Re: Faustian Bargains
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Brian wrote:
. . . but the more likely reason today — when China is clearly capitalist and in some ways more capitalistic than many longer-standing capitalist countries — is that the revolt of Tibetans against China began with the support of the CIA
Who cares how it started?
When the leaders of a group — the Tibetans, the Miskitos, the Hmongs, the Iraqi Kurds, etc. — make a Faustian bargain like agreeing to be backed by the CIA in particular or Washington in general, it changes the estimation of the leaders — though not of the peoples led by them — in the minds of people who know: the estimation goes up in the minds of rightists, and the estimation goes down in the minds of leftists (excepting the confused souls in Hollywood).
Traditional Tibetan society was not the kind of thing that most Queer Buddhist Resisters could feel attached to: a deeply patriarchal, reactionary society, in which an impoverished mass paid tribute to an idle cast of priests. While that doesn’t necessarily justify Chinese intervention, I find it really hard to get excited about defending Tibet. It’s not unlike the choice between the USSR and traditional Afghan society: yes, the Soviets were horrendously brutal in their invasion, but Workers Vanguard had a point when they had their classic headline, “Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan.”
Didn’t the Dalai Lama notoriously make some homophobic remarks a few years ago, much to the shock of his fans in Hollywood?
Doug