TIBETSPACE

TYC TO LAUNCH 2ND PHASE OF TIBETAN PEOPLE'S MASS MOVEMENT

Mr. Tsewang Rigzin, President of the Tibetan Youth Congress, today announced in Dharamsala, the second phase of "The Tibetan People's Mass Movement."  On July 28, Tibetan protestors will begin an "Indefinite Fast for Tibet--Without Food and Water," as a kind of preliminary action to a full-scale demonstration, based on Gandhian principles of satyagraha.  The demonstration will begin on August 7, 2008, the day before the Olympics open in Beijing.

The TYC is the largest Tibetan NGO outside of Tibet, and has long advocated independence for Tibet.  While they differ with His Holiness on his bid for autonomy, the TYC has always respected His Holiness's opinions and recognized him as the greatest living benefactor of the Tibetan people.  This recent announcement is extremely important as it represents the final initiative before the Olympics begin.  It is important that the world's attention be turned toward the Tibetan community during this time.  In the months following the March 10 demonstrations in Tibet, the Chinese were visibly surprised by the general outrage shown around the world, and it is time to rekindle this response.

And remember:  the Olympics in Beijing bring up several instances of racial and cultural suppression at the hands of the Chinese empire, and it's incumbent upon all of us to recognize that awareness of this widespread oppression provides us with more leverage in bringing awareness to the Tibetan situation.  So we should all applaud Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for seeking an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the President of Sudan on charges of genocide.  This is a brave and necessary step, and even if it has little immediate effect on Darfur, it serves notice to the world that the ICC has taken its role seriously.  China of course is directly implicated in the slaughter in Darfur, and while this action will have little impact on the Tibetan situation, it brings China's brutal foreign policy schemes into the light of day.  This can only benefit all those who suffer under the Chinese yoke.

Also, thanks to Agam's Gecko for alerting us to another racist policy well under way in Beijing as that city buckles down for the Olympics.  Here's an excerpt:

Bar owners in Beijing are now being forced to sign pledges to ban black people and Mongolians from their establishments. Question: Wasn't it the apartheid laws which disqualified South Africa from Olympic participation not so many years ago? Can we now disqualify China, or is there a double standard somewhere?

Excellent question, vital information.  With approximately three to go before the Olympics begin, it's important that our thoughts and prayers--and actions--take notice of the larger arena of human oppression.   Shaping the proper consciousness  doesn't require us to be on the front lines, and without the proper consciousness, nothing of  lasting importance will be accomplished.
 

U.S. REPRESENTATIVES MILLER (D-CA) & SENSEBRENNER (R-WI) INTRODUCE TIBETAN REFUGEE ASSISTANCE ACT

Representatives George Miller and Jim Sensenbrenner introduced a bill (HR 6536) in Congress to provide visas for 3000 Tibetans to enter the United States.  The bill comes on the heel of earlier legislation  (SR 504) calling for China to cease their persecution of Tibetans currently living in Tibet.  "The Tibetans face severe persecution under the Chinese government," Representative Miller said, "and must be recognized by the United States for refugee assistance. I am honored to have the opportunity to work with Rep. Sensenbrenner and our other colleagues to address this particular problem and I look forward to working with the State Department as this bill moves forward."

Bills, of course, move slowly through their stages, but I applaud Congress's long-term support of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people.   And  visas themselves take a good deal of time and patience in the post 9-11 era,  but Tibetans, as I currently understand the phrase, can apply for political asylum in the United States, and I would assume that this would become an option for many who are granted a visa.  As a refugee, their status is clearly defined (this comes from the Refugee Act as amended in 1996):

'a refugee' means a person who, owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his or her nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his or her former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it . . .

Tibetans are roundly considered to fall under this definition, and we would hope that our country might eventually become a safe harbor for those Tibetans who would wish to come here.

 

CHINA: EARTHQUAKES, NUCLEAR TESTS, CONSPIRACY THEORIES & A MEDIA NARCOSIS

The story at this point hasn't got legs, and isn't likely to find them, but rumors have circulated recently that the earthquake in China was caused by an underground nuclear test carried out by the Chinese military.  Have a look at one of the recent articles here.  As you'll see, the story has all of the elements of a good conspiracy theory--unexplained physical evidence, suspicious troop movement in the area, anonymous sources defined as "experts," anecdotal evidence everywhere--but it is nonetheless a good story. particularly now that Iran is lobbing missiles through the empyrean air over the Middle East. 

'Tis the season to be testing, apparently.

And not only nuclear missiles . . . China has recently evidenced the kind of talent for hair-splitting that would test the mettle of the best American Sophists who are still wondering what our definition of "is" is.  China has now announced that they will be happy to talk about His Holiness's personal future, but certainly would have no interest in discussing Tibet's future.  Revel in the rollicking embarrassment of it all here.

A teaser from the article:

The Chinese official averred that the Tibetan people had overthrown the 'theocratic system' and established the "People's Republic" in Tibet in 1959.

'He has lost all right to negotiate on the future of Tibet,' Dong said.

You decide not to respond to this because you don't have the time, the patience, or the  emotional reserves it takes to stoop this low, right?  Errors of this nature are like those errors that crash your computer . . . they're so egregious, so viral, so malevolent that they will certainly and clearly crash the engine that's spreading them, right?

Probably not.  Have a look, for example, at the popular perception of Barack Obama in the United States.  Twelve percent of both Democrats and Republicans currently believe he's a practicing Muslim.  Thirty-six percent are convinced he attended a Muslim school while he was living in Indonesia.  And when The New Yorker cover hit the stands yesterday, the firestorm that erupted over its bungled intention--Or was it bungled?--showed just how ready we are to believe whatever we wish to believe without seriously considering the evidence.

There is a further danger.  The popular media--I can't and won't attempt a definition of this phrase--so draws us out of our ourselves, so thoroughly interrupts any moment of potential introspection that might haphazardly arise in our lives, that we are losing the unique analytical powers that introspection bestows upon us.  And here's the stinger:  I don't see those powers returning, not as our culture's common inheritance, without each of us making eccentric and individual commitments to bring it back.

And of course individualism and eccentricity are what the popular, homogenizing media fears the most.   

Weariness with the Chinese obfuscation is symptomatic of this.  Constantly overload your media victims--that's what we are, victims of the media--with patently absurd and obviously time-wasting assertions, and soon you'll have us where you want us:  in a state of media narcosis where snippets of Jon Voigt's fascination with his estranged grandchildren are entwined seamlessly with reports of forced sterilization in Tibet.

Here's the problem.  The brain is a highly capable organism, and it can multi-task with the fluency and speed of a computer, but it's not so good at quality control, particularly when the incoming data stream is a corporate mixture of sludge, trivia, tragedy, and tears (this latter, of course, the staple of the American afternoon talk show).  China's rhetoric--and don't kid yourself, it's working--is no different from McDonald's rhetoric in its essential technique:  overload, overload, overload the air waves with fatuous claims and misleading suggestions, and while there'll be those who monitor and scoff, the media deployed in this fashion is akin to a kind of intellectual carpet-bombing:  some will escape, and pride themselves in having escaped, but most will succumb.

So in America, where we gallantly try to divert attention from our $250 billion trade deficit with China by periodically suggesting to the Chinese that the Tibetans have feelings too, we're drowning in a de-regulated media.

It is tiring, of course, to point out all of the small inaccuracies and tragic lies coming from the Chinese leadership, a stream of propaganda that seems recently to have grown in quantity and boldness as the Western leaders back off their threats of a boycott.  It is so tiring in fact that I often feel that it's no longer worth the effort.  Won't Americans see through this anyway?

No, they won't.  So this, then, is our fight.  The media fight.

Most of us aren't on the ground in Tibet; most of us aren't confronting the Chinese security forces on a daily basis, fearing for our lives.  I don't think we should ever forget that simple fact.  That is not our fight.

We're dealing with the media, our own front lines.  And that's a very different enemy, one that requires very different strategies for victory.  But that's our fight, should we choose to enlist. 

WATCH THIS VIDEO: KESANG YANGKYI TAKLA SPEAKS OUT

Part of the modern neurosis derives from our ability to be a spectator of calamities, atrocities, and abuses that occur in other countries, other cultures, other neighborhoods.  For the past 150 years, journalists have served up the fare that now crowds our living rooms, spilling out of the TV, leaping off the newspapers . . . bodies in varying degrees of dismemberment, exploded cars, decapitated buildings, and all the while many of us safely viewing the carnage with every imaginable human reaction.  Mostly we look away, make a resolution or two, and fear for the future.  Or rather, our future. 

Because the pain of others most often isn't personal.

Except when it is.  And for one reason or another, the pain of the Tibetan people has become deeply personal to many around the world.  Yet at times, one senses a weariness, a nagging notion that the images of atrocity won't stop, that resolutions will not be reached, and that a kind of incipient apathy is seeping into the dialogue of even the most committed.  These images work on us invisibly, they fly into our psyches well below our daily radar, and they have their effects.  They have their way with us.

I suspect that at times like these when the resistive energies are low--and failed boycotts suggest such times are upon us--it is a good thing to learn how to listen all over again.  The video below is a good place to start.  The woman speaking is Kesang Yankgyi Takla, Minister of Information & International Relations of the Central Tibetan Administration; she was in Tokyo in early July when this was recorded.

CRACKDOWN IN TIBET, SEVEN PEACEKEEPERS DEAD IN DARFUR & BUSH IS OFF TO BEIJING

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for reminding their readers, as the outcry for the Beijing boycott has faded to a whimper, of the unique opportunity our leaders have missed, an opportunity that might have aligned us, however fleetingly, with the global struggle for human rights.  It should be noted, however, that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, have made it abundantly clear that their absence from the Opening Ceremony has nothing to do with a boycott.  And while the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose country has a substantial Tibetan population, has declared his intention to boycott, one Canadian newspaper has called his gesture empty and meaningless, and implored him to attend.  As the Times points out, boycotting the Opening Ceremony would seem the perfect compromise, making a clear statement to China, while allowing the athletes to perform their appointed tasks.  To walk away from such a humanitarian opportunity this rare, to turn a blind eye to these blatant, long-term, and highly organized programs of human oppression, seems inexplicable and indefensible to me.

At the very least, this should be pointed out with mechanical regularity. 

THE BOYCOTT BROUHAHA

Having just returned from an extensive 3-week trip to India, I was disheartened, angered, dismayed, confused, but unsurprised, I guess, to see that Bush has announced that he will, in fact, attend the Opening Ceremony in Beijing.  "He believes he's going to China to support first and foremost our athletes. He sees this as a sporting competition," said spokeswoman Dana Perino.  It doesn't matter whether Bush sees the Olympics as a "sporting event" or not--it's entirely typical of the man to resort to simplistic, literal-minded language when confronted with complexity of any sort--but it does matter that his advisors have decided to side with China on this issue.  We all, of course, know why they have done so, and the reasons are unflattering:  money & power, both of which China has far more abundantly than Tibet.

The damage done by such a decision will not be immediately apparent to a President who believes that the Olympics are a series of athletic contests because the damage done here concerns the relationship between our national language and our national consciousness.  George Orwell spent a great deal of his time and energy worrying about the kinds of damage that political language inflicts on a country, and what he has to say in "Politics and the English Language" is directly pertinent to the current problem.  Here , Orwell is talking about the typical political speech, the kind that we all have grown to dread and decided largely to ignore whenever we are confronted with it:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.  Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.  Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.  Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:  this is called pacification . . . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

And so the Olympics, to our President, are a "sporting competition."  The mental picture of the Olympics, however, goes something like this:  the state-sponsored crackdown in Tibet, the arrests, the detentions, the torture, the refusal to negotiate in a meaningful way with the Dalai Lama's envoys, the fundamental denial of human rights to the Tibetans, the continual stream of 3000 Tibetans a year down into India, the forced sterilization and abortion programs in Tibet, the denial of education to Tibetans . . . all of these atrocities are bracketed, minimized, and overlooked when the Olympics becomes a "sporting competition," and our heads-of-state arrive in Beijing for the party.  The wink-and-nod between the Chinese and the visiting heads-of-state as they arrive in Beijing in August will simply nauseate.

It might well be, as some have argued, that the Chinese have become too powerful to snub in this fashion.  That the consequences for such a snubbing too grave, too serious.

I, for one, am thankful that such reasoning never held sway with Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela,  Desmond Tutu,  Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Elie Wiesel, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few.

WATCH THIS VIDEO

This video runs for just over 48 minutes, has been viewed widely in Europe, and contains both well known and unseen footage.  Watch it in short sessions, watch it all at once, watch it when you have the time, but please watch it.

A CHINESE MUSEUM OF TIBETAN HISTORY? THEY AREN'T KIDDING.

If you've been following the recent arguments regarding Sino-Tibetan history, and if you've realized gradually, or suddenly, that history--or what happened--amounts to little more than historiography--or how you write up what happened--then you've probably been a little confused from time to time.  Was Tibet ever an independent nation, as we currently understand the term?  If so, when?  What is the difference between sovereignty and independence?  How do we come to a reasonable estimation of these rather complex problems?  You need to read John Powers' book, History as Propaganda.  Coming in at 160 pages, and published in 2004, the book is relatively current and a manageable size.  Plus, it's clearly written.

As long as we're on the subject of history, it's worth noting that the Chinese have developed some long-range plans regarding the rewriting of their own history.  We all became so enamored of the Grace Wang story in The New York Times on April 17, that we missed the other story that ran directly beside it:  "New Museum Offers the Official Line on a Region."  Here's the second paragraph from that article, describing the contents of Beijing's first museum devoted exclusively to Tibet: 

Inside, curators will display antiquities, dynastic records and reproductions to demonstrate China’s dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. Many experts question China’s historical claims, but few clouds of doubt are likely to darken the museum. Even the Dalai Lama is being edited out of the narrative.

That's right.  The Chinese are doing a Tibetan history museum.  Of course, the Cultural Revolution comes to mind here, and the reports that we've been receiving concerning the forced re-education programs currently going on in Tibet are also relevant.  To see a graphic example of history-as-narrative, have a look at the comparative numbers of the Deaths / Injured / Detained in the recent struggle.  This represents historiography in action, and as the numbers change so too does the indicated reality.  Political structures are defended, explained, exonerated, and rationalized by narrative, and a museum is one of our most powerful narratives.  Ever been to one of those old, out-of-the-way Native American museums in the West, and seen Native American culture represented by a glass case of arrowheads?  You get my point.

That's why it's important that we inform ourselves, as best we can, of the history that we're concerned about here.  The Chinese are working overtime to produce the counter-narrative of lies, misinterpretation, and unbalanced opinion.  And we have to understand where their mistakes lie, and whether they can be corrected, and if so, how so.

The best way to do that is to read.  Read the history, read the philosophy, read the  blogs.  An informed opinion is worth far more than a bumper-sticker because an informed opinion is derived from an evolving narrative, and an evolving narrative, an evolving understanding of the problem, is nothing more nor less than an evolving reality.  And who could ask for more? 

An old blues player I knew once said that if you hold a wrong note long enough, it'll eventually sound OK, and the band will adjust to your mistake.  That's the hope of the Chinese.  That we'll all eventually adjust. 

But it's best, my friend confessed, to hit the right note the first time.

The Chinese are very adept at holding these wrong notes for a very long time.  But we don't have to play along, we don't have to accept their ineptness at historical narrative.  We don't have to buy their oppressive histories.

But we do have to author our own understanding of these histories.  We do have to participate in whatever way we can. 

This, of course, is what the Chinese fear the most:  the truth of understanding.  And this is what is available to all of us who live in a liberal democracy. 

HOUSE RESOLUTION 5668--BOYCOTT THE OPENING CEREMONIES

On April 1, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), along with six other co-sponsors, introduced into the House of Representatives, a bill supporting the boycott of the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics.  The bill, if passed, would prohibit federal government employees and staff from attening these ceremonies. 

To read the full text of the bill go to OpenCongress.  The other states represented by the co-sponsors are Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, California, and New York, and it's a bi-partisan effort as well with five Republicans and two Democrats.

TAIWAN FLEXES ITS MUSCLE, SCOLDS CHINA OVER TIBET

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian today scolded China, not only over their human-rights violations, but also specifically over China's Tibet policy.  And he did this while attending a reception at the Vatican embassy in Taipei, calling on the Pope to condemn China's recent actions in Tibet:  "China's bloody crackdown on Tibetan people last month has shocked the world. Hereby I would like to call on His Holiness the Pope to condemn violence, and to encourage the search for a solution with the aim of protecting peace."  Regardless of President Chen's political motivations for making the statement, the international call for a Tibetan solution has arrived in China's backyard now, and as the external pressure mounts, we can expect an equal and opposite pressure to push back from the interior of Tibet--a kind thermodynamic theory of foreign policy that is wreaking havoc on the Tibetan people.