Tag: Dalai Lama

Covid-19 catch-22: Regime-change policies come packed with US pandemic relief

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Covid-19 catch-22: Regime-change policies come packed with US pandemic relief

While the US public was forced to grovel for months for a $600 direct payment, the same piece of legislation pumps billions of dollars into “democracy programs” — US government code for regime-change operations via civil society NGOs — and foreign military assistance. The measly $600 survival checks pale in comparison to the massive foreign spending on regime change and titanic allocations to prop up US-friendly authoritarian militaries.

Speaker Pema Jungney disapproves, rejects Guo Wengui’s ‘new federal state of China’

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Speaker Pema Jungney disapproves, rejects Guo Wengui’s ‘new federal state of China’

Speaker Pema Jungney called out “retired Chinese football star Hao Haidong and fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui” over their proposed founding of a “New Federal State of China,” as he pointed out that the duo “announced the formation of a non-governmental organization called ‘Himalaya Supervisory Organization’ along with a stretch banner for it and condemned them for unilaterally including “the great nation of Tibet in their proposed new federal state of China” as well as for using “disrespectful terms in referring to His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” for hurling a “multitude of epithets against the Tibetan people living in exile.”

Tibet: The CIA’s Cancelled War

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Tibet: The CIA’s Cancelled War

However there was one dramatic departure from the minimalist approach. For nearly two decades after the 1950 Chinese takeover of Tibet, the CIA ran a covert operation designed to train Tibetan insurgents and gather intelligence about the Chinese, as part of its efforts to contain the spread of communism around the world. Though little known today, the program produced at least one spectacular intelligence coup and provided a source of support for the Dalai Lama. On the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 meeting with Mao, the program was abruptly cancelled, thus returning the US to its traditional arms-length policy toward Tibet. But this did not end the long legacy of mistrust that continues to color Chinese-American relations. Not only was the Chinese government aware of the CIA program; in 1992 it published a white paper on the subject. The paper included information drawn from reliable Western sources about the agency’s activities, but laid the primary blame for the insurgency on the “Dalai Lama clique,” a phrase Beijing still uses today.

[2007] Friendly Fuedalism – The Tibet Myth

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (updated and expanded version, January 2007)

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts. Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed. “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane. In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.” Eventually the resistance crumbled.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.