Zizek scores on Tibet
Quite a few valid points made by the "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist" Slavoj Zizek in Le Monde Diplomatique. Several excerpts follow:
Read the whole article.
...Before 1950 Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (the last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India. This did not prevent the elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.
...The Cultural Revolution which ravaged the Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s was not imported by the Chinese. Fewer than a hundred of the Red Guards came to Tibet with the revolution, and the young mobs burning the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan.
...A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.
Read the whole article.
2 Comments:
This is a good find. It is good to see a more grounded, level-headed criticism of the Tibetan theocracy's economic uselessness, and the West's fascination with Tibet, than the Trimondi couple's writings in the occult panic genre. The problem with Zizek's brief piece lies in that he doesn't spend much time examining the Western fixation with Tibet beyond his broilerplate Marxist language: "predominant form of ideology" that allows us to "continue with our crazy consumerism".
Yes, indeed. But Zizek is not to be expected to move beyond his so oft restated postmodern leftist agenda. However, we can still appreciate the valid - if partial - points in his argument, and the balancing effect they have on the tibetophiles' unconsciously politicized and naively biased perspective.
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