From King Kaufman’s Sports Daily at Salon.com, reporting from the SF protests:
A young man dressed as the Dalai Lama stumbled through the crowds along the barricades lining the curb in front of the Ferry Building. He was moaning. Another man walked behind him, waving a Chinese flag and hitting the ersatz Dalai Lama with a rolled-up magazine. “Get out of here!” the second man yelled as he swung.
“Yeah!” yelled a Chinese woman who saw them. She waved her red flag at the men. “Good job! Good job!”
A man with a South Asian accent turned to his friend. “I don’t think she got it,” he said. “I think she missed the satire.”
And that was your SchizOlympics Moment of Zen.
Thanks – that gives me inspiration for a little performance we might put on for the Australian torch run: Mao vs the Dalai Lama.
Hey Mick, do me a favor. Don’t. Y’know why? Because it’s not funny. Because you’ll just piss people off. Because it’ll be yet another little wedge between both sides and it’ll both offend people on the other side and actually damage your own cause by making it harder to have any sort of dialogue, which I really, really shouldn’t have to remind you is what the Dalai Lama is asking for, since it sounds like you support him. And the whole reason I put this up is because it sums up for me the asinine behavior on both sides that I detest.
And you’ll look like a dick. Don’t be a dick, Mick.
It’s easy to talk smack, but what are the facts? Is the Chinese paranoia unjustified?
http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/56145
“Canadian journalist reveal that a German Foreign Ministry front organization is playing a decisive role in the preparations of the anti-Chinese Tibet campaign. According to this information, the campaign is being orchestrated from a Washington based headquarters. It had been assigned the task of organizing worldwide “protests” at a conference organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (affiliated with the German Free Democratic Party – FDP) in May 2007. The plans were developed with the collaboration of the US State Department and the self-proclaimed Tibetan Government in Exile”
I’ve checked the sources and they seem solid. Is it really that hard to believe that after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper hires Tibet Committee leader Tenzin Khangsar as his advisor, stuff like this can happen?
Charles, I’ve scanned the article by Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail cited as the source of the claim in your quote, both by word search (“German” and “Naumann”) as well as by eye, and find no reference to either (with the exception of “Germany” in reference the 1936 Berlin games).
Where does this information appear in the article?
Robert I don’t know, as half of the references are in German. The original article is also in German.
Robert, the article by Saunders isn’t cited as the source of the information that the conference was supported by the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung. Here is the relevant excerpt:
From the Saunders article:
“Last May, the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan government-in-exile put together a meeting in Brussels of all the major Tibet organizations — there are hundreds, and they’re organized under a Washington-based umbrella group, the International Tibet Support Network. There, the exiled Tibetans decided that the Olympics should be the single focus of their activities for the next 15 months, and they hired a full-time organizer for the Olympic-disruption campaign. They picked Ms. Putt, a University of Victoria graduate who had spent years in the student movement.”
The article goes on to describe the activities organized by Ms. Putt.
The ‘german-foreign-policy.com’ article cites this article and adds its own comment that “Die Konferenz wurde von der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung in Zusammenarbeit mit der selbsternannten tibetischen Exilregierung und einem interfraktionellen Zusammenschluss des belgischen Parlaments durchgeführt. (The conference was conducted by the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung in cooperation with the self-proclaimed Tibetan Government-in-exile and a multifactional gathering of the Belgian Parliament.)”
This in itself seems uncontroversial, and can be confirmed through a brief search online. However, the ‘german-foreign-policy.com’ article provides no evidence for its claim that the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung is “a German Foreign Ministry front organization” (as with many US agencies that receive government support to promote ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘the rule of law’, etc., the relationship is almost certainly not as simple as the term “front organization” would seem to suggest). Moreover, the ‘german-foreign-policy.com’ article strongly suggests a connection between the ethnic violence in Tibet and the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung:
“The pogrom-like mob-violence not only created the necessary media profile for the current Tibet campaign, initiated with the help of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, it also permits an insight into the character of Tibetan separatism.”
Note that it is the “current Tibet campaign” that was “initiated with the help of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation”, not the “pogrom-like mob-violence”. However, this follows a criticism of German media coverage of the situation in Tibet, in which “the German media is [sic] using the uprisings as a backdrop to represent brutal Chinese repression. Facts obviously play a subordinate role.”
My impression is that the FNS is acting out of genuine conviction, and probably had no involvement whatsoever in the inter-ethnic violence in Tibet. My impression is that China is not facing an international conspiracy; rather, the cause of Tibetan independence has captured the western world’s often rather poorly informed imagination.
Cheers
So the London/Paris/SanFran anti-flame thing being orchestrated is believable? Like I said the Chinese paranoia is not unjustified, or at least understandable, when you examine our collective animosiety towards them.