Hah! You neo-con running dog!

Uhh, only kidding. I think the next stage in the argument is to realise that Marxist class theory generally doesn’t predict, with any accuracy, what will happen next in any given society, nor finds the solutions that real world societies need. The theory simply isn’t empirically adequate and people ought to be looking out for new explanations of exploitation and class conflict within society. I quite like this one: http://agorism.info/AgoristClassTheory.pdf (which is stridently anti-imperialist and non-interventionist but for slightly different reasons)

I choose to take a stance on Tibet from a Liberal position, not a Left (or Right) one. Hence, since I’m not a fan of Buddhist nuns being shot to death in the streets, I’ll overlook the fact that Tibet used to be a repressive, feudal, warlord-led society. It’s more important to me now to oppose China’s systematic ‘cultural genocide’ (in the Dalai Lama’s recent words, which are absolutely accurate). A deliberate attempt to bring in Chinese population to the area, give them all the jobs, reward them for breeding out Tibetans, ruthlessly suppressing Tibetan culture…

“Proletarian property relations” were seen as a positive idea by most of their fans because of the implied fairness and equality, the protection of the weaker/poorer individuals. Anyone looking at the Tibetan situation with any humanity can see past Left and Right – China has held Tibet before, this is no longer a matter of who gets to call themselves boss and own the resources. This is a struggle for cultural survival. If you thought the Communist system would have a beneficial outcome on an otherwise feudal community, you could almost make the (wildly blinkered) argument you did back then – but surely not even the most fundamentalist lefties can’t justify the same stance today?

“Similarly, a quarter of a century I would have maintained that the British ruling class was committed in perpetuity to the maintenance of a Unionist statelet in the Six Counties. Yet the trajectory ever since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 has been towards incorporation of the top layer of nationalists into the formal structures of governance”

This tends to prove, not disprove, what you thought 25 years ago.

Ouch! Let’s pick and choose which double standards to apply, when and where!

From the outside it is possible to avoid making a choice between the lesser of the twin evils of feudal represssion and communist repression. What is going on in Tibet is not a struggle for cultural survival, unless someone is making the suggestion that the chinese imperialist tendency equates with genocide, which I don’t. It is a struggle for political supremacy and control – by which terms the west will obviously sympathise with the established western precedent of self-determination against China.

Do we really care about the plight of ordinary Tibetans? Do we even know what their plight is? Are the complaints a result of a lack of economic development, or a case of spiritual (and dare I say, racial?) contamination.

The Dalai Lama overreaches his complaints by railing against the trains carrying chinese investment and people into Tibet – one man’s colonisation process is another’s freedom of labour and movement. He is quite simply acting irresponsibly by taking up the political mantle (without election) and doing anything more than condemning the violence (is it courage that makes someone wilfully want to injure or kill?). He should also be careful in his precarious position not to allow the Chinese position that he is an illegitimate agitator to gain ground or he will undermine the unity that exists among Tibetans.

The Kosovan question must also be seen in the light of the EU’s expansionist policy, so that when the declaration of independence came it was announced as a virtual fait accompli, with the internal propaganda masking their wider intentions. It is perverse that the level of organised criminality has been taken as a reason to oppose independence, as this was one of the main reasons given for pushing it through – though one might argue about definitions of ‘informal economy’ and whether the presence of KFOR enabled those informalities to continue unhindered and spread unchecked.
And there are so many cases where a marriage has broken down, but divorce should be avoided that that analogy holds as much water as a collander.

The end of apartheid in RSA was a revolution, albeit a democratic and peaceful one, which hinged upon the parole and subsequent pardon of the indigenous political figurehead, who can be credited with ensuring the success of the transition. That’s not to say the work he helped start was unblemished or is yet completed

All-in-all it is your ‘trotskyist’ analysis which is, in plain English, say, utter bollocks, not the conclusions you draw, which are no more than hit-and-miss. It seems you are admitting you have moved away from that dogma, so there is still hope.

#3 Eamonn. No it doesn’t. You’ve provided evidence that you’re prepared to interpret any evidence according to your hand-me-down prejudices.

Thomas: I’m interested in your opinion that the Chinese policy on Tibet is more about political control than cultural elimination.

To take one law as an example, any Chinese person who marries a Tibetan is allowed two children instead of one. I assume you see this as “promoting integration and harmony” instead of an attack calculated to reduce or remove Tibetan identity?

The Union is now more firmly entrenched than ever. Those who spent years trying to destroy it have now settled for administering it – and the Mercs and perks that go with that role – and a cross border talking shop. All of this was on offer since Sunningdale. Game set and match to the Unionists I’d say.

Eamonn

Surely that depends on what you think the Unionists wanted, and thus which unionists you mean.

Those who gerrymandered Northern Ireland into a ludicrous sham of a democracy didn’t want see republicans have any decision making powers in their fiefdom. They wanted an Ulster ruled forever by protestants.

They certainly did not want catholics running areas of policy.

The author of the post did not refer to what the Unionists wanted, he said

“Similarly, a quarter of a century I would have maintained that the British ruling class was committed in perpetuity to the maintenance of a Unionist statelet in the Six Counties.”

I don’t think that any British government bothered about how NI was governed as long as the Union was maintained. As long as the Catholics were willing to shut up, gerrymandering etc was fine, when they started getting stroppy other arrangments had to be made.

“To take one law as an example, any Chinese person who marries a Tibetan is allowed two children instead of one. ”

Any Tibetan who marries a Tibetan is also exempt from the one child policy, which only applies to Han Chinese who marry each other. Ethnic Tibetan demographics skew far younger than Han Chinese, not just in Tibet but across China in general. This hardly counts as evidence for a selective breeding programme designed to detsory Tibetannness.

It’s pretty clear that most Tibetans want either genuine autonomy or independence, and so they should have it. Can we leave this BNP type “ethnocide” crap out of it? “Resist the mongrelisation of the pure Tibetan race” is a lousy argeument on every level.

those labouring under the illusion that the GFA and the institutions arising from it involved the NI Unionists or the British govt. giving up anything of substance should read this

http://tinyurl.com/3dyncr

JamieK: Didn’t mean to argue about race, only where that could be seen as a route to suppressing culture. That law seemed to suggest the Chinese were going further than merely wanting political control. Looking back, I got it from a not-exactly-unbiased source, so they were probably being selective with their info.

Nevertheless, are we really arguing that China’s actions (and the statistics of Tibetans becoming unemployed, homeless and the explosion in prostitution, while Han Chinese are preferentially given the jobs) are simply those of a power exerting *political* control? I would say that it’s certainly political, but that doesn’t stop it also being cultural genocide. The Chinese government is giving every impression it would be happy for Tibetan culture to die out entirely.

Eamonn, I’m concerned you’ve inverted the NI argument in order to promote your own.

Firstly, stop mixing and matching your use of ‘British’ with reference to the issue – it is a loaded term and you know it.

Secondly, it might be that individuals within the UK govt took the position you ascribe them all and that the union was prioritised over the substance of government, but then the Irish nationalist cause was equally filled with members who prioritised the breaking of the union over the substance of government too.
Additionally, the violent activism on both sides overtook the movement for good governance and placed everyone under so much threat that it created a special case – this volatile situation was actively encouraged by reactionaries who though they could grow any reaction against it and thus build their cause.

Either politics is practised under the aegis of the gun with everything pointed one-way and all resultant changes are the blackmailers blood money, or you discuss under the auspices of a flag (any flag).

The campaign in the north to free catholics was not based upon any desire for equality, but a desire for supremacy which ignored claims of any ethnic migrant community, whether they be Scots-Ulster who entered over a course of several hundred years, or commonwealth (for that’s what it was by then) immigrants from around the former colonies and dependancies of the British Empire.

Just because you are viewing the issue through the spectrum of green-tinted spectacles (and today nobody could blame you) doesn’t make you right.

The subject of NI offers a direct comparison with Tibet, but the two are not similar. Claims of cultural genocide overstate any real cases of inequality and are false anyway – should Tibet be excluded from the forces of globalisation and integration with the wider world?
I don’t think so, but the religious underpinning of Tibetan resistance does tend to promote this view, though Chinese state force is blunt and continues to be painted (not completely unjustifiably) as undemocratic, unyeildingly and insistent.

The Dalai Lama is the fulcrum of the debate as he will lead by example, but he faces a stark choice – either he secularises his influence, restrains his interventions to the cause of common humanity against violence and resists entry into any campaign to accrue power or he turns himself and his religion into the false prophet that must be brought down before the situation is resolved.

It is just plain impressionable immaturity which allows one to accept the ‘impressions’ of what policies actually exist or of what they actually entail. Obviously clarity helps reassure the naive, but political reality is another beast.

“Firstly, stop mixing and matching your use of ‘British’ with reference to the issue – it is a loaded term and you know it.”

I don’t understand this.

“Just because you are viewing the issue through the spectrum of green-tinted spectacles (and today nobody could blame you) doesn’t make you right.”

I dunno where you got this. Nothing I wrote here is indicative of sympathy for the Provos for the simple reason I don’t have anyway. I was glad that they were defeated and glad that they are devoting themselves to humdrum day to day politics.

Well, Eamonn, if you decide to look at the union through Scottish instead of Irish eyes the union is not more entrenched than ever, but more precariously positioned than ever. Should I have said orange-tinged glasses instead of green?

Thomas: either you can’t read or I can’t write.

Eamonn

you said “Game set and match to the unionists”

And clearly thats not true for a great many unionists. Hence it would depend on which unionists you mean.

As for the British establishment, its fair to say the government that established the peace we thankfully now have probably saw things differently to the previous government.

And of course, maintaining the union was always the only democratic option when most people in northern ireland wanted the union maintained. (that test will come if a majority ever wants independence).

>>> I think the next stage in the argument is to realise that Marxist class theory generally doesn’t predict, with any accuracy, what will happen next in any given society, nor finds the solutions that real world societies need.

One also has to appreciate that there has never been a genuinely ‘Marxist’ revolution in the sense of one occurring under the precise social and economic conditions (industrial capitalism) from which he derived his theories either. Russia was, at best, a transitional, industrialising, economy while China and others were mainly agrarian. What we have had are a series of ‘peasants’ revolutions’ not workers revolutions so you can’t really say whether or not class theory would hold valid in its proper context as that context has never fully arisen.

What you can certainly say, however, it that it doesn’t make accurate predictions for societies which don’t fit the very limited model on which Marx based his theory, so it claim to embody a set of universal principles does stand up.

>>> Game set and match to the Unionists I’d say.

Not at all, Eamonn.

What we have in NI is not, I think, a permanent settlement.

Rather its the case that all sides have chosen to defer the question of final sovereignty to another time.

One cannot predict what the final outcome will be, but one can say that the demographics are clearly running in the favour of the Catholic community who will eventually come to form a clear majority of the population. What happens when that majority is realised – whether there remains the same kind of pull towards unification with the Irish Republic or whether a settlement has evolved in the interim which leaves them feeling that they have more to gain from remaining a devolved and semi-autonomous component of the Union is what is open to question.

Unity – maybe Eamonn meant European Unionists…

Unity

I would argue that far from defering the question of sovereignty – Northern Ireland has concluded fairly well now that some things matter more.

For example, it was interesting to see the role water charges played in securing peace.

The Government proposed widely unpopular water charge reforms and told the main parties in Northern Ireland they would be imposed unless a powersharing coalition was formed to develop an alternative.

It was a concluding illustration of the entire peace process that saw a public tire of sovereignty and yearn simply for better lives.

“Nevertheless, are we really arguing that China’s actions (and the statistics of Tibetans becoming unemployed, homeless and the explosion in prostitution, while Han Chinese are preferentially given the jobs) are simply those of a power exerting *political* control? I would say that it’s certainly political, but that doesn’t stop it also being cultural genocide.”

What do you mean by “cultural genocide?” These arguments sound like someone trying to get the benefit of the word genocide by sticking the word “cultural” in front of it. There was a time when Chinese policy in Tibet was actually near genocidal during the cultural revolution, as part of a general effort to eradicate all forms of traditional culture across China and the places it controlled. Now there’s a forced development programme also similar to that going on across China., and since it’s a Chinese led initiative, it’s the Chinese who tend to benefit from it. Part of the reason that the Chinese benefit is that most or many Tibetans don’t want to be part of an effort to modernise Chinese controlled Tibet, they want to be independent. In other words, it’s all political.

The worst aspect of the current uprising is that it has involved – for the first time ever – lynch mobs out on the streets of Lhasa looking for individual Han Chinese, not just opposing elements of the Chinese state and security forces. This tends to be where cultural genocide arguments lead.

Lastly, the Chinese have had sixty years, under a government of unparalelled ruthlessness, to erase Tibetan culture if that was what they actually planned to do, and with the scope to do anything it pleases to this end. At the end of it, they have a mass uprising of Tibetans on their hands.

jamieK

I don’t know what is meant by cultural genocide that isn’t covered by the words cultural oppression – but whatever it is called it is underway.

After all – genocide doesn’t require holocaust style slaughter. In Iraq the Marsh Arabs were wiped out over three decades by a government that simply destroyed the land they previously lived on.

By forcing them into starvation, degredation, and thus migration – they ceased to exist as a people – or at least their numbers fell to a tenth of what they were at the start of the process, and their culture was somewhat homogenised into Iraqi norms.

The same is effectively true of native tribes in the Americas – some of which were slaughtered, others of which were simply made culturally extinct by habitat loss and cultural imperialism much like that under way in Tibet.

That said – all hope should not be lost.

For example – The Welsh have reasserted their identity strongly in recent years. All across Wales kids now learn Welsh as part of their cultural identity, despite mainly being descended from people who at no point in history ever spoke Welsh.

After all – much of Wales is inhabited by the same Anglo-Saxons as the English, not least because of such long periods of movement between Wales and England.

so while the Picts are unlikely to re-awaken after their oppression and slaughter by the Scots – the Welsh have re-awoken after their homogenisation by the anglo-saxons.

And Tibet may survive similarly. Despite the oppression.

>>What do you mean by “cultural genocide?”

A systematic attempt to eliminate a people’s culture – customs, religion, and national identity.

>>Part of the reason that the Chinese benefit is that most or many Tibetans don’t want to be part of an effort to modernise Chinese controlled Tibet,

Yes. Since “modern Chinese culture” doesn’t seem to allow traditional Tibetan culture to exist alongside it, the Tibetans are generally uninterested. If you’re suggesting the two can coexist, take a look at the all-new tourist version of Lhasa’s monasteries.

This “uprising” is indeed about Tibetans attacking Han Chinese. It’s not a calculated political move for Independence, it’s Tibetans venting their desperate need to Hit A Chinese Person. Just as well the Dalai Lama has said he would have to resign if Tibetan violence continues, or China might imply he’s personally organised the riots. Oh wait, they did.

The Chinese who “don’t want to be part of it” are reduced to poverty, alcoholism and hopelessness. If large parts of the population are rejecting China’s kind offer of improved wages and living conditions, the answer may not be bullets, tanks or detention without trial. Why now more than in the last sixty years? It’s speeded up. Better transport links, more incentives and a big jump in numbers of Han Chinese drafted in, sending the money home to their families. The immediate area doesn’t benefit.

Margin4 Error: And the Marsh Arabs include one of the last surviving Gnostic sects in the entire world (Mandaeans, specifically), showing very starkly how culture disappears along with numbers.

Steve B

Indeed – The Marsh Arabs had actually maintained a long history of diversity, given that the Mandaeans were only one of the sects among them. And of course that history has almost come to an end thanks to the re-routing of the Tigris and Euphrates during the 90s.

As I said – genocide of this sort does not require slaughter in the holocaust mould. Starvation, dispersment, and other forms of oppression often work just as well.

Is culture different to lifestyle? Because now that the marshes have been reflooded the lifestyle is supporting increased numbers.

Thomas

The lifestyle is a little different to culture.

For example – the lifestyle saw the marsh arabs split into two groups – the animal farmers and the crop farmers – and then from (if I understand this right) the crop farmers grew a lifestyle based on the production of reed matting.

That lifestyle can reasonably return now that the landscape has returned. But what may not return is cultural aspects such as the minority worship of John the Baptist (Mandaeans).

Their numbers dwindled strongly with all marsh arabs – and those who moved away or simply died are not likely to be replaced by new converts to that ancient religion.

So while the landscape returns and people get back to their old lifestyles, many aspects to their culture will not recover so easilly.