Shed not too many crocodile tears for the Dalai Lama

Actually, for many people, tears for his post-1959 plight would be real.

And, this is not an apologia post for defending Xi Jinping's minions hacking computers and devices of modern exiled Tibetans.

But, as Tenzin Gyatso officially has announced that his successor, the to-be 15th Dalai Lama will come from outside China, let us take note that, even if he's being truthful in denying original knowledge himself, his brothers were major assets in a CIA campaign of skullduggery against Beijing, a campaign that also involved Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang in Taiwan. Wikipedia has a page about it that, while it gets a flag for possible "original research," is still worth a read. Indeed, per the Wiki page, before the 1949 "fall" of China, the older brother of Tenzin Gyato (who was born Lhamo Thondup), Gyalo Thondup, lived in Nanking 1947-49 and boasts about eating dinner at Chiang's table.

The backstory is that, before Beijing invaded in 1950, Tibet was not part of China. And, we'll get to backstory to that in a minute. Essentially, the Dalai Lama and other lamas ruled it as a semi-feudal theocracy. Now, it was not religiously or otherwise coercive in the way the mullahs are in Iran, let alone the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the way some Christian Right folks would like to be in the USofA, but it wasn't exactly enlightened.

Before that, Lhamo Thondup was officially declared to be that 14th Dalai Lama in 1939. His birthplace was in a northeastern borderland which has both Tibetan and non-Tibetan people and was ruled at this time by a warlord whose nominal superior was Chiang.

Even today, per the map at the top of the Wiki page on Tibet, Tibetan exiles claim a vast amount of land beyond what is clearly Tibet. The orange and red areas on the map contain, by ethnicity and/or language, Han Chinese, Mongolic peoples, peoples of Southeast Asia that live in various parts of southern China, Turkic peoples in its northern areas, etc. And, vis-a-vis this piece, ethnic Han have lived in large numbers in much of that area since the Yuan Dynasty if not earlier. (In today's Tibetan Autonomous Area within China, Beijing trod more lightly in Western Tibet in the first decades, not just first years, post-1950.

Looking back in Tibet's history, the Qing Dynasty, at peak, had semi-full control over Tibet. The Ming, before that, claimed they did, but many scholars reject that. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty indeed controlled the area, but Chinese dynasties before that generally did not. At the tail end of the Qing, in response to "Great Game" meddling by both Britain and Russia, the Qing in the early 20th century for the first time staked a formal legal claim to the land, and began a process of "Sinifiction."

As for long ago history, before Genghis Khan and his descendants and the Yuan Dynasty, there was a "Tibetan Empire" about the same time as Tang Dynasty China, pictured above. As you can see, at its maximum, it controlled or had influence over all of today's Tibet, all of today's Xinjiang, and much if not all of today's Gansu, Yunnan and Sechuan areas of China. To the west, it went into Kashmir and Turkic Central Asia.

See Wiki's "History of Tibet" for more on Tibetan history in general.

The point of this part of this piece is that Tibet does not have something unique and special in its cultural DNA, no more than the Hopis of the US Southwest, or other modern Puebloans. With the Hopi, Awatovi should tell you that. (If that doesn't, Ekkehart Malotki has said that, contrary to legend — whether first propagated by Hopi or by Anglos — that the etymology of the word "Hopi" is NOT related to any Hopi word for "peace.")

Now, one could counterclaim that this was pre-Buddhist Tibet. And, I would counterclaim back to that? The murderous Islamophobia of the 969 Movement in today's Burma, as well as past history in Buddism; I've covered this in a bit of depth.

Back to closer to where we are now. Tibetans eventually resisted the 1950 invasion — with help from the US. The Dalai Lama himself first appeared to encourage some degree of passive resistance against China, including limiting how many troops they would send, while signing off on a 17-point agreement that he repudiated after escaping to India in 1959. What led to that was him becoming, by the middle 1950s, a symbol of resistance whether he was personally leading it or not. Per that link, he may well have lied about signing the agreement under duress.

After he fled into exile, China stopped trying to do its version of Sinification through Tibetans and rather through direct Chinese control and action. Meanwhile, Tibetan exiles continued to resist as they could.

The Dalai Lama himself, at best, made a devil's bargain with his brothers. Could he have done better? Maybe. What led to Beijing's invasion was a decision by parts of Tibet's complex leadership — but definitely not all — to boot all Chinese. It appears to be a bid for "neutrality" after Mao and the Communists had chased Chiang and the KMT off the mainland. But, it was too late for that, it would seem. Even if the Dalai Lama himself were not directly involved, as a teen, he might have been asked for thought. Today? Could he be forthcoming about what he knew and when about the CIA a few years later? I don't totally buy his claim that he was originally ignorant of his brothers' activities.

And what brings us to today is the Dalai Lama's announcement above, in a new book, which directly confronts Beijing's claim it will chose the 15th Dalai Lama.

Today, per Wiki's article on the Kashag, a Qing-era body of Chinese governance reconstituted by the Dalai Lama after his 1959 flight, Gyatso has himself repudiated the idea of full independence for Tibet or a political role for either himself or successor Dalai Lamas. On the former, what degree of autonomy does he want, and what degree of confessional vis-a-vis his ties to the CIA, and other things, will he do to get even a mildly lighter hand by Beijing? On the second? I think you are playing a political role as is. And, playing with a self-dealt bad hand by rejecting Tibetan independence.

That all said, since this is the site for non-twosiderism, isn't the regime of "godless Communists" in Beijing hypocritical for saying it will choose the next Dalai Lama rather than declaring the office abolished? (That said, Lenin and Uncle Joe Stalin didn't abolish Russian Orthodoxy, they just made it more servile inside the country.) That said, this secularist awaits the idea of dueling Dalai Lamas and anti-Dalai Lamas, like the papacy of the late 1300s and early 1400s at the end of the Avignon period. That then said, since Qing times, formalized in 1793, the Chinese government has claimed the right to select, or denote, or whatever term we should use, the next Dalai Lama. It may not always have exercised that right, but it has claimed it. And, we already have dueling Panchen Lamas. (Per the matter at hand, that link notes the Panchen Lama has traditionally been involved with selection of the Dalai Lama.)

And, otherwise? Most the Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ world inside the DC Beltway knows at least the basics of the story above. They're the ones being called out for decades of crocodile tears.

THAT then said, the likes of Max Blumenthal are wrong about Xinjiang. And, good leftists like Cory Doctorow have written much more on that, so it's not just Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ talking about the labor camps, etc., there.