[Robert Stagg]
I remember (though not, as the cliché would have it, “vividly”) when I first heard the term “gadfly” used. It was part of Michael Howard’s slightly creaky assault on the United Kingdom Independence Party. They were “cranks” too; “cranks” and “political gadflies”. How dismissive, I thought. I must look these critters up. A shuffle through the OED reveals that it was Socrates’ nom de chose. He was the irritant, the thorn in the side, the contrarian, the loose cannon, the dissident, the awkward customer, the rebel, the gadfly to the horse-like Athenian political system. He would (as Plato tells us) sting and whip people into a rage, completely in the service of truth.
As a nom de plume to attribute to oneself it seems slightly inappropriate. Like “dissident” it seems like it should be a title you earn rather than claim. But it seems everyone is a gadfly in these sorry old times. (Sneering is easy, of course, but someone has to do it.) Those who have taken to styling themselves “pro-Tibet”, an epithet which manages to say both too much and too little, are the gadflies of the moment. And, unlike Socrates, they are remarkably easy to swat.
One does not have to become an apologist for Chinese atrocities in the area, although – as George Galloway has found – it can help. One simply has to examine the historical record of what Buddhist autocracy (yes, I said Buddhist autocracy) has inflicted, and would inflict again, on Tibetans. Namely, the imposition of a god-king-politician and all the associated luggage. This hereditary business began formally in 1578 with Altan Khan’s bestowing of the title (in diluted form) to Sonam Gyatso, but the Lama line can be stalked back to the 1390s. We Britons have a hereditary monarchy thanks to a long line of historical invasions, collusive or otherwise. Tibetans get all this, and a god too. A reincarnated god. The current embodiment, Mr. Tenzin Gyatso, sometimes does not appear to believe all this stuff, and sometimes does. It broadly relies on the audience to which he is appealing.
The current crowd gathered around the god-king are not listening anyway. They have not queried the validity of this stale little system. Nor have they noted the Dalai Lama’s disposition to violence when it suits him, say, after he fully accepted the (ominous) Seventeen Point Agreement with the Chinese in 1951 and then started a guerrilla war on the rooftop of the world. They have absorbed all the white noise chat about Buddhism being socially nuanced, and neglected the Dalai Lama’s support for Indian nuclear tests or his meetings with the Japanese terrorist Shoko Asahara (who also donated 170 million yen to the Lhasan “exile”). They’ve drenched him in garish celebrity and remained silent as he proclaims, bizarrely, that Richard Gere and Steven Seagal are also reincarnations, or “fulku”.
The Dalai Lama talks a good game, and occasionally plays one too. But his recent verbiage about being half-Buddhist, half-Marxist is a spout of hot air. When the god-king was twenty five and enthroned in Tibet, the following was true: Monasteries owned much of the land, and their residents – most of them government figures – possessed up to four thousand serfs at their will and volition. The serfs had no schooling or medical care and no legal protection. They could be beaten and tortured, and often were. They were taxed on birth, marriage and death. If they required a loan to pay these charges, they could obtain favourable interest rates of twenty to fifty per cent from the landholders. If they did not pay, more torture ensued.
Posed hypothetically, this argument would nurture pangs of conscience and stirrings of regret in the most grizzled of the ‘”pro-Tibet” ranks. But when made seriously and in context, only evasiveness will do. “Pro-Tibet”, in almost all cases, is shorthand for supporting the Dalai Lama and opposing what he calls the “cultural genocide” of Tibet. (By this, he means ‘secularisation’).
But succour for god-kings makes you something of a sucker for the feudalism and political chicanery that follows and ensues. The “pro-Tibet” lobby could use a lesson in history, and a class in what Michel Foucault calls “reverse discourse”. Using the language of your enemy can further your aim. Far from abolishing Buddhism, The Chinese are currently “reincarnating” government officials in Tibet, just as their predecessor god-kings used to.
