Soot on their hands

By Piers Boltbrechtsen

Applied Hermeneutics’ token right-wing commentator takes a rare foray out of semi-retirement.

China-watchers such as myself have watched horrified as a seemingly unending wave of self-immolations has swept Tibet, with the country’s Buddhist monks and nuns, in particular, regularly making that ultimate, grisly sacrifice upon the altar of their doomed, romantic notions of independence.

One may well wonder how these poor dupes can hope to stop the juggernaut of a surging, prosperous China. But the blame must lie, of course, with the trendy Green Left of the so-called developed nations of the West.

For the cause of Tibetan independence, with the Dalai Lama as its fashionable figurehead, has long been a cause celebre among many on the hard left of my side of politics. Worse, it’s further been given an unwarranted cache with high-profile celebrity support from the likes of Richard Gere and Steven Seagal.

And not only has a backward, medieval regime-in-exile been given credibility with a Nobel Peace Prize, but even the administration of George W. Bush succumbed to fashionable soft-headedness in awarding the Dalai Lama a Congressional Gold Medal.

All this has sent all the wrong signals to Tibetan independence apparatchiks, leading them to believe there is actually concrete support in the West for an independent Tibet, where there is in fact none.

As surely as Gillard’s Labor government has lured hundreds of so-called ‘boat people’ to watery graves with its soft-headed policies on illegal migration, so do trendy Western supporters of Tibetan independence incite their hapless third-world dupes to their fiery exits. Boosters like Richard Gere may as well be striking the match for them as they douse themselves with gasoline.

The anti-modernity boosters of the so-called Left should instead be encouraging Tibetans to embrace modernity and economic prosperity by welcoming the Chinese as their liberators from their feudal past. For only by bowing to the inevitable may Tibetans hope to achieve that which they hope to accomplish by their doomed, wrong-headed attempt to re-institute and entrench the ways of their past.

And anyway, at least the Chinese aren’t really Marxists, as indeed the Dalai Lama openly professes to be.

Still, you can almost hear the Left endlessly bleating... aside from law-and-order, roads, public health and sanitation, what have the Chinese ever done for Tibet?