By Maura Moynihan
I recently attended a performance of the Hungarian National Ballet in New York City. The opening number portrayed life in Hungary under the Soviet Occupation, with two male dancers, one in a police uniform, the other his prisoner. The prisoner puts up a fight, but the policeman eventually breaks him with torture and hard labor, rendering him an obedient slave. At the end, a huge iron head of Lenin was rolled onto the stage and pummeled by freed prisoners.
I reflected on the Cold War, when we were told of the savagery of the Soviet state, and sadly of how propaganda conflated the subject peoples of the USSR with their government. We were taught to hate the Russian people, as if all were agents of the Politboro, a prejudice that was shattered with the defection of ballet stars from the Bolshoi: Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhail Barishnikov, the great historian of the Gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the poet Yengeny Yetushenko, all of whom became beloved American citizens and artists.
I also reflected upon the alarming truth, that since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, western governments have displayed no compunction about doing business with a totalitarian dictatorship built on the precepts of the old Soviet Empire: the People’s Republic of China. James Mann, author of “The China Fantasy” describes the west’s “Lexicon of Dismissal” a campaign to ignore the communist governments abuse of its citizens, to keep the American firms investing in China, through the channels of the Chinese Communist Party, which has helped preserve one party rule for 60 years.
Today, western governments find themselves in a bind for having entwined their economies – and more – with a China that has exploded as a capitalist engine, steered by a Politburo that is clinging to the old Stalinist playbook with alarming tenacity. Now the west must face the grim reality that our China policy has made a rich and powerful totalitarian state, built on the apparatus of the old Soviet State we were taught to abhor, with a Politboro, secret police, labor camps, psychiatric “hospitals” for dissidents.
The European Union states that it is “re-thinking its relationship with China”. President Obama will soon meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Washington. But the vast China lobby still propels the spin that China is the new superpower, as American analysts and think-tankers promote China’s mighty ascension, and no one asks why they seem so keen on it, as if such an outcome serves the west’s interests, or anyone’s?
The west has bought the line, strenuously promoted by the party bosses, that the Chinese people are not ready for democracy and only one-party rule will keep China stable and prosperous. It is astonishing to think how many businesses rushed to work with the Chinese Communist Party, with little heed to exactly who they were doing business with. Now that the Google affair has exposed the rules, permission to enter the China market is granted when companies self-censor, ignore the persecution of Tibetans and Uyghers, and profit from the obscene exploitation of Chinese laborers.
The Chinese manufacturing economy is comparable to the antebellum plantations of the American South, where workers were granted no rights or protection under their overseers, were frequently abused and worked to death. And like the old South, the profits are vast, thus the power elite feels no incentive to change course. So how can subjects of a totalitarian state, such as the Chinese people, the Uyghers and Tibetans, triumph over a totalitarian oppressor, the Chinese Communist Party?
For the people of Tibet, a first step is declaring the truth: that Tibet is a captive nation. And recall the legacy of the great 19th century American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
At age 25, Garrison joined the American Colonization Society, which sought to resettle free blacks in present- day Liberia on the west coast of Africa. There were members who encouraged the manumission – granting of freedom – to slaves, but Garrison soon discovered that this view was held by a minority: most members had no wish to free slaves, their goal was only to reduce the population of free blacks in America to preserve the institution of slavery.
Garrison broke with the Colonization Society, was a founder of the Anti-Slavery Society and published a newspaper entitled “The Liberator” calling for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. He burned the US Constitution in a public square for permitting the institution of slavery. He was frequently attacked and nearly killed, but when the Civil War ended and Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Garrison closed “The Liberator”, declaring his mission completed.
In the case of Tibet, claiming Tibet’s sovereignty as a historic truth and a right, is declaring a truth, and the right of emancipation. And now that the west is “re-thinking” its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, it is vital to remind our legislators of the resolution passed by the United States Senate in 1994, that Tibet is an occupied country lashed by sadistic overseers who will torture and kill a Tibetan for so much as uttering the word Rangzen or declaring their allegiance to the Dalai Lama.
On this Losar eve, let us declare the truth of Tibet’s right to independence, and honor the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, a citizen’s revolt against the Stalinist occupation. I offer two quotes from William Lloyd Garrison for Tibet activists everywhere:” and “Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril” and “The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers”.
Free Tibet Now.
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