Erm... Ireland(the republic) is FREE and Northern Ireland don't want to be part of the republic and the republic don't want them either. Why do everyone use Ireland as an example in talking Tibet anyway? I've seen it a few times on youtube videos... China is land hungry for taking Macau and Hong Kong back? I thought they have a treaty to take them back because other countries beat China in a war and took control of them for X amount of years. About Tibet, I don't even think that you can get an unbiased view on it anymore with the Western media and the Chinese media saying nearly opposite things.
Well, that's actually two words. Honestly, Tibet doesn't need to be freed as much as it needs to be treated fairly. However, the PRC government is really a one note canary. The only thing it knows to bring to a negotiating table is a bludgeon, which is going to be its worst enemy. What it basically is telling the Tibetans is that the only way China will ever treat you nicely is if you fight us tooth and nail. So what do you think is going to happen? Tibet may well become Afghanistan in another generation or two.
http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19670420.htm "China's actions in Tibet, whatever one may think of them, are no proof of aggressive expansionism, unless one wants to say the same of Indian suppression of tribal rebellions, for example. Tibet has been recognized internationally as a region of China. This status has been accepted by India as well as Communist and Nationalist China, and to my knowledge, has never been officially questioned by the United States. Although it is of no relevance to the issue, I should also add that it is a bit too simple to say that "China did indeed take over a country that did not want to be taken over." This is by no means the general view of Western scholarship. For example, Ginsburgs and Mathos comment that "the March 1959 uprising did not, by and large, involve any considerable number of lower-class Tibetans, but involved essentially the propertied groups and the traditionally rebellious and foraging Khamba tribes opposed to any outside public authority (including sometimes that of the Dalai Lama)" (Pacific Affairs, September, 1959). But whatever the complexities of the situation may be, it does not substantiate the charge of boundless Chinese expansionism." http://www.pragoti.org/node/681?news_id=681 "Seems to me there is a much closer analogy between the Palestinian occupied territories and Tibet right now. There are dissimilarities too. Thus, rightly or wrongly, Tibet is internationally recognized (by the US too) as part of China, so what is happening there is internal. In contrast, outside of Israel (and in practice, the US), no one recognizes the OT as part of Israel, and in an authoritative judgment, confirming early Security Council resolutions, the International Court of Justice determined that the Geneva Conventions apply to the OT, so all settlement activity is in violation of international law, as are all measures (like the "separation wall") to protect settlers (the US Justice concurred). However, despite the sharp legal distinction, there are some instructive parallels that can be explored. Take the recent US-backed Israeli violence in the OT and Chinese violence inTibet. The former is far greater, and the justifications far weaker. Just imagine how the US and Israel would react if Palestinians in illegally annexed East Jerusalem were to burn down a bank and Jewish stores, attack Jews, etc., as in Tibet We can then compare the actual reactions. In the case of US-backed Israeli violence and illegal actions in the OT, overwhelming support for embattled Israel. In the case of Chinese violence in Tibet, much grandstanding, as when Nancy Pelosi -- an enthusiastic supporter of Israeli violence -- declares passionately that if we don't stand up for Tibet we will lose our "moral authority" (she didn't explain on what that authority rests)."
Down with the Dalai Lama Why do western commentators idolise a celebrity monk who hangs out with Sharon Stone and once guest-edited French Vogue? * Comments (273) * Buzz up! * Digg it * Brendan O'Neill * o Brendan O'Neill o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 May 2008 20.00 BST o Article history Has there ever been a political figure more ridiculous than the Dalai Lama? This is the "humble monk" who forswears worldly goods in favour of living a simple life dressed in maroon robes. Yet in 1992 he guest-edited French Vogue, the bible of the decadent high-fashion classes, which is packed with pictures of the half-starved daughters of the aristocracy modelling skirts and shirts that most of us could never afford. He claims to be the current incarnation of the Tulkus line of Buddhist masters, who are "exempt from the wheel of death and rebirth". Yet he's best known for hanging out with clueless western celebs like Richard Gere and Sharon Stone (who is still most famous for showing her vagina on the big screen). Stone once introduced the Dalai Lama at a glittering fundraising ball as "Mr Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!" The Dalai Lama says he wants Tibetan autonomy and political independence. Yet he allows himself to be used as a tool by western powers keen to humiliate China. Between the late 1950s and 1974, he is alleged to have received around $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year, from the CIA. He has also been, according to the same reporter, "remarkably nepotistic", promoting his brothers and their wives to positions of extraordinary power in his fiefdom-in-exile in Dharamsala, northern India. He poses as the quirky, giggly, modern monk who once auctioned his Land Rover on eBay for $80,000 and has even done an advert for Apple (quite what skinny white computers have got to do with Buddhism is anybody's guess). Yet in truth he is a product of the crushing feudalism of archaic, pre-modern Tibet, where an elite of Buddhist monks treated the masses as serfs and ruthlessly punished them if they stepped out of line. The Dalai Lama demands religious freedom. Yet he persecutes a Buddhist sect that worships a deity called Dorje Shugden. He outlawed praying to Dorje Shugden in 1996, and those who defied his writ were thrown out of their jobs, mocked in the streets and even had their homes smashed up by heavy-handed officials from his government-in-exile. When worshippers complained about their treatment, they were told by representatives of the Dalai Lama that "concepts like democracy and freedom of religion are empty when it comes to the wellbeing of the Dalai Lama". As the Dalai Lama tours Britain, lots of people are asking: why won't Brown receive him at Downing Street? I have a different question: why should Brown, who for all his troubles is still the head of an elected political party, meet with an authoritarian, fame-chasing, Apple-loving monk? The Dalai Lama has effectively been turned into a cartoon good guy. In America and western Europe, where backward anti-modern sentiments are widespread amongst self-loathing sections of the educated and the elite, the Dalai Lama has been embraced as a living, breathing representative of unsullied goodness. Despite the fact that he advertises Apple, guest-edits Vogue and drives a Land Rover, he is held up as evidence that living the simple eastern life is preferable to, in the words of Philip Rawson, westerners' "gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions". Just as earlier generations of disillusioned aristocrats fell in love with a fictional version of Tibet (Shangri-La), so contemporary un-progressives idolise a fictional image of the Dalai Lama. Most strikingly, the Dalai Lama is used as a battering ram by western governments in their culture war with China. The reason he is flattered by world leaders and bankrolled by the CIA is not because these institutions care very much for liberty in Tibet, but rather because they want to ratchet up international pressure on their new competitors in world politics: the Chinese. You don't have to be a defender of the authoritarian regime in Beijing (and I most certainly am not) to see that such global sabre-rattling is more likely to entrench tensions between the Tibetan people and China, and increase instability in world affairs, rather than herald anything like a new era of freedom in the east. Far from "helping Tibet", the slavish western worshippers of the Dalai Lama are helping to stifle the development of a real, lively movement for liberty and democracy in the Tibetan regions. One author on the Tibetan independence movement argues that "the Dalai Lama's role as ultimate spiritual authority is holding back the political process of democratisation", since "the assumption that he occupies the correct moral ground from a spiritual perspective means that any challenge to his political authority may be interpreted as anti-religious". At least one reason why the Dalai Lama can pose as "the ultimate spiritual authority" and all-round supreme leader of Tibetans and their future is because influential elements in the west have empowered him to play that role. In doing so, they have been complicit in the infantilisation of the Tibetan people. Tibetans now suffer the double horror of being ruled by undemocratic Chinese officials on one hand, and demeaned by the Dalai Lama and his western supporters on the other. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/29/downwiththedalailama
Child abuse, Tibetan style. Dalai Lama's choice tells of misery Wed Jun 3, 12:18 am ET MADRID (AFP) – While the Dalai Lama is on a tour of Europe, a Spanish man who he proclaimed to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader has spoken of his unhappy childhood at a monastery and his decision to abandon the faith. Osel Hita Torres made world headlines in 1986 when the Dalai Lama recognised him, then aged 14 months, as the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe, who had died in California two years earlier. He had been brought to see the Dalai Lama in India by his parents and ended up living at a monastery there, where he was only allowed to socialize with others who had been proclaimed reincarnations, until he turned 18. But even though many Buddhists worshipped him almost as a god, Torres said in a rare interview published over the weekend in Spain that he feels the experience stunted the development of his personality. "Psychologically, everything affected me very much. I still feel fury inside and, sometimes, when it comes out, it causes me to lose control and I get depressed," Torres, 24, told daily newspaper El Mundo. "They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal. It was like living a lie," added Torres, who now describes himself as a "spiritual scientific agnostic". When he was eight, he managed to have a tape recorded message expressing his unhappiness delivered to his mother, who took him away from the Sera monastery. But Torres said he quickly volunteered to return because of the pressure he felt over being considered to be the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe. After leaving the monastery for good when he turned 18, he spent a year in Canada followed by six months in Switzerland where he studied philosophy, human rights, art and French. Torres, who said that for a time he lived at the monastery next to the cabin of actor Richard Gere, who he described as a "great guy, very nice", is now studying film in Madrid. He said some aspects of life outside of the monastery really surprised him, such as seeing people kissing in public, and described the bewilderment he felt during his first visit to a nightclub. "I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, asphyxiated and enclosed in a box full of smoke? This is music? It sounds like noise. It hurts my ears. It seemed like the strangest thing in the world," he said. "What is important for me now is to do something that makes me feel useful, to find a direction to put my energy," he added. Asked if he would like to make a movie about his life, he said: "No, my life is too complicated to make a movie. They have proposed writing a biography about me but it would have to wait until after I die because some people would be scandalized." The Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India since 1959, is the most famous of a lineage of reincarnated spiritual leaders. The 73-year-old began a visit to Europe on Friday that will take in Denmark, Iceland, Poland, France and the Netherlands.
