[Peace-discuss] Tibet and hypocrisy

[Brussel Morton K.]

I thinnk he says it all.

Published on Monday, April 14, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations

by Floyd Rudmin

We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural  
genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and  
French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those  
terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898.  
And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported  
the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island  
of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing.  
Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic  
cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a  
big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and  
soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there  
but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition,  
torture and other illegal actions.

When the Olympics come to London in 2012, the Dalai Lama and Desmond  
Tutu will certainly lead the demonstrators protesting the  
“demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” in Diego Garcia. The  
UN Secretary General, the President of France, the Chancellor of  
Germany, the new US President and the entire US Congress will  
certainly boycott the opening ceremonies.

The height of hypocrisy is this moral posturing about 100 dead in  
race riots in Lhasa, while the USA, UK and more than 40 nations in  
the Coalition of the Willing wage a war of aggression against Iraq.  
This is not “demographic aggression” but raw shock-and-awe  
aggression. A war crime. A war on civilians, including the  
intentional destruction of the water and sewage systems, and the  
electrical grid. More than one million Iraqis are now dead; five  
million made into refugees. The Western invaders may not be doing  
“cultural genocide” but they are doing cultural destruction on an  
immense scale, in the very cradle of Western Civilization. Why is the  
news filled with demonstrators about Tibet but not about Iraq?

And as everyone knows but few dare say, “demographic aggression” and  
“cultural genocide” can be applied most accurately to Israel’s  
settlement policies and systematic destruction of Palestinian  
communities. On this, the Dalai Lama seems silent. Demonstrators  
don’t wave flags for bulldozed homes, destroyed orchards, or dead  
Palestinian children.

The Chinese Context

The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security  
of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be  
tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks.

Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began  
building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what  
with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans  
seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then  
the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a  
brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then  
Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s  
Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to  
die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order  
is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion  
cannot be tolerated.

Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has  
been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its  
minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there  
still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years  
of European dominance in North and South America, the original  
minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.

Chinese currency carries five languages: Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan,  
Uigur, and Zhuang. In comparison, Canadian currency carries English  
and French, but no Cree or Inuktitut. If the USA were as considerate  
of ethnic minorities as is China, then the greenback would be written  
in English, Spanish, Cherokee and Hawaiian.

In China, ethnic minorities begin their primary schooling in their  
own language, in a school administered by one of their own community.  
Chinese language instruction is not introduced until age 10 or later.  
This is in sharp contrast to a history of coerced linguistic  
assimilation in most Western nations. The Australian government  
recently apologized to the Aboriginal minority for taking children  
from their families, forcing them to speak English, beating them if  
they spoke their mother tongue. China has no need to make such  
apology to Tibetans or to other minorities.

China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has  
not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have  
as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one  
child, they are punished.

There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to  
admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter  
China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han  
Chinese students.

China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it  
has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in  
the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200  
years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.

Historical Claims

National boundaries are not natural. They all arise from history, and  
all history is disputable. Arguments and evidence can always be found  
to challenge a boundary. China has long claimed Tibet as part of its  
territory, though that has been hard to enforce during the past 200  
years. The Dalai Lama does not dispute China’s claim to Tibet. The  
recent race riots in Tibet and the anti-Olympics demonstrations will  
not cause China to shrink itself and abandon part of its territory.  
Rioters and demonstrators know that.

Foreign governments promoting Tibet separatism and demonstrators  
demanding Tibet independence should look closer to home. Canadians  
can campaign for Québec libre. Americans can support separatists in  
Puerto Rico, Vermont, Texas, California, Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska.  
Brits can work for a free Wales, and Scotland for the Scots. French  
can help free Tahitians, New Caledonians, Corsicans, and the Basques.  
Spaniards can also back the Basques, or the Catalonians. Italians can  
help Sicilian separatists or the Northern League. Danes can free the  
Faeroe Islands. Poles can back Cashubians. Japanese can help Okinawan  
separatists, and Filipinos can help the Moros. Thai can promote  
Patanni independence; Indonesians can promote Acehnese independence.  
New Zealanders can leave the islands to the Maori; Australians can  
vacate Papua. Sri Lankans can help Tamil separatists; Indians can  
help Sikh separatists.

Nearly every nation has a separatist movement of some kind. There is  
no need to go to Tibet, to the top of the world, to promote ethnic  
separatism. China is not promoting separatism in other nations and  
does not appreciate other nations promoting separatism in China. The  
people most oppressed, most needing a nation of their own, are the  
Palestinians. There is a worthy project to promote and to demonstrate  
about.

Danger of Demonstrations

These demonstrations do not serve Tibetans, but rather use Tibetans  
for ulterior motives. Many Tibetans, therefore, oppose these  
demonstrations. Many Chinese remember their history and see the riots  
in Lhasa and subsequent demonstrations as another attempt by foreign  
powers to dismember and weaken China. There is grave danger that  
Chinese might come to fear Tibetans as traitors, resulting in wide  
spread anti-Tibetan feelings in China.

Fear that an ethnic minority serves foreign forces caused Canada,  
during World War 1, to imprison its Ukranian minority in  
concentration camps. For similar reasons, the Ottomans deported their  
Armenian minority and killed more than a million in death marches.  
The German Nazis saw the Jewish minority as traitors who caused  
defeat in World War 1; hence deportations in the 1930s and death  
camps in the 1940s. During World War 2, both Canada and the USA  
feared that their Japanese immigrant minorities were traitorous and  
deported them to concentration camps. Indonesians fearing their  
Chinese minority, deported 100,000 in 1959 and killed thousands more  
in 1965. Israel similarly fears its Arab minority, resulting in  
deportations and oppression.

Hopefully, the Chinese government and the Chinese people will see  
Tibetans as victims of foreign powers rather than agents of foreign  
powers. However, if China reacts like other nations have in history  
and starts systematic severe repression of Tibetans, then today’s  
demonstrators should remember their role in causing that to happen.

Conclusion

The demonstrators now disparaging China serve only to distract  
themselves and others from seeing and correcting the current failings  
of their own governments. If the demonstrators will take a moment to  
listen, they will hear the silence of their own hypocrisy.

The consequences of these demonstrations are 1) China will stiffen  
its resolve to find foreign influences inciting Tibetans to riot, and  
2) the governments of the USA, UK, France and other Western nations  
will have less domestic criticism for a few weeks. That is all. These  
demonstrations can come to no good end.

Floyd Rudmin can be contacted by email. 
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