MIM Notes 208                   April 15, 2000

New York Times glorifies former Tibetan theocracy's feudalism 

by MC45

The New York Times for Sunday March 12 magazine section 
includes an article purported to be the true story of the 
Karmapa Lama's recent escape from Tibet. The story is said to 
have been told to a New York Times reporter by "a key 
participant who, fearing for the safety of friends, associates 
and family in Tibet, would not allow himself to be 
identified."(1) Here we discuss two issues: the feudal legacy 
of self-exiled Tibetan religious leaders and the shameful 
obeisance to said feudal-religious leaders by one of the 
largest newspapers in the so-called democratic countries.

MIM recognizes the right of the Tibetan people to national 
self-determination. Maoists recognize this right of every 
nation on the planet. This includes liberation from the 
current state-capitalist (not Maoist) Chinese government. Our 
support for the rights of the Tibetan people means we focus 
our fire against imperialist interference in Tibetan affairs 
(including CIA intercessions on behalf of the self-exiled 
feudal regime of the Dalai Lama) and against the mysticism of 
the Western supporters of the Dalai Lama.(2) We publish this 
opinionated, communist newspaper to debunk the proclaimed 
objective coverage of such journalists as write for the New 
York Times. These journalists get paid to write uncritically 
about "the infancy of the Dalai Lama's next reincarnation"!(1) 
We call on all anti-imperialists who wish to see a better 
future for Tibet's people to cast aside this insistence on 
mysticism and investigate the history of Tibet's people and 
rulers.

Amerikan journalist Edgar Snow wrote: "certainly a reform and 
an age of enlightenment under Tibet's own leaders [the lamas] 
was long overdue and might have salvaged something of Tibetan 
Buddhism, freed of its lamaistic corruptions. They waited too 
long for a palace revolt. Chinese Communists arrived first. 
... [The lamas and nobles] rebelled and fled into exile, 
thereby hastening their own downfall ... Even without Marxism, 
mass literacy and access to science and knowledge of the 
modern world alone would have doomed the anachronistic Tibetan 
theocracy along with its prayer wheels and sorcerers."(3)

Just what did "lamaistic corruption" mean for Tibet's people? 
Their feudal lords ran the country with the fear of god to 
inspire patronage, in addition to the threat of starvation. 
Feudalism was the pre-capitalist agricultural economic system 
in which small groups of wealthy families owned most of the 
land and rented out portions of their land to serfs, who 
worked it. Serfs paid rent in crops or money to their 
landlords and were permitted to keep the remaining portion of 
their money or crop to feed themselves and their families. 
Because landlord status coincided with government office, 
serfs were left with the bare means of survival, or in some 
cases less. If serfs could not make payments to the landlord 
and work, they would be forced off the land into slavery or 
other bondage. In pre-Liberation Tibet, "fear of devils and 
hellfire for the impious combined with barbaric torture and 
death for fugitives from the system kept the population in 
subjugation, as in other feudalisms."(3)

That the former ruler of such a society has been adopted as a 
mascot by so-called humyn rights advocates in the imperialist 
countries should not be so surprising to genuine anti-
imperialists. The discussion of "humyn rights" as a supposedly 
apolitical issue of morality is designed to shroud the issues 
of political struggle in mysticism. It is no surprise then 
that these activists have chosen a paid mystic as their poster 
boy. The New York Times' coverage (if we can call a six-page 
essay with no attributable sources "news") contributes to the 
campaign for the Karmapa Lama as heir apparent to the Dalai 
Lama.

Ironically, the Dalai Lama himself does a better job 
acknowledging his theocracy's feudal legacy than his Western 
supporters. Of course, he doesn't address why restoring a 
government of former slaveholders will do a better job 
eliminating slavery and oppression than a government of former 
slaves (which would use force to suppress the "rights" of 
former slaveholders to bring back slavery).(4)

The very details of the Karmapa Lama's escape from Tibet 
reveal the extent to which he and his cohort of feudal lords 
and their hangers-on live at the expense of the people of 
Tibet. The story goes that one of the monks who served as the 
Karmapa's cover story announced that he planned a fundraising 
trip in the countryside. When European churches raised money 
from the populace this was called tithing and it is today 
recognized as an historic burden on European peasants -- one 
of the aspects of their economic condition that drove these 
peasants to support bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century. 
The Karmapa himself gave the excuse that he was beginning an 
eight-day retreat so that others would not expect to see him 
while he escaped. The Times notes that "only his teacher and 
his cook would attend him"(1) during this time. MIM suggests 
that perhaps humyn rights activists do not need to spend quite 
so much time concerning themeselves with the "liberation" of 
individuals who have private employees to attend to their 
wants.

Notes: 

1. New York Times Magazine 12 March, 2000, pp. 50-55.

2. MIM Notes 189, 1 Jul 1999.

3. Edgar Snow, Red China Today (New York: Vintage Books, 
1971), p. 562.

4. See a series of debates between MIM and Western supporters 
of the Dalai Lama at: 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/letters/nonfaqlt/index.html