Notes from the Pig Trough 3

China says that its security apparatus in Tibet is there to maintain law and order, and to preserve social tranquility so that people can get on with their day to day affairs. This is true, but it is only meant to be for the colonialist settler population from China. Tibetans are free to partake of this colonialist "social tranquility" and "law and order" only in as much as they are willing to become assimilated to Chinese society and thus complicit with the occupiers.

Tibetans, in short, are free to do as they wish, so long as it is what China wishes. Right now, China wishes for Tibetan nationality to disappear and become forgotten, while Tibetans themselves become Chinese, or get replaced by Chinese settlers, while keeping just enough local flavor to be of interest to tourists.

The Left has tried to obfuscate what the Tibetan movement is all about. You can tell it's a hoodwink when you have articles that claim to be about the "real Tibet" and that seek to unmask the "myths" about the Dalai Lama and the Free Tibet movement. Many Leftists claim that Free Tibet supporters are being naive and unrealistic, and have no connection to the Tibetan people. Some even go so far as to claim they have lived in Tibetan villages or towns and thus would know what "real Tibet" is all about. The funny thing is that these Leftists' writings and comments are lock stock and barrel exact copies of what PRC propaganda claims about Tibet.

When I read comments like "the Dalai Lama is not the peace promoting monk Tibet supporters think he is" I can only laugh. The Dalai Lama, whether you agree with his ideas or not, leads a fairly open life. Most of us would never lead such an open life, with our keen senses of personal privacy. So to claim he is not as he seems is absurd. Or malicious, since Beijing constantly tries to portray him as the Devil Incarnate.

And to the Colonialist Chinese, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is a thorn in the side of the whole empire building project in Tibet. Because the mere fact that he escaped occupied Tibet and has never returned, speaks volumes about the illegal control China wields over Tibet and its people. The fact that the man exists and visits many places around the world, keeps the question of Tibet alive in the media and among the darling superstar world of politicians and cinema celebrities.

If tomorrow, the Dalai Lama, broke his Buddhist monk vows and told Tibetans to arm themselves and drive out the Chinese, you would see a war in Central Asia within weeks. That is how much His Holiness is still loved by the people of Tibet, even after decades of Chinese re-education and propaganda. He would never suggest such a thing, however...although Beijing and its western running dog apologists would like to convince everyone that it is the Dalai Lama who is stirring up Tibetans into wanting to be separate from China (because, as the Beijing line goes, the Dalai Lama wants to become king again with his people as slaves).

Yeah. As if Chinese occupation, brutality and violent racism against Tibetans has nothing to do with the Tibetan desire to be free of China. As if Chinese settlement and colonization, pushing Tibetans into ever more useless lands, or moving them from the cities to make way for more settlers, has nothing to do with their desire to be free from China. As if the turning of a proud people into living Himalayan tourist trinkets who have no say in their identity has nothing to do with their desire to be free of China.

As if over 2000 years of independent national history and cultural development has nothing to do with the raging fires of rangzen. Fires that will eventually consume the Chinese colonialist enterprise.

What will the apologists for Chinese Tibet say when all of their colonialist work has gone to ashes and the snow lion flag is flown freely over its homeland again?

The cracks in the edifice are growing. The walls seem strong now...but they always do just before they shatter and tumble.

Notes from the Pig Trough: Cracks in "Chinese Tibet"

So long as Tibetans remain in the caricatured boxes Western Buddhists and their supporters have placed them into, they will receive moral and material support as individuals, but never as a nation.

In 60 years, the government of China has managed to convince not only its own citizens that Tibet is an inalienable part of China, but also most of the rest of the world.

It is amazing to see a nation like the USA claim to be fighting for freedom in so many other people's countries...yet turn their backs on Tibet. (We'll fight for Iraqi freedom, but ignore Tibet so that Coca Cola can keep selling their shit water to hundreds of millions of Chinese.)

It is amazing that a free and sovereign nation of millions could become invaded and occupied, with its native people pushed aside to make room for the colonial settlers. And all the while, the nation that is doing this very barbarous thing, China, is accepted by the world.

In Tibet, a once proud and free nation, the penalty for disagreeing that Tibet was ever a separate nation is imprisonment and torture. The penalty for even saying the word "rangzen" (freedom) is imprisonment and torture (if you survive being shot at).

The penalty for telling the truth is death.

I am not the Dalai Lama. I can follow His Holiness' Buddhist teachings while dismissing much of the political views he espouses. His Holiness is very wise, but on Tibet, he is wrong on one most salient point: There will never be a middle path for Tibetan freedom, in as much as there will never be a middle way for Buddhists to let go of what makes them suffer. In some things, the "middle path" is an avoidance of reality.

The reality is that China, despite its claims of "Serf Liberation" and of "Sacrificing" for Tibet, is not interested in Tibetans nor does China care about Tibet other than the land it comprises and the resources that go with that. All development in Tibet, including transit networks, urban infrastructure, education, and housing, are all geared towards a settler population consisting of "internal" migrants from south and southwestern China.

The fact that there were no serfs in Tibet on the eve of China's invasion will make your Chinese friends' mouths drop if you mention it. Tibetans, contrary to decades of Chinese mythmaking and racist stereotyping, were not bound to the land nor to "landowners." But Chinese people can be forgiven for seeing Tibetans by the lights of their own experiences, since Chinese people themselves had lived under feudal slavery for generations.

The entire enterprise of Chinese celebration over liberating and modernizing Tibet can be seen in the same way that European colonialists celebrated their triumph over native superstition and cultural lag. The barbarians are not to be trusted to know what they themselves want. Who would ever not want to be a part of China?

So Tibet, as well as its neighbor, East Turkestan, with whom it shares the misfortune of being a nation being colonized by China (in an age when this shit supposedly doesn't happen) gets to be the Chinese man's burden.

The sad fact is that in all of this, neither China nor the Chinese people have ever even bothered to get to know who the Tibetans really are. There has just been the implicit assumption that they "of course must be proto-Chinese, waiting to be taught how to become really Chinese."

Like many colonized peoples' experiences, the Tibetans have to learn the ins and outs of colonialist Chinese culture and occupation/settler society to survive...all the while the Chinese never have to even move an eyebrow to ever learn what any Tibetan may really think about all of this.

The extent of the colonialist project that China has built is so vast that most Chinese people today would consider the very idea of Tibetan independence, whether today or at any moment in history, to be ludicrous.

But THAT is exactly where the cracks in the facade start to show.

The Tibetans have to negotiate their way through the occupation Chinese every day, knowing the colonialist society on even more intimate terms than most of the settler citizens of that society. The Tibetans know exactly where to hit back. When to bide time and be patient, and when to fight back. The Chinese...can only respond from fear. From a position of ignorance...Since they do not know the heart of Tibetans and can only try to impose what they have proclaimed to be Tibetans' heart.

Mao Zedong was wrong when he mentioned that a lie told a hundred times becomes the truth. Mao Zedong was right when he said a single spark can start a prairie fire.

Abraham Lincoln said "How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?.....

"Four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."

Calling Tibet a part of China does not make it so. Trying to silence the Tibetans and spin their resistance as "a fight for autonomy within China" does not hide the truth that they are fighting for their complete freedom, even after all these years.

I wonder if the American Patriots could have held out for so long.

You may think that the Rangzen Spring of 2008 was Tibet's last stand, but you have only fooled yourselves.

-Hugh Kunsang

Spinning with the spinny people: Tibet

When the Rangzen Spring hit (in March of 2008), I was informed by many people in the "buddhist" community that my outspoken behavior was "samsaric" and not spiritual. For those of you who aren't buddha-nerds or not even Buddhists (unlike me who is one) "samsaric" means I am too focused on this world, as opposed to some buddha-nerd's conception of nirvana. (Sorry, but in Buddhism, nirvana is either here and now, or it simply fucking isn't at all. I realized I have just popped a whole lotta people's bubbles about the so-called Buddhist spiritual quest and all....as if I give a crap about their delusions.)

It got to the point where certain Buddhists quoted New Age truisms to me, claiming that they were Buddhist teachings..all in an attempt to get me to give up my unflinching support for Tibetan Independence. (Yeah, that's right. Independence. As in fully free from China. Nope. Not some stupid fucking "autonomous zone" like the Beijing spags describe it today...but full independence, as is the Tibetan birthright.) I was called "worldly." As if this would sway me.

Now....

What some of those dumb asses never realized is that I have been doing the Buddhist practice thing for a while. And I actually practice it. I mean I really do sit there on the floor for long periods of time. I also not only practice meditation, but I practice the precepts. One of which, in the lineage of Buddhism I follow mostly (as opposed to some others which I am also part of but can't seem to be bothered to remember) is to defend oppressed people...not because it is a religious rule nor because it would make me a better person or any of that stupidity, but simply because I see a wrong being done and I yearn for it to be right. I feel the pain of other beings. Just like I seek to help my own arm if wounded, so other people's pains.

What hit me most about the whole episode was that people were telling me how upset or disillusioned they were with Tibetans, because Tibetans were throwing rocks at police and setting fires to Chinese-owned shops. My question to them was "why do you think Tibetans aren't living on the earth?"

The idea many in the West have of Tibetans is some willy nilly spiritual fantasy that has nothing to do with either Tibet or Buddhism. For instance, in Tibet today, a Tibetan concerned with their own survival may see it necessary to throw a rock through a Chinese bank window (thus reinforcing the idea to Chinese colonists that they can never be safe while in Tibet). I do not understand why so many so called spiritual people in the West would begrudge the Tibetans this resistance. Is it because it makes the Tibetans a real people with real concerns, and not anything like the elves from Tolkien?

The New Age has done a lot to hijack the Tibetan struggle, at least in the minds of Westerners. It's not enough that the New Age gets Buddhism wrong almost every time some dumb assed new age crystal wearing goo goo muck decides to speak about karma. No. Now they have to judge the Tibetans as being wrong for standing up to an aggression that almost makes the Third Reich seem tame.

I once asked some pacifist puke what they thought of Tibetans standing up for themselves by either getting firearms or by destroying the colonists' property. That person actually told me that since Tibetans were being violent, their cause lost its legitimacy.

WTF?

How is it that because an oppressed people will not do what you want them to do, they suddenly become undeserving of freedom?

This may shock the new agers a bit, but Tibetan resistance to China has been largely militant and violent for the past 6 decades, Dalai Lama notwithstanding. While Buddhists seek to avoid killing, there is nothing which says you cannot defend yourself or your loved ones from aggression. There is nothing in Tibetan Buddhism that says "roll over and pacify yourself into playing Chinese."

Tibet was around long before either Tang China, or European peacenik ideas about what constitutes morality. It was a nation and has been on its own for centuries. The Tibetan Empire was vaster than Tang China (despite what today's Chinese nationalists would like to think.)

It is stupid and spinny for another Buddhist to tell me that my support for Tibetan Independence is too caught up in the samsaric world. There is really no other world. And anyone who tries to dissuade me from a truth (Tibet) by claiming I am samsaric, is simply being a fuckwit.

Vomiting China's Lies

Nowadays, reading articles and scholarly works about Tibet, one gets the impression that Tibet is an "ethnic" region as opposed to a nation of its own. This is further supported by the idiotic declarations from the current Tibetan Government in Exile, which claim that Tibet is only an internal affair of the People's Republic of China.

Wow. How far the mighty have fallen. I used to respect the Tibetan Government in Exile, until I realized it had no spine. (The aftermath of the Rangzen Spring of 2008 should have clued anyone in to this fact.) I wonder if the Tibetan Government in Exile has realized the implications of their statements. I mean, since the whole affair is an internal PRC issue, then why in the living fuck does the exile government continue to exist? Silly idiots.

One of the worst absurdities of the whole affair is the attitude now being peddled by China and her supporting scholars that Tibet has been a part of China since "since human activity began." It is no longer good enough to claim Tibet was incorporated into China by the Yuan Dynasty more than 700 years ago (and the Yuan Dynasty is really the name for the period when China itself was under the Mongolian Empire, no matter what today's fenqing like to claim). China is now claiming that the Tibetan imperial dynasty of Lha Tsenpo is really a "coexisting dynasty within China, next to the Tang" much as how in many periods of Chinese history, several warring kingdoms coexisted within the sinosphere. It sounds so nice.

Unfortunately it is complete and utter bull shit.

According to Tang dynasty records, Tibet was a foreign and "barbarian" competitor which had superior metallurgy and weaponry. Tang China and the Tibetan Empire locked horns many times over the lands which until very recently were considered inviolate frontiers between China and Tibet.

I suppose the modern day running dogs of Beijing (and this includes some of the western scholars as much as it does the chinese supporters of the illegal atrocity Tibet has had to endure now for the past 6 decades) think that since Mao said truth is malleable, then all they need do is change the truth to their liking. And they have the wealth and the means to do so, since not many in the world could give a rats ass about a piss poor mountain nation, unless we count those who donate money to Buddhist teachers (so long as they remain spiritual first and Tibetan last).

As many more articles and editorials are written about Tibet and Tibetans since the Rangzen Spring of 2008, it appears that there is a carefully crafted avoidance of the fact that Tibetans inside of Tibet for the most part are striving for complete independence from China, not "autonomy" as is often repeated by the idiot pencil pusher journalists we have here in the West who call themselves "leftists" or "progressives." I guess since the Dalai Lama supports Chinese rule over an "autonomous" Tibet now, this means everyone else should check their brains at the door to this issue.

I guess it means that the cries of RANGZEN (freedom) from the Tibetans living inside of Tibet will continue to be silenced, or mistranslated...so as not to piss off the Beijing government. It is sickening, how many times you can clearly hear in footage of Tibetan protesters the word "rangzen" and yet have some commentator explain that Tibetans want merely their fair share under the PRC. Nice. It is like living in 1984.

Rangzen has become the new word to avoid. It is an obscene word. The Tibetan Government in Exile hates it. The western running dogs of Beijing continue to spin it or downplay it. Or to say that anyone who wishes for the complete independence of Tibet is unrealistic. As for the Chinese, at least they are being honest to themselves. They can't even imagine the idea that Tibet was ever a nation of its own now. And this is the view they are demanding everyone else in the world take. The world doesn't seem to mind either.

It is amazing, really. Months and months ago I warned that China would rewrite the ancient history of Tibet and force every else to accept it. Now that this is happening, I am hearing not a peep of protest from anyone but the Tibetan Rangzen supporters. No one else in our great western democratic countries seems to give a shit.

They may get away with it. Or..rather...it may seem to them and their smug supporters that they are getting away with it. But, the simple truth is still the truth. No disguise can deface evil.