Tibet

[Liza Featherstone]

an excellent analysis. the fact that one of the leading Free-Tibetheads,
Richard Gere, recently made a virulently anti-Chinese movie very much in a
Cold War-propaganda vein (forget the name of it but it was something like
Red Harvest, no joke) strengthens Heartfield's point. I'd add that the Free
Tibet campaign offers a way for celebrities to be anti-communist
(anti-Chinese), thus pro-American, but, ludicrously and somewhat
brilliantly, it allows them to be anti-materialism at the same time. 
Buddhism has, at least since the Beats in the 1950s, been embraced by rich
white North Americans as a way to strike a pose against our oh-so-empty
consumerism...as for the how-does it dovetail with our mandatory
Christianity question: Hollywood stars are allowed more moral freedom than
politicians. like other wealthy artists, for the last few centuries, they
are allowed to do things that are just a little bit outside the mainstream.
especially if, like the Free Tibet campaign, they essentially confirms
mainstream assumptions and values. (E. G. communism: bad. the Orient: cute
but inferior. capitalism: inevitable unless you live somewhere superbackward
(eg somewhere cute but inferior)

Liza 

----------
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Tibet
>Date: Thu, Feb 25, 1999, 5:50 PM
>


>Angela asked about the Dalai Lama's appeal among the US elite, and several
>others have commented. When this list was young, James Heartfield
>contributed this analysis.
>
>Doug
>
>----
>
>Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 02:59:57 +0100
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>From: Jim heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
>Subject: Re: Tibet
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Sender: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Precedence: bulk
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>
>In message <l03130300b1c149853a69@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
><dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>>I was at a party the other night populated mainly by amiable meatheads, and
>>one of them started in on Clinton's comments that the Chinese and Tibetans
>>should talk with each other, negotiations that would be premised on Tibetan
>>recognition of Chinese authority over Tibet. "Tibet is not part of China!
>>Free Tibet!!," he exhorted, in a departure for a conversation that was
>>mainly about sports and bad movies. I was surprised to hear this fellow
>>getting so exercised about any political issue, which made me wonder once
>>again - what is it about Tibet and the Dalai Lama? Why are it and he such
>>obsessions among otherwise nonpolitical types? And is he really the abused
>>innocent that Richard Gere and Patti Smith would have us believe? Can
>>anyone elighten me?
>
>I see this embrace of Tibetan liberation as less to do with the Tibetans
>than with the Chinese, as in less *for* Tibet than *anti* Chinese.
>
>There is a particular tradition amongst English imperialists of a
>tactical sympathy for the underdog's underdog. So for example, TE
>Lawrence romanticised the bedouin, out of a hostility to the Turks; The
>mystic Laurens Van Der Post (mentor of Prince Charles) wrote movingly of
>the Kalahari bushmen - a roundabout way of castigating the African
>governments whose modernisation programmes were threatening their way of
>life. The marsh Arabs of Iraq have also been the object of this kind of
>patronising romanticisation, with the pointed conclusion that the
>current regime should relinquish political authority over the Shatt al
>Arab waterways to their Western 'defenders'.
>
>The object of this romanticisation must preferably be a pastoral people,
>whose way of life is so simple and unadorned, that the western patron
>can invest it with a mystical authenticity. The romance is developed as
>a precise counterpoint to the fallen state of the urbanised masses of
>Africa or the Far East. The fantastic projection of an 'inner truth'
>into the lives these 'simple folk' arises out of a sublimated distaste
>for the masses of the third world. The rural idyll is elevated in the
>imagination, precisely because the urban masses appear hostile and
>threatening to the Western romatic.
>
>The current Hollywood treatment of the degenerate autocracy in Tibet
>arises not out of any specific feeling for the Tibetans. Their real
>culture does not feature in the Cinema version, but rather is
>substituted by a fantasy version, and a fantasy whose well-springs are
>to be found in the West rather than the East.
>
>The surprise amongst many Western admirers of the Dalai Lama when he let
>slip his hostility to homosexuality spoke volumes. To the Lama's
>admirers in the West it seems odd that a religion that is so unmacho and
>sensitive should frown of homosexuality. But the interpretation of
>Buddhism as 'unmacho' or 'sensitive' has nothing to do with Buddhism
>itself, and everything to do with Western expectations of Eastern
>mystics.
>
>Surprise, surprise: A religion that is rooted in the most backward
>social conditions of Tibet, where the surplus product is entirely
>redirected towards the unproductive consumption of a monastic leisure
>class, gives rise to backward views about homosexuality, the family and
>women. What else would happen where there is no tendency towards social
>development, where prejudice is the bedrock of the social order, and
>where production is based upon the home?
>
>The tendency to romanticise the most backward and barbaric social
>conditions in the East arises out of a contemporary mood in the West:
>the mood that rejects modernisation as a mistake, and celebrates instead
>the 'uncorrupted' values of primitive societies. The small Tibetan
>theocracy is a romantic counterpoint to the Far East that the Western
>racist most profoundly fears: the Far East that is developing into a
>competitor, and creating a mass working class, that provokes fears of
>the oriental horde in the minds of western elites.
>
>My good freind Aiden Campbell has written eloquently on the celebration
>of the Primitive in his book on Modern Primitives and Ethical Ethnicity,
>which was published by Cassell, inthe UK, last year.
>--
>Jim heartfield