Letters to the Editor
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@lemecdutex
Initiating force is always wrong
Wow! A moral absolutist!
Where do you live? When my home is gone from the next big earthquake, I'm coming to your house, sneaking in without using any "force" while your out and claiming it as mine.
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@RMP
What Michael Parenti seems to miss is whether, on grounds that the government is backwards and oppressive, and feudal, there, it is right for another much more powerful country with a large military to invade and occupy that country in order to impart a better form of government on its people. The question sounds oddly apropos to some other government we know, doesn't it?
Bhutan, and to some extent Nepal, are also quite feudal, quite backward, and little pockets up in the Himalayas. Should somebody invade them because Mr. Parenti thinks Marxism is a better form of government? Should cobbled together states of tribal nomadic Arabs be invaded because democracy is a more just form of government?
Mr. Parenti consistently avoids using the word invasion, and the Chinese occupation of Tibet is vaguely presented as if they just magically sprung up from the soil there, and then sat down with the Tibetans and signed a treaty. The nasty Tibetan government was somehow practicing corvée two years later in his history, but who cares about dates.
I'm sure the oppression of feudal societies (you can't really call the ruling classes in those societies corrupt unless you define what a non-corrupt feudal society is first) is nothing anyone wants to return to. Least of all the Dalai Lama, who was pretty much a house prisoner for life under that system. But the wonderful land reforms Mr. Parenti talks about are still going on. The Chinese are forcing the nomadic herders to give up their grazing lands which are made into collective farms on which the nomads are expected to farm. A touch like Josef Stalin's land reforms, don't you think? He could say that isn't happening, but it happens to be one of the causes of this week's unrest. When 5% of Lhasa (the ethnic Han Chinese who got bonus money from the Chinese government for 'settling the frontier regions') own almost all the shops, and won't hire anybody but other Chinese -- maybe they are just the new feudal lords.
The last time the Tibetans had this kind of disturbance was in 1989. Look in all the U.S. newspapers, and they tell you that, completely out of context. It was during the protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China (there were actually gun battles in Chengdu). Zhao Ziyang favored negotiation and looking at the demands of the protesters. He was sidelined and then house arrested, and the hardliners came in under Li Peng, and you remember what happened in Beijing. In Lhasa, they were similarly hardline, and also curiously made a law forbidding monks from wearing sneakers. The hardliner there was a young protege named Hu Jintao.
Are there inaccuracies on the Tibet in exile side? Of course. They claim the Chinese shelled the Potala in 1959, for instance. It didn't happen. It did get shelled during the Cultural Revolution, though.
Yes, of course, it would be good for all Americans to know the history in Tibet and learn about the oppressiveness of feudalism there, just like it would be nice if people understood that the Buddhist government in Sri Lanka is perpetrating a pretty horrible war. Illusions are better shattered. But it would also be nice if they learned it from someone who knew that "Emperor Kublai Khan" wasn't Chinese.
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RMP and Ondolette
Google CIA in Tibet.
You'll get some YouTube hits even. I've never seen them.
http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/concia.html
http://www.whitecranefilms.com/film/circus.html
http://www.friendsoftibet.org/databank/usdefence/usd7.html
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wow. pow wow @ 7:32, and wow to R.P.M. @ earlier 4:29, and Arne is asking about psychotics? Whoa.
O, ondelette @ 7:43, Yowling & Good, and in by curiosity, O, NO kill, no old cats... okay.
O, agreed.
O, Sysprog.
McCain was NOT tortured by the North Vietnamese.
He was not! I met the man, Hai, who was from the North Vietnamese Peoples Committee, and I did spend two months with Hai, who was an interpreter to us American "guest"..... Hai lived outside of Hanoi. For two months in 1990, The Vietnamese were hospitable To us Americans. The POW's during the Vietnam War were very treated well. It's documented too. It's delicate.
Sysprog. You are excellent? Yes.
I love your research. And You Know!
In the buildup 90's war to bomb Iraq,
I was two-months in Hanoi. And Wow!
The officials in any gov. who rise to the top are - mostly scum....bags....
The worker peasantry, or blue collar worker, do get so royally 'screwed'....
I wished I didn't check-in on a Saturday night...O, for a blonde Leffe Ale beer....
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@ondelette
I’m sure you know that I am not trying to justify the invasion of Tibet. I just get tired of our so called objective media giving us observations that are always through Western eyes. We saw an example of not only a tragic invasion in Iraq, but also that you can’t leap into or demand a “democracy” and “freedom” in a country that has been run under totalitarian tribal hands for hundreds and thousands of years.
We wanted Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union to quickly become a democracy and now we have a mafia run government that is on its way back to a totalitarian state. Chinese leadership has chosen a slower approach and harsh methods. Neither you or I are sufficiently knowledgeable about China to know whether the successes that China is having could be accomplished without some of those harsh methods. I think I know enough to say that our standards of human rights would not have worked at this time in China’s economic and political evolution. I also see little reporting that talks about the positive things that are happening in China. It’s easy to say that a one child policy is cruel, but what does a government do with the world’s largest population?
On the whole, the Olympics will benefit China and its progress toward a better life for its 1.3 billion citizens. I understand why human rights leaders and Chinese expatriates want to use the Olympics to try and improve the situation in China. I also know that the Olympic coverage as it has done for other countries will provide positive stories that are not being told. Our government, hopefully under Obama, needs to treat other countries more as equals instead of spouting off how great we are and how everyone needs to be like us.
I greatly appreciate all you do ondelette to fight for human rights and civil liberties as you have done with Pakistan’s Black Flag Week. I just want all of us to not fall for M$M simplicity and allow Serious foreign policy experts to make our relations with other countries worse and then cause more needless suffering and deaths. It seems to me that just as people like to be appreciated for doing something right, that we should do that with countries like China so that we encourage change instead of coercing change.