Forget Tibet: the bullshit factor

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Monday, 10 March 2008

Earlier this month Icelandic musician Björk grabbed headlines for herself and for the world’s pet cause as she shouted " Tibet! Tibet!" after her song “Declare Independence” at a concert in Shanghai, China, earlier ths month. No doubt many will applaud her move as the most meaningful and provocative statement by a musician since Ireland's Sinéad O'Connor had her way with the Pope’s picture in 1992. However, the more interesting story lies not in what human rights injustices may be exposed in Tibet, but rather in what can be overlooked and ignored while people chant, cheer, and hang flags on their front porches for that sparsely populated region of Asia. “Freedom” is a rallying cry for just about any political cause you might choose to pick up. You might want to “free Iraq” with 140,000 US troops and a five-year occupation during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Or you may prefer a slightly more justified cause and support a “free Afghanistan” with NATO and “Operation Enduring Freedom,” now nearing its seventh full year. But if you think military intervention is, well, passé and overall just bad for karma, then you’re probably one of the many who want to “Free Tibet” with bumper stickers and prayer flags. The problem with all of these freedom movements is the heavy bullshit factor that each of their supporters try to overlook in order to foreground the feel-good factor. The Western movement to liberate Tibet, a.k.a. the Xizang Autonomous Region of China, tops the list. Sure, there are plenty of feel good reasons to support a “free Tibet.” China did conduct a violent take-over the country, ending in 1959; Tibetans’ traditional lifestyle and religion are increasingly threatened in their own homeland; and they do subscribe to a belief system that condemns violence and sounds like it could really help people live overall harmonious and peaceful lives. But a layman’s way into the underlying bullshit here is actually through Showtime’ program "Bullshit" in which the co-hosts Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller examine the Dalai Lama’s back story. They claim the Dalai Lama's apparent benevolence doesn't address the reality of a traditionally class-based society in which the peasant class in Tibet was little more than a population of slave labor. China’s official position mirrors this. Penn and Teller do concede, however, that Communist China’s policies may not be much better for the two million Tibetans who still live there. So while this image of peaceful enlightenment draws hordes of international supporters for “freedom” in Tibet, the truth behind Tibet’s domestic tradition of governance is second to the duplicity of the Tibetan resistance with the United State’s CIA — an organization certainly known not for peaceful humanitarianism but rather its government-sanctioned “subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements.” Several books and declassified documents detail a history of the CIA helping the Dalai Lama’s retreat into exile and Tibetan fighters training with the CIA in Colorado. Few Hollywood stars and average US peaceniks would slap a CIA sticker next to their Tibet paraphernalia, so this inconvenient history is largely ignored in favor of the robes, smiles and karmic promises. But aside from situational awareness, none of that is even worth dwelling on in the discussion of why US liberals’ ego-stroking love affair with Tibet’s ostensible freedom movement is problematic. While the world demonstrates their humanistic awareness by cheering for Tibet, sitting on that autonomous region’s northern border is another separatist situation — much more significant and almost entirely invisible to the world’s do-gooders. Uighurstan — a.k.a. Xinjiang, a.k.a. East Turkestan — makes up a full 20% of China’s land mass and has a native Uighur population of about seven million, which is about three times that of Tibet’s native Tibetan population. They also face displacement by Han Chinese and a loss of traditional lifestyle, language and religion. However, where Tibet was annexed in 1959, Uighurstan was fully absorbed in 1949. Where Tibet has mountains and the headwaters to China’s great rivers, Uighurstan has minerals, fossil fuels and access to the markets and resources of Russia and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. In short, Uighurstan is under a “harsh illegal colonial rule” that would be a wet dream for peace and freedom activists to rally around — except you've never heard about it. Oh, and one more thing: Uighurs are traditionally Muslim and as a result of their geographical location the separatist activities of their independence movement organizations tend to be tied to and lumped with what the US generally characterizes as unsavory “Islamic extremists.” Not many tie-dye Euro-Americans tend to pick up Islam as a fashion statement the way they do with Buddhism. But there's a more basic reason for the lack of attention. In the December 2002 Congressional Research Service report titled “China ’s Relations with Central Asian States and Problems with Terrorism” the CRS summed up the main reason you never heard of Uighurstan is because the “Uighur community lacks a single charismatic leader like Tibet’s Dalai Lama.” No superstar, no superstar attention. But you may hear more of them in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. As Tibet had hoped to send athletes, Beijing authorities are instead expecting more terrorists or, as it were, freedom fighters from Uighurstan, as they claim to have recently stopped a Uighur “terror plot targeting the Beijing Olympics.” So after all this, iyou can see that all this attention on freeing Tibet pretty much takes up all our karmic energy and small bills for colorful flags — there’s nothing left for supporting a free Uighrustan, much less anything left for looking a little closer to home for people who have had their land forcibly occupied and their lifestyles, languages and religions nearly erased. If, however, you do genuinely care about these humanitarian concerns and are not just concerned with massaging your ego and throwing up a façade of peace and compassion to fit into co-opted neo-liberal norms, think about the dozens of Native American Nations in North America, the war, violence, 500 years of injustice; put your energy and karma into a "Free America" campaign. Otherwise, change your “hippie” into just plain “hypocrite” and keep your fashion politics to yourself.