It’s never enough for a fascistic, totalitarian oppessor simply to invade and brutalize your country and culture, nothing less than total assimilation is demanded. With all traces of cultural and national identity eliminated. Propaganda is of course a major weapon in such an offensive, especially when used to rewrite history into a narrative dictated according to the ruling ideology. Tibetans inside occupied Tibet know this all too well having been force-fed disinformation, lies and fabricated versions of their country’s past.
The image above was taken from a TV broadcast in Lhasa on April 22, 2019, Tibetans on Chinese strings performed a grotesque and politically authorized interpretation of daily life supposedly endured by the people of Tibet before China ‘arrived’ to introduce ‘liberty’ and ‘progress’. In terms of historical accuracy it’s a crude distortion, cultured in the laboratory of China’s ministry of deception.
Tibetans are exposed to such indoctrination on a daily basis, a meticulously calculated psyop is waged upon the thinking of Tibet’s people through a number of television and radio channels. The internet too is saturated with similar propaganda messages, while streets across Tibetan towns promote official slogans from the Chinese regime. It’s a war of mind-control.
We are just seeing on Twitter reports from Anonymous activists #Op_Tibet of a cyber attack against a Chinese regime website located in occupied Tibet. According to a number of tweets the servers of a site for a propaganda college have earlier this morning been hacked and disabled. As we write it’s presently offline, no doubt their admin will be trying to restore. Even if successful however it’s another vulnerability exposed and as we’ve witnessed with other sites targeted by Anonymous in the past it will in all likelihood be subjected to further strikes. This latest offensive has been linked with recent events at University of Toronto when a Tibetan, Ms Chemi Lhamo on election as student leader was barraged by by Chinese trolls in an organized campaign of hatred and disinformation. Thanks to our twitter team @tibettruth and special shoutout to @AnonymousTibet and @anonymzmeduza
Sera monastery, Lhasa, Tibet, now an indoctrination center and tourist attraction
Image: archivenet
For anyone selfish or unthinking enough to take a vacation to Lhasa its likely they will join a tour to Sera Monastery just north of the Tibetan capital. There they can see monks enjoying Buddhist debate, marvel at the traditional architecture and absorb the peaceful environs at which Buddhism is flourishing.
Meanwhile behind that staged show of supposed cultural freedom a darker reality exists for Tibetans, although you would not come into contact with that during your tightly controlled and monitored time at Sera.
Dictator Xi jinping prominently displayed within Sera Monastery
Image: Eric Baculinao
We wonder how such tourists would feel about their Tibet trip had they been in attendance at a March 13 meeting in Sera during which a panel of Tibetan collaborators (Lhakpa Tsering ‘Lhasa, Monastery Management Committee Director’, Tsetan Dorje, ‘Manager Sera monastery’ and Jampa Kelsang, ‘Media and Education Committee Director’ Sera Monastery) addressed some three hundred monks. Insisting that they should “… feel grateful to the Chinese government and show their loyalty to the nation by obeying the country’s laws,”.
Tibet’s religious centers are now under occupation by Chinese paramilitary and the thought-police of China’s regime
Image: Tsering Woeser
Surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police, security officials and ‘management’ staff the monks were ordered to stand against what was described as ‘sepratism’. They were also warned of a series of prohibitions regarding online activity, including posting any information the regime considers sensitive.
Tourists, undercover Chinese officials and paramilitary mingle within Lhasa’s Jokhang temple
Image: Tsering Woeser
The meeting concluded with an exultation ‘re-pay China’s generosity in Tibet and demonstrate loyalty to Beijing and love for the top leadership of China’s ruling Communist Party.’.
Sera monastery is in truth no longer a center for Buddhist learning, like monasteries across Tibet it is an indoctrination facility, placed under a suffocating control by the thought-police of the Chinese regime.
Sera monastery is effectively a prison in which its Tibetan Buddhist inmates are under 24/7 surveillance and forced to perform for tourists.
Image: Tsering Woeser
It also has another function, one that exploits the wonderment, gullibility and ignorance of those who travel to Lhasa for an exotic vacation. It’s calculated and tightly controlled illusion of a thriving Tibetan Buddhist culture is an important propaganda tool to manipulate and deceive.
When thinking about Tibet as it suffers under the oppressive grip of Chinese rule there’s a few key phrases to consider.
Sketch showing the bombing of Tibetan monasteries in Kham region in 1956
Image: Melong publication XXiii, 11, November 1956
Scorched Earth
The military strategy that seeks to destroy any assets or resources which might be of use to an enemy. These usually include water and food supplies, industrial centers, transport infrastructure, communications, and most chillingly people are also a target. Such objectives were central to the Chinese army when it invaded and occupied Tibet in 1950, and in the face of armed Tibetan resistance eventually realized.
The remnants of Ganden Monastery in Tibet, one of many hundreds that were dynamited to extinction by China’s regime
Image: tibet86andbeyond
Having secured complete control this policy was not concluded, instead its objectives were shifted to Tibetan culture, which was deemed by the Chinese regime to be backward and in need of what it termed ‘reform’. A euphemism for the cultural genocide which was inflicted upon the Tibetan people.
Mao’s fanatical red-guards on propaganda patrol in Lhasa, Tibet
Image: baidu/print-screen
Ground Zero
The Oxford English Dictionary, citing the use of the term in a 1946 New York Times report on the destroyed city of Hiroshima, defines ground zero as “that part of the ground situated immediately under an exploding bomb, especially an atomic one.” . The cost of Tibetan lives and decades of misery, starvation and persecution which followed the Chinese occupation of Tibet was as if a nuclear bomb had been dropped upon Tibet’s culture and freedom.
Image: archivenet
The reconstruction has been dictated by China’s regime, central to which has remained a merciless and brutal enforcement of dogma. Inflamed by the ideology of Marxism the Chinese tyranny saw its colonialism of Tibet as a progressive stage in the evolution from a supposed feudalism, of what it insisted was a stagnant culure. In Marxist language Tibetans were “relics of peoples” undeserving of national freedom, incapable of economic or political independence. Tibet was, under such ‘reasoning’, a valid target to be refashioned.
A new ‘social harmony’ was to be engineered. From the smouldering ruins of China’s brutal violence against Tibet would emerge a Tibetan population ‘liberated’ from a supposed ‘class exploitation’ and ‘local nationalism’. The methodology employed to assist Tibetans realize such a political consciousness included: forced labor camps, mass arrests, torture, destruction of Tibetan monasteries and a mass population transfer of Han Chinese into Tibet!
Mind-Control
The poisonous cocktail of Marxist-Leninist doctrine with China’s traditional assimilationist ideology continues to terrorize the Tibetan people. Their culture having suffered the ravages of scorched earth and a nuclear-like assault is being redefined according to the political objective of China’s regime. Tibetan children are the experimental subjects, groomed into what is hoped will be a generation that knows only loyalty and gratitude towards the Chinese authorities.
Tibetan children from one of Lhasa’s indocrtination centers attend a propaganda event in Lhasa April 2019
Image: China’s Ministry Of Propaganda
To realize such a mindset Tibet’s past has been recreated, censored and sanitized in accord with the approved political ideology. Within that perversion of the facts China becomes a savior, arriving as the hero to bring freedom to sorely oppressed Tibetans, denied social and political development by a cruel and feudal elite. This meticulous propaganda is drip fed to Tibet’s children each day.
There is no Dalai Lama, no history other than the one fabricated by the Chinese regime. It’s a ‘new Tibet’ which is taught, with a doctrine that asserts before Tibet was ‘liberated’ existed only cruelty, exploitation and slavery. Now, thanks to the ‘enlightened’ policies of China’s government, Tibetans enjoy the modernity and progress of a socialist paradise. They are so the propaganda would have you believe, ‘masters of their own affairs’!
Tibetan monks forced to attend ‘reducation’ centers where they are indoctrinated with the political ideology of the Chinese regime
Image: TseringKyi
Such is the thought-control applied within indoctrination centers (schools and what monasteries are left) across occupied Tibet. China is assiduously destroying Tibet’s past, brutally controlling its present and attempting to possess its future!
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
The surrounding regions of Lhasa such as Ngari witness regular convoys of buses heading off to Tibet’s capital. On board are Tibetan children and their Chinese ‘minders’ headed for indoctrination centers.
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
The aims of which are to erode Tibetan cultural identity. The language medium is Chinese, classrooms and corridors display the propaganda slogans of China’s communist party regime, each day children are lined up to sing in praise of dictator Xi Jinping. Chinese culture dominates every aspect of attendance at these centers, including the food!
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
This psychological assault is one of the weapons used to assimilate Tibetans and eradicate any notion of national and cultural distinctiveness.
They invade your country, through a military occupation enforce a tyranny which targets your culture, while administering a policy of mass-population transfer. Clearly your cultural identity is under threat. But hey no worries because the very same regime which has engineered such an assault, and forced your language onto the brink, announces it’s releasing a cell phone app to encourage and maintain your mother tongue. Time to party? A sign that your oppressor really does respect the traditions and language of your people? Or yet another calculated sleight-of-hand, disinformation to deceive and deflect international criticism and concern?
The Chinese propaganda mouthpiece, the Global Times, reports today that so-called ‘Tibet regional government (sic)’ is to release a mobile app which it claims will support and encourage the learning of Tibetan. Which is rather like a drunk driver responsible for serious freeway casualties declaring that he has a bandaid!
Tibet’s language has long been a target of the Chinese regime, which has been implementing policies to erode and dilute Tibetan cultural and national identity. Apart from enforcing the teaching of Chinese upon Tibetan children it is also debasing the Tibetan language by manipulating and corroding the Tibetan vocabulary by introducing and promoting with words and expressions derived from Mandarin.
Image: courtesy of Xinhua (China’s propaganda mouthpiece)
If you want an indicator of the venal condition of international politics then look no further than today’s visit to France of China’s dictator, Xi Jinping. Currently enjoying the many pleasures of French hospitality and hosted by President Macron. Whose developed sense of ‘pragmatism’ and devotion to globalized economics facilitates a nauseating appeasement of the Chinese regime.
Amid the photo-opportunities and spray-on smiles it’s contracts which are firmly on the table, prominent is the 300 jet deal signed off by Airbus. No doubt some folks are set to make a killing on the markets as France’s elite wine and dine the man who authorizes the state-inflicted terrorism against the people and culture of Tibet.
Image: latimes
The principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité have no place within the negotiations and hand-shakes offered to China, those values are an inconvenience to an open and profitable engagement with the Chinese authorities.
Image: koletink
Such principles however are very much alive within the hearts of France’s people, as displayed by ongoing protests waged by the des gilets jaunes (the yellow vests). A grassroots movement that arose during November 2018 to demand social, economic and political justice.
Image: archivenet
These legitimate demonstrations have on numerous occasions been met with police violence, baton charges, tear gas and rubber bullets. The streets of France are home to armored personal carriers, armed paramilitary, body-armored police and most recently units of the French army have been deployed.
Image: lemde.fr
All this against its own citizens, measures however which Xi Jinping would heartilly approve of, although he would counsel Macron to authorize the use of live rounds, electric batons, mass detentions and incarceration in ‘re-education’ camps!
Such a totalitarian nightmare is not likely to be imposed upon France yet in his elitist zealotry for globalization, and salivating hopes of securing trade agreements with China, President Macron forgets the history and guiding spirit of his nation. As he countenances a military response to ongoing unrest, orders police to forcefully break public opposition to his policies, and tramples over citizens rights he’s dishonoring the principles upon which the French Constitution was founded.
Those values of freedom, justice and human rights, so brutally denied when France itself experienced a brutal occupation, are the very same aspirations of the Tibetan people, who endure a miserable existence under an illegal and suffocating rule by China! There is a shared experience between France and Tibet, both have known immense suffering under foreign rule, equally their respective peoples value greatly and seek freedom, justice, political and civil rights.
