Tibet through a different lens.

[Speck Tater]

Every once in a while I find it interesting to stand back and ask the question: How much of what I believe is actually true, and how much is simply what I want to believe?

Reading this article, and others like it, it is very easy, perhaps too easy, to simply assume that any perception that does not agree with our own preferred view must necessarily be distorted, biased, or simply a lie.

As the old saying goes, The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.

For what it's worth, here is a different persepctive on the politics of Tibet:

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Test how the media informed you

Mila Marcos and Michel Collon

The goal of these media tests is neither to shock nor create a scandal. All beliefs deserve respect. The goal is to allow each of us to determine for ourselves a decisive question: is what I believe based on reliable information? Or did someone try to manipulate public opinion on these big questions?
What makes a good judge? Someone who listens attentively to the contending parties, leaves her prejudices outside, makes up her own mind, and checks the reliability of each document, of each witness. Wouldn’t a media reader or viewer find it helpful to follow this same method?

1. “BEFORE THE CHINESE INVASION, THE TIBETAN PEOPLE LIVED IN HARMONY WITH THEIR NOBILITY IN A SOCIAL ORDER INSPIRED BY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS.”

FALSE. Religious doctrines imposed the superior position of the rich noble and the inferior position of the impoverished peasant, the low-ranking monk, the slave and all women, presenting this ranking as the inevitable outcome of karmic virtues and vices of successive former lives.

This religious ideology justified a feudal class order: serfs worked without pay for life on the grounds of the lord or the monastery, unable to move without permission. All life events–marriage, death, birth, a religious festival, to own an animal, to plant a tree, to dance, or to enter or leave prison–were pretexts for heavy taxes. Debts passed from father to son and to grandson. Those who failed to pay were reduced to slavery.

Fugitives and thieves were tracked by a small professional army. Favorite punishments: tearing out the tongue or the eye, slicing the tendon at the knee, etc. There tortures were not ended until 1959, at the time of democratic reforms decided in Beijing.

MUCH more at the link: http://inpursuitofhappiness.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/tibet-true-or-false/

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Don't shoot the messenger.

[gaspee]

1. Read some of the articles on that site

And see a bunch of whackadoons. I'm not saying parts of this particular article are right or wrong... just consider the source.

[On the Road]

2. Not to Justify China's Breaches of Human Rights

I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view. The storyline being repeated in the states does not represent what has been going on in Tibet.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Thank you for this post! We've also got to wonder about CIA activity in Tibet,

to stir up locals--sometimes into failed, futile, bloody rebellion--as a reflex "anti-communist" policy, based on our ideology, rather than on what was best for Tibetans. Same thing happened in Vietnam, writ large--two million dead to defeat communism, when all Vietnam wanted was ELECTIONS!

Tibet/China is not a simple, black and white situation--any more than India/Pakistan/Kasmir is, or the Colombia/FARC 40+ year civil war, or Israel/Palestine--or any number of conflicts that the U.S. has stoked or outright created for the purposes of, a) war profiteering, and b) U.S.-based global corporate predator advantage. I remember the U.S. war profiteers' paeans to the "South Vietnamese" and their love of "freedom and democracy"--that bunch if gangsters and U.S. welfare queens that the CIA installed in order to start a war. We should become very wary when the virtue of the side we're funding, arming and organizing, for U.S. corporate purposes, is extolled. Most often, it has been a lie.

[MonkeyFunk]

4. That's not really a "different" perspecitve -

it's China's perspective. Not very new.

[Warpy]

5. There's a lot of truth to it, though

because a rigid feudal social order was imposed through a total misunderstanding and misapplication of Karma.

It was pretty much the same in practice as Dispensationalism in this country, only we've been fortunate enough not to be a theocracy.

Yet.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. Old boss, meet the new boss. Good article. K&R