The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    A Brief Introduction to Tibet Archived Message

    Posted by Tomski on December 27, 2019, 12:07 pm

    Fascinating article. I recall Michael Parenti being critical of the old Tibetan feudal system in one of his podcasts. More gory details here.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/brief-introduction-tibet/5697967

    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)

    Etc.

    Message Thread: