He’s back

David Lindsay writes:

He is over here again.

The present Dalai Lama was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet. The Tibetans themselves migrated to what is now Tibet from further east in China, but huge numbers of them never did and never have done. The Dalai Lama comes from one such family.

Before 1959, Tibet was not an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. “Dalai” is a family name; only a member of the House of Dalai can become the Dalai Lama.

Well over 90 per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the “autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.

There has never been an independent state of Tibet. Likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new. The one-child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a problem. It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama as “their spiritual leader”. Relatively few would view him as such. In particular, Google “Dorje Shugden” for, to put at its mildest, some balance to the media portrayal of the present Dalai Lama.

Moreover, he has never condemned either the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq. For more on Buddhism as no more a religion of peace than Islam is, see Sri Lanka, Burma, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, and beyond. In fact, an examination of the relevant texts shows that violence in general and war in particular are fundamental to Buddhism, admittedly a difficult thing to define, in the way that they are to Islam and at least arguably to Judaism, but simply are not, as a first principle, to Christianity. Tibet is particularly striking for this. It is also more than worth noting that the Sri Lankan war criminals were among those on whose behalf Liam Fox was treasonably running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and via his fake charity.

The Dalai Lama is no longer a threat to any government, as far as the political climate inside China goes.  Most Tibetans within China do recognise that their lives today are much better off than they were under the old Buddhist theocracy, even if their economic condition remains wretched on account of the only-partial decollectivisation mixed with market reforms which has characterised the rule of the post-Deng CCP.  Tellingly, by unofficial polling most Tibetans simply do not identify with the Dalai Lama, the former lama-slaveowner-dominated ‘government’-in-exile, or with their political cause.  The only persons the Dalai Lama is capable of harming inside China seem to be the tragic souls who demand the Dalai Lama’s return to China, and who burn themselves to death in protest as a result.

In the Anglosphere and in Europe, the Dalai Lama’s political efforts are pernicious in a different way.  He serves as the lightning rod of all manner of politically dubious causes (including Uyghur separatism and, by extension, Japanese far-right militarism and territorial expansionism - at China’s expense).  Simultaneously, by way of his deft counter-propagansiding against a government as singularly inept at presenting its own case before a world audience as China’s, managed to have made of himself an icon of ‘nonviolent’ resistance to authoritarianism in the process.  Recently, though, his efforts at attracting Western sympathy have drawn some scepticism, and by no means just from Chinese netizen-fenqing with axes to grind.

More attention to the rights and dignities - political, social, economic, cultural - of the Tibetan people in China, is an urgent and, I would say, dire necessity:  if for no other reason than against the encroachment of the faceless, all-consuming cultural black hole which ‘reform and opening’ continues to, well, open.  But the idea that the Dalai Lama or his ‘government’-in-exile are the right people for the job seems to me to be slightly unwarranted.  Why not have leaders and advocates for the Tibetan people who were, for one thing, actually born in Tibet, and who have actually lived in Tibet over the last sixty years?