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.
 

WATCH THIS VIDEO: TIBETAN (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS

As the Tibetan cause becomes more visible around the world, so too do those commentators who are vying for authority and respect.  As a result of these growing numbers, however, misinformation, disinformation, and progaganda have increased as well, and in the following video you will see Jamyang Norbu announcing the new journal, High Asia, which is devoted to correcting those misperceptions about Tibet and Tibetans that are becoming more and more prevalent online, in books, and on the air waves.  Propaganda does not come simply from Beijing anymore.  It's everywhere, in the most unlikely locations and streaming from the most unpredictable podiums. 

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.

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.

HIS HOLINESS APPEARS BEFORE BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

The Dalai Lama spoke yesterday with a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee charged with filing its annual human rights report.  The committee was charged with taking personal evidence from His Holiness, and as you might expect, the questions are considered, articulate, and insightful, as indeed are His Holiness's answers.  Perhaps you won't learn a lot of new facts about the problems in Tibet, but you will see a dramatic example of first-class diplomacy . . . the back-and-forth reaches the very heights of civil discourse.  Watch the proceedings here.  Once at the C-Span site, click on the link that reads, "British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on Human Rights with The Dalai Lama."

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.

BEIJING'S YELLOW BRICK ROAD

Jamyang Norbu's most recent column, "Negotiation Nightmare," gives ample evidence of the frustration a lot of us felt as Kelsang Gyaltsen and Lodi Gyari returned from their meeting with the Chinese.  I, and many other commentators, felt that these talks were little more than stall tactics, buying time until the Olympics were done.  Norbu gives us a glimpse into the daily reality faced by the Tibetans, both in Tibet and by those Tibetans whose sources of information are a good deal more reliable than mine.  This of course is a reality that these dialogues have done nothing to address:

I have also heard of many hundreds, maybe even a thousand or so men in rural Amdo and Kham hiding out in the mountains, to avoid police and military crackdowns in their districts. There has been the report of a gunfight between Tibetans and Chinese security personnel. A couple of days ago I received an unconfirmed account of two women in a village in Amdo who were harassed beyond endurance by Chinese policemen about religious images in their home. The women stabbed three policemen to death and were themselves subsequently gunned down. In all likelihood it appears that the situation in Tibet will deteriorate further. The situation is deeply troubling especially since there is little or no information on what is actually happening.

Clarification here is needed; much of the material we read on both sides seems convinced that the Chinese or the Tibetans can be persuaded that their policies are wrong.  If only one more body, one more atrocity is uncovered, then they will see!  This I believe is naive. 

Fruitful dialogue is possible only when both parties feel that their fundamental principles are, to some degree, negotiable.   If this spirit of co-operation is absent, there are various ways to induce it, and Norbu proposes one such way in his post.  I mentioned Alisdair MacIntyre in a previous post; he acknowledges that protests can be effective, but that they do not, in their modern guise, win over converts by the force of their logic:

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either.  Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises.  This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this (71).

In other words, if you view Tibetan autonomy as a fundamental political right, and you are talking with those who view autonomy as a direct threat to national unity--their own notion of a fundamental political right--then until one of you concedes his fundamental political right, dialogues are logically impossible.  And conceding fundamental political rights isn't currently the order of the day.

Of course, this is old news, Diplomacy 101.  The negotiations that occur at the table--and this is particularly true in the current situation--are the smallest percentage of the negotiations that are actually occurring.  This is where MacIntyre's sense of protest is important.  Protests are not held to win arguments logically; they are held to compel those who hold opposing views to abandon those views by building consensus against them and showing them ultimately that their power--usually calculated in numbers--is dwindling. Black children were not allowed to attend public schools in the South because Civil Rights workers logically demonstrated to the Klan that such racist practice was inhuman.  Integration occurred because the world finally saw black children facing the business end of high-powered water hoses and skidding across pavement.  The media covered the protests, broadcast the images, and the world responded.  Most of the time, if the world is given a choice between senseless human slaughter and bountiful human life, they will choose the latter.

But until this critical mass of outrage is reached, the Chinese will continue to use the diversionary tactics that Norbu so wearingly recounts in his post.  And because the media have been effectively taken out of the formula with the Chinese crackdown, this critical mass will build much more slowly; therefore, bloggers like Woeser, who I mentioned yesterday, are all the more important.

Like the Wizard of Oz, though, the Chinese are continually asking us to pay no attention to the  man behind the curtain.  But the Tibetans parted those curtains in March, and now the Wizard is asking us to look away (while he shuts the curtains again), to look toward the Olympics, to acknowledge the murderous conspiracies of the Dalai Lama, to remember the feudal society of Tibet.  And in the meantime they're frantically pulling the levers of oppression.

So these are not logical arguments that can be won at a negotiation table or on the streets; to try to win such an argument is to play the Wizard's game.  It's time to get off the Yellow Brick Road. 

Let your argument be the bearing of witness, and let your witness gather strength daily by however you choose the strengthen it.  I'd recommend education, and I'd recommend as a first step to garnering that education, reading Jamyang Norbu's column and the forum that follows his posts. 

MAGICAL MISERY TOUR HITS TIBET

On June 18, the Olympic torch will arrive in Chengdu and begin its two-day journey to Lhasa.  Students for a Free Tibet has provided a helpful interactive map of the torch's route, along with pop-up information on some of the major protest sites throughout Tibet.  This is clearly one of the more abominable rituals in recent international history.  The banality of its evil is off the scale:  this is mental thuggery, pure and simple.

Call your friends, write your Congressman, tell your dog, instruct your children in the fundamentals of righteous indignation. 

TIBETAN ENVOYS HEAD TO BEIJING; TIBETANS DIE IN TIBET; GEORGE ORWELL RETURNS

Since the problems in Tibet arrived on the world stage in early March, I have found myself wishing that George Orwell were still with us and that his keen eye might survey the situation and tell us all what to think.  Totalitarianism, empire, human survival, human dignity, human freedom--these were his subjects, and he wrote about them all of his life.  And he wrote about them with great passion and great clarity, two qualities that most often exclude one another.

But we have Orwell's writing, and so we have the best of the man, and while all totalitarian governments are not the same, much of what Orwell wrote applies directly to the current situation in Tibet.  One of Orwell's most well known essays, "Notes on Nationalism," is directly pertinent here.  It was written in May 1945 on the heels of the Second World War, a period of time ripe for reconsidering the relationship between an individual's freedoms and the demands of the state.

Orwell begins by describing the difference between the terms "nationalism" and "patriotism."  And he does so, helpfully, by clarifying the human--very human--behavior associated with each term.  He begins with "nationalism:"

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classfied like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad.'  But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean the habit of indentifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

It is not difficult to see the parallels here between this defintion of nationalism and the   Chinese conception of it as evidenced by their behavior toward the Tibetans.  Patriotic re-education programs, museums designed to bolster Chinese nationalist chauvinism, the imprisonment, torture, and execution of those Tibetans who publicly support the Dalai Lama . . . all of these activities are perfectly in accord with the will to classify human beings as insects, and then classify the insects as good or bad, harmful or harmless. 

But what about patriotism?  Here is Orwell:

By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.  Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.  Nationalism on the other hand is inseperable from the desire for power.

It is a short step from patriotism to nationalism, and the stepping stone is power, the desire for it, the plan to achieve it, and the lack of regard for human suffering that occurs in the acquisition of it.

The Tibetan monk pictured above, whose name is Choetop and who was recently shot and killed by the Chinese, was a patriot who died at the hands of Chinese nationalism.  Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is offensive.  There is a lot of confusion now in our own national dialogue about these two terms, and we would be well advised to examine the American abuse of these terms as well. 

Remember, though, that whenever we go to war to force our way of life on others, this is an act of nationalism and has nothing to do with patriotism.  And a lack of enthusiasm for such wars will be advertised by the administration as a lack of patriotism.  A bait and switch of the highest order and the gravest consequences. 

As the Tibetan envoys head for China, we are witnessing the meeting of Tibetan patriots and Chinese nationalists.  The Tibetans have so far proven themselves unsusceptible to this bait and switch, and they have suffered the gravest consequences for having done so.

Our prayers go with them.  May their vision and bravery endure.

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.