NEW YORK — Are the Tibetans doomed to go the way of the American Indians? Will they be reduced to nothing more than a tourist attraction, peddling cheap mementos of what was a once-great culture? That sad fate is looking more and more likely, and the Olympic year already has been soured by the Chinese government's efforts to suppress resistance to it.
The Chinese have much to answer for, but the fate of Tibet is not just a matter of semi-colonial oppression. It is often forgotten that many Tibetans, especially educated people in the larger towns, were so keen to modernize their society in the mid-20th century that they saw the Chinese Communists as allies against rule by holy monks and serf-owning landlords. In the early 1950s, the young Dalai Lama himself was impressed by Chinese reforms and wrote poems praising Chairman Mao Zedong.
Alas, instead of reforming Tibetan society and culture, the Chinese Communists ended up wrecking it. Religion was crushed in the name of official Marxist atheism.
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