There are a couple of things I’ve always been unable to be a good liberal about; to be fair, I’ve always been pretty firmly convinced they’re only associated with liberalism in the US because of their association with the counterculture; the anti-nuclear movement, for instance, has always seemed a little bit panicky and irrational when it comes to viable (if not quite optimal) alternatives to filthy, destructive use of coal and oil. But far more unsettling to me has always been the American liberal enthusiasm for the Dalai Lama.
Tenzin Gyatso is an interesting figure, as any theocrat tends to be; this is, in large part, because his political movement has made a deliberate effort to present itself in different ways to different people. To the Tibetan people, he’s always had a very firm public image: he promises a return to tradition, moral order, and the end of Chinese and Hui Muslim presence in Tibet. When one presents Mr. Gyatso to the typical left-winger this way, they’re much more leery about supporting him. After all, I doubt anyone you’d want to get trapped in an elevator with would willingly sign up to demonstrate for the Pope’s right to establish an isolationist theocracy in Sicily, expel the Tunisian and north Italian minority, and close off the Straits of Messina to interlopers.
But history was kind to Tenzin Gyatso, as it generally tends to be to the sort of person who powerful monks become convinced is a reincarnation of their god-king. His rule coincided neatly with two extremely useful phenomena: first, the rise of Maoism in China, and second, the rise of the New Age movement in the West. The former made Gyatso from a theocratic pretender in the middle of nowhere to an ideological martyr for those convinced the Communist Chinese were mentioned by John in the Apocalypse; the latter made him from an uninteresting old doctrinaire with little to offer the world any random prince-in-exile could not (besides an interesting accent) to a completely mystical guide to a people who were, all of a sudden, not really religious - but Spiritual.
This is the problem with Gyatso. A lot of people are willing to abandon the faith of their family, and I’m all for that. The problem is that quite a few then decide the natural thing to do is to pick up some other, more foreign religion. It is the natural tendency of youth to rebel, and Gyatso just happened to be the divine leader of a religion in which the world’s wealthiest people all of a sudden had a depressingly condescending passing interest. So, since the 1960s, he has been a cause celebre for a mixture of liberal counterculture dilettantes and hawkish loons convinced any effort to blacken Joe Chinaman’s eye is a step towards freedom for all mankind.
And we have inherited from our parents’ generation a liberal movement with such a deep investment in the counterculture that it cannot tell when it is being taken for a ride. Tibet is a perfect example of this, and it’s worth pointing out, once I’ve described what exactly has been going on there recently, what other allies besides ourselves and Tibet’s answer to the Moral Majority Mr. Gyatso has attracted. In short, in March there were a series of demonstrations. (There is a holiday, amusingly enough, called Tibetan Uprising Day. The story of it coming to be called that is, admittedly, far less amusing - but then, few things involving Mao heartlessly shedding more or less innocent blood are.) This we have all heard about. And they got violent.
The problem is, they got a kind of violent that we’re all too familiar with: while there were substantial injuries to Chinese police, that’s to be expected in a protest situation. But the thing that particularly gives me pause is who else got injured or killed in the uprisings in Lhasa.
The thugs, who seem to be connected politically to the Dalai Lama but for all intents and purposes were simply acting in their own capacity as violently angry backwater assholes, got out any weapons they could find and started smashing in stores, beating up anyone who looked too Chinese, and - so far, most infamously - setting fire to people and buildings. They weren’t attacking the Chinese government, or instruments of Chinese oppression; they were assaulting individual Chinese civilians - including women, children, and the elderly - because they felt their presence in the region was an affront.
I would have no problem calling this behavior fascist if it were to involve white Arizonans, under color of Christian fervor, kicking the Hell out of random Latinos. I’m not sure if belonging to an ethnicity we’re supposed to condescendingly pity changes this.
As the spiteful uproar continued, the citizenry of Lhasa - who love their spiritual leader and would generally not pass up an opportunity to give the Chinese occupation one in the stones for him - kept home in a mixture of disgust and fear. The rioters proceeded to go on a tear against the Hui, members of a Muslim population who have shared the area of land identified as Tibet with the Tibetans since before either Buddhism or Islam existed. The capstone of this shameful orgy of xenophobic violence came with an attempt to burn down a long-standing mosque.
The Chinese decision to increase police presence - really the only thing that could be done - was, of course, met with considerable protest. The degree and kind of protest varied from place to place; Kevin Rudd, representing Australia’s governing Labour party, urged the Chinese to exercise restraint. (They’re not famous for doing so; it’s a reasonable request.)
Of course, many people went beyond that; they demonstrated for the oppressed Tibetans, angry at the oppressive Chinese strangling their quaint little culture and enraged that Beijing would begrudge them just a little innocent ethnic cleansing. So far, the majority of European conservative and folkist parties have come out to support the Tibetan rioters’ right to oppress a smaller, more Muslim minority. Angela Merkel swallowed her pride to support these oppressed Asians (a personal first on both counts) in their quest to free themselves from the tyranny of the Muslim family living down the street (not so much). With friends like these… you invade Iraq.
Tenzin Gyatso’s spent his entire career performing this delicate balancing act, and has been struggling bravely and vaguely since 1959 for Tibet’s right to choose its own destiny, or live under the watchful eye of the one true Church, or slaughter all of the Han and Hui mud people - depending on who’s going to bat for him at the moment.
We’ve been taken in too often by hucksters offering some kind of moral high ground, and we’ve always been suckers for a good oppression story. But we need to be more careful next time; if this is the kind of nonsense we’re going to tolerate trying to free Tibet from Beijing, God only knows what we’re going to have to overlook to free it from Lhasa.
Alec
