The truth about Tibet

10:05, April 22, 2009  

At a recent news conference in Washington on the Tibet issue, Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Clinton whose law firm (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe) has three offices in China was asked about his views.

"I have the greatest respect for the Dalai Lama," says Davis, "but there is another side to the story."

That story is now beginning to emerge.

Or perhaps it was always there but decades of the international media, peddling the America-supported-and-financed views of the Dalai Lama, turned a blind eye to the real Tibet under the "man-god" and his spiritual predecessors.

Some Western politicians and media still want to believe China is an oppressive and negative power, especially when it comes to the Tibet Autonomous Region, said He Rulong, doctoral scholar with the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, School of Law, China University of Political Science and Law. (Source: China Daily)

And that Tibet is not the Shangri-la "paradise" the world has been led to believe and often portrayed by the western news media, travel books, novels, and particularly, Hollywood films. The peace-loving socially-mobile Utopian society that the Dalai and his followers-in-exile have been preaching is now being unceremoniously exposed for the blatant fallacy that it is, was.

The truth is, prior to the takeover (or retake, as Tibet was part of China for 700 years since Genghis Khan) of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army in 1959, Tibet was a brutally oppressive theocracy under the lamas.

Some 95 percent of the population were serfs and slaves, bought, sold and abused at the whim of the three ruling classes- the lamas who controlled the monasteries, the aristocracy-descendants of kings and Tibetan nobility- and government officials.

So what was it like being a serf in pre-1959 Tibet?

Here's an extract from Michael Parenti's revealing, if not chilling, book Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth.
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