She continues: "The involvement of the CIA has been known for a long time, as has the fact that the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, before the Chinese invaded, recognized that he needed to change the situation in Tibet and move towards a democratic form of government."
[Good point - but was he also being blocked from introducing reform proposals by the wealthy caste in Tibet, who may have hemmed him into the Potala Palace in 1959 to pressure him into resisting 'the Chinese'/the lower orders?, but under the supposed guise of protecting him from Chinese pressure?]
"All of this is very well known and repeatedly documented. Repeatedly, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has wanted to step down from his position as political leader of the government of Tibet in exile, and repeatedly he has been asked not to do so by his people.
Currently, some of the most reliable information that we can obtain about what is happening in Tibet is from Tibetans who are living outside of Tibet (I have many Tibetan friends here in Seattle) who have been able to contact their family members still inside Tibet. One of the most consistent reports to emerge from them is the fact that members of the Chinese police and military are dressing up as Tibetan monks in order to incite some of the disturbances, which they can then blame on Tibetans. Be very, very wary of any reports coming out of Tibet that claim that monks have created any disturbances."
[This is a good point, I am sure, but equally we cannot be sure that some of the 'monks' might not be CIA-linked agents - or even genuine monks - since actual fighting between factions and monasteries is not unknown in the history of Tibetan Buddhism, not all of it distant history either. As between the Chinese government and the US the 'Cui bono' - 'Who benefits?' question could cut either way, depending on your analysis, I guess.]
Monica then takes me to task for a statement about the Chinese-backed reforms of the fifties which she doesn't quite quote in full: "And the outrageous comment that suggests that the Chinese "actually left both the common people and the monasteries free to practice their religion to a much greater extent" flies so much in the face of what actually occurred that it is just staggering! That is disinformation of monumental proportions. Having met and spoken with Palden Gyatso, author of "Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk", who spent over 30 years in Chinese prisons and any number of other monks, nuns and "common people", I find that statement to be beyond ludicrous! "
I had originally written of this period (early/mid fifties) that the Chinese "actually left both the common people and the monasteries free to practice their religion to a much greater extent than subsequently obtained [emphasis now added] , i.e. in the context of the Tibetan struggle being taken up by the USA, with two brothers of the Dalai Lama actively involved with armed CIA-trained Tibetan liberation forces".
Even so I may well be wrong on how I put that point, but I had understood that in that period of the fifties most of the threat to the monasteries came from the danger to them that oppressive privileges might be taken away (possibly with enthusiastic participation of poor Tibetans, whose status had often been little more than slaves), not so much that they had to be closed down on religious grounds per se, which of course did happen to a huge extent during the Cultural Revolution, as across all China.
So now I need to ask: Can anyone else clarify:
a) degrees and kinds of destruction and violence in which regions of Tibet and in the various time phases,
b) against which recipients and by which actors - i.e. how much should be ascribed to 'China' versus 'Tibet', and how much can more accurately be understood as poor Tibet versus rich-Tibet?;
c) and correlating the truth from both 'sides' ?
As I thought my initial title made clear, I do not claim to be an expert on Tibet, nor even well-read on it; I just wrote what i did because I have seen how the neocons have manipulated the Western press to generate sympathy for Kosovans, for Chechnya, for Afghan women, for Iraqi ethnic minorities (especially in the ethnically Arab province near Basra, which just happens to have all the oil!) - and sensed another Western-exacerbation of far-distant problems which ends up sacrificing local people on the altar of imperialist geo-politics.
I think the reason I wrote as I did, which may as Monica feels have minimised the degree of repression suffered at China's hands (beyond the previously existing repression sufffered by many poor people in Tibet at the hands of other Tibetans), was that I was following the analysis of the author of The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama, Melvyn C. Goldstein, mentioned above # 1) :
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