Today I saw a 'Free Tibet' bumper sticker. Free Tibet for what? A return to religious tyranny and despotism whereby 90% of the population were subjected to slavery or serfdom, coerced by the threat of mutilation, amputation and torture by buddhist priests?
Gelder and Gelder in their book, The Timely Rain, quote a chilling interview with a former Tibetan serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who, having stolen two sheep from a monastery had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated, upon the orders of the holy lama. The Dalai Lama may have marketed himself very successfully to the West as the spiritual leader of a religion of kindness, but the historical record shows that Tibetan Buddhist theocracy is far from kind and compassionate. The Tibetan people were oppressed and abused by their priestly government.
If the history of mankind has shown anything, it is that separation of religious belief from government safeguards the rights of people, be it from the religion of Yahweh, Christ, Mohammed or Buddha.
Although far from perfect, under communism slavery and serfdom were abolished, along with the crushing taxes and vile forms of physical punishment exacted by the monasteries. Land owned by the lamas was distributed to the peasants. The first hospitals were built and a system of secular education for all was instituted. Claims made by the Dalai Lama and his brother Tendzin Choegyal that "more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation" are unsupported by the evidence. The 1953 census showed the entire population of Tibet to be only 1,274,000.
Michael Parenti, in Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth, 2003, writes
If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then whole cities and huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves -- of which we have seen no evidence. The Chinese military force in Tibet was not big enough to round up, hunt down, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.
The Tibetan people may yearn for liberation from the Chinese communist government, and for a return of their religious leader, but I doubt if they long for a return to the feudal, fascist, sexist, occultic cruelty that Tibetan Buddhism represents.
The Washington Post in 1999 reported
Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China's land reform. 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."
Underneath the veneer of the Dalai Lama's benign smile is an aggressive political agenda. The Dalai's brother, Gyalo Thindrup, attempted to bring all Tibetan sects under the Dalai's control, using force whenever necessary. Opposition leader Gungthang Tsultrim, representative of 14 of the Tibetan settlements in exile, was shot to death, and the murderer is said to have received 300,000 rupees from the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile for his services.
The Dalai is guided by a Tibetan Buddhist eschatology - an end times belief - every bit as violent and as intolerant as the Christian vision of the Apocalypse, except, of course, that Tibetan Buddhism rises in the East and conquers the evil forces of the West, under the banner of Shambhala, to impose its dominionist vision on the world. To a western audience he downplays this as mere metaphor, to his Tibetan adherents he means it quite literally.
I'll be posting more on the Dalai. Someone needs to counterbalance the sycophantic public relations machinery he so skillfully manipulates. It's a shame that the Chinese government has not yet achieved the required level of sophistication to inform and educate the starry-eyed Western media about the realities of Tibetan political history.
Links:
Michael Parenti, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth, 2003
