Rev. Danny Fisher

Over at Progressive Revival, the great Robert Thurman writes about His Holiness the Dalai Lama and commemorating “Tibetan Independence Day” tommorrow. Here’s the choicest quote:

In commemorating all this today on March 10th, one thing we can do at least in our minds, it seems to me, is to take responsibility for our role in standing by while this is happening. We should not blame it all on the poor Chinese. We (meaning here the entire official world, our American government and those of the Europeans, the Indians, and the East Asian free countries) have allowed the Tibetan genocide to continue (along with those in North Korea, Burma, Darfur) out of our greed to profit from China, either as an ally in the cold war against Russia (forgetting in the process that the Chinese government is itself a totalitarian communist dictatorship), or as a huge pool of cheap labor and a mythical market for our goods and commodities. Out of our obsession with ruthless short-term business, we have rationalized our neglect of the basic humanity and justice that is the necessary foundation of a prosperous globalizing world. Acting imperialistic ourselves, we have encouraged by example the Chinese to behave imperialistically. Clinging to our own excessive militarism, we have pushed the Chinese to militarize excessively. Ignoring our own destruction of the natural environment, we have seduced the Chinese into following our model of recklessly toxic industrialization. And now that we have allowed the unrestrained greed of our financial elite to abuse our democracy and destroy our own prosperity and turn us back into an under-developed country, there is a danger that we will imitate the Chinese and turn authoritarian ourselves, thus reinforcing the Chinese fear of democratization and entrenching them further in their unrelenting totalitarianism.