<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>MIM on Brad Pitt</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> [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. </BODY> </HTML>