MIM on Brad Pitt

Liza Featherstone lfeather32 at erols.com
Tue Nov 20 09:21:58 PST 2001


[ridiculous as MIM is, and as much as I giggled over these reviews, their take on Seven Years in Tibet isn't half bad]

Two Long Hours of Historical Revisionism

Seven Years in Tibet is the sanitized and romanticized film version of

the self-promoting memoir of an elite Nazi who became a tutor and

advisor to the spiritual and political leader of one of the last slave

societies on the planet Earth. The elite Nazi is Heinrich Harrer,

played by Brad Pitt, and the slave master is the Dalai Lama. It comes

as no surprise to MIM that the Dalai Lama would embrace a Nazi, nor

that Hollywood would use fascism and slavery to concoct an attack on

communism.

The most important problems with this film are that it practically

ignores of the role of Nazism and slavery and that it fabricates the

positions and actions of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Most

bourgeois reviews of this film have focused on the fact that Harrer

wasn't a good guy (abandoning his wife, engaging in frequent prison

breaks from a British POW camp that jeopardized the escape plans of

the other fascist POWs) or for turning the film into psychological

thriller about Harrer's love for his abandoned son.(1)

After the film was completed, Harrer's Nazi past was revealed and few

voice-overs in the film were changed to suggest that Harrer joined the

Nazi party reluctantly to further his career, and that his sojourn in

Tibet made him realize that Nazism is bad. Actually, Harrer joined the

SA in 1933, and the SS in 1938. Harrer is no Schindler, but instead

someone who joined a voluntary elite Nazi organization and held a rank

the equivalent of sergeant. Harrer's memoir makes no mention of his

Nazi past.(1)

Seven Years in Tibet shows Tibet as a peace-loving, non- violent

society, when it was in fact a brutal society of high lamas owning

hundreds of thousands of serfs. The Dalai Lama's family alone owned

4,000 people.(2) As one former serf told journalist Anna Louise Strong

on life before liberation: "I was not much different than a yak."(3)

Amongst the few correct things about this film is that it shows how

isolated the high lamas were from the people, as we see the young

Dalai Lama constantly watching his people from his palace with a

telescope, and his advisors criticizing him for doing so. His advisors

wanted the Dalai Lama to be even more cut off from the people.

Prior to 1949, Tibet had been considered a part of China. According to

Strong, "No foreign power in seven hundred years has recognized Tibet

as a separate nation or sent an ambassador to Lhasa."(4) While Tibet

relatively autonomous in the period immediately prior to 1949, so was

most of imperialist-weakened China as it had broken up into different

pieces run by warlords.

In the film we see three Chinese People's Liberation Army generals fly

to Lhasa to meet with the Dalai Lama. These generals are rude to

everyone, and kick over a religious symbol created by a monk as a sign

of peace and friendliness towards the generals. After the meeting, the

lead general tells a Tibetan minister "Religion is poison."

Religion is used by ruling classes to justify oppressive systems and

get the people to believe that they deserve their conditions. In the

case of Buddhism, adherents are told that if they tolerate their

position in society well enough, they may do better in another life.

Religion is a reactionary idea that Communists should propagandize

against, but the methods used by the People's Liberation Army in the

film are not only historically inaccurate but proven ineffective at

destroying superstition.

As Mao instructed in "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant

Movement in Hunan" written two decades before the time covered in the

film and a thousand miles from the location of Tibet, the Communists

should "Draw the bow without shooting, just indicate the motions." As

a footnote to this article explains: "This reference to archery is

taken from Mencius. It describes how the expert teacher of archery

draws his bow with a histrionic gesture but does not release the

arrow. The point is that while Communists should guide the peasants in

attaining a full measure of political consciousness, they should leave

it to the peasants' own initiative to abolish superstitious and other

bad practices and should not give them orders or do it for them."(5)

Mao also explained that the nobility would otherwise use this

alienation of the peasants' current ideology to rally them against the

Communist Party and the revolution. But with careful political work

the peasants will become impressed by the honest ways of the

Communists and take up the revolutionary science of Marxism that puts

the faith in the masses' own actions and not in gods or the location

of their ancestors' graves.

The film portrays a surprise attack by PLA forces on the Tibetan

forces in 1950. The reality was portrayed in an article about Tibet in

MIM Theory 8: "The PLA entered the city of Chambdo in 1950. This area

plagued by fighting between Tibetan and Szechwan warlords, was not,

according to most maps, part of Tibet. In 1950, however, the

population was majority Tibetan. The PLA entry was anticipated by the

Dalai Lama, so Tibetan troops were sent to meet and fight the PLA. The

PLA quickly defeated the Dalai Lama's army in Chambdo. Many Tibetans,

including some of the leadership of the Tibetan army, went over to the

PLA side. The PLA was able to win support by explaining their

intentions and through sharing what was happening in [other parts of]

China.

"The PLA did not advance into Tibet until 1951, when an agreement

between the Dalai Lama and the Central Government for the 'Peaceful

Liberation of Tibet' was signed. The agreement set the terms of the

transition for Tibet back into being a functioning part of China.

"Claiming the support of the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama also

claimed to support the agreement, in which China was to 'leave

unchanged the political structure, the powers of the Dalai Lama, the

income of the monasteries' and was not to 'use compulsion for reform.'

Instead reform was left in the hands of the local governments and

monasteries, who had agreed to begin reforming themselves." These

agreements included things like abolished debts the serfs had owed for

generations to the monasteries.(6)

Unlike what was portrayed in the text after the film, the Dalai Lama

and the nobility dragged their feet at the reforms, especially land

reform, and staged a number of rebellions. After a 1959 nobility-led

rebellion, the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India. With the

self-removal of the bulk of the nobility and their invalidation of the

1951 agreement, serfdom was officially abolished and land reform was

carried out in earnest.(6)

This nobility in exile serves as the nucleus of the "Free Tibet"

movement. MIM of course does not support the state- capitalist fascism

of Deng Xiao-ping and Jiang Zemin, but we see it as preferable to a

return to serfdom under the Dalai Lama. A better option would be a

capitalism free of China's current fascism, and the best option would

be for the genuine Maoists remaining within Tibet to lead a communist

revolution against China and for an independent, socialist Tibet.

NOTE: 1. The "Hero" of Seven Years in Tibet, Holocaust,

http:holocaust.miningco.com/library/weekly/mcurrent.htm. Citing:

Dallas Morning News 12 Oct 1997, C3 and Julia Ferguson, "Dalai Lama's

Austrian Tutor Says Was in Nazi Party," Reuters North American Wire 28

May 1997.

2. Great Changes in Tibet, Foreign Languages Press: Peking 1972. p.

22.

3. Anna Louis Strong, Tibetan Interviews. New World Press: Peking

1959, p. 30.

4. Ibid, p. 74.

5. Mao Zedong, Selected Works Volume I, Foreign Languages Press, 1965.

p. 46, 58(n).

6. MIM Theory 8. "The Liberation of Tibet: Revolutionary Advances and

Counter-Revolutionary Claims" pp 92-95. $6 from MIM. This section

cites Strong's Tibetan Interviews and Strong's When Serf's Stood Up in

Tibet, New World Press, Peking 1960.

-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20011120/965c0a65/attachment.htm>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list