On China, Tibet, the Olympics and Hollywood Celebrities

"It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem." - Malcolm Forbes

Sorry my well-meaning friends but, I have no sympathy for the Dalai Lama (DL). After reading The Wisdom of Forgiveness, a 2004 release by "His Holiness" and Victor Chan, I nominate the DL as a master of passive-agressivity. This book is peppered with blame, cloaked as forgiveness. Following his lead, I too am ready to forgive the DL, his monks and the aristocracy that ruled in Tibet before 1949.

• I forgive you for dominating and suppressing the Chinese Tibetan people under a social order that was far more cruel and reactionary than serfdom in Europe in the Middle Ages.
  
• I forgive you and your cadre for failing to provide the people of Tibet with any system of public schools or universities.
• I forgive you for taking young boys away from their families to enlist them in your religious order. I am sure they were much better off living in cloistered seclusion with a bunch of men in orange robes.
  
• I forgive you for being especially dismissive of the women and girls of Tibet who were considered second class citizens and had no opportunity for education.
• I forgive you DL for living in Portola, a 1,000-room palace while your serfs struggled to fend off the weather in mud huts.
• I forgive you and your monks for living like parasites, doing no work, and demanding tithes from the masses you ruled over in Tibet.
  

The DL pretends complete innocence in perpetrating the quite timely outbreak of global protests and violence aimed at shaming China in its moment of pride and glory in Beijing on 08-08-2008. You succeeded in destroying the possibility of spreading a pervasive sense of global unity with the Olympic Torch relay. But I forgive you.

We Americans who live in a glass house (Gitmo, torture, corporate war profiteering, domestic spying, corporate death squads and the criminal invasion of Iraq) have NO business throwing stones at ANY other nation. Whenever the western media reflects on Tibet, the only invasion they ever mention is 1949, when Mao reclaimed the region as part of China, but no mention is EVER made of the brutal invasion of Tibetan China by the British in 1904. Armed with machine guns and cannons the British imperialists "liberated Tibet" by murdering the Tibetan army as they bravely tried to defend themselves with swords and flintlock rifles.

We Americans need to become global citizens once again, finding ways to open communications and increase our historical and cultural knowledge of other nations... and what better time than during the Olympic Games in 2008. Instead, we have the DL and his mindless Hollywood followers grabbing for the spotlight.

Today, under China, all Tibetan children, both boys and girls, have equal rights to a free and compulsory public school education. Increased tourism in part due to the completion of a modern railway connection and ongoing improvements in the infrastructure underway throughout Tibet have eased the former sense of isolation. Better health care and a wide array of environmental improvements have made Tibet a much healthier place to live.

It's time for Americans, especially those in Hollywood, to crack a book and do their homework before deciding to speak out loud. I also suggest taking a field trip to China.