is progressive compared to capitalism, i'd rather have a degenerated workers state than a bourgeois state, i don't expect you to agree as to you stalinism=capitalism

Well, I was specifically making the point to Kleber, not to anyone who might be a closet Stalinist. [Not than I am accusing you of being one.]


The US military hasn't got rid of the Taliban and cannot because capitalism is no longer progressive and is increasingly incapable of developing the productive forces in Afghanistan to such an extent that the Taliban ideology ceases to be.

See my reply to Kleber.

[Prairie Fire]

Ely, considering that you wrote a pamphlet on the subject for the RCP back in the day, why don't repost it?

I have it in print form, but no scanner.

[DDR]

Rosa, are you really comparing the chinese ocupation of the tibet with the ocupation of afghanistan by the us o it is just only for the lulz?

Does the US care for the people of afghanistan? No
Does the chinese care fo the people in tibet? Yes

Does the US spoil afghanistan of its resources? Yes
Does the chinese spoil tibet for its resources? No

Does the military ocupation of afghanistan bring any emprovement of life to the afghanis? No
Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes

And so on, so please, don't say stuff just because you hate "stalinism", what ever it is, or "authoritarian socialism" or anyway you want to call it. That's just plain sectarism, and if you cannot see beyond your nose at least don't say nonsensical things, thanks :)

[Kléber]

This is just another way of saying you do indeed think Stalinism is progressive. This differs from Pablosim in name only.
No, Pabloism means renouncing political independence from Stalinism; if you twist the definition to mean "saying anything that can be construed as thinking Stalinism is better than capitalism," then Trotsky himself was a Pabloite. All I did was acknowledge the fact that the PRC abolished slavery and serfdom in Tibet, I did not say that gives the Chinese state claims on the region nor that it excuses the ongoing repression of the Tibetan people by the Chiense bourgeoisie.


In that case, to be consistent, you must support their efforts to finish the job.
They aren't trying to finish the job. The Coalition protects ex-Taliban reactionaries who came over to its banner, and avoids any interference in the structure of rural society so as not to alienate conservative local elites. Anyway, you are making a strawman out of my position by saying I support the Chinese occupation which I don't.

[Kléber]

Does the US care for the people of afghanistan? No
Does the chinese care fo the people in tibet? Yes

Does the US spoil afghanistan of its resources? Yes
Does the chinese spoil tibet for its resources? No

Does the military ocupation of afghanistan bring any emprovement of life to the afghanis? No
Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes

And so on, so please, don't say stuff just because you hate "stalinism", what ever it is, or "authoritarian socialism" or anyway you want to call it. That's just plain sectarism, and if you cannot see beyond your nose at least don't say nonsensical things, thanks :)
Uh, you just made one of the stupidest posts ever. The Chinese bourgeoisie is not a paternal caretaker, it does exploit the resources of Tibet while keeping the people super-exploited; what "improvement" it brings to the average Tibetan is a joke when he or she makes one-fourth the income of an urban dweller. Unrest among Tibetan workers erupted in an urban rebellion in 2008. Of course Tibetan nationalism is unviable and the only way forward for the Tibetan masses is in alliance with all the working people of China and the world, but that doesn't change the fact of their national exploitation and oppression in the present day.

[RED DAVE]

Does the US care for the people of afghanistan? No
Does the chinese care fo the people in tibet? YesOh, please.


Does the US spoil afghanistan of its resources? Yes
Does the chinese spoil tibet for its resources? NoOh, please.


Does the military ocupation of afghanistan bring any emprovement of life to the afghanis? No
Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes[Oh, please.

The same shit can be written of the US occupations of Panama or Puerto Rico or the US seizure of Northern Mexico. Chicanos in New Mexico have a higher income than Mexican citizens in the northern states of Mexico. Does this justify the seizure of the country.

When US imperialism wants wallpaper on its imperialism, it uses wallpaper. Same as with China and Tibet.

Keep it up, Maoists and Stalinists. Earn the affection of oppressed people around the world by supporting imperialist invasions.

RED DAVE

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DDR:


Rosa, are you really comparing the chinese ocupation of the tibet with the ocupation of afghanistan by the us o it is just only for the lulz?

Yes I am comparing the two.


Does the US care for the people of afghanistan? No
Does the chinese care fo the people in tibet? Yes

I'd answer 'No' to both.


Does the US spoil afghanistan of its resources? Yes
Does the chinese spoil tibet for its resources? No

We have yet to see what the Chinese regime will do.


Does the military ocupation of afghanistan bring any emprovement of life to the afghanis? No
Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes

Again, I'd answer 'No' to both questions.


And so on, so please, don't say stuff just because you hate "stalinism", what ever it is, or "authoritarian socialism" or anyway you want to call it. That's just plain sectarism, and if you cannot see beyond your nose at least don't say nonsensical things, thanks

I don't hate Stalinsin, I hate any form of class oppression, like that in the fSU, China and the USA.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Kleber:


No, Pabloism means renouncing political independence from Stalinism; if you twist the definition to mean "saying anything that can be construed as thinking Stalinism is better than capitalism," then Trotsky himself was a Pabloite. All I did was acknowledge the fact that the PRC abolished slavery and serfdom in Tibet, I did not say that gives the Chinese state claims on the region nor that it excuses the ongoing repression of the Tibetan people by the Chiense bourgeoisie.

I agree that many things Trotsky argued made him a Pabloite (or, rather, made Pablo a consistent orthodox Trostkyist). If the Stalinist regime can be progressive, then why preserve your political independence?


They aren't trying to finish the job. The Coalition protects ex-Taliban reactionaries who came over to its banner, and avoids any interference in the structure of rural society so as not to alienate conservative local elites. Anyway, you are making a strawman out of my position by saying I support the Chinese occupation which I don't.

And, as you yourself have argued , the Chinese regime has helped preserve other reactionary states around the world.

[Kléber]

I agree that many things Trotsky argued made him a Pabloite (or, rather, made Pablo a consistent orthodox Trostkyist). If the Stalinist regime can be progressive, then why preserve your political independence?
Why stay independent from a bourgeois party that achieves some minimal progressive social reform? The enemy of an enemy is not necessarily a friend, but I can see why you might use that excuse to vote for a reactionary imperialist "Labour Party." Well not everyone thinks in such simplistic terms as the SWP (UK) does to justify its opportunism.

Pablo was a traitor; he blocked discussion on entryism into Mao's party, promoted a false sense of security among those entering the CPC and its mass organizations, and went over the heads of the Chinese comrades themselves when they protested his bureaucratic intrigues. Thus he helped deliver the whole Trotskyist RCPC network in China and many unprepared young cadre over to the Stalinist prisons and firing squads.


And, as you yourself have argued , the Chinese regime has helped preserve other reactionary states around the world.Indeed, after the Sino-Soviet split it did. Even in the 1950's the occupation of Tibet was a disgrace, the abolition of feudalism was postponed for years and protesters in Lhasa were slaughtered. The bureaucracy did nevertheless end up abolishing slavery and serfdom in Tibet, not out of some desire to help the people but to better utilize labor and resources. Like I said that does not justify military occupation and certainly not the worsening super-exploitation faced by Tibetan workers and farmers today.

[Tavarisch_Mike]

Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes


And to this i want to ad the fact that during the "terrible" maoist time, Tibet (along with the rest of PRC) dubbled theire expecting living age, got education, hospitals, women became equal and so on...

[Red Commissar]

There is mysticism behind what Tibet was before by some who feel passionately over the question of an independent Tibet. However I do not think this justifies what China does now in regards to its preferential treatment of Han over locals.

Out of curiosity, does Tibet fit into China's "Third Front" policy (their build up of industry and military positions in the southwest for a fall back position).

[Rafiq]

I don't hate Stalinsin, I hate any form of class oppression, like that in the fSU, China and the USA.

You just contradicted yourself.

[Kotze]

You just contradicted yourself.The intended meaning given the context was this: I'm not obsessed with hating Stalinism specifically, in my understanding it belongs to the group of class-oppressing ideologies, and I hate class-oppressing ideologies in general.

[pranabjyoti]

The intended meaning given the context was this: I'm not obsessed with hating Stalinism specifically, in my understanding it belongs to the group of class-oppressing ideologies, and I hate class-oppressing ideologies in general.
Actually, the inner meaning is "I am just unable to understand that until there will be class, there will be class oppression". I am also unable to differentiate between "Dictatorship of proletariat" and class dictatorship of other reactionary classes. Actually, she will probably oppose the suppression and oppression of feudal landlord class by the bourgeoisie, whatever progress that kind of oppression can bring to mankind.

[pranabjyoti]

I thought we were against imperialism no matter what, if we use that line of logic then I could very well say that American occupation is better than a dynastic military dictatorship in regards to North Korea.
ONE BIG DIFFERENCE. They aren't feudal not backed by any imperialist force like Dalai Lama. After all, most of the people of NK aren't surfs like Tibet.

[scarletghoul]

Haha Maoists think they're arguing with Dalai Lama supporters:lol:
If you oppose the revolution in Tibet then you are by implication supporting the Dalai Lama regime. There was no anti-maoist and anti-lama uprising in Tibet in the 50s, it was a struggle between two sides. If you're criticising the Chinese Communists' actions in Tibet, and then saying you dont support the Dalai Lama regime either, what exactly are you advocating ? What do you think should have happened in Tibet in the 50s ??

[and please note this is a historical debate about 1950s, not the Tibet of today. most maoists would agree with what red cat said about peoples power being the goal in Tibet, whether they want it part of China or separate.]

[PhoenixAsh]

Ely's got it spot on.

Here's some pictures of the 'oriental paradise' mourned by so many western liberals: an life under the Dalai Lama
This man's arm was shot off for fun by his master.
Human skins, most likely from serfs. Often this material was used to make drums and whatnot.

Or if thats not real enough, how about this video footage shot by the Lama's good friends from Nazi Germany bP_IohMUWaY


You do realize that the Dalai Lama has never ever had any wordly power...right? And that he spoke out against these situations frequently, right?

Ofcourse you didn't.

[PhoenixAsh]

Rosa, are you really comparing the chinese ocupation of the tibet with the ocupation of afghanistan by the us o it is just only for the lulz?

Does the US care for the people of afghanistan? No
Does the chinese care fo the people in tibet? Yes

Does the US spoil afghanistan of its resources? Yes
Does the chinese spoil tibet for its resources? No

Does the military ocupation of afghanistan bring any emprovement of life to the afghanis? No
Does the chinese ocupation of tibet bring any emprovement of life to the tibetans? Yes

And so on, so please, don't say stuff just because you hate "stalinism", what ever it is, or "authoritarian socialism" or anyway you want to call it. That's just plain sectarism, and if you cannot see beyond your nose at least don't say nonsensical things, thanks :)

Holy crap...do you for one minute believe the answer to any of these questions would be Yes for China concerning Tibet? you should really stop smoking crack.

Have you been to Tibet? I have...you are talking complee crap. The Chinese do not care one iota for teh Tibettans. Instead they are creating lebensraum for the Chinese and have institutionalised racist rule against the indiginous Tibettans in favour of Han Chinese migration. Han Chinese now form a economically superior upper class in Tibet....Han Chinese who are economically stimulated to move to Tibet have more acces to education and permits for work or bussiness than ethnic Tibettans.

The cultuaral and ethnical background of Tibettans is severely repressed....as are their religious freedoms.

I am sorry...but you are sadly mistaken in your arm-chair view of the situation in Tibet. I advice you to go there.


edit: Hwn you do go...be sure to bring a history book containing the picture of the Dalai Lama. Perhaps you can have a wonderful sense of Chinese hospitality then...I certainly did. Three days in jail. Do you know they do torture people...very nice to witness and hear.

[PhoenixAsh]

And to this i want to ad the fact that during the "terrible" maoist time, Tibet (along with the rest of PRC) dubbled theire expecting living age, got education, hospitals, women became equal and so on...

Women being equal in Tibet? No sir...CHINESE women being equal in Tibet. Tibettan women being equal in Tibet was always the case since there are three times the number of women then men. (Buddhisms basic tennent is equality between the sexes btw) However...Tibettan women are worth less than Chinese women.

Education is brought in the equation but Tibettan children do NOT get the same education as Chinese children. Not only is their education in Chinese....which is very hard if you do not speak Chinese. But also they do not get the same educational rights as Chinese children.

But hey...nice white-mans burden argument. You basically legitimized the whole of european imperialism! :thumbup:

[PhoenixAsh]

ONE BIG DIFFERENCE. They aren't feudal not backed by any imperialist force like Dalai Lama. After all, most of the people of NK aren't surfs like Tibet.


Dalai Lama wasn't a wordly power and sp;oke out frequently against the feudal system in Tibet...which was actually installed by the Chinese in 1500 anyways. Get your facts straight.

No...most of the people in NK are "voluntary" slaves and brainwashed...

But hey...who cares...its Stalinism tath is doing it. SO at least its better than...mwah...actual socialism.

[pranabjyoti]

Women being equal in Tibet? No sir...CHINESE women being equal in Tibet. Tibettan women being equal in Tibet was always the case since there are three times the number of women then men. (Buddhisms basic tennent is equality between the sexes btw) However...Tibettan women are worth less than Chinese women.

Education is brought in the equation but Tibettan children do NOT get the same education as Chinese children. Not only is their education in Chinese....which is very hard if you do not speak Chinese. But also they do not get the same educational rights as Chinese children.

But hey...nice white-mans burden argument. You basically legitimized the whole of european imperialism! :thumbup:
So, as per you, as Tibet is a Buddhist state, they CAN NOT BE FEUDAL. If you have a minimum idea about the basic teachings of most dominant religions, you can see that they always talk about equality. BUT, THAT DOESN'T STOPPED FEUDALISM TO GROW AND PROSPER AROUND THE WORLD. If religion can bring equality, then perhaps the world will be socialist after the fall of the Roman empire and Catholic Christianity is enough to bring socialism in whole Europe alone.
Can you show us some sources of your information? The European imperialism is basically search for market, raw material and cheap labor. Just show us some information that the Mao had treated the Tibetan people the same way as Europeans treated their colonial people.
By this standard, India is now occupying Kashmir and the whole "Indian North-East states" and the behavior of Indian states and their representatives is much worse than Chinese authorities behavior towards people of Tibet. But, as far as I can remember, you (and many other "leftists" like you) have never spoke a single word against India.

[pranabjyoti]

Dalai Lama wasn't a wordly power and sp;oke out frequently against the feudal system in Tibet...which was actually installed by the Chinese in 1500 anyways. Get your facts straight.

No...most of the people in NK are "voluntary" slaves and brainwashed...

But hey...who cares...its Stalinism tath is doing it. SO at least its better than...mwah...actual socialism.
Brainwashed? Certainly less than US citizens. Actually, they know well that this "dynasty" is their only hope against US imperialism. I am inviting some Gobbets to come to "Democratic" India to see how dynastic rules can reign even in a "western certified" "world's biggest democracy".

[PhoenixAsh]

Brainwashed? Certainly less than US citizens. Actually, they know well that this "dynasty" is their only hope against US imperialism. I am inviting some Gobbets to come to "Democratic" India to see how dynastic rules can reign even in a "western certified" "world's biggest democracy".

Yeah...I wasn't talking about India...and neither were you untill you needed it to deflect from the topic of human rights abuses in NK and Tibet.

They know well because that is actually the only thing they are told over and over and over again. Not because the system actually proves itself to be better but because if you do not agree you are send to a reeducation camp.

[PhoenixAsh]

So, as per you, as Tibet is a Buddhist state, they CAN NOT BE FEUDAL. If you have a minimum idea about the basic teachings of most dominant religions, you can see that they always talk about equality. BUT, THAT DOESN'T STOPPED FEUDALISM TO GROW AND PROSPER AROUND THE WORLD. If religion can bring equality, then perhaps the world will be socialist after the fall of the Roman empire and Catholic Christianity is enough to bring socialism in whole Europe alone.
Can you show us some sources of your information? The European imperialism is basically search for market, raw material and cheap labor. Just show us some information that the Mao had treated the Tibetan people the same way as Europeans treated their colonial people.
By this standard, India is now occupying Kashmir and the whole "Indian North-East states" and the behavior of Indian states and their representatives is much worse than Chinese authorities behavior towards people of Tibet. But, as far as I can remember, you (and many other "leftists" like you) have never spoke a single word against India.

well, well....being a maoist and NK supporter hasn't done wonders for your reading skills, has it? Read that post again. Come back...and edit your post so that it actually reflects what I am saying.

And again...you deflect form teh topic by bringing in india....which is a bit strange in a thread that is about the Chinese occupation and repression of Tibet

And if you use the term "leftist" in such a deragatory manner to me again I am going to refer to you as a genocidal apologizer and a poor excuse for a revolutionary.

[PhoenixAsh]

Have you or haven't you been to chinese occupied Tibet?

[Sir Comradical]

The US government once liberated the slaves, does that mean African-Americans are permanently indebted to Uncle Sam and lost their right to self-determination?

At least you agree then with the liberation of Tibet by the Chinese red army. However by supporting Tibetan self-determination aren't you essentially supporting a petty-bourgeois movement backed by the West to undermine China's bourgeoisie?


On this basis, Maoists should support the 'liberation' of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military.

The Chinese communists didn't overthrow a progressive government in Tibet, replace it with a reactionary one and then invade the region to overthrow the regime they once helped to establish.

[PhoenixAsh]

At least you agree then with the liberation of Tibet by the Chinese red army. However by supporting Tibetan self-determination aren't you essentially supporting a petty-bourgeois movement backed by the West to undermine China's bourgeoisie?



The Chinese communists didn't overthrow a progressive (insert: neither did the US) government in Tibet, replace it with a reactionary one and then invade the region to overthrow the regime they once helped to establish.


Yes they did...they just took longer to do so.

[pranabjyoti]

Yeah...I wasn't talking about India...and neither were you untill you needed it to deflect from the topic of human rights abuses in NK and Tibet.

They know well because that is actually the only thing they are told over and over and over again. Not because the system actually proves itself to be better but because if you do not agree you are send to a reeducation camp.
India is just an example that dynastic mentality can survive even in so-called open democracy, specially in Asia which has a long tradition of feudalism and don't forget that NK is also an Asian country.
The record of maintenance of human rights of so called "democracies" isn't better than NK and China. They why should we concentrate on NK and Tibet? To help the imperialists?

[Tavarisch_Mike]

Women being equal in Tibet? No sir...CHINESE women being equal in Tibet.

To be clear i was talking about the time before Deng, when the real idea of gender-equality where introduced in Tibet "Women hold up half the sky" The Tibet of today im sure is not really good on this point, but during the maoist time they at least tried to do this practicly for the first time in the history of Tibet.


Tibettan women being equal in Tibet was always the case since there are three times the number of women then men. (Buddhisms basic tennent is equality between the sexes btw) However...Tibettan women are worth less than Chinese women.



You mena like in Thailand? Theory and practice doesnt always get along to well. And here is the thing why i and many others are so hostile to the Free Tibet-movement, it is based on a false presumption of that Tibet once was a Shangri-La a paradise on earth where evryone where equal and no violence or oppression existed, without regarding the feudalistic theocratical ruling system which btw had slaves. No one (at leat i hope so) are defending the current system or the chineese goverment, as Michael Parenti said;

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



Education is brought in the equation but Tibettan children do NOT get the same education as Chinese children. Not only is their education in Chinese....which is very hard if you do not speak Chinese. But also they do not get the same educational rights as Chinese children.



Thats terrible and unacceptable no question about that, but it hasnt always being like this.


But hey...nice white-mans burden argument. You basically legitimized the whole of european imperialism! :thumbup:

Please explaine how i did that, or is it just a way to label your opponent in a discussion by putting words in his mouth?

Anyway i recommend the text "Friendly Feudalism: The myth about Tibet" by Michael Parenti




I. For Lords and Lamas Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor dogmatic--so say its adherents. For many of them Buddhism is less a theology and more a meditative and investigative discipline intended to promote an inner harmony and enlightenment while directing us to a path of right living. Generally, the spiritual focus is not only on oneself but on the welfare of others. One tries to put aside egoistic pursuits and gain a deeper understanding of one’s connection to all people and things. “Socially engaged Buddhism” tries to blend individual liberation with responsible social action in order to build an enlightened society.
A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. 1 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices. The brawls damaged the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, “it would use worshippers’ donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars.” 2 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest's sway. The Tacchu monks accused Komatsu of selling writings and drawings under the temple's name for his own gain. They also were appalled by the frequency with which he was seen in the company of women. Komatsu in turn sought to isolate and punish monks who were critical of his leadership. The conflict lasted some five years and made it into the courts. 3 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La. The Dalai Lama himself stated that “the pervasive influence of Buddhism” in Tibet, “amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” 4 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” 5 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) 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. 6 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks…. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.” 7 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 1792, many Kagyu monasteries were confiscated and their monks were forcibly converted to the Gelug sect (the Dalai Lama’s denomination). The Gelug school, known also as the “Yellow Hats,” showed little tolerance or willingness to mix their teachings with other Buddhist sects. In the words of one of their traditional prayers: “Praise to you, violent god of the Yellow Hat teachings/who reduces to particles of dust/ great beings, high officials and ordinary people/ who pollute and corrupt the Gelug doctrine.” 8 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be. 9 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) This grim history remains largely unvisited by present-day followers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” 10 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” 11 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. 12 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” 13 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 14 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. 15 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monastery’s land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.16 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. 17 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.”18 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.19 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.20 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation--including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation--were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”21 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 22 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.23 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”24 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.
II. Secularization vs. Spirituality
What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also granted a direct role in internal administration “to promote social reforms.” Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in an attempt to effect reconstruction. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants. “Contrary to popular belief in the West,” claims one observer, the Chinese “took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion.”25 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China.26 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) The approval of the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was first installed in Lhasa, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.
The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.27 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.28 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed.29 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane.30 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.”31 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Eventually the resistance crumbled.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.32 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in Hitler’s SS) wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the Tibetans who resisted the Chinese “were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived.” They also had to live in a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants--all of which Harrer treats as sure evidence of the dreadful nature of the Chinese occupation.33 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
By 1961, Chinese occupation authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes.. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.34 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But monks who had been conscripted as children into the religious orders were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.35 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.”36 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) The official 1953 census--six years before the Chinese crackdown--recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.37 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves--of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.
Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”38 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration. Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate private plots, sell their harvest surpluses, decide for themselves what crops to grow, and keep yaks and sheep. Communication with the outside world was again permitted, and frontier controls were eased to permit some Tibetans to visit exiled relatives in India and Nepal.39 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) By the 1980s many of the principal lamas had begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile communities abroad, “restoring their monasteries in Tibet and helping to revitalize Buddhism there.”40 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
As of 2007 Tibetan Buddhism was still practiced widely and tolerated by officialdom. Religious pilgrimages and other standard forms of worship were allowed but within limits. All monks and nuns had to sign a loyalty pledge that they would not use their religious position to foment secession or dissent. And displaying photos of the Dalai Lama was declared illegal.41 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In the 1990s, the Han, the ethnic group comprising over 95 percent of China’s immense population, began moving in substantial numbers into Tibet. On the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse, signs of Han colonization are readily visible. Chinese run the factories and many of the shops and vending stalls. Tall office buildings and large shopping centers have been built with funds that might have been better spent on water treatment plants and housing. Chinese cadres in Tibet too often view their Tibetan neighbors as backward and lazy, in need of economic development and “patriotic education.” During the 1990s Tibetan government employees suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies were purged from office, and campaigns were once again launched to discredit the Dalai Lama. Individual Tibetans reportedly were subjected to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor for carrying out separatist activities and engaging in “political subversion.” Some were held in administrative detention without adequate food, water, and blankets, subjected to threats, beatings, and other mistreatment.42 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Tibetan history, culture, and certainly religion are slighted in schools. Teaching materials, though translated into Tibetan, focus mainly on Chinese history and culture. Chinese family planning regulations allow a three-child limit for Tibetan families. (There is only a one-child limit for Han families throughout China, and a two-child limit for rural Han families whose first child is a girl.) If a Tibetan couple goes over the three-child limit, the excess children can be denied subsidized daycare, health care, housing, and education. These penalties have been enforced irregularly and vary by district.43 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) None of these child services, it should be noted, were available to Tibetans before the Chinese takeover.

For the rich lamas and secular lords, the Communist intervention was an unmitigated calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Many, however, escaped that fate. Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.44 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline “Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right.”45 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the Dalai Lama called upon the British government to release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Into the twenty-first century, via the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits that are more respectable sounding than the CIA, the U.S. Congress continued to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional millions for “democracy activities” within the Tibetan exile community. In addition to these funds, the Dalai Lama received money from financier George Soros.46 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
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.47 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)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.48 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an unsettling effect on the exile community. It read in part: “Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability.” Marxism fosters “the equitable utilization of the means of production” and cares about “the fate of the working classes” and “the victims of . . . exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and . . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.49 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
But he also sent a reassuring message to “those who live in abundance”: “It is a good thing to be rich... Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And to the poor he offers this admonition: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune... It is better to develop a positive attitude.”50 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In 2005 the Dalai Lama signed a widely advertised statement along with ten other Nobel Laureates supporting the “inalienable and fundamental human right” of working people throughout the world to form labor unions to protect their interests, in accordance with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many countries “this fundamental right is poorly protected and in some it is explicitly banned or brutally suppressed,” the statement read. Burma, China, Colombia, Bosnia, and a few other countries were singled out as among the worst offenders. Even the United States “fails to adequately protect workers’ rights to form unions and bargain collectively. Millions of U.S. workers lack any legal protection to form unions….”51 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
The Dalai Lama also gave full support to removing the ingrained traditional obstacles that have kept Tibetan nuns from receiving an education. Upon arriving in exile, few nuns could read or write. In Tibet their activities had been devoted to daylong periods of prayer and chants. But in northern India they now began reading Buddhist philosophy and engaging in theological study and debate, activities that in old Tibet had been open only to monks.52 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
In November 2005 the Dalai Lama spoke at Stanford University on “The Heart of Nonviolence,” but stopped short of a blanket condemnation of all violence. Violent actions that are committed in order to reduce future suffering are not to be condemned, he said, citing World War II as an example of a worthy effort to protect democracy. What of the four years of carnage and mass destruction in Iraq, a war condemned by most of the world—even by a conservative pope--as a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity? The Dalai Lama was undecided: “The Iraq war—it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”53 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Earlier he had voiced support for the U.S. military intervention against Yugoslavia and, later on, the U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan.54 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
III. Exit Feudal Theocracy
As the Shangri-La myth would have it, in old Tibet the people lived in contented and tranquil symbiosis with their monastic and secular lords. Rich lamas and poor monks, wealthy landlords and impoverished serfs were all bonded together, mutually sustained by the comforting balm of a deeply spiritual and pacific culture.
One is reminded of the idealized image of feudal Europe presented by latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants living in the secure embrace of their Church, under the more or less benign protection of their lords.55 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) Again we are invited to accept a particular culture in its idealized form divorced from its murky material history. This means accepting it as presented by its favored class, by those who profited most from it. The Shangri-La image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic actuality than does the pastoral image of medieval Europe.
Seen in all its grim realities, old Tibet confirms the view I expressed in an earlier book, namely that culture is anything but neutral. Culture can operate as a legitimating cover for a host of grave injustices, benefiting a privileged portion of society at great cost to the rest.56 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) In theocratic feudal Tibet, ruling interests manipulated the traditional culture to fortify their own wealth and power. The theocracy equated rebellious thought and action with satanic influence. It propagated the general presumption of landlord superiority and peasant unworthiness. The rich were represented as deserving their good life, and the lowly poor as deserving their mean existence, all codified in teachings about the karmic residue of virtue and vice accumulated from past lives, presented as part of God’s will.
Were the more affluent lamas just hypocrites who preached one thing and secretly believed another? More likely they were genuinely attached to those beliefs that brought such good results for them. That their theology so perfectly supported their material privileges only strengthened the sincerity with which it was embraced.
It might be said that we denizens of the modern secular world cannot grasp the equations of happiness and pain, contentment and custom, that characterize more traditionally spiritual societies. This is probably true, and it may explain why some of us idealize such societies. But still, a gouged eye is a gouged eye; a flogging is a flogging; and the grinding exploitation of serfs and slaves is a brutal class injustice whatever its cultural wrapping. There is a difference between a spiritual bond and human bondage, even when both exist side by side
Many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their country, but it appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he represented. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that the Dalai Lama continues to be revered in Tibet, but


. . . few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China’s land reform to the clans. Tibet’s former slaves say they, too, don’t want their former masters to return to power. “I’ve already lived that life once before,” said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, “I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.”57 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
It should be noted that the Dalai Lama is not the only highly placed lama chosen in childhood as a reincarnation. One or another reincarnate lama or tulku--a spiritual teacher of special purity elected to be reborn again and again--can be found presiding over most major monasteries. The tulku system is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. Scores of Tibetan lamas claim to be reincarnate tulkus.
The very first tulku was a lama known as the Karmapa who appeared nearly three centuries before the first Dalai Lama. The Karmapa is leader of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition known as the Karma Kagyu. The rise of the Gelugpa sect headed by the Dalai Lama led to a politico-religious rivalry with the Kagyu that has lasted five hundred years and continues to play itself out within the Tibetan exile community today. That the Kagyu sect has grown famously, opening some six hundred new centers around the world in the last thirty-five years, has not helped the situation.
The search for a tulku, Erik Curren reminds us, has not always been conducted in that purely spiritual mode portrayed in certain Hollywood films. “Sometimes monastic officials wanted a child from a powerful local noble family to give the cloister more political clout. Other times they wanted a child from a lower-class family who would have little leverage to influence the child’s upbringing.” On other occasions “a local warlord, the Chinese emperor or even the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa might [have tried] to impose its choice of tulku on a monastery for political reasons.”58 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Such may have been the case in the selection of the 17th Karmapa, whose monastery-in-exile is situated in Rumtek, in the Indian state of Sikkim. In 1993 the monks of the Karma Kagyu tradition had a candidate of their own choice. The Dalai Lama, along with several dissenting Karma Kagyu leaders (and with the support of the Chinese government!) backed a different boy. The Kagyu monks charged that the Dalai Lama had overstepped his authority in attempting to select a leader for their sect. “Neither his political role nor his position as a lama in his own Gelugpa tradition entitled him to choose the Karmapa, who is a leader of a different tradition…”59 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes) As one of the Kagyu leaders insisted, “Dharma is about thinking for yourself. It is not about automatically following a teacher in all things, no matter how respected that teacher may be. More than anyone else, Buddhists should respect other people’s rights—their human rights and their religious freedom.”60 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
What followed was a dozen years of conflict in the Tibetan exile community, punctuated by intermittent riots, intimidation, physical attacks, blacklisting, police harassment, litigation, official corruption, and the looting and undermining of the Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek by supporters of the Gelugpa faction. All this has caused at least one western devotee to wonder if the years of exile were not hastening the moral corrosion of Tibetan Buddhism.61 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
What is clear is that not all Tibetan Buddhists accept the Dalai Lama as their theological and spiritual mentor. Though he is referred to as the “spiritual leader of Tibet,” many see this title as little more than a formality. It does not give him authority over the four religious schools of Tibet other than his own, “just as calling the U.S. president the ‘leader of the free world’ gives him no role in governing France or Germany.”62 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].”63 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
The women interviewed by Lewis recounted stories of their grandmothers’ ordeals with monks who used them as “wisdom consorts.” By sleeping with the monks, the grandmothers were told, they gained “the means to enlightenment” -- after all, the Buddha himself had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment.
The women also mentioned the “rampant” sex that the supposedly spiritual and abstemious monks practiced with each other in the Gelugpa sect. The women who were mothers spoke bitterly about the monastery’s confiscation of their young boys in Tibet. They claimed that when a boy cried for his mother, he would be told “Why do you cry for her, she gave you up--she's just a woman.”
The monks who were granted political asylum in California applied for public assistance. Lewis, herself a devotee for a time, assisted with the paperwork. She observes that they continue to receive government checks amounting to $550 to $700 per month along with Medicare. In addition, the monks reside rent free in nicely furnished apartments. “They pay no utilities, have free access to the Internet on computers provided for them, along with fax machines, free cell and home phones and cable TV.”
They also receive a monthly payment from their order, along with contributions and dues from their American followers. Some devotees eagerly carry out chores for the monks, including grocery shopping and cleaning their apartments and toilets. These same holy men, Lewis remarks, “have no problem criticizing Americans for their ‘obsession with material things.’”64 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity.”65 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
One common complaint among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet’s religious culture is being undermined by the Chinese occupation. To some extent this seems to be the case. Many of the monasteries are closed, and much of the theocracy seems to have passed into history. Whether Chinese rule has brought betterment or disaster is not the central issue here. The question is what kind of country was old Tibet. What I am disputing is the supposedly pristine spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. We can advocate religious freedom and independence for a new Tibet without having to embrace the mythology about old Tibet. Tibetan feudalism was cloaked in Buddhism, but the two are not to be equated. In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La.
Finally, let it be said that if Tibet’s future is to be positioned somewhere within China’s emerging free-market paradise, then this does not bode well for the Tibetans. China boasts a dazzling 8 percent economic growth rate and is emerging as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers. But with economic growth has come an ever deepening gulf between rich and poor. Most Chinese live close to the poverty level or well under it, while a small group of newly brooded capitalists profit hugely in collusion with shady officials. Regional bureaucrats milk the country dry, extorting graft from the populace and looting local treasuries. Land grabbing in cities and countryside by avaricious developers and corrupt officials at the expense of the populace are almost everyday occurrences. Tens of thousands of grassroot protests and disturbances have erupted across the country, usually to be met with unforgiving police force. Corruption is so prevalent, reaching into so many places, that even the normally complacent national leadership was forced to take notice and began moving against it in late 2006.
Workers in China who try to organize labor unions in the corporate dominated “business zones” risk losing their jobs or getting beaten and imprisoned. Millions of business zone workers toil twelve-hour days at subsistence wages. With the health care system now being privatized, free or affordable medical treatment is no longer available for millions. Men have tramped into the cities in search of work, leaving an increasingly impoverished countryside populated by women, children, and the elderly. The suicide rate has increased dramatically, especially among women.66 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
China’s natural environment is sadly polluted. Most of its fabled rivers and many lakes are dead, producing massive fish die-offs from the billions of tons of industrial emissions and untreated human waste dumped into them. Toxic effluents, including pesticides and herbicides, seep into ground water or directly into irrigation canals. Cancer rates in villages situated along waterways have skyrocketed a thousand-fold. Hundreds of millions of urban residents breathe air rated as dangerously unhealthy, contaminated by industrial growth and the recent addition of millions of automobiles. An estimated 400,000 die prematurely every year from air pollution. Government environmental agencies have no enforcement power to stop polluters, and generally the government ignores or denies such problems, concentrating instead on industrial growth.67 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
China’s own scientific establishment reports that unless greenhouse gases are curbed, the nation will face massive crop failures along with catastrophic food and water shortages in the years ahead. In 2006-2007 severe drought was already afflicting southwest China.68 (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html#notes)
If China is the great success story of speedy free market development, and is to be the model and inspiration for Tibet’s future, then old feudal Tibet indeed may start looking a lot better than it actually was.
Notes:



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

Kyong-Hwa Seok, "Korean Monk Gangs Battle for Temple Turf," San Francisco Examiner, 3 December 1998.

Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2006.

Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 205.

Erik D. Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press 2005), 41.

Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (Monthly Review Press, 1964), 119, 123; and Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (University of California Press, 1995), 6-16.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 50.

Stephen Bachelor, "Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden," Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 7, Spring 1998. Bachelor discusses the sectarian fanaticism and doctrinal clashes that ill fit the Western portrait of Buddhism as a non-dogmatic and tolerant tradition.

Dhoring Tenzin Paljor, Autobiography, cited in Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 8.

Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 64.

See Gary Wilson's report in Worker's World, 6 February 1997.

Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 62 and 174.

As skeptically noted by Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 9.

Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering, The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashì-Tsering (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).

Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 110.

Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5 and passim.

Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959), 15, 19-21, 24.

Quoted in Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25.

Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 31.

Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 175-176; and Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25-26.

Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 113.

A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet rev. ed. (Armonk, N.Y. and London: 1996), 9 and 7-33 for a general discussion of feudal Tibet; see also Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 241-249; Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 3-5; and Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, passim.

Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 91-96.

Waddell, Landon, O'Connor, and Chapman are quoted in Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 123-125.

Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 52.

Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985), 29.

See Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and William Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet," Air & Space, December 1997/January 1998.

On the CIA's links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet."�

Hugh Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet,"� CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987).

George Ginsburg and Michael Mathos Communist China and Tibet (1964), quoted in Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet." Deane notes that author Bina Roy reached a similar conclusion.

See Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 248 and passim; and Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet, passim.

Harrer, Return to Tibet, 54.

Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 36-38, 41, 57-58; London Times, 4 July 1966.

Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 29 and 47-48.

Tendzin Choegyal, "The Truth about Tibet," Imprimis (publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan), April 1999.

Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 52-53.

Elaine Kurtenbach, Associate Press report, 12 February 1998.

Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 47-48.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 8.

San Francisco Chonicle, 9 January 2007.

Report by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril (Berkeley Calif.: 2001), passim.

International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril, 66-68, 98.

im Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show,"� Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998.

News & Observer, 6 September 1995, cited in Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 3.

Heather Cottin, "George Soros, Imperial Wizard," CovertAction Quarterly no. 74 (Fall 2002).

Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 51.

Tendzin Choegyal, "The Truth about Tibet."�

The Dalai Lama in Marianne Dresser (ed.), Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1996)

These comments are from a book of the Dalai Lama's writings quoted in Nikolai Thyssen, "Oceaner af onkel Tom," Dagbladet Information, 29 December 2003, (translated for me by Julius Wilm). Thyssen's review (in Danish) can be found at http://www.information.dk/Indgang/VisArkiv.dna?pArtNo=20031229154141.txt.

"A Global Call for Human Rights in the Workplace,"� New York Times, 6 December 2005.

San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 2007.

San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 2005.

Times of India 13 October 2000; Samantha Conti's report, Reuter, 17 June 1994; Amitabh Pal, "The Dalai Lama Interview," Progressive, January 2006.

The Gelders draw this comparison, The Timely Rain, 64.

Michael Parenti, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006).

John Pomfret, "Tibet Caught in China's Web,�" Washington Post, 23 July 1999.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 3.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 13 and 138.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 21.

Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, passim. For books that are favorable toward the Karmapa appointed by the Dalai Lama's faction, see Lea Terhune, Karmapa of Tibet: The Politics of Reincarnation (Wisdom Publications, 2004); Gaby Naher, Wrestling the Dragon (Rider 2004); Mick Brown, The Dance of 17 Lives (Bloomsbury 2004).

Erik Curren, "Not So Easy to Say Who is Karmapa," correspondence, 22 August 2005, www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=22.1577,0,0,1,0.

Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 15 July 2004.

Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 16 July 2004.

Ma Jian, Stick Out Your Tongue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).

See the PBS documentary, China from the Inside, January 2007, KQED.PBS.org/kqed/chinanside.

San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2007.

"China: Global Warming to Cause Food Shortages,"� People's Weekly World, 13 January 2007



http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

[RED DAVE]

What the Maoists are basically saying is that the invasion and occupation of a foreign country by a state capitalist country, and its conversion to modern capitalism is okay.

We are seeing the same pattern in Nepal, where the Maoists are aiding and abetting the development of capitalism in that country.

Marxism?

RED DAVE

[pranabjyoti]

The question is whether Tibet is a foreign country or not. By what standard Tibet is another country and not a part of China?

[red cat]

What the Maoists are basically saying is that the invasion and occupation of a foreign country by a state capitalist country, and its conversion to modern capitalism is okay.

Yes, no more state capitalist than the USSR under Lenin. These "state capitalists" provided military assistance to the native "state capitalists" of Tibet who failed to make a "state capitalist" revolution against the Lamaist theocracy all by themselves. I think your solution would have been to let the theocracy continue ?



We are seeing the same pattern in Nepal, where the Maoists are aiding and abetting the development of capitalism in that country.

Marxism?

RED DAVEWhat kind of Marxism have Nepalese Trots been loyal to by not taking up arms against the monarchy ?

[RED DAVE]

Yes, no more state capitalist than the USSR under Lenin.Obviously, you do not understand the Russian Revolution and the "stages" it went through, imncluding the "stage" of counter-revolution presided over by Stalin and Co.


These "state capitalists" provided military assistance to the native "state capitalists" of Tibet who failed to make a "state capitalist" revolution against the Lamaist theocracy all by themselves. I think your solution would have been to let the theocracy continue ?I think that you don't know the difference between socialism and capitalism. What the Chinese have done is institute capitalism in Tibet. That seems to be okay with you.

Why don't you just admit that the essence of Maoism is the accomplishment of capitalism in undeveloped countries? All that crap about New Democracy is just a fig leaf for capitalism, and that's fine with you.


What kind of Marxism have Nepalese Trots been loyal to by not taking up arms against the monarchy ?To take up arms against the monarchy is one thing; to institute capitalism, which is what the Nepalese Maoists are consciously and deliberately doing is another.

RED DAVE

[red cat]

Obviously, you do not understand the Russian Revolution and the "stages" it went through, imncluding the "stage" of counter-revolution presided over by Stalin and Co.

Yes, obviously. :rolleyes:


I think that you don't know the difference between socialism and capitalism. What the Chinese have done is institute capitalism in Tibet. That seems to be okay with you.

Obviously, you don't understand the historical developments that took place in Tibet at all.


Why don't you just admit that the essence of Maoism is the accomplishment of capitalism in undeveloped countries? All that crap about New Democracy is just a fig leaf for capitalism, and that's fine with you.

And what is the essence of Trotskyism ? Doesn't seem to be very inspiring at least from their activities in Nepal.



To take up arms against the monarchy is one thing; to institute capitalism, which is what the Nepalese Maoists are consciously and deliberately doing is another.

RED DAVE

But that tendency whose followers did not have the courage to engage in the war against the monarchy in the first place, loses its right to criticize any developments that follow.

[RED DAVE]

But that tendency whose followers did not have the courage to engage in the war against the monarchy in the first place, loses its right to criticize any developments that follow.This is political dishonesty of the first order and typical of Maoism. Criticism is criticism from whatever source and must be faced honestly, which you don't do. You want to discuss the role of Trotskyism in China, Nepal, Vietnam or the USA, fine, but that's not the topic here.

What you and your ilk refuse to admit is that you are basically a left cover for capitalism. Apparently, the establishment of full-fledged capitalism in China, Vietnam and now Nepal is fine with you.

RED DAVE

[red cat]

This is political dishonesty of the first order and typical of Maoism. Criticism is criticism from whatever source and must be faced honestly, which you don't do. You want to discuss the role of Trotskyism in China, Nepal, Vietnam or the USA, fine, but that's not the topic here.

Sorry, I don't agree with you. Every arbitrary person can come up with some random criticism of his own. That doesn't mean that we will treat them with any importance. You have a criticism of Nepal and an alternative, fine. Now prove that it is valid by implementing your solution in Nepal.



What you and your ilk refuse to admit is that you are basically a left cover for capitalism. Apparently, the establishment of full-fledged capitalism in China, Vietnam and now Nepal is fine with you.

RED DAVENoticing that Trotskyites in Nepal and India did not participate in the anti-imperialist wars, but opposed the anti imperialists, and continue to remain silent about the major gains made during the struggles, exactly whose left cover are you proving to be ?

[PhoenixAsh]

India is just an example that dynastic mentality can survive even in so-called open democracy, specially in Asia which has a long tradition of feudalism and don't forget that NK is also an Asian country.
The record of maintenance of human rights of so called "democracies" isn't better than NK and China. They why should we concentrate on NK and Tibet? To help the imperialists?

Because we as left wing revolutionaries have a responsibility by proxy to defend against the misuse of our ideologies. As these countries are dominated by regimes that pretend to do so becaue of the theories we hold.

And because Tibet...and not India is the topic of the debate.

[PhoenixAsh]

The question is whether Tibet is a foreign country or not. By what standard Tibet is another country and not a part of China?

By the standard that it took military force to acquire posession.

The Chinese argument is based on the fact that it rules Tibet dejure because of the mongols who ruled china also ruled Tibet. While international law simply states that the nation was defacto independent and since 1950 has its rights to selfdetermination violated.

Defacto the Chinese explanation means the Nethelands rule Germany and Spain because at somepoint we were all ruled by the Habsburgs. In fact...more recent than the Yuan dynasty in the case of Tibet.

[RED DAVE]

This is political dishonesty of the first order and typical of Maoism. Criticism is criticism from whatever source and must be faced honestly, which you don't do. You want to discuss the role of Trotskyism in China, Nepal, Vietnam or the USA, fine, but that's not the topic here.
Sorry, I don't agree with you. Every arbitrary person can come up with some random criticism of his own.That's true, but the criticism being presented here is hardly random or arbit4ary. Once again, you are being dishonest and truying to duck the question.


That doesn't mean that we will treat them with any importance. You have a criticism of Nepal and an alternative, fine. Now prove that it is valid by implementing your solution in Nepal.At this point, my case is proved by what the Maoists are doing in Nepal. You are aiding and abetting capitalism as you did in China.


Noticing that Trotskyites in Nepal and India did not participate in the anti-imperialist wars, but opposed the anti imperialists, and continue to remain silent about the major gains made during the struggles, exactly whose left cover are you proving to be ?Even if this were true, it wouldn't vitiate my point. The Nepalese Maoists are (1) in what is in effect a coalition government with the bourgeois parties; (2) have actively assumed the prime ministership of a capitalist government; (3) if the news is correct, they are dissolving their independent fighting force into the bourgeopis army.

In Tibet, they have aided and abetted capitalism, to bring it back to the OP. Tibet is now fully capitalist and occupied by a foreign power. Apparently, this is okay with the Maoists.

RED DAVE

[red cat]

That's true, but the criticism being presented here is hardly random or arbit4ary. Once again, you are being dishonest and truying to duck the question.

Again, that is your opinion. I think that you are the one who is being dishonest by trying to cover up the inaction of Nepalese Trots by criticizing the Maoists.


At this point, my case is proved by what the Maoists are doing in Nepal. You are aiding and abetting capitalism as you did in China. What Maoists are doing is the best strategy to prevent a military defeat of the revolution. Your case will be proved only if your comrades can create socialism in Nepal by following whatever you propose.



Even if this were true, it wouldn't vitiate my point.
Only that we don't pay much attention to monarchist critiques of the revolution.



The Nepalese Maoists are (1) in what is in effect a coalition government with the bourgeois parties; (2) have actively assumed the prime ministership of a capitalist government; (3) if the news is correct, they are dissolving their independent fighting force into the bourgeopis army.

In Tibet, they have aided and abetted capitalism, to bring it back to the OP. Tibet is now fully capitalist and occupied by a foreign power. Apparently, this is okay with the Maoists.

RED DAVEAnd the Nepalese Trotskyites have shown their true class character by remaining silent throughout the war against the monarchy and then coming out to attack the victorious forces as soon as the king was toppled.

[PhoenixAsh]

To be clear i was talking about the time before Deng, when the real idea of gender-equality where introduced in Tibet "Women hold up half the sky" The Tibet of today im sure is not really good on this point, but during the maoist time they at least tried to do this practicly for the first time in the history of Tibet.

The Chinese gender equality has led to such nice situations in, for example, the QingHai region where Tibettan women were forced to partake in sterilisation programs. These are not voluntary but can be enforced, physically, and when not "voluntarily" complied to are punished by economic sanctions, negating of housing priveleges (note the term priviliges), working priviliges and freedom sanctions.

The normal standard within China is a two child policy. After women get two children they are required to undergo sterilisation. Not so however for Tibettan women. They are resticted to a one child policy.

The two child policy, however you look at it, is adopted because two children maintain population levels without growth (one new individual for each parent). A one child policy equals eventual extinction of an ethnic group.

That in effect means the policy regarding the PRC towards Tibet is one of ethnic genocide by using eugenics.

I do also want to mention tha Lhasa now has the highest prostitution rates in Asia. So much for womens rights.




You mena like in Thailand? Theory and practice doesnt always get along to well. And here is the thing why i and many others are so hostile to the Free Tibet-movement, it is based on a false presumption of that Tibet once was a Shangri-La a paradise on earth where evryone where equal and no violence or oppression existed, without regarding the feudalistic theocratical ruling system which btw had slaves. No one (at leat i hope so) are defending the current system or the chineese goverment, as Michael Parenti said;

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

Its based on the narrowing field that the free tibet movement is homogenous.

While nobody here disputes the feudal society in Tibet....nobody here is arguing for its return. However there are some here that argue against the PRC having any rights to control and dominate a country whilst simultaniously adpoting racial discriminatory and genocidal politics towards the ethnic indiginous people.

This stratey has been adopted from the start. The ethnic Tibettans have been led from one subjegation to another...one that is actively working towards their ethnic destruction.


The aim of China for the start has been to create new land and has adopted a policy for resettlement of millions of Han Chinese into the region. whilst at the same time forcing a structure in which indiginous ethnic groups are being placed in a lesser economic and political position denying them de facto equality within the country. In its most brutal form this has eventually led to the altered version of the 2 child policy.




Thats terrible and unacceptable no question about that, but it hasnt always being like this.

I tend to disagree as I have stated above, but for the sake of keeping the argument on track...it isn't the case any more. and as such China lost any right to control Tibet.

However I do want to note her that freeing the serfs did pose a few problems. China for one did not concern itself with actually feeding them. And when teh Panchen Lama (put there by China and supporting the actual involvement of China) wrote a 60.000 word letter to Mao suggesting that the serfs actually needed help and taht many Tibettans were starving...he was put in jail. No action was taken to eleviate the plight of the starving serfs.

Neither did de facto slavery end. Tibettans were worked to death by the Chinese in the Borax mines.


I went to Tibet expecting to find how good it had become. I did not experience that at all. What I did see was opression and blatant imperialist genocide under the guise of communism. It was disappointing and unheartening at best and at the very least disgusting. The only reason I am still a revolutionary after having seen what has happened there is because I am now an Anarchist.

Now I could mention several disturbing self experienced facts about the Tibet under PRC rule. I would want to tell you about the torture I heard being performed, the rape that took place by Chinese military police, I could tell you of endemic malnourishment...but as all my film and photographic equipment was confiscated by the Chinese police for me owning a book with the picture of the Dalai Lama...I can not back that up with any of the evidence I had collected.





Please explaine how i did that, or is it just a way to label your opponent in a discussion by putting words in his mouth?

Western imperialism has always been apologized by the countries during and after that they were bringing much needed advancement towards backwards people. All in all it states that the west has an obligation to conquer and rule over other societies until they can accept and fully employ the western ways....thus liberating tehm form social and cultural backwards restrictions.

The term white mans burden (from a poem by Kippling) actually means that imperialism was justified because it was a noble enterprise. The title of the poem refers to western racism and aspirations to dominate.

In this case I used it because of your arguments...and those of others that Tibet was backwards and therefore it was justified to attack and conquer them. Naturally because China was revolutionary...and i some way Marxist/Communist. But the comparison still stands. Not only does China use the same arguments as Kipplin in the case of Tibet... but more importantly it also negates the fact that instead of conquest the right revolutionary way was to create class awareness and help, rather than dominate, the Tibettans to free themselves and join out of free will and revolutionary left because of class consciousness. Which is the empowerment tennant.



Anyway i recommend the text "Friendly Feudalism: The myth about Tibet" by Michael Parenti


I know the text well. I however do not agree with some of its conclusions concerning the role of the Dalai Lama.

To note this. He is not an expert on Tibet, nor on Busshism, nor on Asia. This is in fact his only article related to Tibet and his sources are suspect of have been disputed by reputed scholars in those fields who already denounced the Shangri-La myth and paint a very differnt picture of Tibet which is in fact neither as dark nor as happy...but much more nuanced. In fact...he bases himself mainly on authors who draw their evidence from official Chinese sources.

He has piled 600 years in one few page essay...and focussed on the facts that suited his proposed view. Ignoring the rest. Such as the fact that the death penalty in Tibet had been abolsihed for sometime before theb 50's and that landreforms were already beeing executed well before the 50's. Or the fact that he paints Tibettan society as beeing devided amongst three seperate classes: serfs, clergy and feudal lords which negates farmers, secular burgeoisie, traders etc. Hen paints a very limited picture of Tibettan society. Or the fact that it wasn't Chinese but Mongols who actually had anything to do with the election of the Dalai Lama's. He also ignores the fact that the Buddhist elite is not born in its position but taken from all walks of live. most Lama's, including the Dalai Lama, are in fact born in farming communities and outside the clergy or feudal families.

But hey...what are facts?




A Lie Repeated - The Far Left’s Flawed History of Tibet

By Joshua Michael Schrei

[snip]

In his writing on Tibet, Parenti shares something in common with all of his predecessors -Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart
Gelder among them- in that his writing on Tibet is essentially argumentative. He is not writing in order to give an unbiased history of a nation, he is writing in order to prove a point. In this case, the point he is trying to prove is that the society of 'old Tibet' was a terrible place, and that the resistance movement that is so visible today is essentially a movement to re-establish this despicable regime.
...
In his descriptions of old Tibet, Parenti predominantly draws on the work of four historians - Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart Gelder. The fact that all of these historians had a romantic predilection towards Maoism and drew mostly on Chinese government statistics should surely be cause for concern as far as their legitimacy as source material. One certainly wouldn't trust the Indonesian government's party line on Aceh or East Timor. Or, for that matter, the U.S. government's continued assertion that the Iraqi people welcome the current American occupation. Such manipulations of public sentiment, in which an occupation is presented as 'the will of the people,' are – as a rule – only employed to further the agenda of the occupier.
...
For the most part, Parenti and the handful of historians who have adopted the view of old Tibet as a despotic feudal theocracy have had little if no contact with actual Tibetans either in or outside Tibet. Therefore, they have no real way of gauging the sentiments of the Tibetan people. Neither Parenti, Strong, Grunfeld, nor the Gelders speak Tibetan - or Chinese for that matter- so the body of historical literature on the Tibet issue that is available to them is extremely limited. Tom Grunfeld never went to Tibet until after his book was published. Anna Louise Strong – a diehard Marxist – was given a tightly monitored Chinese government tour of Lhasa and then went on to proclaim that "a million Tibetan serfs have stood up! They are burying the old serfdom and building a new tomorrow!" One might say that one doesn't need to go to Paris to know the Eiffel tower exists. However, before dismissing an entire culture's history as despotically repressive it is perhaps worth speaking to a few of its representatives.
...
Parenti does little better in his treatment of history, erroneously stating that the first Dalai Lama was installed by 'the Chinese army'. One would presume that a Yale Ph.D. would know the difference between Chinese and Mongols. But apparently, in the Parenti-Grunfeld-Strong school of history, one word is as good as another and a Chinese is as good as a Mongol, as long as the point gets across.


Don't get me wrong. I like Parenti. He has had contact with my father in the defence of Slobodan Milosovic and as far as I am concerned he means well for a social democrat. However...that does not negate the fact that his assesment in this essay is wrong, based on false facts and one-sided sources. As someone with an historic background I can not overlook these transgressions in careful historic research.

I suggest you read Tsering Shakya´s Dragon in the land of snows`. This book both denounces the exiles and chinese as dishonest (or better...being mostly less than honest) and actually dos something that Parenti does not manage to do which is painting a historically accurate picture instead of trying to prove a point based on every historians no-no out there.

[vDv]

What Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribunal about British Colonial rule in india is very easily transplanted onto the situation in Tibet.

"Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness, We must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition enslaving it beneath the traditional rules depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."

We must not turn our disapproval of the current regime in Tibet into praise of the former. Instead, as always, the subaltern nationalism of Tibetans must be supported in so far as the creation of community and unity for the multitude and not into the oppression of diversity.

[hardlinecommunist]

That is a vicious lie to justify Maoist imperialism. Tibet has been independent for much of its historical existence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

RED DAVE
No it was not Tibet has been connected to China for much of its History and it was not an independent Nation by any means

[hardlinecommunist]

A free indepentent and socialist Tibet? Yes
A independent and feudal, lama's style, Tibet? Hell, no.

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/756/freetibetmaozedonga3090.th.jpg (http://img190.imageshack.us/i/freetibetmaozedonga3090.jpg/)
do you support Tibetian Independence under Socialism

[red cat]

What Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribunal about British Colonial rule in india is very easily transplanted onto the situation in Tibet.

"Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness, We must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition enslaving it beneath the traditional rules depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."

We must not turn our disapproval of the current regime in Tibet into praise of the former. Instead, as always, the subaltern nationalism of Tibetans must be supported in so far as the creation of community and unity for the multitude and not into the oppression of diversity.

That is a wrong and semi western chauvinist analysis by Marx. The British colonial rule was in no way beneficial to India. There cannot be any comparison between that and the Chinese military assistance to the Tibetan revolution.

[Queercommie Girl]

My questions:

Why are any self-proclaimed socialists, of any tendency, still apologise in any form what-so-ever for any kind of theocratic regime, such as the ultra-oppressive theocracy in Lamaist Tibet?

All theocracies must be unconditionally smashed, no exceptions. Theocracy is like fascism. It represents some of the worst kinds of feudalism and capitalism. Yes, I dare say that in some cases even US imperialism is more progressive than a feudal theocracy, just as I would support the US against Nazi Germany in WWII.

Which class except the national bourgeois would actually consider abstract "national rights" to be an absolute principle? What would you care about more, actual concrete social welfare for workers and peasants or abstract national rights?

I dare say that the food in your plate is far more important than what is on your flag. And just in case you think I come from the perspective of Chinese nationalism - I am certainly no hypocrite: If the United States actually becomes genuinely socialist, I would without a second thought "betray" the Chinese nation and bow down to the sickle and hammer version of the stars and stripes. I might even support an US socialist "invasion" of capitalist China. What is good for the Tibetans is also good for the Chinese.

I don't support Chinese capitalism in Tibet now. As for the Maoist period, no-one except useless dogmatists would deny that it was largely progressive in the objective sense. (Which from the perspective of Historical Materialism, is ultimately the only thing that matters. History cares nothing for the fragile religious nationalist sentiments of backward reactionaries) However, being influenced also by Trotskyism I agree that bureaucratic degeneration did exist. But to be frank, even US imperialism or KMT Chinese capitalism would be slightly more progressive than the reactionary theocratic hell-hole that was feudal Tibet. As Marx said, capitalism is more advanced than feudalism.

[Queercommie Girl]

That is a wrong and semi western chauvinist analysis by Marx. The British colonial rule was in no way beneficial to India. There cannot be any comparison between that and the Chinese military assistance to the Tibetan revolution.


The analysis may be mistaken, but it is not an example of Western chauvinism.

All Marx ever said is that capitalism is superior to feudalism, which is actually true. Marx never said capitalism must be "Western" in nature.

Chinese capitalism of the KMT variety would also be objectively superior to Tibetan feudalism. The KMT in the 1950s did carry out a limited "land revolution" on the island of Taiwan for instance.

[red cat]

The analysis may be mistaken, but it is not an example of Western chauvinism.

All Marx ever said is that capitalism is superior to feudalism, which is actually true. Marx never said capitalism must be "Western" in nature.

Chinese capitalism of the KMT variety would also be objectively superior to Tibetan feudalism. The KMT in the 1950s did carry out a limited "land revolution" on the island of Taiwan for instance.

Capitalism does not elevate a feudal country to capitalistic means of production when it turns it into a colony. On the contrary, it strengthens several aspects of feudal oppression in order to introduce commodity production, while it destroys all or most of the already existing self-sufficient industries. The colony has its natural bourgeois developments stopped and acts as a source of raw materials for the imperialist power. What "oriental despotism" was Marx talking about, when the British imperialists themselves strengthened the caste system and killed huge fractions of the Indian population by starving them ?

[Queercommie Girl]

Capitalism does not elevate a feudal country to capitalistic means of production when it turns it into a colony. On the contrary, it strengthens several aspects of feudal oppression in order to introduce commodity production, while it destroys all or most of the already existing self-sufficient industries. The colony has its natural bourgeois developments stopped and acts as a source of raw materials for the imperialist power. What "oriental despotism" was Marx talking about, when the British imperialists themselves strengthened the caste system and killed huge fractions of the Indian population by starving them ?

You may be right, but what I said still stands: perhaps Marx is wrong in that he over-estimated the objective progressive nature of capitalism over feudalism in many cases, but he was not a Western chauvinist. He didn't say capitalism must be "western". He was not sucking up to the British imperialists. He would have made the same analysis if it was say Chinese or Arab capitalism in India, had they developed to the extent of imperialism. (Which in our timeline, they didn't)

[red cat]

You may be right, but what I said still stands: perhaps Marx is wrong in that he over-estimated the objective progressive nature of capitalism over feudalism in many cases, but he was not a Western chauvinist. He didn't say capitalism must be "western". He was not sucking up to the British imperialists. He would have made the same analysis if it was say Chinese or Arab capitalism in India, had they developed to the extent of imperialism. (Which in our timeline, they didn't)

He mentioned "oriental despotism", mind it. Making such comments about the colonial masses while you are a westerner and your country is imperialist, indeed counts as western chauvinism. Do you think Marx would have made such a comment if France was a colony ? He would have taken care to actually visit and study the conditions there.

[Queercommie Girl]

He mentioned "oriental despotism", mind it. Making such comments about the colonial masses while you are a westerner and your country is imperialist, indeed counts as western chauvinism. Do you think Marx would have made such a comment if France was a colony ? He would have taken care to actually visit and study the conditions there.


Engels said that the Abrahamic God is a manifestation of "Oriental Despotism". Was that racist and Eurocentric too? I don't think so, since actually much of Europe itself is Christian.

[red cat]

Engels said that the Abrahamic God is a manifestation of "Oriental Despotism". Was that racist and Eurocentric too? I don't think so, since actually much of Europe itself is Christian.

Depends on the context. And why "oriental" despotism specifically ? Why didn't they mention European despotism in these cases ? Was Europe any short of barbarism throughout its history ? Face it, Marx was a product of his time, and naturally he inherited some of the faults of the bourgeois society. There is nothing sacred about him so that we will not criticize him for his mistakes.

[Queercommie Girl]

Depends on the context. And why "oriental" despotism specifically ? Why didn't they mention European despotism in these cases ? Was Europe any short of barbarism throughout its history ? Face it, Marx was a product of his time, and naturally he inherited some of the faults of the bourgeois society. There is nothing sacred about him so that we will not criticize him for his mistakes.

To be fair, while Europe was highly barbaric and backward during much of the feudal Middle Ages, during the Greco-Roman era, European slavery society was the most progressive in the entire world, being the only slavery system that did not exhibit explicit human sacrifice, unlike the slavery societies in China and native South America. (In China the Western Zhou dynasty had a more developed slavery system than the Shang dynasty, the amount of human sacrifice decreased dramatically and the Western Zhou represented the highest development of slavery civilisation in ancient China) Greco-Roman or Classical philosophy directly influenced Enlightenment thought and Marxism itself. Indeed, the Marxist philosophical tradition largely came from the line of Classical Philosophy ---> Enlightenment Thought ---> Marxism. During the Middle Ages, the Islamic World was superior to Europe precisely because it inherited the best of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. Many of the Greek classics that had being long lost in Europe during the barbaric Dark Ages were re-translated back into Europe from the Arab world.

Euro-centrism is wrong, but so is "Euro-nihilism". You have to give credit where it's due.

[red cat]

To be fair, while Europe was highly barbaric and backward during much of the feudal Middle Ages, during the Greco-Roman era, European slavery society was the most progressive in the entire world, being the only slavery system that did not exhibit explicit human sacrifice, unlike the slavery societies in China and native South America. (In China the Western Zhou dynasty had a more developed slavery system than the Shang dynasty, the amount of human sacrifice decreased dramatically and the Western Zhou represented the highest development of slavery civilisation in ancient China) Greco-Roman or Classical philosophy directly influenced Enlightenment thought and Marxism itself. Indeed, the Marxist philosophical tradition largely came from the line of Classical Philosophy ---> Enlightenment Thought ---> Marxism. During the Middle Ages, the Islamic World was superior to Europe precisely because it inherited the best of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. Many of the Greek classics that had being long lost in Europe during the barbaric Dark Ages were re-translated back into Europe from the Arab world.

Euro-centrism is wrong, but so is "Euro-nihilism". You have to give credit where it's due.

What is the point that you are trying to make ? Go back a few thousand years and you will see that there were well developed civilizations in China and India long before Greece had emerged. Greece might have been the most advanced of slave societies, but again, in the middle ages, Asian serfs were not treated like personal property, unlike their European counterparts. Different parts of the world have been at the height of advancement in different periods of history. What right does ancient Greece give a western philosopher to link despotism with Asia ?

[Queercommie Girl]

What is the point that you are trying to make ? Go back a few thousand years and you will see that there were well developed civilizations in China and India long before Greece had emerged. Greece might have been the most advanced of slave societies, but again, in the middle ages, Asian serfs were not treated like personal property, unlike their European counterparts. Different parts of the world have been at the height of advancement in different periods of history. What right does ancient Greece give a western philosopher to link despotism with Asia ?

Well, the only reason I created this comment is because you said: Was Europe any short of barbarism throughout its history?

Actually it isn't true. Because I'd much rather live under the slavery system in ancient Athens than under the slavery system in China's ancient Shang dynasty or the brutal theocratic regimes of the Aztecs and the Incas. Even being a slave gladiator in Rome is better than being treated as a religious offering on the sacrificial altar, at least I'd have a fighting chance.

In criticising many reactionary aspects of European culture and history, it would be wrong to write it off completely. The same with any other culture.

But obviously just as Greco-Roman slavery society was the most advanced of its kind, Chinese feudalism was the most advanced in the world. Not only was Chinese feudalism ahead of Europe, it was also ahead of India and the Islamic World.

In Europe the serfs were treated like property. In India they weren't. In China from the Tang dynasty onwards, serfs didn't even exist in large quantities, and the reign of the feudal aristocracy was smashed more than 1000 years ago in China, replaced by a meritocratic bureaucracy, (as reactionary as bureaucratic rule can be it certainly still beats aristocratic rule) long before the age of the great European revolutions of the recent centuries.

[red cat]

Well, the only reason I created this comment is because you said: Was Europe any short of barbarism throughout its history?

Actually it isn't true. Because I'd much rather live under the slavery system in ancient Athens than under the slavery system in China's ancient Shang dynasty or the brutal theocratic regimes of the Aztecs and the Incas. Even being a slave gladiator in Rome is better than being treated as a religious offering on the sacrificial altar, at least I'd have a fighting chance.

In criticising many reactionary aspects of European culture and history, it would be wrong to write it off completely. The same with any other culture.

Okay, sorry, I misunderstood your stand. Now let me explain mine. Do you agree that the ancient Greek civilization, no matter how advanced it might have been, should be seen as an example of barbarism for enslaving people in the first place ? In no way have I tried to state that Europe is inferior to the rest of the world or something like that.

Now consider the case of a European philosopher. He has many examples of barbarism in Europe at hand, ranging from the medieval period from the genocides of the native American population committed by the European colonists. If he is not at all influenced by western chauvinism, then how come only examples like ancient Greece should strike his mind, specially when it was barbarism compared to any modern Asian society anyway ? Since there are so many examples of European barbarism, isn't it a bit unusual for him to focus on "oriental despotism" ?

So, Marx most probably did not think of all that when he mentioned oriental despotism. He did it because people around him were doing it all the time, unaware of how offensive it might sound to the oriental masses.

[Queercommie Girl]

Okay, sorry, I misunderstood your stand. Now let me explain mine. Do you agree that the ancient Greek civilization, no matter how advanced it might have been, should be seen as an example of barbarism for enslaving people in the first place ? In no way have I tried to state that Europe is inferior to the rest of the world or something like that.

Now consider the case of a European philosopher. He has many examples of barbarism in Europe at hand, ranging from the medieval period from the genocides of the native American population committed by the European colonists. If he is not at all influenced by western chauvinism, then how come only examples like ancient Greece should strike his mind, specially when it was barbarism compared to any modern Asian society anyway ? Since there are so many examples of European barbarism, isn't it a bit unusual for him to focus on "oriental despotism" ?

Well, it depends on the context, but I see your point.

In the case of Engels labelling the Abrahamic God as "Oriental Despotism", I don't think it's wrong at all, since Abrahamic religions did originate in the "Orient", and not in Europe itself, (for the ancient Europeans anything east of Greece is considered to be the "Orient" and not just China and India, just like for the ancient Chinese anything west of Central Asia is considered to be the "Western Regions") and objectively the philosophical traditions of the Afro-Asiatic peoples like Hebrews and Arabs are largely alien to the philosophical traditions of either the Greeks and Romans or the pagan religions of the Celts and Germanic peoples.

In fact, Greek thought in its form is more similar to Buddhist thought:

Greco-Buddhism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

Keep in mind that geographical or racial "closeness" does not always correlate with cultural closeness. A Confucian philosopher from ancient China would feel more at home in ancient Greece, despite China and Greece being thousands of miles apart and Chinese and Greeks being of different races, than he would be in ancient India with its prevalent religious superstitions of Hinduism and rigid aristocratic caste system, despite the geographical closeness and historical links between China and India, or in ancient South America with its irrational theocratic system, despite the Chinese and native Americans being of the same Mongolid "race", because both Chinese and Greek philosophy emphasise secularism, humanism, rationalism and meritocracy. The central concept in Chinese ethics, de or "virtue", is similar to many ways to the ancient Greek concept of arete, or "excellence". It's a case of "parallel evolution".

[red cat]

Well, it depends on the context, but I see your point.

In the case of Engels labelling the Abrahamic God as "Oriental Despotism", I don't think it's wrong at all, since Abrahamic religions did originate in the "Orient", and not in Europe itself, (for the ancient Europeans anything east of Greece is considered to be the "Orient" and not just China and India, just like for the ancient Chinese anything west of Central Asia is considered to be the "Western Regions") and objectively the philosophical traditions of the Afro-Asiatic peoples like Hebrews and Arabs are largely alien to the philosophical traditions of either the Greeks and Romans or the pagan religions of the Celts and Germanic peoples.

In fact, Greek thought in its form is more similar to Buddhist thought:

Greco-Buddhism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

What I found offensive was the comment of Marx. It is awfully close to the imperialist concept of civilizing the colonial masses.

[Queercommie Girl]

What I found offensive was the comment of Marx. It is awfully close to the imperialist concept of civilizing the colonial masses.

In this I largely agree.

But do keep in mind that there is no such thing as a single "Oriental masses". That itself is a ridiculous Eurocentric and Orientalist idea, as if all peoples east of Greece are "one nation".

Often the antagonisms between the various "oriental" peoples were greater than the antagonisms between the "orientals" and the Europeans. British colonial rule in India and China was very brutal, true, but so was the Islamic conquest of India and the Mongol conquest of China, and in fact in the latter cases it was more explicitly violent. Far more Han Chinese people died in history at the hands of the barbarian Mongol hordes than at the hands of the European colonists. (Despite Mongols and Chinese being of the same "race") The only European nation that was comparable to the Mongols in terms of explicit mass violence as far as colonialism in China is concerned is Russia, who annexed much of China's northern territories through direct military conquest.

There is simply no such thing as "Oriental unity against the West". Different "oriental" nations and cultures have very different interests. Did the Chinese always ally themselves with the Muslims against the West, simply because both China and the Islamic World suffered under Western imperialism and colonialism? Not so at all. The Qing dynasty general Zuo Zongtang borrowed money from British imperialists based in Hong Kong, and purchased machine guns from the Germans to crush the Muslim uprisings in Northwestern China in the 19th century. And Zuo was certainly no "sell-out" to the West, he is considered by every Chinese nationalist as a "great hero".

During the Mongol Yuan dyansty, the Mongols and Chinese often allied with the Christians against the Muslim world. (Many Mongols were themselves Nestorian Christians) Mongol, Chinese, Central Asian and Christian forces ganged up together to destroy Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic empire, in 1258:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29

In 1257, the Mongol ruler Möngke Khan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6ngke_Khan) resolved to conquer the Abbasid Caliphate next after conquering and creating vassal states out of the surrounding regions. He conscripted one out of every ten fighting men in the empire for the invasion force knowing that Baghdad was a large and central area in the region. This force, by one estimate 150,000 strong, was probably the largest ever fielded by the Mongols.[citation needed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed)] In November of 1257, under the command of Hulagu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu) Khan (also spelled as Hulegu) and the Jalayir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalayir) general Koke Ilge and with the Chinese commander Guo Kan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Kan) in vice-command, it set out for Baghdad.[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-4) It also contained a large contingent of various Christian forces, chief among which seems to have been the Georgians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgians), who were eager to avenge the sacking of their capital, Tiflis, decades earlier by Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah.[6] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-5) Other participating Christian forces were the Armenian army, led by their king, and some Frankish troops from the Principality of Antioch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Antioch).[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-6) The contemporary Persian observer Ata al-Mulk Juvayni (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ata_al-Mulk_Juvayni) reports as participants in the siege about 1,000 Chinese artillery experts, and Armenians, Georgians, Persians, and Turks.

Also of interest is that during the last years of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese were assisted by Portuguese colonists and Chinese Catholics based in Macao against the Manchu invaders from the north.

[red cat]

In this I largely agree.

But do keep in mind that there is no such thing as a single "Oriental masses". That itself is a ridiculous Eurocentric and Orientalist idea, as if all peoples east of Greece are "one nation".

Often the antagonisms between the various "oriental" peoples were greater than the antagonisms between the "orientals" and the Europeans. British colonial rule in India and China was very brutal, true, but so was the Islamic conquest of India and the Mongol conquest of China, and in fact in the latter cases it was more explicitly violent. Far more Han Chinese people died in history at the hands of the barbarian Mongol hordes than at the hands of the European colonists. (Despite Mongols and Chinese being of the same "race) The only European nation that was comparable to the Mongols in terms of explicit mass violence as far as colonialism in China is concerned is Russia, who annexed much of China's northern territories through direct military conquest.

There is simply no such thing as "Oriental unity against the West". Different "oriental" nations and cultures have very different interests. Did the Chinese always ally themselves with the Muslims against the West, simply because both China and the Islamic World suffered under Western imperialism and colonialism? Not so at all. The Qing dynasty general Zuo Zongtang borrowed money from British imperialists based in Hong Kong, and purchased machine guns from the Germans to crush the Muslim uprisings in Northwestern China in the 19th century. And Zuo was certainly no "sell-out" to the West, he is considered by every Chinese nationalist as a "great hero".

During the Mongol Yuan dyansty, the Mongols and Chinese often allied with the Christians against the Muslim world. (Many Mongols were themselves Nestorian Christians) Mongol, Chinese, Central Asian and Christian forces ganged up together to destroy Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic empire, in 1258:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29

In 1257, the Mongol ruler Möngke Khan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6ngke_Khan) resolved to conquer the Abbasid Caliphate next after conquering and creating vassal states out of the surrounding regions. He conscripted one out of every ten fighting men in the empire for the invasion force knowing that Baghdad was a large and central area in the region. This force, by one estimate 150,000 strong, was probably the largest ever fielded by the Mongols.[citation needed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed)] In November of 1257, under the command of Hulagu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu) Khan (also spelled as Hulegu) and the Jalayir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalayir)Guo Kan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Kan) in vice-command, it set out for Baghdad.[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-4) It also contained a large contingent of various Christian forces, chief among which seems to have been the Georgians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgians), who were eager to avenge the sacking of their capital, Tiflis, decades earlier by Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah.[6] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-5) Other participating Christian forces were the Armenian army, led by their king, and some Frankish troops from the Principality of Antioch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Antioch).[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%281258%29#cite_note-6) The contemporary Persian observer Ata al-Mulk Juvayni (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ata_al-Mulk_Juvayni) general Koke Ilge and with the Chinese commander reports as participants in the siege about 1,000 Chinese artillery experts, and Armenians, Georgians, Persians, and Turks.

Also of interest is that during the last years of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese were assisted by Portuguese colonists and Chinese Catholics based in Macao against the Manchu invaders from the north.
A very good post, but I have the following points to make :

1) The masses of the eastern world are the oriental masses.

2) A barbaric stereotype of the oriental masses was created by the western imperialists to aid their exploitation of the Asian colonies.

3) The primary contradictions in modern Asian history before Japan emerged as an imperialist power, have been those between the oriental masses and western imperialism, with the top portion of the oriental population siding with the imperialists.

4) The kind of oppression that western imperialism brought in Asia was different from anything that the oriental masses had experienced before. Instead of the ruling classes settling in the colonies, and replacing the heads of the former ruling class while keeping the system qualitatively the same, the colonies had their natural development halted, and acted as providers of raw material for western nations.

5) Western chauvinism against the oriental masses is very much prevalent today, ranging from open racism to taking a pseudo-leftist stand and writing off the Asian revolutionary movements as reactionary.

6) We communists do not advocate anything as vague as oriental unity against the west, we engage in a class analysis of western chauvinism and call for the class unity of the international proletariat leading all oppressed classes against the bourgeoisie and its representatives in all countries.

[Queercommie Girl]

1) The masses of the eastern world are the oriental masses.


That's a semantic point. Truth is, the "oriental masses" are not a singular group. What exactly is the "eastern world"? How is it qualitatively different from the "western world", the "native american world" or the "african world"?



2) A barbaric stereotype of the oriental masses was created by the western imperialists to aid their exploitation of the Asian colonies.
Perhaps that's true to some extent, but it cannot change the objective fact that far more Han Chinese "masses" perished under the swords of the Mongol hordes than under the heel of European colonialism.

Are you denying that feudal imperialism, such as the kind represented by the Mongol empire, can be objectively even worse than capitalist imperialism? Or do you fancy that feudalism can never become imperialist?



3) The primary contradictions in modern Asian history before Japan emerged as an imperialist power, have been those between the oriental masses and western imperialism, with the top portion of the oriental population siding with the imperialists.
I don't entirely agree with this. You seem to have the forgotten the primary class contradiction between the peasants and the landlords.



4) The kind of oppression that western imperialism brought in Asia was different from anything that the oriental masses had experienced before. Instead of the ruling classes settling in the colonies, and replacing the heads of the former ruling class while keeping the system qualitatively the same, the colonies had their natural development halted, and acted as providers of raw material for western nations.
Yes, and frankly, capitalist imperialism in Asia wasn't as directly brutal as feudal imperialism was. It was only in the Americas that European capitalist imperialism reached a similar level of genocidal mass violence.

You obviously have no idea of the level of destruction and suffering the Mongol conquests caused in China. The level of genocide in some areas was comparable or even exceeded the level of genocide by the European colonists in the Americas. The fact that Mongols and Chinese largely "look the same" means nothing. To be frank, if I have to choose, I'd rather live under British colonialism. British imperialism never directly killed so many people in China, at least.



5) Western chauvinism against the oriental masses is very much prevalent today, ranging from open racism to taking a pseudo-leftist stand and writing off the Asian revolutionary movements as reactionary.
I don't believe there exists a single "Asian" people.

We Chinese do not face the same kind of racism from white people as Muslims and Indians do, so why should we consider ourselves to be in the same category as the Muslims and the Indians?



6) We communists do not advocate anything as vague as oriental unity against the west, we engage in a class analysis of western chauvinism and call for the class unity of the international proletariat leading all oppressed classes against the bourgeoisie and its representatives in all countries.Agree. But don't forget the struggle against native feudalism too!

[scarletghoul]

As for the 'oriental masses', perhaps this is similar to Africa. Africa was never a country or a nation, there are 1000s of tribes and so on, but the continent was raped and enslaved just the same, so now there is a sense of African identity among many of its people (and among some blacks in the Americas, who were robbed of their specific tribal identity so they just identify themselves as Africans). Pan-africanism and african nationalism is not just for blacks either, it exists in the north african countries too (Colonel Gaddafi is the best example), despite the historical atrocities carried out by the Arabs there. This African identity has been forged from centuries of severe oppression. Asia of course wasn't as totally colonised as Africa and there is no 'pan-asianism' or 'asian nationalism' that I know of, but it certainly wouldn't be inconsistent for revolutionaries there to embrace a kind of pan-asian resistance to imperialism, given the shared oppression. If Africans and Latin Americans do this then why not Asians. The imperialists created the 'oriental masses', just as they created the African Nation and the Hispanic Race

[Queercommie Girl]

^

There is however one crucial difference: In Africa much of the continent was still tribal in nature, but most of Asia already existed under an oppressive feudal system for thousands of years. In some cases, the antagonism between the peasants and the native landlords in Asia exceeded the antagonism between the "masses" and the European capitalists.

Politically European capitalism in Asia was pretty much always oppressive, but culturally this is not true. The Chinese socialist tradition, starting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectually borrowed much from European philosophy, (mainly Classical Philosophy and Enlightenment Thought, not Western religious philosophy, which is pretty much completely rejected) so much that for Chinese socialists, Europe is already our "intellectual second homeland". (One Chinese socialist even commented: the Yellow River and the Yangtze are our primary mother rivers, and the Rhine is our secondary mother river) We feel much more "cultural affinity" with European rationalist and enlightenment philosophies than we would ever do with Muslim or Hindu cultures.

In fact, even European Christian missionaries did not play a completely reactionary role in China. They opened many hospitals and did a lot of charity work to help China's poor.

Intellectually, the Chinese leftist and socialist tradition in general is a fusion of Chinese and European philosophy, of Classical Chinese Philosophy with Enlightenment Thought, Classical Marxism, Social Democracy and Maoism. So while I completely oppose Western capitalism politically, I simply completely reject any notion of "rejecting the West" on a cultural, philosophical, or religious level. The Muslims may have interest in such a "project", but the Chinese certainly do not. Modern Chinese people, whether those on the left or those on the right, have already been "Europeanised" to a significant extent. (Marxism itself is an European tradition originally)

To call for "pan-Asianism" in the abstract is not only un-Marxist, it is also unrealistic. While I do not deny, as a Chinese person living in the West, that we Chinese also suffer from racism at the hands of white people, we face different issues compared with Muslims and Indians, and it is wrong to force all of us into the same "mould".

It is also unfair. For many people "pan-Asianism" is simply a version of "pan-Islamism", it is somehow implicitly assumed that Muslims should be the "leaders" of the "Asians", just as Muslim North Africans are the "leaders" of the pan-African movement. As a Chinese person, I completely reject this, since China is not primitive tribal Africa, China has a rich and complex philosophical and cultural tradition dating back thousands of years that is at least on par with that of the Islamic world. During the feudal era, the Chinese had a political system, based on a meritocratic bureaucracy, that was even more progressive than that of the Arabs. So why should Muslims assume "cultural leadership" of pan-Asianism and not the Chinese, or Hindus from India?

[scarletghoul]

I'm not 'calling for pan-asianism', just saying that some kind of asian identity being formed against imperialism would not be without precedent.

[pranabjyoti]

Because we as left wing revolutionaries have a responsibility by proxy to defend against the misuse of our ideologies. As these countries are dominated by regimes that pretend to do so because of the theories we hold.

And because Tibet...and not India is the topic of the debate.
India is an example that other "democratic" nations are "guilty" of same reason as China. If you can not understand that and use this thread as to target Maoism and when any other example was put before you, you start crying "out of topic". What you want to say is while discussing this matter, we just forgot the rest of world and say "yes" to your attack.

[pranabjyoti]

By the standard that it took military force to acquire posession.

The Chinese argument is based on the fact that it rules Tibet dejure because of the mongols who ruled china also ruled Tibet. While international law simply states that the nation was defacto independent and since 1950 has its rights to selfdetermination violated.

Defacto the Chinese explanation means the Nethelands rule Germany and Spain because at somepoint we were all ruled by the Habsburgs. In fact...more recent than the Yuan dynasty in the case of Tibet.
Every European colonial force faced fierce resistance from local residents while colonizing the countries of Asia and Africa. If Tibet was a separate country and Tibetans think of themselves as citizen of a separate country than China, then why there wasn't much resistance against the Chinese "occupation"? Even with so much imperialist backing, why there wasn't much popular resistance against the Chinese "occupation" in Tibet now?
Do you think that the feudal lords and lamacracy will leave Tibet without any kind of "violent" resistance?
By your standard of Mongol rule, the North-Eastern states of modern India was never a part of India throughout the history.

[pranabjyoti]

What Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribunal about British Colonial rule in india is very easily transplanted onto the situation in Tibet.

"Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness, We must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition enslaving it beneath the traditional rules depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."

We must not turn our disapproval of the current regime in Tibet into praise of the former. Instead, as always, the subaltern nationalism of Tibetans must be supported in so far as the creation of community and unity for the multitude and not into the oppression of diversity.
I agree very much with you in this regard. Basically, feudalism is flourished and reached its height in Asia and that's why feudal traditions are still so much alive in Asia. India is not an exception. Old feudal and semi-feudal ideologies and thinking are still reigning among a large share of peoples mind here in India and this kind of mentality often blocks their mind so much that they even oppose progress and progressive ideas and fall victim to backward, reactionary ideas.

[Queercommie Girl]

History shouldn't even matter for socialists. How the world map looked like 100, 300 or 500 years ago is irrelevant. The fact is, socialism is fundamentally internationalist, and class interests override national interests.

I support the Chinese socialist "invasion" of Tibet (in the large part, while also recognising that bureaucratic deformation did exist), just like potentially I would support an US socialist "invasion" of China itself, even though I am Chinese. Chinese workers, peasants and students would welcome a genuinely democratic socialist US army into our homeland with flying banners for sure! No more Foxconn suicides, no more illegal land grabbing by corrupt bureaucrats, no more queer oppression! Of what worth is abstract "nationalism" in the face of genuine social progress?

If a completely genuinely democratic socialist United States "invades" China, I will certainly "betray" my nation! To the hell with abstract "nationalism"!!

Long Live the Socialist United States! LOL

[pranabjyoti]

I think everybody should support the "invasion" of internationalist socialist army to any country, specially backward, semi-feudal countries of Asia specially.
Me too, like you would support and invasion of socialist army to India and myself very much willing to take part in the purging of feudal, reactionary elements here. That will be the best for both world and India.

[red cat]

That's a semantic point. Truth is, the "oriental masses" are not a singular group. What exactly is the "eastern world"? How is it qualitatively different from the "western world", the "native american world" or the "african world"?

I was talking about the people historically living in Asia. Of course, there are many subgroups.


Perhaps that's true to some extent, but it cannot change the objective fact that far more Han Chinese "masses" perished under the swords of the Mongol hordes than under the heel of European colonialism.As for India, things such as a third of the population of a big province dying of hunger, were unheard of before western imperialism came into power. We should also take into account the opium policies of Britain in China.


Are you denying that feudal imperialism, such as the kind represented by the Mongol empire, can be objectively even worse than capitalist imperialism? Or do you fancy that feudalism can never become imperialist?
Feudal imperialism does not halt the natural developments of the conquered lands; capitalist imperialism does.


I don't entirely agree with this. You seem to have the forgotten the primary class contradiction between the peasants and the landlords.In today's world, the landlords are representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie.


Yes, and frankly, capitalist imperialism in Asia wasn't as directly brutal as feudal imperialism was. It was only in the Americas that European capitalist imperialism reached a similar level of genocidal mass violence.

You obviously have no idea of the level of destruction and suffering the Mongol conquests caused in China. The level of genocide in some areas was comparable or even exceeded the level of genocide by the European colonists in the Americas. The fact that Mongols and Chinese largely "look the same" means nothing. To be frank, if I have to choose, I'd rather live under British colonialism. British imperialism never directly killed so many people in China, at least.But at some point in history, it systematically drugged about ninety percent of the Chinese population under forty with opium, didn't it ? Moreover, since imperialism actually stopped the bourgeois developments in China, the question should be whether you would live under British colonialism or a hypothetical China that was never conquered by imperialism and became a capitalist country itself ?


I don't believe there exists a single "Asian" people.

We Chinese do not face the same kind of racism from white people as Muslims and Indians do, so why should we consider ourselves to be in the same category as the Muslims and the Indians?Historically both have faced comparable kind of racism. At some point racism against the Chinese was elevated to such an extent that Indians were racially instigated against them and some Chinese communities living in India went through almost holocaust-like elimination. Japanese were considered white by South Africa as soon as Japan emerged as a capitalist country. It could be that the Chinese do not face that much racism nowadays due to the same reason.

I was referring to the Asian masses in a very general manner. If you want to bring in finer details then you cannot talk of even "Chinese" or "Indian" people in the first place. There are around 56 nationalities in China and they look quite different from each other. It is very hard or sometimes impossible to tell some communities of Indians from Africans, some from Europeans, and some from Han Chinese. They would also face different degrees of racism or even no racism at all from whites.


Agree. But don't forget the struggle against native feudalism too!What you are calling native feudalism is actually semi-feudalism that represents the imperialist bourgeoisie.

[Queercommie Girl]

As for India, things such as a third of the population of a big province dying of hunger, were unheard of before western imperialism came into power. We should also take into account the opium policies of Britain in China.

Feudal imperialism does not halt the natural developments of the conquered lands; capitalist imperialism does.


I can't speak for India, but in China's case, the feudal imperialism of the Mongol empire was the most destructive force in the country's entire history, not European colonialism. Only the Russians from the north directly killed the Chinese en masse, the British, French and the Americans did not.

Opium drugging is bad, but the British were not completely to blame. No-one forced opium down the throats of the Chinese masses, the Chinese volunteered for them. So the degenerate social system that was feudal China at the time was also to blame.

Also, opium drugging is extremely bad, but genocide and mass killings is worse.



In today's world, the landlords are representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
That's true to a significant extent.



Historically both have faced comparable kind of racism. At some point racism against the Chinese was elevated to such an extent that Indians were racially instigated against them and some Chinese communities living in India went through almost holocaust-like elimination. Japanese were considered white by South Africa as soon as Japan emerged as a capitalist country. It could be that the Chinese do not face that much racism nowadays due to the same reason.
Actually I didn't say the Chinese face less racism, I meant to say that Chinese, Muslims and Indians face different kinds of issues and problems.



What you are calling native feudalism is actually semi-feudalism that represents the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Politically this is true, but culturally Asian semi-feudalism still presents itself as "orthodox Asian", so actually many elements of Western capitalist culture would be superior to it.

Therefore Asian cultural nationalism against the West is generally reactionary. Except when these cultural elements have a progressive role to play.

I oppose the West politically, but not culturally. (Apart from Western Christianity) That is the difference between the Chinese and the Muslim attitudes to the West. The Muslims feel they are threatened not just by Western states, but by the Western Civilisation as a whole, the Chinese do not. We've already made much of Greco-Roman and Enlightenment philosophies, as well as Western values of liberalism, our own. To a significant extent the "Western Civilisation" already is our civilisation as well.

Both Chinese socialists on the left and Chinese nationalists on the right feel threatened by Western states politically and economically, obviously for very different reasons. But we do not really feel threatened by Western culture so much, except for Christianity. China shares the same general modern secular-humanist-scientific cultural background as most Western nations, our differences are mainly political and economic.

If there is a political and economic war between the West and the Islamic World, China would stand on the side of the Islamic World. But if there is a cultural war between the West and the Islamic World, China would stand on the side of the West. It is not in China's interest to let US capitalism politically and economically dominate the world, but it is also not in China's interest to promote Islamism and theocracy against modern secular-humanist-scientific civilisation. This is a sentiment both the left-wing and the right-wing in China share.

Modern secular-humanist-scientific civilisation is not just Western civilisation, it is also Chinese civilisation. It is not just the civilisation of Socrates, Aristotle, Voltaire, Newton and Einstein, but also the civilisation of Confucius, Zhang Heng, Sun Yat-sen, Lu Xun and Mao Zedong. The Chinese (both the left and the right) feel threatened culturally by the growth of Islamism and theocracy, just as much as Europeans and Americans do.

[DDR]

do you support Tibetian Independence under Socialism

Yes of course I do, as every one will do (at lest on this forum :P), no?

[Queercommie Girl]

Dalai Lama wasn't a wordly power and sp;oke out frequently against the feudal system in Tibet...which was actually installed by the Chinese in 1500 anyways. Get your facts straight.


Actually you should read more history. It was the Mongol feudal imperialists who installed Lamaist theocracy in Tibet, the same feudal imperialists, who with their Chinese collaborators, massacred some 30 million Han Chinese, Korean, Tibetan etc. people in East Asia, as well as millions more in the Islamic World and in Eastern Europe.

Han Chinese were generally considered to be the 3rd and 4th castes during the Yuan dynasty.

Blame Lamaism on feudal imperialism, not on the Chinese! (Or even on the Mongol masses for that matter)

It's true that originally Buddhism in Tibet, fused with the native Tibetan Bon religion, was partially progressive, but then Buddhism is certainly not special in this. Early Islam, early Christianity and early Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) were all partly progressive.

But Lamaism is a completely different ball of game, completely different. Lamaism is to genuine partially progressive early Buddhism what right-wing pro-war homophobic fundamentalist Christianity in the US today is to the message of peace and universal love of Jesus, and what ultra-hypocritical state-sponsored Confucianism in China today is to the original ethical teachings of Confucius.

Lamaist theocracy is the complete and utter negation of every partly progressive element that ever existed in the Buddhist religion.

[PhoenixAsh]

Actually you should read more history. It was the Mongol feudal imperialists who installed Lamaist theocracy in Tibet, the same feudal imperialists, who with their Chinese collaborators, massacred some 30 million Han Chinese, Korean, Tibetan etc. people in East Asia, as well as millions more in the Islamic World and in Eastern Europe.

If you had read my posts you would have known why I made that remark. Its because the Chinese position that they have legal rights to Tibet based on the fact that they both existed under the Yuan dynasty. They refer to the treaty of Sakya Pandita and Godan, who converted to Buddhism. Their explanation is that since the Mongols invaded Tibet and China and installed a central government (Yuan Dynasty) the current government is its defacto heir and therefore there is an unbroken bond of servitude of Tibet to China since it always was subjegated to China's government. (see what they did there?)

Now if that is the case China is to blame for teh feudal system in the first place (see what I did there?)

Get it?

Now a few posts further along...in my critique of Peretti...I state that the mongols are in fact the ones who furthered the Lama system (it was already there btw. only now it was enforced by the Mongols). So you could have know this.

What you are overlooking however is the Manchu period. In which China did, on the invitation of the 6th DL have defacto control over Tibet and created a seperate ruling class within the Lama system. The system which was there in the 50s. Lama's did not have effective controll...that was left to the regents or ministers.


Han Chinese were generally considered to be the 3rd and 4th castes during the Yuan dynasty.

Blame Lamaism on feudal imperialism, not on the Chinese! (Or even on the Mongol masses for that matter)
It's true that originally Buddhism in Tibet, fused with the native Tibetan Bon religion, was partially progressive, but then Buddhism is certainly not special in this. Early Islam, early Christianity and early Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) were all partly progressive.I do not see the relevance.



But Lamaism is a completely different ball of game, completely different. Lamaism is to genuine partially progressive early Buddhism what right-wing pro-war homophobic fundamentalist Christianity in the US today is to the message of peace and universal love of Jesus, and what ultra-hypocritical state-sponsored Confucianism in China today is to the original ethical teachings of Confucius.

Lamaist theocracy is the complete and utter negation of every partly progressive element that ever existed in the Buddhist religion.

making it bold doesn't hide the fact that you now are compressing some centuries with each other and compress 6 centuries into one bald statement. ;-)

but it is also a bit useless to add this since nobody here stated that there was no feudal system.

[red cat]

Opium drugging is bad, but the British were not completely to blame. No-one forced opium down the throats of the Chinese masses, the Chinese volunteered for them. So the degenerate social system that was feudal China at the time was also to blame.

Are you sure about this ? In general imperialists use force to open new markets for their products.



Politically this is true, but culturally Asian semi-feudalism still presents itself as "orthodox Asian", so actually many elements of Western capitalist culture would be superior to it.

Therefore Asian cultural nationalism against the West is generally reactionary. Except when these cultural elements have a progressive role to play.True and true.


I oppose the West politically, but not culturally. (Apart from Western Christianity) That is the difference between the Chinese and the Muslim attitudes to the West. The Muslims feel they are threatened not just by Western states, but by the Western Civilisation as a whole, the Chinese do not. We've already made much of Greco-Roman and Enlightenment philosophies, as well as Western values of liberalism, our own. To a significant extent the "Western Civilisation" already is our civilisation as well.

Both Chinese socialists on the left and Chinese nationalists on the right feel threatened by Western states politically and economically, obviously for very different reasons. But we do not really feel threatened by Western culture so much, except for Christianity. China shares the same general modern secular-humanist-scientific cultural background as most Western nations, our differences are mainly political and economic.

If there is a political and economic war between the West and the Islamic World, China would stand on the side of the Islamic World. But if there is a cultural war between the West and the Islamic World, China would stand on the side of the West. It is not in China's interest to let US capitalism politically and economically dominate the world, but it is also not in China's interest to promote Islamism and theocracy against modern secular-humanist-scientific civilisation. This is a sentiment both the left-wing and the right-wing in China share.It is difficult to predict it this way. That stand is a somewhat socialist one. China of today will do whatever increases her influence over specific areas. So if China decides to extend influence in the middle east, of course it will support Islamic theocracy.

[Queercommie Girl]

Are you sure about this ? In general imperialists use force to open new markets for their products.


I completely agree. However, feudal imperialists generally are more directly brutal than capitalist imperialists.

Of all the European colonists who invaded China, the Russians were the most brutal and violent, because the Russians were still a semi-feudal nation.



It is difficult to predict it this way. That stand is a somewhat socialist one. China of today will do whatever increases her influence over specific areas. So if China decides to extend influence in the middle east, of course it will support Islamic theocracy.


Even from a Chinese nationalist perspective, while China might support Islamist states strategically in an opportunistic way as a counter-weight against Western imperialism, China will never allow Islamist influences to grow within its own borders.

[Queercommie Girl]

If you had read my posts you would have known why I made that remark. Its because the Chinese position that they have legal rights to Tibet based on the fact that they both existed under the Yuan dynasty.


Yes, but that's a Chinese nationalist dogma which I reject. The Yuan Dynasty was a feudal-colonial government, both Tibetans and Han Chinese were oppressed peoples during that period, and the Red Turban Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion) that overthrew the Mongols was the national liberation struggle for the Han Chinese. So the Yuan does not represent "China".

My support (to a significant extent) of the Maoist liberation of Tibet (note I said Maoist liberation of Tibet, not Chinese liberation of Tibet, if say a Maoist group based in the US conducts a successful revolution in the US, then "invades" capitalist China, I'd support that too) is purely based on socialism, not nationalism.

Essentially, I don't believe national rights are absolute, I think class rights over-ride national rights.



They refer to the treaty of Sakya Pandita and Godan, who converted to Buddhism. Their explanation is that since the Mongols invaded Tibet and China and installed a central government (Yuan Dynasty) the current government is its defacto heir and therefore there is an unbroken bond of servitude of Tibet to China since it always was subjegated to China's government. (see what they did there?)
I reject this kind of claim since I'm not a nationalist. And even from a Han Chinese nationalist perspective the Mongol Yuan government was a feudal-colonial force which oppressed the Han people. So the left-wing nationalism of the Han which overthrew the Mongols is the kind of nationalism of the oppressed nations, and significantly progressive.

The Han Chinese Ming Dynasty which replaced the Yuan did not have direct political control over Tibet.



Now if that is the case China is to blame for teh feudal system in the first place (see what I did there?)

Get it?
You are an idiot who is completely missing the point, since Yuan is not really "China", no more than the colonial Spanish-Inca empire in South America is really "Inca".

The Mongols killed more Han people in China than the Europeans did in the Americas. That's a historical fact. (Even though the Mongol ruling class also had many Han collaborators) The Mongols killed many Tibetans too.

I'm not a nationalist, I'm a socialist. My perspective is completely different.

The Yuan feudal-colonial government which officially represented "China" during that time was to blame for the feudal theocracy in Tibet, not the Han Chinese, who were also oppressed under the Mongol yoke.



Now a few posts further along...in my critique of Peretti...I state that the mongols are in fact the ones who furthered the Lama system (it was already there btw. only now it was enforced by the Mongols). So you could have know this.
But actually before the Mongol period Lamaism was not a theocracy in the political sense, that's the difference.



What you are overlooking however is the Manchu period. In which China did, on the invitation of the 6th DL have defacto control over Tibet and created a seperate ruling class within the Lama system. The system which was there in the 50s. Lama's did not have effective controll...that was left to the regents or ministers.
Again, "China" under the Manchus was another semi-feudal-colonial government, though not as bad for the Han Chinese as the Mongol Yuan.

So the Han Chinese never did directly control Tibet. The Manchu ruling class controlled Tibet directly during the Qing Dynasty.

My argument around Tibet is not based on maps centuries old. You need to understand this.

But all of this doesn't prove that the Lamas were not heavily reactionary at all. Even if they didn't rule completely directly since the mid-Qing period, they still completely turned a blind eye to some of the most horrifying practices and worst oppression in human history by the feudal government of Tibet upon the serf population and actually supported the regime. So at least they were guilty collaborators of a Nazi-like reactionary feudal regime.

It's like if the Roman Catholic Church actively supported the Nazis, then they'd be guilty as Nazi collaborators too, even if they weren't directly theocratic.



but it is also a bit useless to add this since nobody here stated that there was no feudal system.
But the Mongol period was not just any kind of "feudalism". It was the worst kind of feudal-imperialism. People always talk about the European conquest of the Americas as the greatest genocide in history. But actually the Mongol conquest of Eurasia was also another great genocide that happened centuries earlier. Marxists and socialists really need to know this fact from history.

[Queercommie Girl]

Kleber:

I hesitate to diagree with you, but this seems to suggest you think Stalinism is progressive!

Again, on this basis you could argue that since the US military got rid of the 'medieval' Taliban, it's a progressive force.


Sorry to upset your fragile liberal sentiments, but yes, Stalinism, despite the bureaucratic deformation, is significantly more progressive than Lamaism.

Even Chinese KMT capitalism would be somewhat more progressive, the KMT carried out a limited "land revolution" in Taiwan in the 1950s. They would have done the same in Tibet.

Try to sell your abstract principle of "absolute national rights" to the Tibetan serfs who are treated like livestock by their god-king masters.

[pranabjyoti]

Sorry to upset your fragile liberal sentiments, but yes, Stalinism, despite the bureaucratic deformation, is significantly more progressive than Lamaism.

Even Chinese KMT capitalism would be somewhat more progressive, the KMT carried out a limited "land revolution" in Taiwan in the 1950s. They would have done the same in Tibet.

Try to sell your abstract principle of "absolute national rights" to the Tibetan serfs who are treated like livestock by their god-king masters.
My personal request to you (and others). Please don't argue with Rosa. That would give you nothing other than headache.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The Chinese claims over Tibet based on Nationalism are about as solid as the British claims over Dublin or Sri Lanka. The Tibetans have a different religion, language, writing and historical trajectory, even if they existed within the borders of Imperial China at various points in history. The Tibetans had a right to develop their own economic system and not have it imposed

As for the argument that the Tibetan feudal government was so bad, this is fair but not the whole story. First, the Dalai Lama was a teenager when the Chinese invaded, and was 24 when he was overthrown. Second, Tibet was incredibly remote and isolated, and developed a rich philosophical tradition but had failed to make it "Socially aware" as Marxism did to Hegelianism and Western Philosophy. For such a poor society in a very harsh environment, its government was no more morally repugnant than any other place at that level of development (especially considering the depravities of other nations going on at the same time which were far more "advanced").

As for their historical crimes; should we ban catholic priests from having pictures of the pope because popes in the past committed atrocities? On one hand, the liberal bourgeoise image of shangri la is absurd and idealistic, but the image of fascist monks leading a reactionary theocracy by duping the serfs is overly dark. As in so many other things, the story is somewhere in between. It is important to give a more sympathetic reading to the Tibetans and their conditions.

Most importantly, the Dalai Lama himself praises socialism and the economic improvement and reform in Tibet. He even recognizes Chinese control of Tibet, and the domination of the Chinese party. He wants China to stay and help modernize Tibet. He just wants China to stop disregarding the Tibetan culture and society. He has made statements claiming to be a Marxist and support socialism, and while I think he also made comments condemning the old Lamaist feudal system, I can't seem to find it.


Try to sell your abstract principle of "absolute national rights" to the Tibetan serfs who are treated like livestock by their god-king masters.

If the KMT and the PRC pursued land reform, there's no reason to think the Dalai Lama wouldn't have himself without the right ideological prodding. He himself was only in power a matter of years, and never reached maturity. While you can condemn the 2,000 year old political system for being reactionary, in a way this shouldn't be a surprise. Tibet was very isolated, and was an agrarian society living in a very hostile land, leading to a very poor and technologically backwards society where real social criticism and dialogue hadn't had time to flower. If we can blame them for anything, it is that their autarky and isolation prevented them from seeing other societies very often, leading to a minimal amount of self-criticism. But there's really no reason to believe that, just as the liberation theologians from the catholic church, revolutionaries could arise from within the hierarchy. And considering the young age of the Dalai Lama and his broad support base, there's no reason to think he couldn't be such a figure. Perhaps we can criticize his notion of Marxism, or how he defines it, or how he thinks it should be implemented. Perhaps we can criticize him for taking CIA money. But none of those make him evil or cruel. He's just a powerful monk from an otherwise very backwards society.

Anyways, the Chinese State Bourgeoise aren't a whole lot better.



I think what worries Tibet is the negation of their cultural and linguistic heritage, thanks to immigration from the rest of China and the creation of a new Chinese bourgeoise. This lead to the riots a few years back. There were even Chinese officials who wanted to replace Tibetan in the school systems with Mandarin! This is a more than reasonable concern, considering the most valuable collective property that many peoples have are their languages and shared traditions.


As to Marx's comments on "Oriental Despotism", its hardly unsurprising considering his Hegelianism, but it is definitely one of the more counter-revolutionary thinks Marx ever said. Truth is, there is no "East" or "Orient" any more than Swedes and Arabs are the same because they both worship the god of Abraham. That the peasants believed in religious superstition shouldn't be surprising considering they were peasants. And he kind of ignores many of the intellectual movements that arose within China and India, both religious and non-religious, up from the soil of Indian philosophy and against the hegemonic economic assumptions of their societies.

But this comes from so many Western philosophers who talk about "The East" without ever really probing their works, reading their history, or going there. However, the grand corpus of Marx's other works still put him a head above his contemporaries on this point.

[Queercommie Girl]

^

Chinese philosophical development wasn't based on "Indian Philosophy". What a cultural imperialist thing to say. We Chinese have our own native philosophical and religious traditions that date back to the era of the Hundred Schools of Thought around 2500 years ago. (Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism being the main schools) Chinese religion and philosophy is just as different from the Indian tradition as it is from the Middle Eastern and the European.

Marx and Engels never said all "oriental" cultures are Despotic. There is no such thing as "oriental culture" anyway. Different "oriental" cultures are more different from each other as they are from European culture. All they said is that the idea of an intolerant absolutist God in the Abrahamic religions is a superstructural manifestation of political despotism on Earth. Given how so many followers of Abrahamic religions often like to engage in religious wars and persecute those of other religions and traditions, such as pagans, atheists and queer people (including of course Indian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism), such a remark is not so off the mark.

No-one imposed socialism on Tibet. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the serfs and the poor in Tibet supported the land reforms that the Maoists introduced in the country. Chinese capitalism in Tibet today of course is a different story.

[PhoenixAsh]

I had lost trac of this thread with. Sorry I replied so late. I am also going to tear your posts chronology apart a bit.


No-one imposed socialism on Tibet. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the serfs and the poor in Tibet supported the land reforms that the Maoists introduced in the country. Chinese capitalism in Tibet today of course is a different story. Well...in fact they did. There was no workers or serf uprising in Tibet. The whole political structure was imported from abroad by the Chinese military and support for it by the workers does not make it any less of an imposed structure.

Also I still contest the version about feudal serfdom the Chinese and Maoists put foreward. More on that later.


Yes, but that's a Chinese nationalist dogma which I reject.

You are an idiot who is completely missing the point, since Yuan is not really "China", no more than the colonial Spanish-Inca empire in South America is really "Inca".


Well its good that you reject this.

However it IS the argument the Chinese maoists used to conquer Tibet and (Han) China still uses as an argument for perpetuating domination over the region...and that is what I refered to. As such it was a mocking re-use of this argument and not a serious statement. I thought I made that clear.




My support (to a significant extent) of the Maoist liberation of Tibet (note I said Maoist liberation of Tibet, not Chinese liberation of Tibet, if say a Maoist group based in the US conducts a successful revolution in the US, then "invades" capitalist China, I'd support that too) is purely based on socialism, not nationalism.I really do not see it as a liberation. I am very opposed to exported revolutions in which the people of the territory do not have a dominant role. Has China supported maoist movements within Tibet or even helped crfeate them and they in turn started a revolution would have been liberation. His is just annexation.



Essentially, I don't believe national rights are absolute, I think class rights over-ride national rights.I agree. Unfortunately the class rights need to be established within the class and not imposed over the class.



I reject this kind of claim since I'm not a nationalist. And even from a Han Chinese nationalist perspective the Mongol Yuan government was a feudal-colonial force which oppressed the Han people. So the left-wing nationalism of the Han which overthrew the Mongols is the kind of nationalism of the oppressed nations, and significantly progressive.

The Han Chinese Ming Dynasty which replaced the Yuan did not have direct political control over Tibet.

The Mongols killed more Han people in China than the Europeans did in the Americas. That's a historical fact. (Even though the Mongol ruling class also had many Han collaborators) The Mongols killed many Tibetans too.

I'm not a nationalist, I'm a socialist. My perspective is completely different.

The Yuan feudal-colonial government which officially represented "China" during that time was to blame for the feudal theocracy in Tibet, not the Han Chinese, who were also oppressed under the Mongol yoke.

But actually before the Mongol period Lamaism was not a theocracy in the political sense, that's the difference.

Again, "China" under the Manchus was another semi-feudal-colonial government, though not as bad for the Han Chinese as the Mongol Yuan.

So the Han Chinese never did directly control Tibet. The Manchu ruling class controlled Tibet directly during the Qing Dynasty.

My argument around Tibet is not based on maps centuries old. You need to understand this.I understand this...I however do not see any understanding from you that the fact is that present China does not make a distinction between Han, Manchu and Yuan in their arguments for their rights to dominate Tibet? In their eyes and arguments China is China....no matter who ruled it. And again...it is THIS argument I refered to.




But all of this doesn't prove that the Lamas were not heavily reactionary at all. Even if they didn't rule completely directly since the mid-Qing period, they still completely turned a blind eye to some of the most horrifying practices and worst oppression in human history by the feudal government of Tibet upon the serf population and actually supported the regime. So at least they were guilty collaborators of a Nazi-like reactionary feudal regime.Yeah...we are seriously going to differ of opinion on that matter of the serfs.

The reality is that Shayka legal systems were abolished in 1913 in Tibet. That means the legal mutilation of criminals, was abolished. By the 13th Dalai Lama as was the death penalty (Tibet was the first country to do so). That does not mean they didnt occur but that they in itself were punishable by law. The13th and 14th dalai lama had set up government bodies to see to it that these laws were maintained and transgressions were punished.

Also regions of Tibet were not under Lama controll. In fact QinHai had abolished "serfdom" in their province and even when they returned under Lama rule it did not return to the province.

Chimbi for example has only two dozen serfs. Which is a far cry from the 95% of Tibettan society that lived in serfdom. This is according to British records and as such the information does not come from the Government in exile.

To be fair...several cases of shayka law were however officially implemented after 1913 but they were implemented on the highest classes of Tibettan society. It is very instructive that these few cases have been well documented as well as the complete bafflement of the executioners who did not know how to go about and needed to consult ancient texts. They did apply anestetics that were available.

There is no evidence of 95% of the Tibettan population living in serfdom or that in the decades leading up to the invasion of China their situation was anything comparable to nazism.

That version of history has been put foreward by the Chinese and is heavilly influenced by the formal resolutions of the CCP on how about certain parts of history should be written...and historians have fierce debates about the truth and reality of Tibettan society....the classification of the system as feudal serfdom...and the position of the serfs...and even the term serf at all. All evidence points to a far milder system of Tibettan society than the Chinese have us believe. Allthough it also disputes the exile governments version.

The pictures posted earlier have been widely accepted by historians and experst many who lived in the region in the period as being reminants from periods long past.

After the Maoisty liberation of Tibet however punitative torture has een widely implemented by the Maoists....who reimplemented a form of Shayka rule. Which is counter intuitive given the chinese arguments that they were morally superior and wanted to free the serfs of this horrible regime. Untill you realise tht originally the freeing of the serfs did not play a great role in the Chinese arguments....in actuallity in 1950's it was freedom of imperialist influences.




But the Mongol period was not just any kind of "feudalism". It was the worst kind of feudal-imperialism. People always talk about the European conquest of the Americas as the greatest genocide in history. But actually the Mongol conquest of Eurasia was also another great genocide that happened centuries earlier. Marxists and socialists really need to know this fact from history.Yes. I agree to that without reserve.

However...again...China today and China in the 50's does not make a difference between China under Yuan, Manchu and Han. Its China all the way for them in their arguments.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

^

Chinese philosophical development wasn't based on "Indian Philosophy". What a cultural imperialist thing to say. We Chinese have our own native philosophical and religious traditions that date back to the era of the Hundred Schools of Thought around 2500 years ago. (Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism being the main schools) Chinese religion and philosophy is just as different from the Indian tradition as it is from the Middle Eastern and the European.


Whoah! That's not what I meant at all. What I was saying was that China and India had distinct cultural traditions and therefore could NOT be grouped under a common "Orient". India had its traditions grow out of its soil and into neighbors like Tibet, particularly Tantric Buddhism. China obviously had Taoism, Confucianism, Folk religion, etc which spread from China. Sorry if you misunderstood me.



Marx and Engels never said all "oriental" cultures are Despotic. There is no such thing as "oriental culture" anyway.

No, but Hegel suggested that "oriental" cultures were despotic, and it was pretty much taken as a given by most European philosophers at the time. And as for "oriental culture", same thing, it was an old Western trope. It's not true, but it is a part of the intellectual tradition nonetheless.


Different "oriental" cultures are more different from each other as they are from European culture.

You don't understand, that's not what I believe! I was arguing against marx's description of the "orient" as was presented in an earlier quote about the nature and social structure of the Indian village. You must have misunderstood me or something.


All they said is that the idea of an intolerant absolutist God in the Abrahamic religions is a superstructural manifestation of political despotism on Earth. Given how so many followers of Abrahamic religions often like to engage in religious wars and persecute those of other religions and traditions, such as pagans, atheists and queer people (including of course Indian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism), such a remark is not so off the mark.

this isn't something peculiar to abrahamic religions i dont think, even if it is often more pronounced.



No-one imposed socialism on Tibet. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the serfs and the poor in Tibet supported the land reforms that the Maoists introduced in the country. Chinese capitalism in Tibet today of course is a different story.

This is questionable, did they ever poll the Tibetan people? Was there an unbiased vote taken? Even if they did support the land reforms, they may not necessarily support the Chinese government overall, and the Dalai Lama himself doesn't seem to argue in favor of reinstituting feudalism. Again, he claims to support Marxist theory, at least some of it, so it's not so impossible to imagine that the Dalai Lama himself would have agreed to Mao's reforms.

Anyways, from my understanding, Tibet actually has a lot of internal divisions. The people around Lhasa are far more sympathetic to the Dalai Lama for instance.

The real point is, however, that there wasn't a domestic uprising and insurrection to create socialism. It was a Han Chinese political party who used old Imperial claims over tibet to justify their actions.