TIBETSPACE

IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE: FIVE THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND AS THE REVOLUTION GETS TELEVISED

If you're like me, and you don't work for the BBC or live in Cairo, you might have missed Paul Mason's important blog posting over a year ago, "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere."  The "it" he refers to in the title are the democratic movements that have been sequentially kicking off throughout the Middle East, as well as the "occupy" movements that have popped up around the globe.  Mason has recently published a book on the subject that provides the back-stories for the twenty reasons he cites in his blog.  The book is called Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere:  The New Global Revolutions, and it's a necessary narrative of these movements, the personalities that drive them, and the social media that facilitate them.  Mason's a wonderful writer; he's a field journalist, and his prose bristles with the pressures of living in the field. 

As I was reading the book—which I'd recommend everyone do—I made some notes that ultimately pertain to what's happening in Tibet. Think China, think economic power, think oppression, and how it can be dissipated.

1. Free-market capitalism has gone South, and whenever it decides to return, it will do so badly damaged.  Few people trust it to solve our problems, even those who have profited most by its excesses.  The moment capitalism proves itself an unreliable system for acquiring more profit, the profit-makers will leave it behind.
2. The alliance between the emerging social technologies and the push for self-determination is not exaggerated.  The alliance is real, it's working, and it's undisciplined, so it has problems of implementation that lead to surprising, or unplanned, results.  This is why it seems, at times, chaotic.  But for those who are in the midst of the movement, the so-called chaos has a revisionary energy to it.  Regimes topple because the created chaos makes for a moving target of revolutionary bodies.  Regimes appear orderly in this model, and oppressive.  And they lose.
3. While self-determination and freedom, at least since Thom Paine's Rights of Man (1791), are regarded as natural human rights, the new social technology extends the dream of freedom and self-determination to populations that might previously have found that dream unattainable, unthinkable, or inconceivable.  The technology, in a very real sense, has become for political activists the Liberty-Making Dream Machine.  
4. Old folks, like me, think it's all about "the internet" because we've never gotten over the fact that we can read Tolstoy online, and because our eyes still sparkle when we think about the days before email. To the young people who are currently challenging these oppressive regimes, the internet is nothing more than a cup of coffee: always useful, almost always around, but always unreliable, because it doesn't do what a macchiato will do—focus, drive, and sustain at a very high bit rate.  For political change nowadays, you avoid the firewall by jumping over the firewall with texts, street art, graffiti, memes, music-sharing, and constant movement across the spectrum of expression available to the newly operative, political agents of change. A t-shirt with the right graphic, camera-phoned and messaged across north Africa, does more to promote social change and political reform than any sponsored bill in any deliberative house of duly elected officials.  "Due process" is now a mystifying phrase that in the current milieu has been relegated to a big, dusty dictionary that no one reads.
5. Knowledge is no longer a vertical proposition (except in universities) where you begin on the ground floor and work your way gradually upward through increasing complexities and an expanding network of relevance.  So authority no longer resides at the top, where in the penthouse are gathered those who have survived the trials and tribulations of traditional learning. Authority belongs now to those who most effectively use this text, or that song, or this picture, or that graphic to effect this change.  Period.  The knowledge base now has been levelled—it's a horizontal affair, and its relevance is judged by the changes it effects. If you decide to make the world a better place, most of what you want to read, hear, or see to bring about that betterment is readily available to you without being examined, tested, or credentialed.  Here's the kicker:  to a certain degree, this has always been the case (I'm thinking now about how many writers I love that avoided the American educational gauntlet . . . like, all of them?), but social media encourages visionary renovators to bypass the indoctrination of a standardized American university-think education.  This is a good thing.  And we have the new media to thank for it. So the old road is rapidly aging.  And if you're old like me you know the rest of the lyric. 
6. IMO.

SENATE RESOLUTION 356: SUPPORT TIBET

Senator Diane Feinstein and other senators have introduced Senate Resolution 356 which urges China to cease and desist from its persecution of the Tibetan people and reaffirms the "friendship" between American and the Tibetan people.  I would urge you to write your Senators and ask them to support this resolution.

In a letter that Jamphel Yeshi wrote before he self-immolated recently in New Delhi, he asked that if "you have any empathy, stand up for Tibet."

Here is one way of standing up.  On the right navigation bar of this page, under "Action Corner," you can easily locate your Senators and send them an email.  You may, of course write whatever you wish, but in the interest of time, you may also want to cut and past the following message:

Dear Senator . . . 

I am writing to ask that you lend your support to Senate Resolution 356 which requests, among other things, that the Chinese government suspend its brutal oppression of the fundamental religious and civic liberties in Tibet.  It also asserts that America is a friend to the Tibetan people and does not condone the abuse of human rights that China has visited upon these people.

The Tibetan people are making the supreme sacrifice for the restoration of their liberties, and I feel that is only right that we offer our support in their heroic struggle.

Sincerely, 

Thanks for your help in this important matter.  Feel free to re-blog this or forward the information.

TWELFTH TIBETAN SELF-IMMOLATES IN FRONT OF CHINESE EMBASSY IN NEW DELHI

In New Delhi today, Sherab TseDor, 25, self-immolated in front of the Chinese Embassy. While human rights are always at stake in these protests, the central concern regards the fate of the Tibetans who are currently living in Tibet under an increasingly oppressive Chinese regime.  The young man read a statement before he set himself on fire and claimed that he hoped to join the "eleven martyrs" that had preceded him.  Indian police, however, were able to extinguish the flames, and Sherab is currently recovering from his wounds in a Delhi hospital.  

Sherab marks the twelfth Tibetan to undertake this heroic form of protest.  His action also underscores the close connection felt between the Tibetans living in exile and their fellow countrymen who remain in Tibet.  The mainstream cable channels in our country, where most Americans seem to get their news nowadays, has not covered the Tibetan resistance movement in any depth—it never has, in fact—and it is sad that an originally free people has been denied the kind of coverage that they deserve in our country.  Still, because of the efforts of the Dalai Lama, who is bigger even than American cable, and because of the resolute will of the Tibetan people, both in Tibet and in exile, the Tibetan cause has garnered a steadily growing audience of supporters.

In fact, the newly elected Prime Minister of Tibet, Lobsang Sangay, was in our nation's capitol today to speak to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and the Prime Minister's speech, a long one, is a masterful treatment of American support of the Tibetan cause.  

He reminds the Commission that Tibetans have taken great sustenance from American support over the years:  

In very difficult times, American support keeps Tibetans’ spirits up and their hopes alive – hopes that the future may bring change that will allow Tibetans to reclaim their dignity and their fundamental freedoms.

But Tibet is at a crossroads now, it seems, as the oppression in eastern Tibet is intensifying daily and as the importation of Han Chinese into Lhasa and the surrounding areas continues at a steady pace.  

Now, with the advent of the fire protests, shouldn't we move from being a more or less silent partner to Tibet's goals of freedom and democracy toward a more vocal and insistent advocate of their fundamental human rights?

Wouldn't that do wonderful things for our international reputation?

Surely, now would be an auspicious time for us to begin a more public phase of our support.

CHINA'S ON A ROLL: 'RE-EDUCATING' ELDERLY WOMEN & JUST SAYING NO TO PEACE & iTUNES

With the closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics clearly in sight now, China has gone into a frenzied suppression of all people and all things that might potentially spoil its bid to enter the modern world.  Two elderly women, for example, who were forcibly evicted from their  homes in 2001, have applied five times to stage a protest in the approved 'protest zones.'  Yesterday, these women, aged 77 and 79, were interrogated for ten hours, and ultimately sentenced to one year of re-education through labor (see story here).  I suppose, as the bumper sticker reads, the beatings will stop when the attitudes improve?  And in another report, you'll learn that China has blocked access to the iTunes online store after it was discovered that Olympic athletes were actually downloading the CD, Songs for Tibet, which I mentioned in yesterday's posting.  Silly athletes, in need of re-education.

Also:  not a single protest has been approved in China during the Olympic games, even though promises were made to allow them in the approved areas (a policy that is often in effect in this country as well, although here they are more routinely approved.)

There's more, and I couldn't make this up:  While French President Nicolas Sarkozy declined to meet with the Dalai Lama during his 12-day visit to France because the Chinese--let's face it--told him he couldn't, the job has been handed to the French Human Rights Minister Yama Rade. 

Who? 

Qin Gang, a representative from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, stated that "we hope the French side respects China's concerns and will deal carefully with the important and sensitive issues." 

Read:  We know that the French Human Rights Minister will refuse to speak of the continuing human rights abuses in Tibet and the oppression of the Chinese dissidents in Beijing and elsewhere, particularly during the run-up to the Games, whose essential spirit--if you believe in essential spirits--we have thoroughly and triumphantly violated.

I need to state this clearly for my own benefit: Beijing gets the Olympics and steps up its human rights abuses as protests mount; the IOC remains not only silent, but supportive of the oppressive regime; and China begins a regular, thorough, and unrelenting program of propagandistic abuse of those heads of state who have enough nerve (Nicolas Sarkozy didn't; Gordon Brown didn't) to meet with one of the world's leading ambassadors of peace and tolerance who happens to have under that robe of his a Nobel and Congressional Gold Medal . . .

Does anyone find this cheeky, or bullying, or troubling, or manipulative?

But not to worry:  His Holiness, while in France, will meet with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, heiress, international super-model, and Madame President of France. 

O to be a fly on that wall . . .