Robert Thurman spins myths and lies about Tibet and Dalai Lama

People like Robert Thurman (father of actress Uma) are why Christopher Hitchens, in “God is not Great,” was prescient to tackle the foibles and worse of Eastern as well as Western religion.

Thurman, the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan monk, has a few untruths about China vis-à-vis Tibet:

The Chinese have been brainwashing their people into thinking that Tibet is an inalienable part of their territory. No Chinese people lived in Tibet before 1950. Zero. It’s absurd they claim that they were there.

I don’t disagree with the first sentence at all; no country has an “inalienable” right to ANY of its current territory. That’s like believing in the “end of history.”

That said, “zero” Han Chinese in Tibet before 1950 is a flat lie. The implication that pre-1950, Tibet was never part of the land holdings of any Chinese dynasty is also a lie.

The Chinese have been brainwashing their people into thinking that Tibet is an inalienable part of their territory. No Chinese people lived in Tibet before 1950. Zero. It’s absurd they claim that they were there.

I don’t disagree with the first sentence at all; no country has an “inalienable” right to ANY of its current territory. That’s like believing in the “end of history.”

(Question): In a recent article Slavoj Zizek argued that the Tibetans are not necessarily a spiritual people — that we’ve created that myth out of a need to imagine an alternative to our crazy Western consumerism.
Zizek is simply misinformed. It’s leftist propaganda meant to legitimize China’s aggression in Tibet.

No, it’s a very thought-provoking argument. While not justifying Han Chinese aggression, it should be noted that, pre-1950, Tibet was a feudal theocracy that, if not Afghanistan, arguable had as much in common with the 13th-century Brabant as the modern world.

Thurman goes on to talk about being breast-fed by Dick Cheney as his mother in a previous life, and how Freud would regard such a search for enlightenment as “infantile regression.”

Well, Freud could be right at times.