[net.religion] Religious & physical extermination in Tibet

rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (02/24/86)

Communist Genocide in Tibet
===========================

Reports claim that from 1959 to at least 1980 the People's Republic
of China conducted a reign of terror in conquered Tibet (invaded &
occupied in 1959) which destroyed MOST of its Buddhism-Lamaism, and
EXTERMINATED AT LEAST 1 MILLION TIBETANS (or AT LEAST 55 PER CENT of
the 1953 estimate of the ethnic Tibetan population in Tibet: geographer
Theodore Shabad's "China's Changing Map 1949-71" gives a 1953 estimate
of 1.8 million ethnic Tibetans in the 2 Tibetan highlands districts of
Tsinghai Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Region).

According to a recent "Sixty Minutes" installment (can't remember date),
Red Guards killed 1 million Tibetans, destroyed most of the 6,000
monasteries, and looted or completely destroyed their art treasures.
The current rulers in Peking (Deng Xiao-ping et alia) attribute "this
attempt [sic.] to destroy Tibetan culture" to the Gang of Four.

According to a 7/12/85 report on NPR's "All Things Considered" by
Wendy Lin, after twenty+ years of suppression, Buddhism is making
a big comeback (resurrection?) in Tibet.  Many monks were imprisoned
and brutally treated; monasteries were looted, damaged, & sometimes
entirely destroyed.  The jewels of 5 Dalai Lamas were destroyed.

One monk said he'd been in prison 20 years, during which he quarried
stone & was shut up each night in a tiny cell.

The PRC has recently released many monks from prison.  Unlike some
Communist countries, the PRC's constitution allows freedom of worship,
but the Communist Party still limits the number of monks.

The large Ganden monastery is rubble.  Of its former 4000 monks there
are now only 200.  Only 30 new monks are allowed per year.  The entire
monastery had been leveled, systematically taken apart by Red Guards
from Lhasa City armed with dynamite and tools.  Some of the Guards who
participated were top Chinese Communist officials of the area.  Laborious
attempts to manually rebuild the monasteries literally brick-by-brick
have begun, but 80% of Ganden is still in ruins.

According to Jean-Francois Revel in "How Democracies Perish" (Doubleday,
1983): 

	the extermination of the Tibetan people and the destruction of
	their culture accomplished over a twenty-year period almost
	without the world's knowledge.  From 1959, when a Chinese army
	invaded Tibet, until 1980, when a political change in Peking
	gave Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal an opportunity to
	return home to see such remnants of their families as survived,
	scarcely any news had seeped out to disturb Western sinolatry
	--- nothing substantial and exhaustive enough, at any rate, to
	shake Western apathy.  A few books, a few articles here and
	there, scattered reports from refugees all went unnoticed.  Not
	many people, probably, were keen on noticing them.

	The term genocide, too often lightly used, is irreplaceable here.
	It does not refer to just any massacre, no matter how frightful
	or murderous.  It is a massacre that is coldly decreed, planned
	and executed by a state, an authority, and that cannot be imputed
	to even the most inexcusable excesses of an army in wartime.  For
	it was AFTER the conquest of Tibet that the Chinese army of occu-
	pation set about the physical and cultural liquidation of a de-
	fenseless people that had abandoned all but moral resistance.

	....

	Testimony by travelers returning from Tibet to Nepal, Bhutan and
	northern India indicates that, incredible as it may seem, up to
	80 percent of the population remaining after the invasion died;
	in many cases, families of six children were left with only one
	survivor.  Victims who were not murdered outright were felled
	by those other great pillars of communism: famine and forced
	labor.  Of perhaps one thousand refugees who reached India and
	Nepal in 1981, more than half had served prison terms: some
	three hundred had been in prison uninterruptedly since 1959.
	Working conditions were so hard, both day and night, and food
	so scarce (a handful every twenty-four hours of TSAMPA, the
	flour of grilled barley that is Tibet's staple food) that there
	were always a few people who failed to reply at evening roll
	call in the camps; they had died, the fugitives said, of ex-
	haustion.

	The massacres were particularly ferocious among Tibetan monks.
	Two hundred of them who remained in the Sechen monastery in
	eastern Tibet were slaughtered in one day, and this is merely
	one of many such examples.  The Chinese tortured clerics and
	lay believers who refused to abjure their religion.  If the
	victims moved their lips in prayer under torture, they were
	beaten to death.  One witness told a relative of mine, who is
	an expert on Tibet and speaks the language fluently, that he
	had been assigned for a full month to the job of tossing bodies
	into a gigantic pit.  Accused one day of having failed to stack
	the corpses correctly, which obviously required a certain level
	of Maoist training, he was forced to go down into the pit, where
	he sank into the heap of decomposing flesh.  He was hauled out
	just in time to avoid asphyxiation.

	The obliteration of Tibet's culture was carried on with almost
	insane violence, especially after the Cultural Revolution's Red
	Guards arrived to lend a "spontaneous" hand to the occupation
	army.  Suppose the Nazis had razed every old church in Italy
	except Saint Peter's in Rome, all the churches and cathedrals
	in France except Notre Dame in Paris, leaving these two build-
	ings standing only to prove to visitors how calumnious all the
	rumors of vandalism were.  Suppose also that the National Lib-
	rary of France had been burned, and you begin to have a picture
	of what has happened in Tibet.  More than thirty thousand of
	the country's monasteries and temples [ this figure may include
        the very numerous shrines ] were destroyed; hundreds of thou-
	sands of woodblocks for printing ancient Tibetan scripture were
	used as firewood or to build army barracks.  The great monas-
	teries at Sechen, Zongsar, Kathog, Dzochen, to cite only the
	main ones, were razed; only plains are there now that give
	no hint that the greatest treasures of Tibetan architecture
	once stood on those sites.  Of Ganden, Turphu, Mindroeing,
	Palpung, nothing but ruins remain.  Gone, too, are the five-
	story Riwotse monastery in the Kham and the thousands of old
	manuscripts it contained.  Over one hundred thousand woodblocks
	at the great Dershe print shop were saved from burning by a
	popular uprising that Peking elected not to crush.  The sole
	surviving monastery is the one the world knows, the Potala
	in Lhasa; damaging it would have been too noticeable.

						[ pages 172-5 ]

The assault on Tibetan religion and culture was underway BEFORE the
Cultural Revolution, though the worst excesses may have occurred
later:  300 of the 1000 refugees to India & Nepal that Revel mentions
had been continuously imprisoned since 1959.

I don't know who exactly in the PRC regime were responsible or to what
extent, but the blame for the rape of Tibet can't be put only on:

	1 Mao, because, according to Simon Leys in "The Chairman's New
	  Clothes", after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1959-
	  62) Mao had little influence on actual policy until the
	  Cultural Revolution (1966-69); or

	2 Maoists: again according to Leys, influential maoists were
	  concentrated in those parts of the military around Lin Biao
	  & the Peking command, & even here were opposed by other
	  commands and militias; or

	3 the Cultural Revolution or the Gang of Four, given the chro-
	  nology & the scapegoat status of the Gang.

Also, actions & policies like the 1959 invasion & occupation of Tibet, 
suppression & destruction of religion, & even destruction of culture
& genocide aren't unique within Communism to "extremist" factions like
maoists or Khmer Rouge.  Lenin's doctrine of nationalities didn't in-
hibit Leninists from, eg, destroying religious institutions that were
intimate parts of ethnic identity (ie, Jewish, Ukrainian & Russian
Orthodox).

Revel again:

        Here's cause for meditation on the developing conscience of
        history: at a time when the entire world was anathematizing
        the war in Vietnam, an almost flawless program of genocide
        was being carried out in total secrecy a few thousand kilo-
        meters away on the same continent.  [ page 172 ]

And a slaughter which proportionately was at the least nearly one & 
a half times that of the highest estimate of the Cambodian holocaust
(ie, 1/3 of the Cambodian population).


					Better well-read than Red,

					Ron Rizzo

tedrick@ernie.berkeley.edu.BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Tedrick) (02/27/86)

>Communist Genocide in Tibet

So is anyone surprised about this? The fundamental
principle of Marxism is the need for class struggle,
which means any cultural group opposed to the absolute
power of the Communists is to be ruthlessly destroyed.
This includes intellectuals, religious groups, property
holders, and anyone smart enough to be a threat to the
party. By destroying the existing culture and reducing
the population to the level of a dull, uneducated, brutish
mass, the party will have no significant internal opposition
to worry about, and can go about its business of establishing
communism. Who do you think we are up against, the Girl Scouts? :-)

>	The obliteration of Tibet's culture was carried on with almost
>	insane violence, 

Now this I can't understand. After all this time, isn't it clear
that the violent obliteration of non-communist culture is a fundamental
principle of communism? There is nothing insane about it, it is
coldly calculated, entirely deliberate, and well thought out beforehand.

>        Here's cause for meditation on the developing conscience of
>        history: at a time when the entire world was anathematizing
>        the war in Vietnam, an almost flawless program of genocide
>        was being carried out in total secrecy a few thousand kilo-
>        meters away on the same continent.  [ page 172 ]

Again, what is so surprising about this? Part of the game is to
control information. Hasn't anyone noticed that communist states
like to monopolize the control of information (and disinformation)?
Democratic states which allow free flow of information (so that
the voters can make rational political choices) are a juicy
target for the masters of propaganda and disinformation.

The communists rewrite history, educate (or rather "diseducate",
to coin a phrase) the youth, and generally make great efforts
to impose their worldview on the rest of us.

That is one reason you won't see a network like this in the 
Soviet Union, for a long time to come ... free flow of information
is anethema to the communists ...

Seriously, Ron, thanks for a great article!