The Guardian 30 April, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Tibet and ruling class media
You know, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that some of the people who write for the capitalist media really do have it easy, don’t they?
Their employers do not require them to show any trace of a scientific understanding of social movements or the elements of social change. All they are required to do is demonstrate a firm grasp of current "spin" from the USA’s propaganda mills.
For this, all they need is a nodding acquaintance with which leaders and movements are "pro-democracy" and which are not. The first group is by definition comprised of "good guys", to be lauded and applauded by an openly admiring yet (we are told) "unbiased" bourgeois media.
The second group, those who allegedly are not "pro-democracy", is of course made up of "bad guys", to be demonised, derided, "exposed" and pilloried, the subjects of general derision and contempt. This simple differentiation makes news analysis and current affairs writing very easy for the bourgeois media indeed.
Take the present fracas over Tibet, for example. For your bourgeois media it’s simple: Tibetan good, Chinese bad. As for the pro-China Tibetans, they are so bad they are not mentioned at all, which makes that particular complication very easy to handle: it simply doesn’t exist!
The vast majority of the population of Tibet took no part in the riots of March 14. Unlike the émigré community, the Tibetans living in Tibet had no desire to return to the rule of the Dalai Lama’s feudal land-owners and monasteries, to the era of forced labour on the feudal lord’s fields or the fields of the local religious leader.
The Tibetan people have no motivation to return to the time when young boys were forcibly removed from peasant families to become trainee monks, to strengthen the monasteries and the continued rule of the feudal elite they represented.
Under the Dalai Lama, that feudal regime had hardly changed since the first Westerners arrived in the country. American author and lecturer Michael Parenti, a former member of the Communist Party of the USA but these days no friend of People’s China, has nevertheless done interesting research into the history of Tibet.
"Earlier visitors to Tibet", he writes, "commented on the theocratic despotism".
"In 1895, an Englishman, Dr AL Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the ‘intolerable tyranny of monks’ and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorise the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as ‘an engine of oppression’.
"At about that time, another English traveller, Captain WFT O’Connor, observed that ‘the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal’, while the people are ‘oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft’.
"O’Connor wrote that Tibetan rulers ‘invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition’ among the common people.
"In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, ‘The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.’"
No doubt the former feudal elite would dearly like to see that era return, but why would the rest of the Tibetan population want it back? In fact, of course, they don’t. Who would?
Certain Western "personalities" in show business or politics who profess to a faith in mysticism proclaim themselves to be "Buddhists" and as such heap abuse on the Communist Party of China, accusing it of every kind of sin.
The singer KD Lang was on TV the other day telling the world’s media what a dreadful thing it would be if the culture of Tibet was to disappear from the Earth. By implication she was parroting the Dalai Lama clique’s claims of "genocide".
The facts, however, do not support such a claim: life expectancy has almost doubled since the feudals lost power; the ethnic Tibetan population has increased, not declined; illiteracy, a feature of the country under the Dalai’s regime, has been done away with.
"As much as we might wish otherwise", comments Parenti, "feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticised Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes."
And of course, by "the culture of Tibet", Ms Lang meant the culture of that former feudal ruling clique. But even that is being protected by the Communist government of China. As reported in The Guardian of April 16, "in the past 20 years, China has invested over 700 million yuan in repairing temples, cultural relics and religious sites.
"The central government has also made efforts in the collection and publication of Tibetan classics, including the Buddhism transcript the Tibetan Tripitaka, and the heroic epic Biography of King Gesar, to preserve and develop Tibetan traditional culture."
The bulk of the bourgeois media, however, is not concerned about such matters. They have merely to stick to their approved formula — Tibetan exiles good, China bad — to keep their jobs and their status as members of a "free press".
That it also means they thereby confirm their status as mere mouthpieces for the ruling class is something they ignore.
It makes life easier that way, I guess.