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Tibet as a land and people should be made a first class citizen of the physical and political world as well. I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out

Tibet as a land and people should be made a first class citizen of the physical and political world as well. I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe, but less than 75 years ago, China forcibly and illegally took over Tibet and since then has been engaged in a forced reeducation and erasure of the people and their culture (Sinicization): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet This is one of the great injustices of the world, and unfortunately the Tibetan leader (the real Dalai Lama) had to flee and live in exile in India.

EA-3167 2y ago
> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going. With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of entropy. People, even very passionate and politically active people, moved on to causes with at least some hope, or at least the perception of hope.
- g-b-r 2y ago
  What? From my recollection, when it was decided to admit China in the WTO, every problem was set aside for the asserted belief that growth would result in democracy, human rights and hence the solution of those problems. By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the manufacturing).
  - EA-3167 2y ago
    Even with reshoring, it's not as though China would just shrug and give up Tibet, and a military confrontation with them over Tibet would be profoundly unpopular in any reasonably foreseeable political landscape. There is no underlying racial animus to drive focus on the issue, as there is with conflicts in the Middle East. For most Americans Tibet is a place they've never been, know precious little about, and while they may feel badly when the situation is explained, it isn't going to weigh heavily on them. It would be hard to explain why that's something to be prioritized over the MENA region, Russia and Ukraine, or places like Mali, Niger, and Sudan.
    - g-b-r 2y ago
      If the west wasn't so dependent on China, it could offer something in return for improving the treatment of Tibetans. The Tibetan issue used to be felt very strongly, even in America, I believe. It probably largely still is, but it's much less on the forefront, and probably seen as too hard to solve. And maybe the younger generations don't know it well. Anyway, if it became more feasible to improve the situation, I think there would be a lot of support and pressure to do it. Sure, probably not to the point of entering into a war with a nuclear country, but that wouldn't be needed. The support for Tibet was due to the fascination for the culture, the people and the places, I imagine. People so peaceful, places so beautiful, and a culture so fascinating, violated in this way. It's just outrageous, and very hard to comprehend. Of course anyhow, a reshoring anytime soon is extremely unlikely. I'm not sure what you meant with the racial animus in the Middle East, by the way
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Is it just due to numbers? Middle East conflict has Muslims all over the world engaging and amplifying the issue. But there are few Tibetans and no allies of theirs to really speak of in the same way (as with the international Muslim community).
justin66 2y ago
> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people money.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
[flagged]
- hackernewds 2y ago
  A very loaded and weird take comparing tibetan culture to the worst denominator of cannibalism, scientology and brainwashing. We have much to learn from Eastern wisdom as we already find with TCM, meditation, Ayurveda and yoga to mention a few.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Read about what kind of tortures the lamas brought to serfs and slaves. Beware, because it's highly NSFW. And I don't support the CCCP in any case, but Tibet wasn't Disneyland as HNers believe. If the only problem the previous commenter stated was just some kind of a cult, well, if woudn't be half-bad. But upon reading about the Tibet and basically the Asian Inquisition (not the Spanish one, but the actual witch-burning one from Central Europe), you will see the Tibet in a very different way.
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      Agreed. I was very mild in my criticism.
    - cosignal 2y ago
      You're definitely bringing up issues that are worth consideration. The low-resolution view of Tibet that is/has been popular among (usually liberal, middle-to-upper class) Westerners following a kinda Buddhism-lite trend is that it was actually Shambhala/Shangri-la. You can see how gorgeous parts of Tibet are by looking up photos, and the assumption is that society there was as beautiful as the landscapes and thangka paintings. But in fact Tibet was in many ways just about as far from Disneyland as can be conceived. Even by the early 20th century, it was a medieval-esque serfdom and theocracy. It doesn't matter how technical or philosophical someone gets about how Buddhism is non-theistic and Vajrayana is some kind of system of applied psychology, the fact is that powerful lamas were viewed as actual gods and, like a caste system, the underprivileged were regarded as deserving of their lot due to karma. There was a centuries-in-the-making ingrained resistance to outside ideas throughout the region, and those which would include things like modernity and human rights. While the rest of the world was getting stuff like penicillin and effective surgery, the stranglehold that the monastic institutions had on the education-deprived Tibetans prevented any meaningful cross-border dialogue. All that being said, the CCP was not (and China still is not) some kind of bastion of human rights and openness to ideas. The People's Army would have never been so much as scratched by whatever barely passed for Tibetan soldiers, so they arguably did not need to be nearly so heavy-handed. Assuming it's actually anyone's legitimate responsibility to 'liberate' that place, I suppose that some 'force' might've been required to crack the nut of that massively insular Tibetan world, but there's no way that it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and erasure. In a parallel universe, the world of Tibet could have been introduced to modernity without being placed under the thumb of the Chinese monolith. So I guess I'm just trying to provide a balanced perspective.
modernpink 2y ago
[flagged]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  It’s also weird that Xinjiang and the Uyghur genocide get almost no commentary from the Arab Islamic world, even though the scale of violence against Muslims is far greater than the Israel-Arab conflict, by several orders of magnitude. To me it looks a lot like antisemitism - the smaller conflict matters only because it involves Jews.
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    Far greater is very debatable, you get a similar number of killings only if the organ harvesting allegations are true. The Arab-islamic world is made up of autocracies; they don't need to care about a lot, and they indeed showed extremely little concern for the Palestinians as well.
    - feedforward 2y ago
      Egypt is an autocracy because the US sends it billions of dollars to keep it an autocracy. Neither the US nor Israel want Egypt to be anything other than an autocracy. Regarding organ harvesting, the FBI arrested Israeli-connected illegal organ harvesters in the US, as reported by the New York Times. The Palestinians have complained about Israeli organ harvesting, and apparently the US is concerned about their illegal organ harvesting networks too.
      - g-b-r 2y ago
        For the first part, true, probably. For the second, I don't know anything about it For the Uighurs, there are allegations of 25.000 murders a year for organ harvesting in the Xinjiang.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2y ago
debit-freak 2y ago
[flagged]
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Is anyone suggesting first people's in North America deserve less consideration than Tibet? I've heard concerns about both Tibet and treatment of first peoples in the US (historical and at present).
- Retric 2y ago
  There’s an expiration date on being able to do anything on this kind of conquest and forceful relocations. I’m personally more concerned with China’s genocide of the Uyghur because you can’t undo such atrocities after a population is gone as happened to many Native American populations. There’s a few relatively tiny “Native American” populations that are still genetically distinct, but a wide range of cultures have been effectively erased with only fragments remaining. Hundreds of dead languages we don’t even know enough about to classify let alone stories. Imagine if everything from Spain to Japan was referenced as Eurasian culture and thrown into basically the same bucket.
- hash872 2y ago
  As OP notes, the 'Free Tibet' cause was very popular in the 90s when the US was not seen as being in a great-power conflict with China. So I don't think your 2nd sentence is correct. Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism
  - debit-freak 2y ago
    > Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement. Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Tainnor 2y ago
I'm inclined to agree with you politically (with what little I know about this conflict which admittedly is... almost nothing), but I don't think this kind of political discourse is very appropriate for HN. You can already see from some of the replies to your comment how the quality of the discussion deteriorates.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I get what you’re saying but I shared it because the motives are the same. Why does Tibetan language matter at all? This BDRC article about digital representation of the language is tied back to that motivation. And the language is under threat due to Sinicization (the program of brainwashing Tibet so it looks like the rest of China). In other words, this discussions around a digital effort is tied to a greater effort to preserve Tibet (land, people, culture).
  - Tainnor 2y ago
    From my point of view, representation of minority languages matters no matter the political situation. I'm aware that this isn't always (and wasn't always) universally accepted, but I would still think that it's less controversial than political autonomy. For example, people can support increased representation of the Welsh language without wanting Wales to secede from the UK.
oyveyyyy 2y ago
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EA-3167 2y ago

> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going. With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of entropy. People, even very passionate and politically active people, moved on to causes with at least some hope, or at least the perception of hope.

g-b-r 2y ago
What? From my recollection, when it was decided to admit China in the WTO, every problem was set aside for the asserted belief that growth would result in democracy, human rights and hence the solution of those problems. By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the manufacturing).
- EA-3167 2y ago
  Even with reshoring, it's not as though China would just shrug and give up Tibet, and a military confrontation with them over Tibet would be profoundly unpopular in any reasonably foreseeable political landscape. There is no underlying racial animus to drive focus on the issue, as there is with conflicts in the Middle East. For most Americans Tibet is a place they've never been, know precious little about, and while they may feel badly when the situation is explained, it isn't going to weigh heavily on them. It would be hard to explain why that's something to be prioritized over the MENA region, Russia and Ukraine, or places like Mali, Niger, and Sudan.
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    If the west wasn't so dependent on China, it could offer something in return for improving the treatment of Tibetans. The Tibetan issue used to be felt very strongly, even in America, I believe. It probably largely still is, but it's much less on the forefront, and probably seen as too hard to solve. And maybe the younger generations don't know it well. Anyway, if it became more feasible to improve the situation, I think there would be a lot of support and pressure to do it. Sure, probably not to the point of entering into a war with a nuclear country, but that wouldn't be needed. The support for Tibet was due to the fascination for the culture, the people and the places, I imagine. People so peaceful, places so beautiful, and a culture so fascinating, violated in this way. It's just outrageous, and very hard to comprehend. Of course anyhow, a reshoring anytime soon is extremely unlikely. I'm not sure what you meant with the racial animus in the Middle East, by the way
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Is it just due to numbers? Middle East conflict has Muslims all over the world engaging and amplifying the issue. But there are few Tibetans and no allies of theirs to really speak of in the same way (as with the international Muslim community).

justin66 2y ago

> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people money.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

[flagged]

hackernewds 2y ago
A very loaded and weird take comparing tibetan culture to the worst denominator of cannibalism, scientology and brainwashing. We have much to learn from Eastern wisdom as we already find with TCM, meditation, Ayurveda and yoga to mention a few.
- anthk 2y ago
  Read about what kind of tortures the lamas brought to serfs and slaves. Beware, because it's highly NSFW. And I don't support the CCCP in any case, but Tibet wasn't Disneyland as HNers believe. If the only problem the previous commenter stated was just some kind of a cult, well, if woudn't be half-bad. But upon reading about the Tibet and basically the Asian Inquisition (not the Spanish one, but the actual witch-burning one from Central Europe), you will see the Tibet in a very different way.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Agreed. I was very mild in my criticism.
  - cosignal 2y ago
    You're definitely bringing up issues that are worth consideration. The low-resolution view of Tibet that is/has been popular among (usually liberal, middle-to-upper class) Westerners following a kinda Buddhism-lite trend is that it was actually Shambhala/Shangri-la. You can see how gorgeous parts of Tibet are by looking up photos, and the assumption is that society there was as beautiful as the landscapes and thangka paintings. But in fact Tibet was in many ways just about as far from Disneyland as can be conceived. Even by the early 20th century, it was a medieval-esque serfdom and theocracy. It doesn't matter how technical or philosophical someone gets about how Buddhism is non-theistic and Vajrayana is some kind of system of applied psychology, the fact is that powerful lamas were viewed as actual gods and, like a caste system, the underprivileged were regarded as deserving of their lot due to karma. There was a centuries-in-the-making ingrained resistance to outside ideas throughout the region, and those which would include things like modernity and human rights. While the rest of the world was getting stuff like penicillin and effective surgery, the stranglehold that the monastic institutions had on the education-deprived Tibetans prevented any meaningful cross-border dialogue. All that being said, the CCP was not (and China still is not) some kind of bastion of human rights and openness to ideas. The People's Army would have never been so much as scratched by whatever barely passed for Tibetan soldiers, so they arguably did not need to be nearly so heavy-handed. Assuming it's actually anyone's legitimate responsibility to 'liberate' that place, I suppose that some 'force' might've been required to crack the nut of that massively insular Tibetan world, but there's no way that it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and erasure. In a parallel universe, the world of Tibet could have been introduced to modernity without being placed under the thumb of the Chinese monolith. So I guess I'm just trying to provide a balanced perspective.

modernpink 2y ago

[flagged]

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It’s also weird that Xinjiang and the Uyghur genocide get almost no commentary from the Arab Islamic world, even though the scale of violence against Muslims is far greater than the Israel-Arab conflict, by several orders of magnitude. To me it looks a lot like antisemitism - the smaller conflict matters only because it involves Jews.
- g-b-r 2y ago
  Far greater is very debatable, you get a similar number of killings only if the organ harvesting allegations are true. The Arab-islamic world is made up of autocracies; they don't need to care about a lot, and they indeed showed extremely little concern for the Palestinians as well.
  - feedforward 2y ago
    Egypt is an autocracy because the US sends it billions of dollars to keep it an autocracy. Neither the US nor Israel want Egypt to be anything other than an autocracy. Regarding organ harvesting, the FBI arrested Israeli-connected illegal organ harvesters in the US, as reported by the New York Times. The Palestinians have complained about Israeli organ harvesting, and apparently the US is concerned about their illegal organ harvesting networks too.
    - g-b-r 2y ago
      For the first part, true, probably. For the second, I don't know anything about it For the Uighurs, there are allegations of 25.000 murders a year for organ harvesting in the Xinjiang.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 2y ago

debit-freak 2y ago

[flagged]

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Is anyone suggesting first people's in North America deserve less consideration than Tibet? I've heard concerns about both Tibet and treatment of first peoples in the US (historical and at present).
Retric 2y ago
There’s an expiration date on being able to do anything on this kind of conquest and forceful relocations. I’m personally more concerned with China’s genocide of the Uyghur because you can’t undo such atrocities after a population is gone as happened to many Native American populations. There’s a few relatively tiny “Native American” populations that are still genetically distinct, but a wide range of cultures have been effectively erased with only fragments remaining. Hundreds of dead languages we don’t even know enough about to classify let alone stories. Imagine if everything from Spain to Japan was referenced as Eurasian culture and thrown into basically the same bucket.
hash872 2y ago
As OP notes, the 'Free Tibet' cause was very popular in the 90s when the US was not seen as being in a great-power conflict with China. So I don't think your 2nd sentence is correct. Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism
- debit-freak 2y ago
  > Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement. Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Tainnor 2y ago

I'm inclined to agree with you politically (with what little I know about this conflict which admittedly is... almost nothing), but I don't think this kind of political discourse is very appropriate for HN. You can already see from some of the replies to your comment how the quality of the discussion deteriorates.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I get what you’re saying but I shared it because the motives are the same. Why does Tibetan language matter at all? This BDRC article about digital representation of the language is tied back to that motivation. And the language is under threat due to Sinicization (the program of brainwashing Tibet so it looks like the rest of China). In other words, this discussions around a digital effort is tied to a greater effort to preserve Tibet (land, people, culture).
- Tainnor 2y ago
  From my point of view, representation of minority languages matters no matter the political situation. I'm aware that this isn't always (and wasn't always) universally accepted, but I would still think that it's less controversial than political autonomy. For example, people can support increased representation of the Welsh language without wanting Wales to secede from the UK.

oyveyyyy 2y ago

[dead]