Readers at LJ: click here to check out this post which has been gobbled up by the horrible Moloch that lives somewhere in Livejournal’s API.

Yeah, I gotta say, after having been around some Tibetans in Northern India, and hearing their stories first hand… I am so not into the Tibetan Buddhist theocracy, and think they probably were living off the slave-like labour of the Tibetan people, just like China’s official party line claims.

But colonial occupation and genocide isn’t really much in the way of help for the Tibetan people, regardless of what the Chinese official party line claims. And since the Dalai Lama has stated publicly that he would not want a free Tibet to be a theocracy, but instead a democracy. There would have to be a good constitution to prevent some later Dalai Lama from pulling a radical takeover powered by clerical machinations, but hey, if the Tibetans can free themselves of China, by whatever means they eventually resort to, then I suspect they will be able to free themselves of a bunch of old monks with books tucked under their arms.

The dead and the injured, it’s a horror, yes, but it does my heart good to see people in Lhasa fighting back. Maybe they’re going to take advantage of the Olympics this summer. Sadly, I think it’ll be a long time before Beijing lets the territory slip through its vampiric fingers, but to see the people demanding their right to demand their rights, it’s a step. Much better than the pained resignation that the Tibetans I met described to me.