How the Dalai Lama earned his prize

Fri, 10/09/2009 - 3:48pm

By Daniel Blumenthal

The symmetry is almost perfect. The week that President Obama breaks with 18 years of precedence and snubs the Dalai Lama (the man Jon Stewart called the international prince of peace) while he is in Washington, D.C., Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps an even greater coincidence is that the Dalai Lama was the prize's recipient 20 years ago, in 1989. The Norwegian Nobel Committee's presentation of that year's prize is worth quoting:

This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to H.H. The Dalai Lama, first and foremost for his consistent resistance to the use of violence in his people's struggle to regain their liberty....

This policy of nonviolence is all the more remarkable when it is considered in relation to the sufferings inflicted on the Tibetan people during the occupation of their country. The Dalai Lama's response has been to propose a peaceful solution which would go a long way to satisfying Chinese interests. It would be difficult to cite any historical example of a minority's struggle to secure its rights, in which a more conciliatory attitude to the adversary has been adopted than in the case of the Dalai Lama.

The Nobel Committee's presentation speech went on to describe the Dalai Lama's continued policy of nonviolent resistance even in the face of violent suppression by the Chinese of a peaceful protest by Tibetans.

The committee noted that the Dalai Lama had been a generous and patient negotiator. He abandoned claims of Tibetan independence and conceded China's authority over defense and foreign policy in the region as well. He asked only for "elementary human rights" and "a halt to Chinese immigration to Tibet."

"This [Chinese immigration] has proceeded," said the committee, "on such a scale that there is a risk of the Tibetans becoming a minority in their own country."

As part of its reassurance policy (defended here by New Yorker writer Evan Osnos) the Obama administration seems to want to eliminate any Chinese-defined obstacles to a good Sino-American relationship. Personally, I am skeptical that this approach will maintain peace, prosperity, and the growing freedom in Asia over the long term. If I am correct, the current snubbing of a former Nobel Peace Prize winner by the current one will have sacrificed our principles without securing our interests.

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Policy of Reassurance Vs Policy of Setting Limits

by Palden on Wed, 10/14/2009 - 6:58am

Having a policy of reassurance for China would work if China was like a shy kid living in a kinder and gentler world. China, however, is not the new kid on the block.
At their recent "Nuremberg parade" style anniversary they showed off the Dong Feng-21 missile which is reputed to be an aircraft carrier killer for which we have little defense.
Does that mean that Taiwan is a cake walk for China?

Last year China made 208 incursions into their southern neighbor India. China's territorial dispute is heated up again just today. China has territorial claims against Russia, North Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Tajikistan and Malaysia.

Sixty years of singular communist dictatorship has made it possible for this mass of humanity to adorn the narcissism and the megalomania of its leadership.
A majority of the Chinese people today feel that they are headed for complete world domination. Evidence of this chauvinistic drive is all over the Internet.

What we consider to be a gesture of reassurance or concession towards China is likely to be deliberated by them as our inferiority and their superiority. This prejudicial world view has been cultivated by the Communist party for the past 60 years.
It is due to this sense of ingrained Nationalism that we now have the strange situation where even overseas Chinese who have sought asylum in the US are now celebrating a cheering for Communist China's 60th Anniversary.
For some strange reason, recently a few such Chinese expatriates in Washington were given the permission to fly the Chinese Communist flag in a public park in the vicinity of the White house to mark the 60th Anniversary of the founding of Chinese Communism. The Chinese state media subsequently depicted the flag as being flown in the south lawn of the White House. ( Is the underlying message here is that China owns us?)
Does Obama not meeting the Dalai Lama at Hu Jintao's urging mean that Obama works at Hu's pleasure?
China has hosted an Olympic, built modern cities and highways and its time for them to start talking straight.
It might be more to our interest to start setting limits to China and deal with the actual world issues in plain language rather than let ourselves be drawn to role playing some symbolic game where we are subservient and inferior while they are dominant and superior.

I agree with Daniel Blumenthal that our principles should never be traded deliberately or eroded inadvertently
It is with these principles that we are equal to the best and inferior to none.
If China responds well to the limits that we set then we can play a mentoring role and help to transition them into a great democracy but no more foolish games!

Hard to justify

by Annan Amos on Wed, 10/14/2009 - 6:21pm

It would seem hard to justify snubbing the Dalai Lama. One could claim that he's a public servant, and by gosh he has actual work to do - nothing much done on that front! Or that he's got two wars to wrap up - oops! They went the other way, didn't they?
Although I have my own personal beef with the Free Tibet movement in a way (prior to the takeover of the Chinese, Tibet was tantamount to a theocracy, in which a landed clergy class had a divine mandate, of course, to do whatever they wanted, and I can't in good conscience advocate to exchange a secular party dictatorship with a religious party dictatorship) I still think that he deserved his far above Obama does his. I want to know what joker nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. One of the chief features of peace is that absence of armed conflict - and the two armed conflicts the U.S.A. is involved in are still ongoing, one of which has been escalated to the point of killing civilians in the next country over!
And my diatribe so far hasn't even touched on his utter failure as regards to domestic economic issues, and neither job nor career creation has been realized in either the private sector or government work. If there was some sort of Nobel Prize for Lame Duckitude, then I'd certainly short list Obama for that.