Both sides of most disputes have some work to do. The Chinese have a legitimate concern that whatever the DL says, his US handlers will use him and try to bounce the people of Tibet into uprisings, denunciations, etc - just pawns on the geo-political board to be brought into play to pressure China for US goals, e.g. not to dump their increasingly worthless trade-surplus dollars, or sacrificed in return for e.g China accepting the imminent US financial/commercial blacklisting of Iran in the name of combatting terrorism, which it will insist every other firm and country joins in.
I will look at your website, David. Please do find time to study the work of the Trimondis. As regards finding Tibetans to speak with, I don't come across many in Perth, I must confess! However history shows time and again that exile communities develop their own take on what is good for the country they left, which tends increasingly to diverge from what 'ordinary Tibetans' (in this case) think - most of whom live in Tibet. Of course it would be lovely for those ordinary Tibetans also to be able to make free internet connections with us, for journalists to circulate more freely, etc. But that this isn't likely (absent a political settlement) shouldn't just be laid at the door of the Chinese, since how they have developed relates to how the US and the UK and other countries have acted, not just vis a vis China/Tibet but also in Afghanistan (which shares a border), Iran, Pakistan, Korea, etc. (Interdependent co-arising, you could call this) .
It doesn't make it OKay for (presumably) the Chinese secret service to hack your website, but please remember that the US is doing this sort of thing routinely worldwide, it is called 'full spectrum dominance, including in cyberspace', and recently they used specially designed kit from warships to cut about ten vital communication lines into Iran and much of the Gulf. Also sometimes they do 'false flag operations', e.g. in Italy in the 70's and 80's - which hide their own interventions behind acts which blame the reds. (See Daniel Ganser’s revelatory and authoritative Nato's Secret Armies on this.)
One last point: of course I support full autonomy culturally, economically, politically for everyone in Tibet: also in every bioregion of China. Also the US, the UK, and on and on, including places like the Congo and Iraq and Haiti, where the scale of repression makes life in Tibet seem positively well-ordered by comparison, I can't help adding, however 'heartless' this may sound to many - or even an 'apology' (rather than a contextualisation) for Chinese government authoritarianism. But let us not make the best the enemy of the good-as-it-can-be in these not-of-our-liking circumstances.
'With the Ideal comes the actual.' (Zen saying): 'With majority Tibetan aspirations for freedom but also for peace and justice and for Tibetan self-determination in whatever relational framework they decide on are packaged also the shadow side of Tibetan Buddhism and the CIA and ethnic resentments against Han and Muslim shopkeepers] Sadness, yes, oceans of it. Annoyance, less helpful?
With loving-kindness to all the people of Tibet and China/the rest of China, Keith Mothersson (foolish being who makes many mistakes)
7) Did I minimize 'ludicrously' the extent of Chinese repression in the the fiftes?
My controversial Op Ed News article was carried in Jean Hudon's Earth Rainbow Network mail-out (which often carries great reports, by the way). It was followed by a reply by someone called Monica in Seattle, who is a member of the Sakya sangha www.sakya.org "whose head is His Holiness Jigdal Dagchen Sakya, the brother-in-law of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (one of Rinpoche's sisters is married to one of HHDL's brothers)".
She continues: "Of course there are always political machinations that occur in any situation, but to characterize His Holiness the Dalai Lama as anything other than the compassionate person that he is simply not accurate."
[Monica's sense of the Dalai Lama is not quite mine: I do sense that he has other aspects to his psyche than just compassion, including wrath, which most Buddhists see not as an expression of a compassionate deity, but as a personal affliction, one of the three poisons of greed, hate/anger and delusion. I speak as someone who was also separated from my mum and home community at an early age! ]
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