Dalai Drama
Eamonn McCann, 20 Jan 2000
Much jubiliation among the daft tendency in our district about the escape of the 17th Karmapa of the Kagyus from the clutches of the Chinese.
The 15-year-old monk managed to elude his jailers and is now at a secret location in India. He had been identified by astrologers and other experts as the 17th reincarnation of a major-league Buddhist saint.
The senior monk who made the positive ID and ordered the boy taken away from his parents knew he was a saint from his fine, white, clear features .
It strikes me in passing that if a fundamentalist preacher or Christian Brother attributed special holiness to a child and ordered its kidnap on that basis, we wouldn t know whether to feel anger at the cruelty and implicit racism or to laugh at the farcical stupidity.
The oppression of Tibet by the Beijing Stalinists is a continuing crime against humanity. But in acknowledging this, it is not necessary to ignore the irrationality of Tibetan Buddhism or the fact that its supreme leader, the Dalai Lama, is a medieval despot and most Tibetan monks are fat parasites. Why do we never hear a word against the Dalai Lama s policy on women priests, which is exactly in line with the Pope s?
Why no comment on his opposition to democratic rights for the Tibetan people?
Afghanistan suffered as much from the Russians as the Tibetans still suffer from the Chinese. But we don t give the Taliban any leeway on that account. It s time to give over with this sentimentality about Tibet. The absurd ideology of the Dalai Lama is a major reason for the relative impotence of the Tibetan opposition to Chinese dictatorship.
Reincarnation, indeed. Astrologers. Fine white features. Makes you feel like stamping on a grasshopper on the way home.
Eamonn McCann
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