C. Tavia,
On lists such as these polemic plays a more central role than argument. You realize that when you find the Dalai Lama compared to Mussolini, concentration camp guards and "torture specialists." Obviously any reasonable person who even scanned the history of Tibet would come to the conclusion that the Dalai Lama was the religious leader of a poor, backwards, feudal state whose high ideals were compromised with low associations. Even something as simple as the movie "Kundun" suggests all these things. Your intelligence immediately resists the black hats/white hats approach which leads you to suspect the truth is somewhere in between dark mutterings about the CIA (CIA = black hats, any hint of involvement = X-Files-style super-plot) and feudal dungeons (which dungeons are discussed in even the lightest pop history) and the neo-Buddhist idolatry of the Lama. You wonder at the way otherwise intelligent-seeming people fall prey to this kind of thinking. Welcome to the club.
Is the Dalai Lama a good guy? Well, first I guess you have to ask whether he is a good Buddhist. I would say that his first problem is that Tibetan Buddhism is a little peculiar. Still, he is a monk with a pretty good resume so let's give him an A- on Buddhism, or at least a B+. Is he a good prince? (the closest word for whatever he is) I would say there is no such thing as a good prince but compared to other princes, I'd have to give him reasonably high marks. Is he a good politician? I would say that he's a bad politician doing what he can. Is he a good leader? I would say that he's a pretty good leader, considering that he has gotten a real backwater some pretty good press. His people have been reasonably non-violent, by no means perfect. He certainly advocates non-violence all the time. The whole bit with the 350-year-old-ghosts is a little disturbing but *his* adherents have not been implicated in any religious violence that I know of.
In short, I would say that if you plucked a politico-religious leader out of the 16th century, you would do well to get somebody as nice as this guy. There certainly were some Popes and Cardinals you'd never want to meet. I don't care for a lot of the Imams you get even today. The question is whether a decent person can represent a backwards ideology. I think the answer is obviously "yes." I would also say that it is a brutal irony that so much of the bandwidth being used to condemn this guy is often used to defend people who are flawed (to say the kindest thing) simply because they waived a red banner, knew the words to the Internationale, or said the words "labor" and "working class" a lot.
I remember when a "Comrade" Schroeder was championed on this list and everybody heralded the return of "real" leftist values to Europe in a blaze of Green and red. Apparently the Blair and Jospin elections weren't enough of an object lesson. I know that I would be embarrassed if I was spending my time denigrating the Dalai Lama while pinning my hopes for humanity on Chinese mandarins whose idea of socialism is membership in the WTO and union-busting, Fidel Castro's boys and the great European "third way" circle-jerk. If you can look at the group of people in the previous sentence and the one who most reminds you of Benito Mussolini is the Dalai Lama, you may be slightly too idealistic.
peace