The Guardian 9 April, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Tibet: who’s for feudalism?
Easily the most popular cause at present for film stars, pop stars and what Greg Barns in the Hobart Mercury calls "celebrity politicians" is freedom for Tibet. The "freedom" they want would return Tibet to feudalism, to the system that prevailed before 1951.
The country would once again be ruled by the Dalai Lama, a prospect that the incumbents in both the White House and Downing Street would clearly welcome. And why not? For all their noise about fostering democracy, the leaders of the US and Britain have no difficulty cosying up to feudal autocrats in the Middle East or Asia or anywhere else such relics can be found.
Britain has been actively interfering in Tibet (and also in Afghanistan) since the 19th century, but stepped up its activities after the victory of the Revolution and the Chinese Red Army in 1949. Together with the US, Britain helped to provoke the flight of the Dalai Lama to India.
Britain played a dominant role in counter-revolutionary activity in many parts of the world between the two world wars, but after WW2 was eclipsed by the US in this field. On March 24, in a Hobart Mercury article with the fairly blunt heading "US finger in unrest pie", Greg Barns (writing of the Tibetan exiles grouped around the Dalai Lama) noted "the CIA gave the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama money and support through the 1950s and 1960s".
US policy in that period was to try to provoke war with China, using the US, Taiwanese and South Korean military as well as CIA-funded "guerrillas" operating out of Thailand.
"On September 15, 1998", notes Barns, "a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that during ‘the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with US$1.7 million? (AU$1.9 million) a year for operations against China including an annual subsidy of US$180,000? (AU$197,000) for the Dalai Lama".
Barns says this CIA support "petered out in the 1970s", but I think he would be more accurate if he said it merely changed its form. At any rate it received a new boost in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a classic CIA front which openly admits to receiving funds directly from the peak US intelligence body.
Barns quotes Michael Barker, "a PhD student at Griffith University in Brisbane who studies social and political movements", who points out that "much of the present international campaigning for a free Tibet is financed by the NED".
Barns’ article continues: "The NED has financed the work of the International Campaign for Tibet, the Tibet Fund and the Tibetan Information Network, the three leading anti-Chinese Tibetan advocacy organisations.
"In short, the CIA/NED directly bankrolls the apparatus that runs the Dalai Lama’s international campaign for a non-violent revolution in Tibet to overthrow the Chinese."
The brutal way the Dalai Lama’s supporters hacked to death ordinary workers — shop assistants and others — during their "revolutionary" riots suggests that their leader’s appeals for non-violence were a sop to the Western media.
For the Dalai Lama is not after democracy or indeed any form of popular rule. He wants to be restored to power, and images of benign monks exuding love and kindness simply aren’t supported by the historical facts.
Barns has him pegged to rights: "The Dalai Lama leads an elite of families and religious figures that once ruled Tibet. And the Tibet they ruled was one of the most backward and inhumane societies in the world.
"Almost 90 percent of Tibetans were slaves before the Chinese invaded the country". Barns then goes on to quote an article by Aniket Alam, an Indian commentator writing earlier this month:
"Far from any democratic rights, for an overwhelming majority of Tibetans, the rule of the Dalai Lama was one of unending unpaid labour, cruelty and debt-bondage and not some spiritual Shangri-la.
"…one prisoner in the Dalai Lama’s prison in the 1960s called it hell on Earth."
Of course, we must not forget that the Dalai Lama’s own supporters may in fact not have been responsible for some of the fire-bombing and killing. We know from many previous instances of carefully manufactured "civil disturbances" that a favourite tactic of US special forces and intelligence services is the staging of provocations.
Time magazine revealed back in the beginning of 2003 that under the current US President, the CIA had rebuilt its paramilitary outfit, the euphemistically named Special Operations Group. One of SOG’s roles is to do the stirring when the US needs trouble stirred up somewhere in the world.
As Barns writes in the Mercury: "One cannot rule out the possibility, or indeed the probability, that this group and other CIA operatives have had some role in fuelling unrest in Tibet over the past few weeks".
The Hobart Mercury is a mainstream bourgeois newspaper. Its publishing of Barns’ comments on Tibet and the USA reflect the contradictions within the ruling class over attacking China. Their greed is at odds with their desire to do over a socialist power.
For some of the media and what Barns calls "political celebrities", the Dalai Lama and the collection of expatriates that he leads in India are beyond all criticism.
However, now that the initial shock is over and the media frenzy about "Tibet in revolt" has subsided, reality checks have begun. Despite the Australian media, the IOC has ruled that "there is no credible movement for a boycott" of the Olympic Games.
Nor have the fractious protests by a handful of Tibetan émigrés backed up by Falun Gong cult members from China carried much weight.
Chalk up a further defeat for US scheming.