Theos-Talk Archives (March 2008 Message tt00224)

According to the article Chuck we are talking about 1959.  I hope its not the case of 'another one bites the dust'.  
  Cass

Drpsionic@aol.com wrote:
          Considering that no one who ever visited Tibet ever wrote of such things, it sounds like a lie of the Chinese.

In any event, Tibet was not exactly a western nation with western ways of looking at things, but more of a truly medieval society so no doubt it did have certain unpleasant aspects but these would hardly be a matter of serious contemporary consideration, any more than we would get upset about something that happened in medieval Europe.

Chuck the Heretic

http://www.geocities.com/c_cosimano 

-----Original Message-----
From: Cass Silva <silva_cass@yahoo.com>
To: Theosophy <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 6:08 pm
Subject: Theos-World Dalai Lama and Serfdom

Will someone please tell me this is all lies. I have often wondered why the Dalai Lama did not follow in the steps of Mandala and remain in Tibet, even if this had meants imprisonment and death. 
Cass

One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a â??liberation.â?? He claimed that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord's men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain.â?? 
From: 
http://www.spitfire list.com/ f548.html 
5. â??Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. 
Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that â??a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches. . . . 
In addition, individual monks and lamas were able to accumulate great wealth through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.â?? Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. 
The wealth of the monasteries went mostly to the higher-ranking lamas, many of them scions of aristocratic families. Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in- chief of the Tibetan army, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. 
He also was a member of the Dalai Lama's lay Cabinet. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some of its Western admirers as â??a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.â?? In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order and hunt down runaway serfs.â?? (Idem.) 
6. â??Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they became bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 
The monastic estates also conscripted impoverished peasant children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers. In Old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the â??middle-classâ?? families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. 
A small minority were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. The greater part of the rural population-- -some 700,000 of an estimated total of 1,250,000--- were serfs. Serfs and other peasants generally were little better than slaves. They went without schooling or medical care. They spent most of their time laboring for high-ranking lamas or for the secular landed aristocracy. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. 
They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners send them to work in a distant location. One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: â??Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished.â?? They â??were just slaves without rights.â?? Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. 
Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a â??liberation.â?? He claimed that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord's men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain.â?? (Idem.) 
7. â??The serfs were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land---or the monastery's land---without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. They were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child, and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. There were taxes for religious festivals, for singing, dancing, drumming, and bell ringing. 
People were taxed for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. 
When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being placed into slavery sometimes for the rest of their lives. 
The theocracy's religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve upon being reborn. The rich and powerful of course treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.â?? (Idem.) 
8. â??In the Dalai Lama's Tibet, torture and mutilation-- -including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation-- were favored punishments inflicted upon runaway serfs and thieves. 
Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: â??When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.â?? 
Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then â??left to Godâ?? in the freezing night to die. â??The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,â?? concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, and breaking off hands. There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master's cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.â?? (Idem.) 
9. â??Early visitors to Tibet comment about the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the â??intolerable tyranny of monksâ?? and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. 
In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama's rule as â??an engine of oppression.â?? At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O'Connor, observed that â??the great landowners and the priests . . . exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,â?? while the people are â??oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.â?? Tibetan rulers â??invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstitionâ?? among the common people. 
In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, â??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.â?? . . .â?? (Idem.) 
10. The program reviews the links of the Dalai Lama and his milieu to various intelligence agencies and some of the groups that they sponsor. Reviewing information presented in FTR#547, we note that the Dalai Lama himself is no stranger to elements of U.S. intelligence, specifically the CIA. â?? . . . 
However, throughout the 1960â??s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lamaâ??s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960â??s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. 
The Dalai Llamaâ??s annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment. . . .â?? (Idem.) 
11. Gaining a broader view of the political milieu of which the Dalai Lama is a part, the broadcast notes that the Dalai Lama has collaborated with Islamists from among the Uighur population of Xinjiang province of China. 
The Uighurs--a largely Muslim population who speak a Turkic languageâ??have been agitating for independence from China. (The Uighurs refer to Xinjiang as East or Eastern Turkestan.) 
With Xinjiang province being rich in petroleum, the Uighurs have had little trouble obtaining support from foreign intelligence services. 
For additional information about Uighur involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood/ Al Qaeda milieu, see FTR#348. It should be noted that we are a long way from dealing with â??Buddhistsâ?? here!! 
The Dalai Lamaâ??s milieu is part of a larger Underground Reich virtual state. 
It is also important to bear in mind that the milieu of which the Dalai Lama is a part appears to focus on Central Asiaâ??that part of the â??Earth Islandâ?? seen by geopoliticians as key to controlling that land mass and, as a consequence, the world. 
â??India should have reasons to be concerned over the Dalai Lama's hobnobbing with the pan- Islamic elements in Xinjiang. 
One cannot avoid suspecting that the influence of these elements must have been behind his participation in a conference organized in Chennai last year by some elements, which have been acting as apologists for Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani military dictator, which was attended by a representative of the Huryiat of J&K and a large number of Pakistanis, some of them retired Pakistani military officers. 
The Dalai Lama's set-up subsequently denied or played down some of the controversial remarks attributed to him at the conference. 
The Government of India should consider conveying to the Dalai Lama its unhappiness and concern over his association with pan-Islamic elements in Xinjiang.â?? (â??US & Terrorism in Xinjiangâ?? by B. Raman; From the website of the South Asia Analysis Group [an Indian intelligence/ national security think tank]; 7/02; accessed at: http://www.saag. org/papers5/ paper499. html.) 
12. More on the Uighur involvement with Al Qaeda: â??10. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Abu Sayyaf of the southern Philippines have been designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under the US law of 1996, but not the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party, though all the three are members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the USA and Israel. 
In initiating action, either for designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization or for action under the UN Security Council Resolution No, 1373 in respect of bank accounts, the US and the European Union have focused essentially on terrorist organizations, which are perceived by them as international in nature or which are seen as posing a threat to their nationals and interests. Terrorist organizations viewed by them as purely indigenous have been excluded. These multiple yardsticks have been used vis- a-vis China as well as India.â?? (Idem.) 
13. Note that both the Islamist element of the Uighur independence movement and its secular allies have collaborated with the Dalai Lama. â??7. Uighurs were found fighting with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We are aware of credible reports that some Uighurs who were trained by al-Qaeda have returned to China. . . .24. 
The second similarity relates to the external causes of aggravation of the terrorist violence in Xinjiang. Just as in J & K, in Xinjiang too, there are two distinct terrorist/extremist movements- -one resorting to violence on ethnic grounds to assert the Uighur ethnic identity against the perceived Han Chinese domination and the other using religious and pan-Islamic arguments to justify violence for the establishment of an independent Islamic State. 
While the ethnic separatist elements have been the beneficiaries of sympathy and support from the Dalai Lama's set-up and the Tibetan diaspora abroad, and the US, Taiwanese and Turkish intelligence agencies, the religious fundamentalist elements have been in receipt of support from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-backed jehadi organizations in Pakistan, the Taliban and bin Laden's International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the USA and Israel.â?? (Idem.) 
14. According to the Raman paper, the CIA had close connections to Erkin Alptekin, a member of the board of the Dalai Lama foundation and a functionary of the movement to establish Xinjiang province of China as an independent (Muslim) Uighur stateâ??East Turkestan. 
It should be noted that Alptekin is an operative of the Pan-Turkist movement, which is distinct from the Islamist element in the Uighur independence movement. The Pan-Turkist movement is discussed at length in RFA#â??s 14 and 21, available from Spitfire. 
â??25. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA had built up a network of contacts with the Uighur separatist elements and some of those, who had in the past worked for the Munich-based Radio Liberty of the CIA such as Erkin Alptekin, chairman of the Europe-based Eastern Turkestani Union and a close Uighur associate of the Dalai Lama, are now in the forefront of the ethnic separatist movement. . . .â?? (Idem.) 
15. In addition to his background with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty â?? both closely connected to U.S. intelligence â?? Erkin Alptekin is a founder and key member of the UNPO, about which we will have more to say in weeks to come. 
â??ERKIN ALPTEKIN is one of the foremost human rights advocates for the Uighur people of Eastern Turkestan, also known as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of the Peopleâ??s Republic of China. Mr. Alptekin was employed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1971 to 1994. He is one of the founders of the Unrepresented Nations and Peopleâ??s Organization (UNPO), and currently serves as its general secretary.â?? (Excerpt from the list of the board of the Dalai Lama Foundation; accessed at: 
http://www.dalailam afoundation. org/members/ en/founders. jsp.) 
16. Looking ahead to future discussions of the milieu to which the Dalai Lama belongs, the program highlights the head of the UNPO â?? Karl von Habsburg, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (For more about the Habsburgs and their fascist connections, seeâ??among other programsâ??FTR# 536.) 
Again, we are a long, long way from dealing with â??Buddhistsâ?? here! 
With the Dalai Lama and his milieu, we appear to be looking at manifestations of the Underground Reich as a â??virtual stateâ?? â?? a state without formal geographical borders. We should also note that Central Asia â?? the area that is the focal point of the Dalai Lamaâ??s and UNPOâ??s support for Uighur separatist elements was viewed by geopoliticians as critical for maintaining control of the Earth Island. 
â??The eldest son and heir of the dynasty is Karl (Karl's website), who lives in Austria and has served in the Austrian army and was a member of the European Parliament, like his father, from 1996-1999. [Italics are Mr. Emoryâ??s.] He has worked hard to keep the family in the public limelight, even hosting a popular television game show. He works quietly to change the Austrian laws of 1919 that forbid the Habsburgs from holding any political office and has often been mentioned as a possible Chancellor of the Austrian Republic. At this time he is the Generaldirektor of the UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization) . 
In 1993 Karl married Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza who is well known in European high society.â?? (Entry for Karl von Habsburg; accessed at: 
http://www.antiques atoz.com/ habsburg/ habsburg- family.htm.) 
17. Recently, the Dalai Lama visited the United States in order to, in part, â??promote understandingâ?? of Islam on the part of Americans. An altogether laudable undertaking on the surface, this effort raises some questions. Is the Dalai Lama actually running interference for some of the Islamist elements with which he is associated? In this context, one should recall the advisory given by the Trimondis in paragraph #2. They warn that the Dalai Lama goes out of his way to be less than forthcoming about his true beliefs and agenda. â??The Dalai Lama, a powerful icon for peace worldwide, will gather influential American Muslim leaders in San Francisco today to help refashion Islamâ??s image in the United States. Concerned that Muslims are unfairly demonized in American popular consciousness, the world-renowned Buddhist leader hopes to help show Islam in what he sees as its truest form, one of peace. . . .â?? 
(â??Dalai Lama Seeks to Improve image of Islam in U.S.â?? by Matthai Chakko Kuruvila; San Francisco Chronicle; 4/15/2006; accessed at: 
http://www.sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? file=/c/a/ 2006/04/15/ MNGELI9PLR1. DTL.) 

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