Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/tibetan-man-gets-five-years-in.html
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Never forget. China is horrible. America did the same thing, locking up Indian kids in boarding school-prisons and punishing use of native language, but China is horrible now. America is-oh, never mind.
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If the Tibetans don’t like Chinese policies, they should just leave.
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I would ask: is this late-stage communism?
But no, it’s just the same old, same old ‘communism’ - i.e., one-party statist dictators at play. Conform or die. Assimilate. Resistance is futile.
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Either you left off the /s from your post, or else you’ve just given the rest of the world permission to point at you in the street and laugh at you for being a complete jackass.
I know which I believe to be true…
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Knowing birdman for a while, I’m sure he was just fucking with us.
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“In 1949, Mao Zedong got China all hot and horny for Communism. Looking to regain the lands that they felt belonged to them, for political and defensive reasons, The People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1950, invaded Tibet, scourging the nation’s culture, language and beliefs in an effort to bring it into line with China’s political doctrine.”
The invasion, subjugation and continuing repression of Tibet is a tragedy most Western people don’t understand. It was little more than the easy invasion of a pacifist nation rich in resources and (crucially) closer in nuclear-missile range to the USSR.
But can you please stop willfully conflating Communism with tyranny, despotism, corruption and failed states in general?
Communism is a socio-economic system. It could be the choice of hippies, monarchies or seasteading scammers. Since 1917 however, what’s happened historically was that communist states were subverted internally by tyrants, warlords, criminality, corruption, and racism.
Which is what happened with Russia.
Which is also what happened with America and far earlier.
“But wait!”, I hear you cry.
“America is the bastion of democracy and Capitalism!”
Ha! America is far less democratic than the European Union and Capitalist America is still infested with tyrants, warlords, criminality, corruption, and racism.
Oh, you think that America is not like the Soviet Union, which purged dissidents and intellectuals and non-Russian ethnic groups? “Gulags! Public beatings! Disappearances!”
Are you poor and black? Did your parents bring you to America as a child? Are you transgender or suffering from an addiction?
The private prison industry. Cops shooting people dead, every day. ICE arbitrary deportations.
The labels are different but the actions are the same.
And then there’s the simple truth that both Capitalist states and Communist states engaged in a vicious military and economic cold war for 70 years that ultimately, benefited nobody except their political elites.
So please stop with this bullshit meme that Communism automatically leads to tyranny.
I’m not an advocate for Communism (certainly not for Capitalism) but for a BoingBoing contributor, you should be better.
So… like corporate capitalism?
What happens to you when the banks unilaterally decide to replace paper cash with mandatory implanted chips?
You’re on BoingBoing so you should have some idea how that can happen.
But isn’t there enough density to keep the language alive? Tibet is small compared to Chia, but I thought there was a decent population, though maybe sixty years since the invasion things have been watered down too much. Of course, there is a large number of exiles, including the Dalai Lama, that does try to keep the language alive.
A friend did take Tibetan lessons, that’s one way to protect the language, though I don’t know if he kept with it.
It’s not like North America, where some of the Peoples had small populations to begin with, then lost many to disease when the Europeans came over, then endless effort to erase them. Some do okay, because they have large numbers, but even the Mohawk with thousands of speakers are worried. I guess it was the Navajo who do well enough to dub “Star Wars” into their language. But for many it’s a fight. There’s something like 150 Syilx speakers, and presumably most re elderly. Just knowing that sc’win is sockeye salmon is a big thing, I’ll never learn the language but like many, learn a few words or phrases because someone bothers to drop the words into otherwise English text. So maybe, like the sc’win, it will come back.
That’s no excuse for the Tibetans to be persecuted for speaking up.
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Pretty sure he was making a joke at the point that they already left back in 1913, but were taken back by force…
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They should totally go back to their own country!
Yes…the UN condemns the criminalization of freedom of expression, but doesn’t actually do anything.
just riffing on the fact that he was charged with “inciting separatism.”
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