Planet Earth.

I'm posting this because the first time I discussed the Dalai Lama and Tibet on Facebook my many comments were deleted. In fact the entire post was deleted. I suppose people sometimes don't like the truth. The subject came up again today and I decided rather then post a gazillion comments on someone elses post, and since I'd already posted several, it was just time to write about it.

My bubble was burst.

The Dalai Lama is a fraud perpetrated by the CIA and the foundation of that fraud is our covert war with China . My hobby, reading, is often fraught with danger because if you read enough and access enough valid data, sometime you're bubble bursts and as a one-time fan of the Dalai Lama that bubble was roundly destroyed.

The Dalai Lama has been on the CIA payroll for more then 50 years. This is a well known and admitted fact, not opinion or speculation. He's admitted this publicly as has the CIA. He has a nice, tidy income.

What's worse is that there is very little information in the mainstream media regarding the truth of Feudal Tibetan society pre-1960. This requires reading books so here are a few excerpts from some books by westerners that actually traveled in Tibet and wrote about it. This is the Tibet we don't know about.

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lamas lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs.

Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.

In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway slaves.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine.

The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the middle-class families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery.

The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monasterys land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.

Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serfs maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished; they were just slaves without rights.

Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a liberation. He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlords men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.

The theocracys religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

End

Tibet under the Dalai Lama was not a nice place to live unless of course you were the Dalai Lama.

You can find books by:

Gelder and Gelder

Melvyn Goldstein , William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering

Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison

William Leary

And others.

Gelder and Gelder and A. L. Strong actually traveled through Tibet and

Loren Coleman wrote about the CIA and the Dalai Lama.

Here's an article by Michael Parenti on Feudal Tibet:

Peace, and as the Dalai Lama says,

"The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis. "