this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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[–] 420blazeit69@hexbear.net 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Since taking office in 2021, Biden has yet to meet the Dalai Lama. As a candidate in 2020, Biden criticised Donald Trump for being the only US president in three decades who had neither met nor spoken to the Tibetan spiritual leader.

biden-horror

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

they just can't help fucking with China

[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

Definitely better now than the theocracy it used to be under, but it can get a lot better.

The way to get better is not to return it to a theocratic serfdom system.

[–] ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

CW: a litany of absurd horrors

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” [11]

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. [22]

Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [24]

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away. [25]

Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. […] The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.” [26] As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri-La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.

Fun fact: US support for this regime was so thorough that we tried to do a Bay of Pigs (Valley of Llamas?) there and it went even worse than the original. Like, do not pass go, do not collect lethal aid, straight on the forgotten failure pile next to the Siberian War.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago
[–] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago

I question the US's claims over a certain region (the whole of it)

[–] BurgerPunk@hexbear.net 20 points 1 year ago

The west will never get over the fact that Tibet is already free

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago

Everyone should read When serfs stood up in Tibet by Anna Louise Strong

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-louise/1959/tibet/ch17.htm

[–] TRexBear@hexbear.net 18 points 1 year ago

America, your entire country is "Tibet".

[–] ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

Playing the hits I see

[–] filoria@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] davel@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Dumbass alert

🤡

Some reports make me want to break my own rule of not divulging reporters’ names.

[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tibetan monks literally had child sex slaves. Those dudes have a better PR department than the Catholic church

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Those dudes have a better PR department than the Catholic church

Catholic church isn't backed by the entire western propaganda machine, Dalai Lama is.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So, if any of your local religious leaders is a pedophile you lose your right to self determination? That will massively reduce the number of sovereign countries. To 0.

[–] Joncash2@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If that happens good? Why do we think having countries and borders that creates strife a good thing? If we eliminate all borders and are just humanity I see that as an absolute win.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 5 points 1 year ago

Humanity needs to be way more interactive globally than it currently is, and for a good long time. Forcing elimination of borders and nations without having a basically uniform global culture - and probably language - is a "bad idea."

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space -1 points 1 year ago

It’s a good thing that communist parties are immune to having sexual predators in their ranks.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de -2 points 1 year ago

So, you are telling me that in your enlightened opinion imperialism is a great thing and decolonization was wrong? That's a take...

[–] Aradina@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If the country is a theocracy run by a ruling class of slave owning pedophiles, yes, that government deserves to go away. Serfdom is bad.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And does it deserve to be colonized? Because you are basically justifing imperial colonization.

[–] highalectical@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

It's not colonized, so your question is irrelevent.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

right to self determination

jagoff

China freed the Tibetan people from serfdom imposed by a feudal religious state.

[–] FenrirIII@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ITT: A post critical of China gets flooded by lemmy.ml whataboutism comments.

[–] MarcoPOLO@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

If anything, this is a post critical of the US lmao

You're projecting