TIBETSPACE

TEN WAYS TO FREE TIBET (8-10)

Below, I've listed the last three of my Ten Ways to Free Tibet.  For the other seven, see the previous two postings.

8.  Avoid double-barreled, dualistic thinking.  Often, the way we conceive of a problem directly shapes the kinds of solutions we envision for that problem.  Clearly, in the Tibetan struggle, we view the Tibetans as the good guys and the Chinese as the bad guys.  There’s good reason for doing that, particularly when one well-armed culture has already slaughtered 1.2 million citizens of another culture and destroyed thousands of its temples and sacred artifacts in the process.  But to conceive of this struggle as essentially Sino-Tibetan, as pitting the Tibetans against the Chinese, will never allow a successful resolution from the Tibetan perspective.  And so for the last half-century, the Dalai Lama and his people have been slowly gaining allies in many countries, developing a multi-faceted response to Chinese aggression.  There is, of course, disagreement within the Tibetan community about what should be done, and viewing Tibetans as having a monolithic voice, most often a voice in agreement with His Holiness’s voice, is yet another problem of dualistic thinking.  Tibetans good and always in agreement about their goodness, Chinese evil and always committed to their evil—of course, it’s not that simple.

The interface between Chinese and Tibetan culture is changing.  Young Tibetans arriving in Dharamsala often speak Chinese and are conversant with Chinese culture, for better or worse.  I met a young Tibetan last summer in Dharamsala who’d arrived in India in 2005, who spoke Chinese, and claimed to have many young Chinese friends in eastern Tibet who are as unhappy with the PRC as the Tibetans are.  He argued forcefully that the future of the Tibetan struggle within Tibet lay partly with the Tibetans’ ability to make alliances with the younger Chinese generation.  In this country, for example, at the University of Virginia and at Harvard, conferences have been recently held between young Tibetans and young Chinese aimed simply at historical understanding and dialogue.  Totalitarian governments, of course, depend upon human oppression, but human oppression is the common denominator for successful political liberation. 

So if we familiarize ourselves with the Chinese dissidents who are living heroic lives in China; if we learn a little more about the reform movements in China that are constantly facing debilitating opposition from the PRC; if we begin to see the human rights struggle as a global initiative with national concentrations, and to see human rights as the common denominator that runs across national boundaries, then perhaps we will begin to find realistic solutions that reflect more accurately the nature of our involvement with the Tibetans and their current struggle with the Chinese.

9.  Understand the technology and get creative with it.  The revolution will be tweeted.  As many of you know,  in Moldova a mass demonstration was organized instantly through Facebook and Twitter, and much of what happened in Tibet before the Olympics was exposed through video and camera phones.  (Read an insightful piece here on Twitter.)  A cell phone is now more dangerous to totalitarian governments than an AK-47.  One of the many things we learned from the Obama election is that viral technology empowers large groups of people who previously had no access to power.  And once empowered, they vote.  If you spend any time on Facebook or Twitter, you also have learned something else:  that the new technology reflects the strengths and foibles of the cultures that adopt it.  The point is that the same mind-numbing technology that allows people to tweet about what their dogs are doing or what sort of coffee they just ordered or what the sunset looks like from a condo on a beach is also the very same technology that strikes fault lines through the Moldovan government.   These “social networks,” as they are called, have enormous organizational and information-spreading potential.  They’re waiting to be developed, applied, and targeted.  We’re at a pivotal moment, I believe, as we’re learning just how influential these networks can become . . . they’re clearly on the radar of most oppressive regimes, and they’re clearly one of the most significant threats these regimes have seen in a long time.

10.  Conceptualize, organize, and contact.  Finally, after all is said and done, nothing replaces political organization, if you live in a country where political organization is viable, and nothing leads to political organization like an old-fashioned petition.  Check out the Care2petition site; there, you can find examples of successful petitions and by clicking on “create petition,” you can design and create your own.  If you want a handbook for political organization, one that lists both strategies and online resources, have a look at Naomi Wolf’s Give Me Liberty.  It’s a good place to begin.

In my next posting, I’ll offer an overview of the logic behind these “Ten Ways to Free Tibet.”

TEN WAYS TO FREE TIBET (1-3)

I continually meet people who want to “do something” about Tibet and the Tibetans.  And who wouldn’t?  An entire people committed, particularly over the last 700 years, to the principles of non-violence, whose homeland has been occupied with varying degrees of brutality over the last half century, and whose leader has become not only an adroit ambassador for his country, but one of the most revered spiritual figures in the world . . . What’s not to like?  And don’t forget:  George Lucas, in Return of the Jedi (1983) had those cute little Ewoks speaking Tibetan. 

So if you google the phrase, “help Tibet,” you’ll get over 8.5 million hits.

Take your pick.  Many of these organizations have made substantial contributions to the Tibetan cause, and there’s a lot you can do that will make a difference.

But having been involved over several decades now, and with dramatically varying degrees of commitment, to understanding what Tibetan culture might reasonably offer Americans, I wanted to offer my own Ten Ways to Free Tibet, and then be done with it.  It’s not a manifesto; it’s not a declaration.  It’s just a list of suggestions that are offered here as tentative answers to persistent questions. 

My working plan:  In this posting I’ll list three suggestions; in the next posting, four; and in the third posting, three, making for a total of ten.  I’ll eventually offer a bit of commentary, a very little commentary, on each item, hoping to provide a picture of the overall conceptual structure that stands behind the entire set of ten.  But for now, here are the first three ways to free Tibet.

1. Set aside 20 minutes and watch the following video. It's a recording of a talk given by Jill Bolte Taylor at a TED Conference on February 27, 2008.  (If you're unfamiliar with TED, correct that problem asap.  Their website contains a library of TED talks, and they're routinely amazing, jaw-dropping, and inspiring.)  Dr. Taylor, a neuroanatomist, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in the left hemisphere, and her description of this experience lays the scientific groundwork for Americans to approach and potentially understand one of the most important legacies the Tibetan philosophers have left us.  Warning:  Don't even think about starting this video if you don't have twenty minutes to give to it because you'll completely ignore whatever you were supposesd to be doing.
2. Memorize this fact:  Before Western explorers arrived in America and began its colonization, noted anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated the population of Native Americans to be approximately 10 million.  By the end of the 19th century, the number had dwindled to 250,000.  Over 9 million Native Americans perished as a result of our arrival on these shores.
3. Memorize this quotation by Mahatma Gandhi:  "The outward freedom . . . that we shall attain, will be only in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment" (from The Essential Gandhi, ed. by Louis Fischer with a Preface by Eknath Easwaran,  p. 165.)

So, the first three ways to save Tibet.  Four more in the next posting.  Stay tuned.

THE DEATH PENALTY, TIBET & AMERICA

When the Chinese courts sentenced two Tibetans to the death penalty recently (check out the BBC report here), an outcry arose immediately among the Tibetan community and has now gradually spread around the world.  Both the Tibetan Youth Congress and Amnesty International have registered their protests against this unfair, inhuman, and brutal practice. 

Amnesty International continues to be one of the agencies that makes public the grim statistics of judicial killing; many countries have their own branch of AI, such as Amnesty International USA.    These are all carefully maintained websites that have devoted themselves to humanitarian causes around the globe, and if you haven't bookmarked them yet, you might think about doing so.  Reading them on a regular basis will have a direct impact on your humanitarian practice, however you wish to define it. 

Have a look at the following video that chronicles the Get on the Bus movement, sponsored by Amnesty International and supporting, among other issues, free speech in Tibet.

Grass-roots movements like Get on the Bus allow, for example, Irene Kahn, Secretary General of Amnesty International, to do her work (see a brief video statement by Kahn here) on a global scale.  With these local initiatives in place, the balance between barbarism and humanitarianism (the two sides are always at war because they are two forces warring within the individual human psyche) can begin to shift ever so slightly toward human dignity and a respect for human life.  In this campaign, the ongoing fate of capital punishment is a kind of yardstick on how we're faring as a compassionate and caring global village.

Several facts and figures regarding the death penalty that you might want to know (all taken from Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2008) are listed below.  Call it a kind of statistical autobiography of the world's spirit:

1. Fifty-nine countries have retained the death penalty for ordinary crimes.  Here they are:  Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad And Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States Of America, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.
2. Only 25 countries of those 59 listed above actually carried out an execution in 2008.  This is seen as a sign that these countries are drifting away from this practice.
3. A disproportionate number of sentences were handed down to the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities in countries such as Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and USA.
4. Regarding the United States:  The current total number of defendants on state and federal death rows is 3,307, of whom 45% are white, 41.6% are black, and 11% are Latino/Latina.  Over 98% of those on death row are male. The states with the largest death rows are California (662), Florida (399), Texas (367), and Pennsylvania (226).
5. The big killers continue to be China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
6. Paradoxically, Asia, the font of non-violent philosophy, leads the world in state-sponsored executions.  More people were executed in Asia than in any other part of the world in 2008.
7. China carried out more executions than the rest of the world put together.

So what can you do?  Read the Amnesty International website.  That's the first thing.  If you're interested in Tibet, then you want to concentrate, for the time being, on human rights violations in China, and AI has a site for that.  And if you're an American reading this blog, you need to be aware of the international perspective on America's own reputation in the human rights arena.  Click here for more details.

It's a global issue.

ANOTHER MONK DEAD BY HIS OWN HAND

Another monk, this time of Amdo Golok Ragya monastery in Gyulgho township, Machen county, Qinghai, committed suicide by drowning himself in the Machu River.  His name is Tashi Sangpo, and he's pictured to the left.

Say a prayer for him.

It's early morning, Saturday, and raining here as I read of this latest suicide in Tibet.  The world, or my world, at least, seems affected by this latest death.  I have previously posted about this unfolding tragedy, and I don't have much more to add.  But the number of Tibetans who find life impossible under Chinese rule seems to be increasing; I don't have any definite figures.  Maybe someone does and will share them with me.

In the final three years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. began to expand his civil rights movement into a human rights initiative that focused on the three evils of racism, militarism, and poverty.  He began to see the deeper links that unite all human suffering.  And began to envsion ways to excavate those links and bring them into public view. 

He began, in fact, the renovation of consciousness within a political arena.  It was a destabilizing initiative, one that sent shock waves through his own community of supporters, and might well have ultimately led to his assassination.  After all, if it's difficult to break a bad habit like smoking, imagine how difficult it will be to stop thinking of anyone anywhere as somehow, someway different from yourself. 

Imagine then trying to break a habit of perception . . . that's what King would ask us to do now, but he wouldn't attempt this in retreat and seclusion.

He'd do it in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

NOW THAT WE HAVE THE VIDEO . . .

Note:  If you haven't seen the new video showing the full extent of Chinese brutality surrounding the March 2008 protest in Lhasa, have a look at it.  It's a graphic video so be forewarned.  For more commentary before you watch it, click here.

We live in a culture of the starkly visual . . . written testimony, word-of-mouth, radio broadcasts, nothing holds a candle to the image.  Since the 19th century, when photography announced itself as our new way of being in the world, our new way locating authenticity in a world that seems increasingly inauthentic, we do finally believe what we see.  And only what we see.

So what do we make of these images?  Do they reveal anything that we didn't know before they hit the wires?  No.  Do they elicit new emotions in anyone who has been following the Tibetan struggle for at least the past year?  No.  Will they spur anyone to action who hasn't already taken up some kind of active response?  Probably not.

So why are these images so powerful, so moving, so deeply affecting?  First of all, the video was distributed by the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, and that gives it the government-in-exile's seal of approval:  a ratcheting up of the Tibetan government's counter-offensive.

But the images also move us because photography and film record, as no other medium can, the unalleviated presence of death in our lives.  In its unscrupulous comprehensiveness, the camera lens looks at death and torture and decay without flinching, without rationalizing, without moralizing.

Tibetan culture in Lhasa is dying an unnatural death. 

And only a camera can deliver that news without crying.

Which leaves the crying to us.  And that is why the video is so powerful, so moving, so deeply affecting.

CALIFORNIA ASSEMBLY RELENTS UNDER CHINESE PRESSURE

The California Assembly, one of the most award-granting assemblies in the country, recently saw a resolution honoring the Dalai Lama--and one sponsored by Sam Blakeslee, a Republican--get "tabled" for further discussion.  Read:  "executed."  According to an article in the LA Times, representatives from the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco had lobbied to have the resolution tabled, and apparently they were successful. China View reports excerpts from the letter received by the California Assembly on behalf of the Chinese government.  Here's a sample of the kind of the rhetoric, long a staple of the PRC, that is shot through the entire letter:

As the world economy faces a grim situation, it is all the more important for the most developed country and the biggest developing country in the world to cross the river in a common boat and proceed hand in hand . . . .

Of course, the Chinese here are being honest in their intimidation.  With the demise of our manufacturing sector, and the rise of our own debtor nation, China has an enormous influence on the health of our economy.  Their threat is direct and forthright:  Unless the U.S. wants the current fiscal disaster to worsen with China's implicit refusal to prop up our faulty financial structure, we must stop this nonsense about the Dalai Lama.  Our response:  Yessir.

The idealist in me feels real anger against those in California's Assembly who folded their tents in the face of China's veiled and bullying threats.  The realist knows otherwise.  The idealist in me makes heartfelt statements about the Tibetans' right to return to a free Tibet--a right guaranteed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights--and the realist in me darkly suspects this will not happen.

But the truth of the matter is fairly simple.  The greed of our corporate excecutives--which is only the public flowering of the materialism that is currently rampaging through America--and their willingness to place private profit over the public good is one piece of a financial debacle that has landed us in China's debt.  And now China is  calling in its markers. 

So our inability to support Tibet, publicly, legislatively, institutionally, often arises from our own greed.

So anger at the Assemblymen of California is understandable, but unproductive.  Attention to our greed, to our attachment to destructive goals and the afflictive emotions that arise from that attachment . . . that's an economy that produces beneficial results.

VIDEO: LOOKING BACK AT HIS HOLINESS

This six-minute video interview, conducted in 1994, gives us a chance to hear the Dalai Lama's message of non-violence long before the 2008 protests occurred both in Tibet and around the world.  Remarkable for his consistency (some might say "stubborness"), His Holiness delivers a very clear and forceful case for his position on non-violence, and states just as clearly that he would never oversee a violent action of any sort.  Notable too is  his statement that one of his central allies in the Tibetan struggle is the world community, a community that he believes is most effectively recruited by the practice of non-violence.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama - a Classic Interview - For more funny movies, click here

CHINA STRIKES HARD

A few quick notes:

China's aggression against the Tibetans in and around Lhasa continues unabated.  Read the report here.  The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy has just released its Human Rights report for 2008.  You can download the Adobe file here.

With the Olympics over and done with, China is ratcheting up its oppressive strategies again.  We all need to make certain that President Obama is aware of our concerns regarding China, so write your Senator, and write the President.  It helps.  On a related note, Kirsten Gillibrand, who has inherited the Senate seat from New York, has ties with Tibet and the Dalai Lama.  Read the story in The New York Times.  She did a report on Tibet as a student and even met the Dalai Lama.

CHINA, OUR CHINA

 While Nixon and Frost are currently in the movie houses across the country, it's well to remember that the United States and China are rather quietly marking three decades of diplomatic relationships, ushered in, of course, by Richard Nixon himself.  Secretary of State John Negroponte was recently in Beijing to commemorate these three decades by watching, of all things, a ping-pong tournament, and one that was designed to mark the "ping-pong diplomacy" inaugurated by Nixon and Chairman Mao (full story here.)

Our relationship with China, of course, has a deep impact on our response to Tibet.  Human rights abuses against the Tibetans are proceeding apace, with the latest installment involving what one source, at least, is calling the "live corpses."  Abused and tortured Tibetan prisoners are now being turned over to their families at the point of death, and their release is being tallied by the Chinese as a freed prisoner.  It's difficult to underestimate the wretched cleverness of the Chinese in matters of this sort.

Americans who actively support Tibetan rights find themselves now between a rock and a hard place.  It's become common for us to see China as a "market," to shrug our shoulders, and to prepare ourselves for the inevitable and ongoing relationship between our two countries.  Have a look at the labels on your clothes, your coffee cups, your running shoes, and see just how implicated you are in supporting China and their policies in Tibet.  Even if you've done all you can to avoid buying Chinese, your fellow citizens haven't, and so the soul you save is your own.  Tibetans are still dying.

But China is not simply a "market," any more than we are (or used to be in healthier economic times).  It's helpful to remind ourselves continually that China is a nation of frequent and frequently suppressed protests; it's a nation whose history seems organized around long periods of fruitful and productive isolation followed by periods of troubled immigration and exposure; it's a nation of some of the bravest and most intelligent dissidents on the world stage.  Example?  Gao Yaojie, or Grandma Courage, as she is known in China.  Here is a woman who has heroically fought for AIDS awareness in China, and at age 81 is still going strong.  Read her story here.  You'll notice that she has all the qualities we associate with the spiritually accomplished:  kindness, compassion, fearlessness, and a wry humor about her lifelong struggle for an open society.

China has many such people . . . they don't control the media, they don't run the government, they don't command the armies, but they are contributing to China's national life, to its pulse, if you will, and we must never forget that.  In fact, we should continually visualize China as a nation with a healthy share of silent liberators. 

It wouldn't be far from the truth; not as I'd visualize it.  Besides, I'm having trouble discovering anything else worth doing.

CHINA SPANKS FRANCE . . . AGAIN!

After crumbling under China's schoolyard bullying this summer, French President Sarkozy sent his wife to meet with His Holiness.  Now, having agreed to meet on December 6 with His Holiness in Poland--not even on French soil--the French President is once again feeling the wrath of the Chinese government.  The language of the current disapproval is true to form:  vague, foreboding, angry, threatening, self-important.  China realizes that the Dalai Lama has garnered Western support for many of his causes, and this of course enrages the Chinese. 

The Tibetan cause, however you define it, is being played out, however you feel about it, on the world stage, with a distinguished group of commentators and power-brokers in the audience.  When we consider the ongoing and epic tragedy in the Congo, for example, and acknowledge how comparatively little attention it is receiving, we also have to acknowledge, as the Chinese have been forced grudgingly to do, that the Tibetan campaign has been waged with considerable skill and adroitness. 

Commentators on the American political scene have already suggested that the Obama campaign, developed over the past four years, is worthy of extended analysis.  Let me suggest that His Holiness's campaign, waged over the last half-century, falls into the same category. 

An honest question:  Has there ever been a similar case, where a people living in utter geographical and political isolation, moves from complete anonymity on the world stage to a position of such widespread recognition and approval as that of the Tibetans in the 21st century? 

We might debate the effects of such recognition, of course.  We might wonder at the motivations involved, both of the Tibetans who engineered the campaign and the Westerners, particularly, who have so eagerly embraced the campaign.  But that the Tibetan crisis has reached the world's attention can't be denied. 

And this, of course, is what angers the Chinese.  Stay tuned, as the Tibetans convene in Dharamsala next week for a very important meeting.  The Chinese propaganda machine will be chugging along at full speed.