/ dave / wrote:
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > There's a pretty good book by A Tom Grunfeld called The Making of
> > Modern Tibet published a few years ago by Sharpe. Not that I know
> > enough about Tibet to judge, but it did tell me some things I wanted
> > to hear (that traditional Tibet was a pretty horrifying place, and
> > that the Dalai Lama crowd buddied up with the CIA).
>
> Are we giving context due consideration here? I'll be the first one to
> stand up and declare that the CIA should be annihilated, but I remember
> reading that long piece you forwarded on the CIA/Tibet involvement and
> it seems to me that "buddying up" with the CIA was a wholly pragmatic
> and fairly straightforward move on the part of the Dalai Lama and Co.,
The point is that the Dalai was a scoundrel whether he buddied with the CIA or not. The "culture" he was defending was a culture of exploitation, torture, and tyranny. At worst, either communist or capitalist China would be better than the Dalai.
Carrol