Cultural-Genocide

Miscellaneous, News Item, Tibet

China’s Destruction Of Uyghur Culture A Crime Against Humanity!

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Image:HRW

Looking at this image of Uyghurs imprisoned in a Chinese run concentration camp, one of our colleagues remarked, ‘The only thing missing is a yellow star stitched onto the uniform’. A reference to the emblem forced upon Jewish prisoners by the Nationalist Socialist Party. A controversial analogy for some, yet there’s no denying that the Muslim culture of occupied East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang Region) is being systematically and violently dismantled. Mosques obliterated, Islamic traditions banned, Uyghur women forced into marriages with Han Chinese colonists. The Uyghur language marginalized as Chinese is forced upon school children.

Meanwhile human rights organizations and the United Nations have received  accounts that Uyghurs have been rounded up and forced into what are effectively concentration camps. There they suffer a harsh regime of indoctrination and abuse that has the objective of generating obedience to the ideology of China’s communist party. A people are being violently denied their culture, which has been criminalized, racism and apartheid are driving forces in such tyranny. As they were of course for Nazi-Germany. Uyghur culture is now portrayed as the great enemy of ‘social stability’, regarded too as ‘less than’, dark resonances indeed from recent history.

China denied such camps existed, but only this week information came out  acknowledging their existence, SOURCE while insisting it was all very legal!

Some insist such reports are fabricated, the product of US inspired propaganda, others defend the Chinese regime, while the haunted expressions stare out from behind the barbed wire! We’ve been here before!

Appeasing China, Miscellaneous, Tibet

Why World ‘Leaders’ Are Culpable Of Crimes Against Tibet

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Turning A Blind Eye

Image: voxcdn

No genocide exists in a vacuum and while responsibility can often be justly placed upon an originating tyranny, be it China’s regime, the Khymer Rouge, or dictators such as Stalin and Hitler the atrocities and oppression which spring from such fascistic authority are often enabled and tolerated by the political and economic interests of other states. Some go further of course and encourage and fund state-terrorism, we need only to assess the history between the CIA and Pol Pot to realize that ethics can be relegated below geo-strategic requirements. Sure the Western Allies went to war against the Nazis, but there was much appeasement, indifference and indeed financial, as well as academic cooperation with Hitler’s Germany that took place. Would the horrors that came to define Germany during that period have been prevented or significantly reduced had the world presented, from the rise of Hitler, a unified and determined stance against fascism?

Of course it was not in the political and more importantly commercial interest of countries to destablize relations with Germany in the years prior to the Second World War. Yet they were aware of the accounts of labor-camps, forced-sterilization laws and growing persecution of Gypsies and Jews, but took vitually no action. Such economically driven apathy sent a clear signal to the Nazis that the wider world cared so little of such reports as to be interpreted as an acceptance of their vicious campaign of suppression.

A similar theatre of callousness is emboldening the Chinese regime while Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and Manchurians are suffering a genocidal assault against their cultural and national identity. Concentration camps are housing up to a million Uyghurs, existing in a dark misery, abused and indoctrinated with the approved ideology of China’s totalitarian authority. Human rights violations mostly ignored, the eradication of Tibetan and Uyghur culture barely mentioned, apart from the occasional platitude from a United Nations official or carefully worded report. Global media too facilitates the odious excesses of dictator Xi Jinpeng, its reportage, with far too few notable and sadly isolated examples, preoccupied with a narrative that in-the-main avoids or treads very softly on the nature and extent of tyranny that characterizes China’s policies towards Tibet and East Turkestan.

What’s behind such engineered disinterest? The political and financial concerns of states which have long elevated trade interests with China above unease on human rights and the brutal denial of freedom being witnessed against Tibetans and Uyghurs. What’s been a global scramble to profit from the opportunities of a Chinese market has resulted in a dilution of foreign policy anxieties on China and almost extinction of ethical structuring of such protocols. When governments issue bland and acutely worded cautions on human rights related issues on China their target audience is not the vile and corrupted terrorists of the Chinese regime, but a domestic one. Better show folks at least some pretence of valuing the principles we  make so much noise about as exemplifying our national values on liberty, justice and rights. These of course are being trampled into the dust by China’s paramilitary as they inflict measures of control and abuse that Himmler’s SS would have recognized!

Yet it is largely silence that dominates the global response, as business, media corporations and politicians grovel to Beijing, signalling to China that in real terms they are unconcerned by the harrowing atrocities and war of genocide against Tibetan and Uyghur culture. Like their Twentieth Century counterparts their greed-driven indifference makes them complict enablers of the harrowing crimes being perpetrated against the people of occupied Tibet, East Turkestan and China itself.

Demonstrations, Miscellaneous, Tibet

Destroying Tibet’s Language Will Not Eliminate Tibetan Cultural And National Identity

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We just received a report that in occupied Tibet the Chinese regime is now forcing Tibetans to memorize the words of China’s national anthem, lyrics which praise the glorious ideology of the communist party and supposed progress of the so-called Motherland.

This latest example of tyranny is further evidence of a calculated campaign to eradicate Tibetan national and cultural identity, those failing to comply face the ‘choice’ of prison, forced-labor camps and torture.

Reading of such genocidal assault upon Tibet it’s natural to feel outrage, sadness and indeed for some a sense of despair. Others may regard the momentum of Chinese rule over Tibetans has an inevitable conclusion, the demise of Tibetan culture, crushed into obscurity by increasingly aggressive measures that aim to eliminate the language of Tibet.

Such colonial violence was waged against the Irish when under occupation by the English the reasoning, crude as it is, hopes that in destroying the indigenous spoken language any sense of cultural and national identity is diluted. To the point that with successive generations a compliant, and uncritical population emerges. No doubt thankful and loyal subjects.

While the ability to speak the tongue of your culture and ancestors is a critical component defining the idea of cultural and national identity it’s erosion and forced replacement as a consequence of being occupied by a foreign power does not necessarily mean the game is won for the colonizing tyranny.

Take Ireland and its loss of Gaelic, beaten and humiliated out of Irish mouths by English rule, despite such a loss the resentment and determination among many Irish people to honor and maintain their culture was immensely strong. The language of those taking up arms against England in the cause of Irish freedom, was often English, yet the hearts and minds which sacrificed themselves for that struggle remained profoundly Irish. That reality offers hope for Tibetans suffering under the asphyxiating pressures of Chinese cultural dominance.

While Chinese may in time become the first language of occupied Tibet such a disturbing development would not in itself extinguish a Tibetan identity. That flickering sense of distinctness, if protected and nurtured within, could enable Tibetans to retain a vital connection. Not only with their cultural tradition and past, but as a spark which at some opportune time could allow the re-ignition of Tibetan cultural expression.

Of course it would be preferable if the people of Tibet could maintain their language, but the genocidal policies of China’s regime seek to exterminate a separate Tibetan identity. Language is the prime target. What the psychopaths of the Chinese government fail to understand is that socially engineering, through force, a generation of Chinese-speaking Tibetans does not address the oppression, injustice, suffering and cruelty; which has scarred every single Tibetan family since China invaded Tibet in 1950. It is that harrowing legacy, scorched across the collective memory of Tibetans, which will continue to undermine attempts to expunge the distinctiveness of Tibetan character.

Sure, it could be that with 24/7 Chinese language internet and television pumping into Tibetan homes, with ‘must speak Chinese’ requirements for employment and schoolchildren taught only Chinese we may well see a future Tibet in which Tibetan is a relic language. The interest only of academics and linguists. But depressing as that grim vision is, we believe  it’s more than probable that political and civil dissent to Chinese rule will continue into the future, that the past will not be forgotten. What makes a people is more than language, and a culture and sense-of-belonging is not, as shown by history, vanquished by terrorism and persecution. Hope remains, even if its first words are in the language of an oppressor!

Miscellaneous, Tibet

Welcome Comrade To Your New Home!

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Image:archivenet

The Tibetan people’s nomadic culture is fast disappearing, courtesy of policies enforced by the Chinese regime, in which some 2 million Tibetan nomads are being removed from the grasslands and into housing settlements.

The official narrative would have you believe that this is a benign social program, aimed to provide Tibetans with the benefits of modern housing, after all who would enjoy a life under a tent during the bone-chilling winters of the Tibetan plateau?

Persuasive reasoning, right? What is not being mentioned though is that Tibetans have no choice in the matter, their right to maintain a way-of-life is being denied, by order of an oppressive foreign occupier.

Image: archivenet

There’s a dark motive operating behind the staged images of Tibetans ‘enjoying’ their modern homes, one that has at an objective an assault against Tibetan national and cultural identity.

In forcing Tibetans into what in essence are concentration camps China’s regime is engineering a dependent and population, formerly self-reliant Tibetans that lived a sustainable life on the grasslands are now reduced to a form of servility utterly reliant upon the Chinese authorities for fuel and food.

Meanwhile these drab concrete prisons, known officially as ‘socialist paradise villages’ concentrate Tibetan populations enabling China’s regime total control and freedom to pursue the degradation and eventual demise of Tibetan culture.

 

News Item, Tibet, Uncategorized

It’s Cultural Extermination, Not Development In Tibet!

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Another Socialist Nightmare Awaits Tibet's Nomads
Another Socialist Nightmare Awaits Tibet’s Nomads

Image:humanrightswatch

Information received from inside Tibet and verified by interviews with Tibetans in exile reveals that China’s regime is implementing policies that are designed to create a wholly dependent and thus subservient Tibetan population. Given that the majority of Tibet’s people were of either a full or partly nomadic culture it is that group which faces the full force of such policies, although farmers too are feeling the impact.

The agenda operating may from the outside appear as altruistic, it is certainly promoted as such by China’s regime, replacing traditional lifestyles with the benefits of modernity, improved agriculture, housing settlements, transport links, greater availability of consumer goods. If we are to believe the official propaganda why Tibetans are experiencing a paradise, guided and funded by sensitive and respectful authority. Hmmmm.

The truth however is very different, what development that is taking place benefits mostly China’s regime and Chinese corporations; through the exploitation of natural resources and the countless Chinese settlers who now dominate businesses and services in Tibet. With huge profit to be made Tibetans are being further marginalized and exploited, additionally they are being ordered into socialist ‘villages’ such as the charming example below, where they will be ‘cared’ for the tyrannical authorities of the communist party of China!

Concentration 'Settlements' For Tibetans
Concentration ‘Settlements’ For Tibetans

Image:humanrightswatch

Meanwhile Tibetans are being driven at gunpoint off their lands, forced into what are effectively concentration camps, their livestock confiscated and facing a wretched existence where they become dependent having to buy fuel and food. A reported 2 million Tibetans will over the next few years be relocated to such misery, their freedom of movement and independent lifestyles ended, a culture that stretches back to antiquity executed by order of the Chinese regime.

Stripped of their independence how many more years has this traditional lifestyle under the tyranny of China's regime?
Stripped of their independence how many more years can Tibetans retain this traditional lifestyle under the tyranny of China’s regime?

Image:humanrightswatch

Any resource or way-of-life that enables Tibetans to preserve their national identity or sense of independence is being targeted, one account received details how Yaks are being systematically confiscated and slaughtered. This animal is critical to the nomads and farmers of Tibet, enabling ploughing, transport, the female Dri proving milk for yoghurt and butter, its fur used to make tent material and ropes. Now increasing numbers of Tibetan villages are empty of yaks, replaced by tractors, rented or paid for with loans to Chinese controlled banks or money lenders, fuel sold via Chinese run gas stores. During the severe winters Tibetans now increasingly are warmed not by the dried dung from yaks, but are reliant upon oil, which of course needs to be paid for, that further binds Tibetans to the economic infrastructure of their colonial tyrants.

Is this the inevitable future of the Tibetan yak? It's fur died white to carry Chinese tourists into the sacred lake of Yamdrok Tso?
A sight that looks set to become rarer as China forces Tibetans off their lands

Image:humanrightswatch

So beware reports, so uncritically repeated by mainstream media of China’s claimed investments into truncated regions of Tibet such as the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, such accounts are carefully constructed deceptions that seek to mislead and distract attention away from the odious reality which Tibet’s people endure under the iron-fist of the Chinese authorities.

With appreciation to Human Rights Watch for their excellent and must read report on this issue PDF Here albeit its disappointing use in the title of a phrase (Tibetan areas in China) engineered by China’s regime to assert the lie that Tibet is not independent nor rightfully possessed of that status.