The Tibet myth

[Ignoramus]

In the Dalai Lama's Tibet, torture and mutilation---including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation of arms and legs--were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, runaway serfs, and other "criminals." Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: "When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion." [19] Some Western visitors to Old Tibet remarked on the number of amputees to be seen. Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then "left to God" in the freezing night to die. "The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking," concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [20]

Some monasteries had their own private prisons, reports Anna Louise Strong. In 1959, she 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, and breaking off hands. For gouging out eyes, there was a special stone cap with two holes in it that was pressed down over the head so that the eyes bulged out through the holes and could be more readily torn out. There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disembowling. [21]

...

Elites, Émigrés, and CIA Money

For the Tibetan upper class lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Those feudal elites who remained in Tibet and decided to cooperate with the new regime faced difficult adjustments. Consider the following:

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited the Central Institute of National Minorities in Beijing which trained various ethnic minorities for the civil service or prepared them for entrance into agricultural and medical schools. Of the 900 Tibetan students attending, most were runaway serfs and slaves. But about 100 were from privileged Tibetan families, sent by their parents so that they might win favorable posts in the new administration. The class divide between these two groups of students was all too evident. As the institute's director noted:

Those from noble families at first consider that in all ways they are superior. They resent having to carry their own suitcases, make their own beds, look after their own room. This, they think, is the task of slaves; they are insulted because we expect them to do this. Some never accept it but go home; others accept it at last. The serfs at first fear the others and cannot sit at ease in the same room. In the next stage they have less fear but still feel separate and cannot mix. Only after some time and considerable discussion do they reach the stage in which they mix easily as fellow students, criticizing and helping each other. [42]

The émigrés' plight won fulsome play in the West and substantial support from U.S. agencies dedicated to making the world safe for economic inequality. Throughout the 1960s the Tibetan exile community secretly pocketed $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama's organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual share was $186,000, making him a paid agent of the CIA. Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan exiles. [43] He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked with the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment. [44]



I'm stealing this link from a guy an a different liberal web site and reposting it here. Read the whole thing, or note the parts toward the ending where Mr. Parenti's position on the issue is elaborated:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Parenti_Tibet.htm

[aquart]

1. Not unlike Batista's people who fled Castro.

We have a silly tendency to consider an ultra-orthodox religion as holier than us. The Amish, for instance? Ultra orthodox Jews? Cloistered nuns?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The same for absolute religion.

[applegrove]

2. Um - not. Tibetans have bureaucracy and history like any other group

in the world. They also have a history of peace-making. And yes - the church hierarchy was like a hierarchy of old. And yes they had prisons.

They also have a whole lot to offer the world in terms of culture. They were not a rich, rich, rich, place and yet they developed a culture of sharing and peace & love - even when most Tibetans had "less that not much" in the way of resources.

We need these lessons more so than ever. The world is heading to being completely resource poor. How will be handle it? With War? With Peace & Love?

And yes the CIA would be involved with the Dali Lama. USA was the world cavalry at the time and they helped anyone who was opposition to communism. That would be absolutely normal.

And yes - many of the first refugees from Tibet were middle class or business owners. Because Mao walked in and targeted those very people for isolation and destruction of private property. That is also normal for communist takeovers.

How will we live together when the soil is so poor it can barely sustain us. What will be the guiding principle? Greed or love? "It is better to kill the very, fewest animals and only when you need them to survive - take one soul over many if you need it to live and feed your family." Scary stuff! Tibet gives us ideas. So obviously, like the Red Cross, it must be targeted for destruction.

[applegrove]

3. No - the mob was all over Havanna. Drugs, Mob, elites, and nothing

for the poor.

[Ignoramus]

4. Maybe you didn't read much of the article

or you are contradicting it's claims without justifying your claims.

Here's some more, which doesn't sound much like a culure of sharing and peace & love.

In 1953, the greater part of the rural population---some 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000---were serfs. Tied to the land, they were allotted only a small parcel to grow their own food. Serfs and other peasants generally went without schooling or medical care. They spent most of their time laboring for the monasteries and individual high-ranking lamas, or for a secular aristocracy that numbered not more than 200 families. In effect, they were owned by their masters who told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. A serf might easily be separated from his family should the owner send him to work in a distant location. Serfs could be sold by their masters, or subjected to torture and death. [14]

A Tibetan lord would often take his pick of females in the serf population, if we are to believe one 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf: "All pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished." They "were just slaves without rights." [15] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture and forcibly bring back those who tried to flee. A 24-year old runaway serf, interviewed by Anna Louise Strong, welcomed the Chinese intervention as a "liberation." During his time as a serf he claims he was not much different from a draft animal, subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold, unable to read or write, and knowing nothing at all. He tells of his attempts to flee:

The first time [the landlord's men] caught me running away, I was very small, and they only cuffed me and cursed me. The second time they beat me up. The third time I was already fifteen and they gave me fifty heavy lashes, with two men sitting on me, one on my head and one on my feet. Blood came then from my nose and mouth. The overseer said: "This is only blood from the nose; maybe you take heavier sticks and bring some blood from the brain." They beat then with heavier sticks and poured alcohol and water with caustic soda on the wounds to make more pain. I passed out for two hours. [16]

In addition to being under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land---or the monastery's land---without pay, the serfs were obliged to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. "It was an efficient system of economic exploitation that guaranteed to the country's religious and secular elites a permanent and secure labor force to cultivate their land holdings without burdening them either with any direct day-to-day responsibility for the serf's subsistence and without the need to compete for labor in a market context." [17]

The common people labored under the twin burdens of the corvée (forced unpaid labor on behalf of the lord) and onerous tithes. They were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child, and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a new tree in their yard, for keeping domestic or barnyard animals, for owning a flower pot, or putting a bell on an animal. There were taxes for religious festivals, for singing, dancing, drumming, and bell ringing. People were taxed for being sent to prison and upon being released. Even beggars were taxed. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being placed into slavery for as long as the monastery demanded, sometimes for the rest of their lives. [18]

The theocracy's religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their foolish and wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as an atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve upon being reborn. The rich and powerful of course treated their good fortune as a reward for--and tangible evidence of-virtue in past and present lives.

[onager]

5. But the Dolly Llama must be a great guy!

I saw him get a HUGE endorsement from that veritable symbol of peace and love, and well-known religious philosoper--Steven Seagal! (Pronounced "Say-GALL.)

:rofl:

Penn & Teller's Showtime series Bullshit! summed up the Dalai Lama perfectly. It went something like this:

"When the Dalai Lama lost his CIA funding, he needed money. So he turned to the one group of people even dumber than the U.S. government--Hollywood celebrities."

[sweetheart]

6. Tibet as an occult power place

Tibet, with an average altitude of 13,000 feet, is a sacred desert, and
in places, such as the region around mount Kailas, a place so profoundly
beautiful, that it has moved many persons to deep and beautiful
realizations.

The earth has several wheels, or powerplaces of occult significance,
amongst them the colorado river basin in utah is such a place, one where
any individual may attempt to use the power of that place for magic, or
sorcery, depending on their ilk.

Whatever is that roof of the world, a sacred place so powerful that
all who posess it are corrupted and fail with time.

Theologically then, tibet is a mytical device, here on the other side
of the planet, an ideal, as might as well be atlantis. Plato had his
myth of a conceptual utopia, and so we wash away the dirt from tibet
that it stands as a sort of mythical device, one combined with tragedy,
genocide, and the last vestiges of enlightened mysticism of parts of
the old tibetan culture.

And might it be a bit odd, for a culture that even today keeps more of
its blacks in prison, to be priggish about some buddhists who survived
for so many hundreds of years without committing any mass acts of
genocide such as using nuclear weapons.

Ironic it is even more that china has made tibet a giant nuclear
missile launching pad. And if the asian nations could ever unite,
and share the unity of their fortune, woe be to any ex-slave nations
in the west. In our new world of porus borders, so many buddhas are
able to avoid the genocides and the wars, that no nation is that
utopia. None. Or rather it is the storyteller's tibet, where on
every mountaintop were enlightened buddha's, people living in harmony
with the spirit, and a wilderness of untamed and sacred desert.

Who is to say, that tibet has moved from asia in to the hearts of
men and women, nurturing them to transcend the empty mediocrity of
materialist post-modern dystopia. So all people from tibet are
sacred people, and we ourselves are from tibet, all of us, in a great
transcendence of nationality to share in neo-buddhist goodwill. :-)

[moobu2]

7. They'd still

have to do a couple of more hundred years of killing and maiming to catch the Catholics.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Nah, they're the Minardis of religious violence.

Protestants and Muslims, on the other hands, are serious contestants. Hindus look like a credible midfielder, like Red (Sacred?) Bull.