The Dalai Lama: a FAQ for the right
In 1959, a Time magazine article,
The Three Precious Jewels, said about Tibetans:
About four-fifths of them work to support one-fifth, who are shut up in lamaseries. What little land is not owned by the monks belongs either to the Dalai Lama or to about 150 noble families.
From Peter Hessler’s Tibet Through Chinese Eyes:
From the Chinese perspective, Tibet has always been a part of China. ... An unbiased arbiter would find Tibetan arguments for independence more compelling than the Chinese version of history — but also, perhaps, would find that the Chinese have a stronger historical claim to Tibet than the United States does to much of the American West.
And:
When the Chinese speak of pre-1951 Tibet, they emphasize the shortcomings of the region’s feudal-theocratic government: life expectancy was thirty-six years; 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate; 95 percent of the population was hereditary serfs and slaves owned by monasteries and nobles. ... The statistics about Tibetan illiteracy and life expectancy are accurate.
And:
One common misperception in Western reports is that these people are sent by the government: the image is of a tremendous Han civilian army arriving to overwhelm Tibetan culture. The truth is that the government has little control over the situation. “How do you cut off the people moving out there?” asked one American who had spent much time in Tibet. “What mechanism are you going to have to prevent that? They don’t have any restrictions on internal travel — and we always beat them over the head about not having those, because to institute them would be a human-rights issue.”
A Washington Post article,
In Tibet, a Struggle of the Soul had this:
While love for the Dalai Lama overflows in Tibet, few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of the Dalai’s advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China’s land reform to the aristocratic 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 worshiped the Dalai Lama, but added, “I may not be free under Chinese Communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.”
As for the claim that the Chinese killed millions of Tibetans, Patrick French admits in the New York Times, He May Be a God, but He’s No Politician :
…the Free Tibet Campaign in London (of which I am a former director) and other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the archives in Dharamsala while researching my book on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to support that figure.
The Dalai Lama’s group had two long-kept secrets revealed in the 1990s:
From Dalai Lama Group Says It Got Money From C.I.A. - New York Times:
The Dalai Lama's administration acknowledged today that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960's from the Central Intelligence Agency.
A Newsweek article,
When Heaven Shed Blood: Details Of The Cia's Secret War In Tibet Are Only Now Leaking Out, A Tale Of Daring Espionage, Violence And Finally Betrayal, has the details: The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan rebels were secretly funded by the CIA. The rebels included monks like Athar Norbu, which explains why monks and monasteries were involved in the fighting. The Dalai Lama's elder brother, Gyalo Thondup, was the CIA liaison. After the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, the CIA's secret funding continued, "costing Washington more than $1.7 million a year, according to intelligence documents. That included $500,000 to support 2,100 Tibetan guerrillas (800 of them armed) based in Nepal and $180,000 worth of "subsidy to the Dalai Lama."
The Dalai Lama's support for the fighters continued until after the CIA money stopped flowing: "In July 1974 the Dalai Lama himself sent a 20-minute tape-recorded message asking the resistance fighters, now led by a CIA-trained Khampa named Wangdu, to surrender."
If you care about freedom or democracy, remember that these rebels were fighting to restore slavery in Tibet, and they were being helped by people who had overthrown democratic governments (Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala) to install dictators. So it’s understandable why the Dalai Lama would hide that for as long as he could
The result:
In the end, the CIA adventure left much blood in its wake. By Beijing's own reckoning, some 87,000 Tibetans were "eliminated" during the Lhasa uprising and its aftermath. The CIA involvement gave Beijing an easy excuse to depict Tibet as a "pawn on the chessboard of imperialist cold-war policy." The CIA's proteges, however, were left with nothing. "The Tibetans were abandoned," says CIA veteran Lilley, evoking the Bay of Pigs fiasco. "It was Cuba all over again."
The other long-kept secret concerns the Dalai Lama’s friend and tutor. From the New York Times,
Heinrich Harrer, 93, Explorer of Tibet, Dies:
In 1997, a film titled "Seven Years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt, dramatized his book of the same name, a best seller in the United States in 1954.
Just months before the movie's release, the German magazine Stern added a startling and disagreeable new dimension to Mr. Harrer's life story; it reported that he enlisted in Hitler's storm troopers in 1933, when they were still illegal in Austria.
Five years later, he enlisted in the SS, the Nazi organization responsible for countless atrocities, and rose to sergeant. He asked the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, for permission to marry in 1938, giving proof that he and his fiancée were Aryans. He later said he wore his SS uniform only once, the day of that marriage to Charlotte Wegener. In a ceremony celebrating the Eiger triumph in 1938, Mr. Harrer shook hands with Hitler and had his picture taken with him.
Mr. Harrer reacted to the disclosure of a Nazi past by saying that he had committed no crimes or atrocities. He said he understood and regretted his mistakes. He explained that he joined the SS only in order to coach skiing, and never coached an SS member.
Orville Schell, in his 2000 book
"Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood," commented: "There are not that many moments in life when to claim to be a craven careerist of the most calculating sort is a step up from ignominy."
Harrer may have been a craven careerist, but he's still a useful source of information. Though the Dalai Lama's group claims the Tibetan people opposed the Chinese, Harrer reveals in Return to Tibet that the rebels “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.”
Regarding the notion that the Dalai Lama is a vegetarian, see Nancy Stohs’ Dalai Lama digs into veal, pheasant:
Despite expectations that a vegetarian feast would be in order, the team of chefs assembled to cook for His Holiness on his recent visit to Madison was given no such instruction, said Catherine McKiernan, executive chef at the Madison Club, where the elaborate luncheon was held.
The Dalai Lama is, it turns out, a meat lover.
Some of the Dalai Lama's supporters claim that he must eat meat because of a liver condition, an idea that's not supported by current ideas of medicine.
http://tibetfaq.blogspot.com/2008/05/dalai-lama-faq-for-right.html
