The Dalai Lama knows how to generate publicity for his dubious cause. This time, he is using the 50th anniversary of his failed uprising against the Chinese in Tibet, to tell the world that the years since the events of 1959 have brought “untold suffering and destruction to the land and people of Tibet.”
Naturally, the Western media swallows this statement lock, stock and barrel, even though it is simply brazen intellectual and historical dishonesty on the part of the well heeled, formerly CIA funded, Tibetan monk.
The reality of life for Tibetans when the Dalai Lama and his predecessors ruled Tibet was simply ghastly. It was truly “hell on earth”, a phrase the Dalai Lama is using to describe the impact of China’s presence in Tibet today.
In his 1996 book, The Making of Modern Tibet, Tom Grunfeld describes the feudal system that existed in Tibet in the lead up to 1959. Tibetans, he writes, were ruled by a system of feudal theocracy, and the Dalai Lama was at the pinnacle of that structure. It was a society in which land owners and nobles made life as hellish for peasants as was the case in medieval England. Nobles collected taxes, beat their “serfs”, took bribes and ensured that the serfs, who lived in hovels on their estates, starved while their banquet tables heaved with produce grown on the estate.
Serfs, and the vast majority of Tibetans were in this category, had no power. They had to gain permission to attend a monastery or to get married. There was, Grunfeld writes, little class mobility in Tibet. It was a rigid and thoroughly elite driven society in which slavery was tolerated.
Grunfeld’s bleak assessment of living conditions in Tibet up to 1959 is not a maverick one. Another scholar, Michael Parenti from the University of California, has researched and written extensively on the issue of Tibetan society prior to the Chinese intervention in 1959.
Parenti, writing in academic journal New Political Science in 2003, observes that in “the Dalai Lama’s Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon runaway serfs and thieves.”
Parenti cites the work of one Western observer who in 1929:
…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, and breaking off hands.
There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling.
Sexual abuse in monasteries was rife, and starvation among the serfs a regular occurrence, despite the plentiful conditions for agriculture that existed in Tibet.
The Tibet that the Dalai Lama presided over, until his exile in 1959, was far from the Shangri-la that dewy eyed supporters of the Free Tibet movement pretend it to be. Unless you were a member of the small elite class, or a monk, life was, in Thomas Hobbes’ memorable phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
The Dalai Lama speaks today of “repressive and violent” campaigns by China over the past 50 years. What he has not told you, and nor has any media outlet that has quoted his gibberish today, is that he and the system he represents made life intolerable for millions of Tibetans over hundreds of years.
The history books record this.
Unbelievable, it’s alright for you Greg to sit and pontificate, but it’s not for us to decide. What do the Tibetans want? I’m sure that the chinese have been model invaders. It doesn’t seem that the people of tibet are all that happy with the current system either. It’s not like the chinese have used any instruments of torture over the past 50 years have they?
Mark Freyne, good link although the author does little to give an account of what he understands life in pre-1950 Tibet to have been like. Some quick googling lead me to http://tajemnice.org/content/view/121/42/ which gives an interesting description.
While he seems like a very nice fellow, I’m unclear about what the Dalai Lama actually stands for. He wants “autonomy” but many of his supporters campaign for independence. He’s no democrat given he was selected for his role via some apparently absurd religious ceremony as a child. Maybe we shouldn’t count this because he’s a Buddhist and they’re nice. The notion that replacement of the current oppressive Chinese rule – with all the excesses that entails – with an equally anachronistic feudal theocracy will improve the lot of Tibetans is as absurd as the process by which the DL was annointed. If the proposed form of Government is to be something else – what?
Thanks Greg, for putting your head into the lion’s mouth to say it.
Nice work, Greg, and a useful corrective to the usual feting of the Dalai Lama that you find among us bien-pensants. I find it beyond peculiar that people who are normally liberal to the core experience no apparent cognitive dissonance when lionising the cause of a would-be theocrat. But you get accused of being a CCP plant, or an apologist for Tiananmen, the latter of which is more than a little obscene.
Damien Anderson, I anticipated such a response. You fall into the trap of judging others by your your own jaded and cynical values. You wish to now expand the discussion. I never sought to put “a gimlet gaze on western religious leaders”. And I smile at your reference to “more fashionable faiths”… I am not going to lower myself to take your bait, Damien, nor to attempt to educate you. Suffice it to say that you do yourself no credit denigrating the Dalai lama. I support the Tibetan people’s right to choose.