By Larry
Romanoff, December 26,
2019
Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about
Tibet, with strong opinions often held by those who haven’t been there and
whose knowledge appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press.
The Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled
theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning prayer
wheels in a pastoral idyll. The West’s fascination with Tibet has turned it
into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams and our own spiritual
fantasies. The result is what I call the Shangri-La syndrome (1), millions of
Westerners choosing to believe in an attractive but wholly mythological,
romantic fantasy which has never existed.
The first adjective that would come to mind about
Tibet is ‘desolate’. Those who have been in the far North beyond the Arctic
Circle, or above the tree line in the North American Rocky Mountains or the
European Alps, will have some idea of the Tibetan landscape – which is 10,000
feet above the tree line. There is nothing hospitable about the isolated
conditions or climate in Tibet and few of us would live there by choice. Tibet
is a high-altitude desert with little oxygen, almost no rainfall, and harsh
temperatures. Only sparse numbers of the hardiest animals can survive there
and, in much of the land, the severe climate means that nothing, or almost
nothing, can grow. No one in Tibet has ever seen a tree or even a bush.
Native
Tibetans are not dissimilar to the Mongolian ethnic groups in China, being partially nomadic but susceptible to education
and societal structure with built stable communities. It is noteworthy that few
Tibetans will naturally or spontaneously engage in commerce whereas virtually
all Chinese will do so, leading Westerners to view the Han Chinese shops in
Lhasa as ‘commercial exploitation’ or some such. This is perhaps an aside, but
this is one reason we see no street beggars in China (except for one subset of
Xinjiang Uigurs). Even the most impoverished Chinese old woman will purchase green
onions in a market, lay them out for sale on a cloth on the sidewalk, and live
independently.
The Western press refer euphemistically to Tibet’s
pre-1950 social structure as a benign ‘feudal system’, but it was no such
thing. When Mao went in to clean it up, Tibet was a slave colony. Virtually all
the people were literally owned by the Dalai and other lamas, the people
forbidden to own land, and worked their entire lives without pay. The highest
monks each owned 35,000 to 40,000 slaves.
The level of poverty in Tibet (outside the
monasteries) until the 1950s could not be imagined by Westerners; it would have
to be seen to be believed. Tibetans couldn’t afford fabric clothing, still
wearing sheepskins as they did centuries earlier. Life was brutal, harsh, and
corrupt. Life expectancy was barely 30. The prettiest girls and boys were
confiscated to the monasteries for sex. Education was forbidden to all but the
monks because education was expensive and educated peasants were considered
dangerous to the system. The Dalai Lama prohibited any development of industry
because wealth of the population brought independence from the religion. The
Lamas, however, sent their children to British schools in India, and freely
transferred the Province’s financial assets to British banks.
The so-called Tibetan religion was so intertwined with
government as to be inseparable, and was merely a method of population control
– with more forcible methods when religion failed. To this end, torture was
rampant. For anyone who cares to look, the internet contains no shortage of
photos of the torture rooms, especially at the Potala Palace and Gandan
Monastery, with instruments used for crushing fingers and cutting leg tendons.
There are handcuffs of many sizes, including small ones for children,
instruments for cutting off noses and ears, others for breaking off the hands.
One favorite of the Dalai and other Lamas was an ingenious method of gouging
out eyes. They had carved a special stone cap with two holes that was pressed
down over the head to force the eyes to bulge through the holes, in which
position the eyes were gouged out, after which boiling oil was poured into the
sockets. (2)
Typical daily events in Tibet involved the Lamas and
their thugs rounding up peasants insufficiently enamored with the life to come
and desiring a bit more of the life that is today, normally exemplified by
cutting and extracting ankle and leg tendons, sentencing those people to lives
as creeping reptiles. Another common punishment was severing hands at the
wrists. One example typical of those widely reported was of a man objecting
when a Lama attempted to confiscate his attractive wife to the monastery for
sex. The Lama had the man’s hands placed on a flat stone and beaten with clubs
until they were reduced to a pulpy flesh and separated. For good measure, they
repeated the process with the man’s brother and sister. Both died from the
assault.
Tibet has been described as the darkest slavery system
in human history, one even darker and more backward than medieval Europe and in
some ways even worse than in the US, with no rights or freedom in any form.
Virtually the entire population of Tibet consisted of private property to be
used, sold, given as gifts, used to pay debts or traded for other property. The
Dalai and other Lamas ruled not only their earthly lives with absolute power,
but literally terrorised the people under the guise of rewards and punishment
in their afterlives, in part justifying religious privileges of
breeding at will. Hence the lack of education and focus on religion.
The Dalai Lama was responsible for all this. The US pressure to give him a Nobel Peace
Prize was an obscenity equivalent to paying such respects to the American
Commander of Guantanamo Bay. Many Western news articles refer to the Dalai
Lama as a spiritual leader, but he was never so much that as the former head of
a shockingly inhumane and repressive government. There is literally
nothing published in the popular Western media about Tibet that even remotely
resembles its true history. When the CIA realised their inability to strip
Tibet from China, the Dalai Lama changed his tune to one of freedom for the
people rather than independence from China, but included in that
definition of freedom was a return to the old ‘feudal’ system.
Vintage 1864 Colton Atlas Map: Asia–Russian Empire-Tibet-Arabia
(Authentic)
Tibet had been under China’s governance for many
centuries though it was largely self-managed up to the 1950s, a fact
long-recognised by the world but today conveniently omitted in an eagerness to
disparage China. Even a US Rand-McNally atlas from the 1800s clearly displays
Tibet as a province of China. China’s so-called ‘invasion’ of Tibet in the
1950s is one of the more repugnant examples of historical revisionism promulgated
by the West.
China, through Chou En-Lai, tried for ten or more
years without success to negotiate with the Dalai Lama the freedom from slavery
of the Tibetan people. The
greatest cause of his failure was that the Americans became involved in the midst
of all the discussions, with the CIA training insurgents in Nepal and launching
terrorist attacks in Tibet. It was then, when China finally moved in to stop
the slaughter and oppression, that the CIA engineered the Dalai Lama’s “flight
to India”, which T. D. Allman termed “one of the CIA’s greatest cold war
propaganda triumphs. The Western media were filled with lurid reports of
massacres and desecrations of priceless religious relics.” (3)
China has invested heavily in Tibet’s economic
development, as well as in housing, infrastructure, and education and health
services. The Chinese national government recently built more than 60,000 new
homes in Tibet, given to the people free of charge, to remove them from
poverty, put them together in real communities, and help to protect the
environment. Many Westerners won’t care to hear this, but there is no
oppression in Tibet, and the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard
of living as today.
In Tibet, as in Xinjiang, the government is teaching
Mandarin Chinese to the locals. This is not, as the NYT or WSJ will tell you,
“genocide” of their culture. The Tibetan (or Uigur) language is not being
replaced. Instead, the locals are learning a second language – the basic
language of the nation – to further help remove them from isolation. Religion
is the same. Temples, prayer flags and prayer wheels are so common in all the
ethnic areas in China as to be a nuisance. The only change is that religion has
been separated from politics, most particularly the American terrorist kind.
In truth, China’s government has spent countless
billions trying to bring Tibet out of the Stone Age. Education is now almost
universal, the $4 billion (pressurised) Qinghai-Tibet railway brings in
billions in tourist dollars and finally provides a way to move goods in and
out. Tibet’s economic rate of growth and standard of living are higher now than
in much of the rest of Western China. This is so true that China has pampered
Tibet over the remainder of the undeveloped Western rural provinces like
Qinghai and Gansu which are now poorer than Tibet.
It has been well-documented by many authors that the
CIA and NED fund all the ‘Free Tibet’ groups in North America and Europe.
“A main reason why so many in the West have taken part
in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by
the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist
spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our
fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our
dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they
don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically
spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.” (4)
Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and
substantial CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so
Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational. In
fact, there is an enormous body of documentation, perhaps falling a bit short
of incontrovertible proof, that the sudden violence in Tibet in 2008 was merely
America’s gift to China for the Olympics, rather like their gift to Russia for
the Sochi Olympics. Xinjiang is of course the same, in this case with
incontrovertible proof.
But in fact, Western interference and attempts at
genocide began more than 100 years ago. Few people today seem aware that the
British instigated a war in Tibet in the early 1900s, later boasting that their
machine guns mowed down thousands of Tibetans (who had only knives or sticks),
without themselves suffering a single casualty.
But still, everybody wants to save the Tibetans. In this context, consider the (European)
white man’s record of saving domestic populations: they totally exterminated
the ancient Inca, Maya and Aztec civilisations as well as the Carib Indians and
95% of the North American natives. Australia
exterminated about 90% of their aboriginal people, New Zealand about 75% of
theirs, Canada about the same, and everyone participated in exterminating the
entire race of Tasmanian people, slaughtering every man, woman and child on the
island. It would thus appear much to the benefit of Tibetans that they have not
been saved.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has
been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150
foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well
as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired
management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions
in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting
case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff
lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally
related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia
McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt.
2 — Dealing with Demons).
His
full archive can be seen at
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He
can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(1)
Shangri-la was originally thrust upon the world in the 1933 novel ‘Lost
Horizon’ by British author James Hilton https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Horizon-Novel-James-Hilton/dp/0062113720 who described it as a mystical, harmonious
valley, gently guided by devoted lamas, the name since becoming synonymous with
a mythical earthly but isolated paradise whose inhabitants are virtually
immortal. However, Shangri-la really does exist, a charming town in the remote
NorthWest of China’s Yunnan Province.
(2)
Anna Louise Strong; Tibetan Interviews, 1959; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-louise/1959/tibet/index.htm
(3)
T. D. Allman; A Myth Foisted on the Western World, The Nation Magazine; https://shugdensociety.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/a-myth-foisted-on-the-western-world/
(4)
What if China now is our past and future? Le Monde Diplomatique, By Slavoj
Zizek; https://mondediplo.com/2008/05/09tibet
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
