June 15, 2008
Žižek on Tibet and China
Slavoj Žižek responds to his critics in the LRB
When I was a young student in socialist Yugoslavia, criticism of the regime was dismissed by those in power as ‘Western propaganda’. It was always enough to say threateningly: ‘We know whom such reasoning serves.’ To my surprise, the critics of my letter on Tibet and China rely on the same manoeuvre: my statements are dismissed with the claim that they repeat Chinese propaganda (Letters, 5 June). But I base my claim that Tibet before 1949 was an oppressive and corrupted feudal society on by far the best and most extensive study of the Tibetan legal system, Rebecca Redwood French’s The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995), which has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese propaganda.
If it were the custom to dedicate letters, I would dedicate mine to the Tibetan exile settlements in Mundgod and Bylakuppe in southern India. All the media attention is on upper-class Dharamsala: nobody – the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere included – talks about the destitute thousands in these two larger camps.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:41 PM | Permalink
Comments
Disingenuous. Has anyone ever suggested that the Tibetan government-in-exile wants a return to pre-1949 conditions? Zizek's contrasting of "upper-class" Dharamsala (where creature comforts obviously are up to the standards of movie stars!) with the "destitute thousands" of the southern settlements tries to imply that feudalism is alive and well in the exile community, a nasty piece of propaganda if I ever saw one. He ignores the complete democratic restructuring of the exile government since arriving in India, the introduction of a modern educational system, and mobility between the settlements. The poverty of the settlements like Mundgod and Bylakuppe has nothing to do with feudalism, everything to do with the original circumstances of a refugee community carving out a subsistence on land the Indian government was happy to give away, and later effects of reliance on external aid for three generations. When I first went to Dharamsala in the early nineties, the finance ministry of the government-in-exile consisted of a single desk with a calculator, and Richard Gere was taking cold showers most days like the rest of us. Much has changed recently, but mainly as a function of economic changes throughout India. It would be much more revealing to compare the conditions in the Tibetan refugee settlements with the surrounding Indian communities, than to compare conditions in Chinese-occupied Tibet with pre-1949 Tibet.
Posted by: Zara Houshmand | Jun 16, 2008 11:29:37 AM
Accusing Zizek of using propaganda proves his point.
It's refreshing that someone is finally debunking the idealisation of Lamaism.
Posted by: Eleut Amand | Jul 10, 2008 8:33:43 AM
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