by John B. Westerberg (Excerpts, edited by Christian Lanciai, September 2003)
[Published in “Fritänkaren”, issue 119, August 2002, published 12.8.2003, a monthly journal of music, literature, films, philosophy, religion and politics.]
The Free Thinker – September 10th, 2003.
China occupied Tibet and East Turkestan by force with no right as soon as the communists had taken over the leadership in Beijing in 1949. As a result of this enforced occupation, Tibet not only lost one fifth (more than 1,200,000) of all Tibetans by violence, persecution, abduction, starvation, deportation and mass executions, but did also China deliberately try to exterminate the whole national Tibetan culture and identity by methodically destroying almost all the temples and monasteries there was, in total 6246 out of 6259. Many of these monasteries were bombed by aircraft, for example Tsurphu, Ganden and Lithang, where thousands of women and children had sought refuge, who were bombed to death, about 2000 civilians in one monastery bombing in 1956. We must never forget this. The Chinese atrocities against Tibet, their people and culture during 50 years, is the most clear-cut possible argument for total Tibetan independence from China.
Thereby nothing has been said about China’s crimes against their own citizens. The victims of the Mao Zedong regime are calculated to about 43 million especially by starvation catastrophes caused by aborted political reform programs and the inhuman systematic persecution carried out by the Culture Revolution against all of China’s own citizens during the last ten years of Mao. The communist regime boasts of having eliminated 125 million unborn children (mostly by forced sterilizations and abortions) in enforced birth control programs. Recently they also boasted the humanization of their executions from a bullet in the neck to specially manufactured execution buses. This is a kind of progress that the Nazis of Germany were proud of in the 30s.
But you mustn’t tell the Chinese about these things, because it will upset them, and if you ask them with what right they keep Tibet and East Turkestan under forced occupation, they will accuse you of trying to split their mother country. Then you mustn’t spare them, because the only way to teach the cat not to shit in the sofa is to put his nose into his own shit until he learns from his own mistakes.(It’s the same with what the Turks have done with the Armenians and are doing about the Kurds.) Such is the immensity of the disastrous results of China’s aborted enterprises in Tibet and the western provinces of China, that lasting environmental problems might match what the Soviet Union left behind as a legacy of one immense environmental disaster from Vladivostok to Berlin after its fall. The same kind of gross environmental ruthlessness without considering the consequences has been forced on Tibet, East Turkestan and the western provinces of China which once Stalinism in the Soviet Union was responsible for turning all the Russias into a dump with. Moreover, this affects India, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as well, since their rivers come from Tibet, where Chinese deforestation has turned nature into a havoc of disasters across the entire Tibetan plateau; which gives us the strange impression of China accelerating their environmental destruction in panic as if to insist on destroying as much as possible before its regime has to fall, as did the same environmentally disastrous Soviet regime.
Recently Australia decided to invest $1,4 million in human rights development in China, which China smilingly accepts while they continue to execute people on a larger scale than in the rest of the world together and boast the “humanization” of their execution methods. With equally humble flatulence and creeping encouragement, India kowtows to China, acknowledging Tibet to be part of China; and so does the US, who has helped the China regime to progress ever since the Nixon-Kissinger days in the beginning of the 70s, when they embarked on their global policy program to support and build up rogue states and autocracies like Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Iraq and China for the sake of American business interests.
Recently president Bush announced there were still a number of rogue states left in the world to consider. These were pointed out to be Belorussia under Lukashenko, North Korea under Kim Jong Il, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, Libya under colonel Khaddafi, Burma with its China-supported military rule, Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Not a word was in this context mentioned of China, the world’s greatest autocracy and rogue state with possibly 200 million lives on their conscience and which democratic nations like the US and Australia humbly and enthusiastically continue backing up since they make money out of that business.
Here in Darjeeling there are intense discussions going on about the possible opening up of the old trade route between Darjeeling and Gyangtse across Sikkim. No one knows as yet when and if it will happen, and here they don’t quite believe in it. This opening is presumed to be a result of the latest negotiations between India and China, in which India made the concession to accept that Tibet is part of China. Was it a tactical manoeuvre of India which will speed up the thaw of China and hasten the fall of its regime, or was it China that once more fooled India? That remains to be seen.
