FREE TIBET!! LET CHINA DEVELOP IT

A recent letter published in the Guardian UK. It is addressed to the People's Republic of China by a motley array of thinkers. The subject is TIBET, that favorite liberal cause celebre in the West. FREE TIBET! That tiny country invaded by Red China.

Tibet is portrayed as a poor victim and its former headman, the Dalai Lama, a man of peace in exile. But this narrative has more to do with Western geopolitics than Reality.

Before China invaded - re-claimed, or whatever - its province, territory, or that sovereign country called Tibet, it was a feudal theocratic monarchy, a privileged elite, and masses of its people living in squalor and poverty not unlike centuries passed, where serfdom and slavery existed. Punishments included gouging out a person's eyes or cutting off body parts. How does a feudal theocratic monarchy keep its people poor and itself rich and in power, class if not by gouging out the eyes of "criminals"? The current Dalai Lama's predecessors collaborated with British and US agents: to what end, one wonders. Franklin Roosevelt sent an expedition to bear gifts to the Dalai Lama during his presidency. One wonders why ...

China under its ancien regime before its revolution was little better than its Tibetan neighbor, wide class disparities, abject poverty and a ruling elite, imperial powers taking wealth here and there from it. Then, as Lincoln famously remotely said: the war came.

Mao Tse Tung began a social, economic, and political awakening to that great country with a devoutly communist revolution. Examine the record, and tell me where a capitalist revolution has brought such great changes to not only the peasant but also national productivity. It is a much-ignored fact that thanks to Joseph Stalin [yes, Stalin!] the USSR was the most industrializing and prosperous country while the West was sorting through its 1930's Depression. But official doctrine says Stalin must only be remembered for his heinous crimes - that of the murder of thousands. The Western equivalent of such crimes - the massacre of Native Americans/Indians, for example, by men like Gen. George Washington, are dropped from the narrative and are not worthy of historical record.

Mao and the PRC, like Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the USSR, were anathemas to the Capitalist West. So of course, our official hearts began to bleed for those peasants we had yesterday forced opium on. Human Rights is a novel tool employed by the West. Like Apple Pie it would seem uncontroversial, but a look at the historical record of the 40's and 50's, the former Imperial powers gave not a damn about Human Rights in Latin America, Southeast Asia ["French" Indochina!], or Asia as a whole. Indeed, no. Human rights seemed only to extend to the privileged West's right to exploit the humans within the Axis of Dark Corners of the Globe. This hypocrisy would extend to that tiny, brutal country called Tibet.

I have no position on whether it was a China province or a sovereign country, but I recognize such a position is important on principal. Do I endorse invading foreign countries at will and claiming them? This is an important principle and debate. But it is also an important principle to speak Truths.

We can endorse sovereignty for Afghanistan, for example. But will we not highlight laws against women, against gays? Free Afghanistan for the Misogynists?

Enter an Open Letter, authored by Vaclav Havel, Prince Hassan Bin Talal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others. I am struck by this intersection of theatre [Havel being a brilliant playwright and essayist], a member of the Jordan Royal Family - a client state carved there by their British masters after the Ottoman humiliation, and a very, very honorable man who has defended the rights of democracy, women, LGBT's, the poor. Strange Bedfellows indeed and one wonders why Tutu's name would be added!

The Open Letter may reveal this. Anyway, Open Letters are kind of joke to me coming out of a weekly barrage of Open Letter Campaigns in my Queer Nation days. This one asks for a fair trail for some Accused and more openness in China's goings-on within Tibet. Tutu chaired a famous Truth Commission the likes of which the world has not seen. He has unblemished authority in this matter. A son of the Jordan ruling family is poxed. His country is poxed. His terrain is poxed. That he would have any authority to speak about human rights is a joke.

On the eminent closure of the Guantanamo gulag, Mumia Abu-Jamal warns us that there are Guantanamos within every one of our 50 states. But where is the chorus demanding US openness, British complicity - with these War on Terror crimes against humanity?

The Free Tibet Movement is a tool. Some good-thinking people who know little about how tools are made back it out of an sincere desire to want to end oppression. But the Western Interest forms the movement's foundation and continues to use it by perennial assaults on Chinese Communism. The Official Narrative dictates we must never think anything promising about Communism, so we must keep getting proofs of Chinese barbarism and evidence of Western compassion. As usual the Official Story is Twisted.