Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Dalai Hitler

Two of my abiding interests through the years have been the rise of Nazism and Tibet. The former arose from class VIII when I chanced on a coffee-book at a teacher's room where my young eyes stood paralyzed at the sight of bones coarsely draped with the semblance of white skin piled in a heap like a Holika (I still remember that picture).

Through the years I swallowed books and articles to understand the mass psyche that can invoke this cold, grotesque reality.

Tibet fascinated me from my trips to the Garhwals where I chanced on is depleted yet fascinating civilization. After meeting Tarun, I read more on Tibet and have always anguished at the gradual deculturization of this great body of knowledge, art and philosophy in the blood-red hands of an expansionist and anachronistically totalitarian machinery.

The recent rhetoric by China against the Dalai Lama calling him "wolf in monk's robes" and talking about suicide bombing squads reminded me of Hitlers' own tactics of attacking nations by claiming unfettered violence from . Ah! His genius! Of rhetoric, playing the aggrieved party while being the aggressor, of the wolf calling the lamb the predator.

Totalitarianism - both left and right -has always thrived on rhetoric and repression of thought within.

As a result, I searched on Google if anyone else had commented on this obvious parallel - besides the timing of this Olympics and the 1936 Berlin.

So far, I haven't come across any such articles. The closest I came was this article - written in 2006 whose logical flow still evades me.

But more interestingly - here it is China which is comparing the once-free Tibet to the Nazis!

I think China's hypocrisy is fast rivaling that of Hitler and Stalin's own.

It is, in my opinion, a great tragedy that we have empowered China economically(by allowing it to trade in the world economy by exploiting its totalitarian "advantages" - of slave labor, unfair financial practices and enforcement of mass migration and resource deployment) so highly, that it can mock us with its barefaced lies and genocides. Instead of denouncing its corrupt and inhuman governance over a fifth of the humanity with embargoes, we have succumbed to the lure of cheap goods manufactured against the laws of comparative advantage (simply because they do not come from the law of free markets) and allowed this festering red dragon to hold in terror a significant part of the world. From its own people who refuse to hear the world Tiannamen even in the cubicles of US, to the Maoists in Nepal, to the Naxalites in Telanagana forests, to the evil junta in Burma and to that grand old man in Dharamshala who weeps at the thought of how a great culture like his breathes the last, unheard gasps on the deathbed of Tibet - and human dignity.

1 comment:

Pankaj said...

i have myself been thinking over the subject lately, but my musings have headed in a completely different direction from your own.

The global reaction can be summed up thus "the leaders of the civilized world tremble with indignation at the injustice"

isnt worse injustice being meted out elsewhere in the world? havent the same leaders looked on or even participated in the injustices?

facts seem to account for nothing in global politics. its just a matter of "perspectives". (im sure an alien would see things differently) certain sections of the world hold the title of being "civilized", and another section is the perennial "other", the sadistic demon (chinki eyed or bearded). but who really has more blood on thier hands - body for body count?

underlying it is a ruthless power politics, where nobody is innocent, where the remotest concern is "justice".

"It is, in my opinion, a great tragedy that we have empowered China economically(by allowing it to trade in the world economy by exploiting its totalitarian "advantages" - of slave labor, unfair financial practices and enforcement of mass migration and resource deployment) so highly, that it can mock us with its barefaced lies and genocides."

who is "we" here? the governments?the righteously indignant governments of the civilized world, represented by the noble institution of free markets? do these "civilized" governments really care that much ? or is it a shuffling of "strategic positions" in the wake of the huge upcoming global economic event (so much for higher, faster, stronger) - the olympics.