Recent news about unrest in Tibet has spurred protest concerning the
behavior of the mainland Chinese government in many countries. Initial
stories about the unrest in Tibet referred to violent attacks on
ordinary Chinese and Muslims living in Tibet, but noted this only
started after a peaceful protest by some monks was crushed with deadly
force. Later, claims were made that this violence may have been staged
by the Chinese authorities, and it was noted that this sort of thing
did happen on a previous occasion of unrest in Tibet.
Some people have questioned the popularity of the cause of an
independent Tibet in the Western world. The United States shows no
sign of returning Hawaii to the exclusive use of ethnic Hawaiians,
never mind giving the rest of itself back to the Indians. And what
about the Maoris in New Zealand, or the Aborigines of Australia?
One can quickly dismiss these counter-arguments on the basis that one
is comparing injustices that took place long ago, and against peoples
that had not established a civilization. Tibetans did not need the
Chinese to teach them how to read and write; they were a literate
civilization, with a writing system derived from the Devanagari
writing system of India.
And, furthermore, the claim that China has some sort of right to
expand into the land of non-Han ethnic groups as part of its
development, since the West profited from colonialism as part of its
growth, can be rejected in another way.
Because that argument was used in Asia before it was used by
apologists for the Communist Chinese presence in Tibet. Japan tried to
justify its efforts at conquest of China and Indonesia and other
countries on the grounds that it needed more territory to develop in
the way Western countries had previously developed at the expense of
other lands.
Most people in the West don't really need to work hard to reject both
claims. The brutality known as the "Rape of Nanking" meant that no
argument could defend the Japanese aggression, and the brutality of
the Cultural Revolution meant that not only Tibetans but Uighurs or
even speakers of Cantonese, Wu, Southern Min, or indeed anyone in
China who did not wish to live under the brutality of Communism would
be felt to have a perfect right to separate themselves from Communist
rule. The historic extent of the Chinese Empire, by comparison, is
simply irrelevant, as Communist brutality is a far more real and
immediate concern.
But even if one dismisses the claims of the indigenous people in the
Americas or elsewhere as too far in the past to act upon, the State of
Israel was founded in 1948, which was also the year the People's
Republic of China was proclaimed.
Opinion in the West is by no means unanimous these days concerning
Israel. Many people criticize its treatment of the Palestinians.
However, the viewpoint that all of Israel is an illegitimate outpost
on Arab land is generally condemned as extreme.
Why is this, since Palestine was previously an overwhelmingly Arab
land, with only a tiny minority of Jews?
For one thing, Israel wasn't created in the first instance by means of
an army of Zionists with tanks and guns seizing a patch of land from
peaceful Arabs. Instead, since the 1890s, a few Jewish settlers had
come to Palestine as immigrants. The Palestinian Mandate was governed
from Britain, which made the decision to admit these immigrants, but
which limited their number strictly because it was apparent that their
arrival was leading to negative reactions from the Arabs living in
Palestine.
Then came the Second World War. Britain felt ashamed of its former
policy of limiting entry to Palestine, because every Jew from Poland
or France, for example, that would have been admitted to Palestine
would have been one less to perish in Hitler's concentration camps.
And so it began to allow Jewish settlers to enter Palestine in greater
numbers. As Arab protests were often violent, there was little
sympathy for that perspective. Then there came the bloodshed
accompanying the partition of India. While all sides had shed blood,
it is generally acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood lit the fuse,
and the contrast between the obstructionist Ali Jinnah and the non-
violent courage of Mahatma Gandhi caught the attention of the world.
So Palestine was partitioned; the Jews of Palestine were not going to
become the victims of a second bloodbath, because the West had the
power to prevent that.
Given terrorist violence against American and European targets, given
the Arab nations' obtaining armaments from the Soviet Union, in the
ensuing years, as the prosperous and democratic nations of Western
Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand were very
concerned with the menace posed by Communism in Russia, it was clear
that Israel was another prosperous and democratic nation like their
countries, while its enemies were willing to put the outcome of the
Cold War in doubt over their petty squabble over the tiny patch of
land that was Israel compared to the Arab world.
The moral issue here, then, seemed not to be a clear-cut case of Jews
stealing land from Arabs. Jewish settlers bought land, and the use of
force only started after Arabs, acting on the basis of anti-Jewish
bigotry and hatred, engaged in violence.
But others have claimed that the case for Tibet, or the case for
Israel, is based partly on selective propaganda, and partly on Western
self-interest. Every conflict between two nations will involve some
violence on both sides, and one can always choose to emphasize the
wrongs of one of those two sides. Our natural moral sentiments are not
a trustworthy guide when they are being manipulated.
While Noam Chomsky deserves credit for helping to raise awareness
about East Timor, and some caution about forming firm conclusions
about major political issues based on impulse is a good thing, self-
doubt and hesitation have never been popular things to sell to any
group of people.
This is especially true for the American people after September 11,
2001.
But this is also why many Chinese people with no love for Communism
are dubious about Tibetan independence.
I don't think that the arguments against China in one case, and for
Israel in the other, are based on distorted, lying propaganda as some
try to claim. Even so, even though I disagree very much with a certain
class of political views, those who advance them also have a point
which ought not to be forgotten.
Let us suppose that all the bad people, who are willing to take what
doesn't belong to them and push other people around, whether they are
common criminals in the streets of New York, or heads of state in
Pyongyang, were put behind bars where they belonged. Would all the
world's problems go away?
Of course, they would not. If innocent children have a right to have
enough to eat, then how can one unmercifully condemn China, a very
poor country, for wanting to hold on to the oil of Sinkiang or the
minerals of Tibet? How can one unmercifully condemn the Arabs of the
Sahara, a place not well suited to agriculture, for stealing from the
flocks or caravans of their black neighbors to the south? Getting back
to China, isn't there hypocrisy in criticizing it for the heavy-handed
nature of its one-child policy when no one is offering huge tracts of
land for Chinese people to go off and settle?
So, while brutality and wickedness are bad things in their own right,
and condemning and suppressing them is unavoidable, it might be argued
that they are only the symptoms. Making noise about surface problems
only distracts people from the real cause.
If the real cause is overpopulation, hasn't that problem been solved?
Yes, in past ages, since people were driven by a fierce basic instinct
to seek out ***ual contact, just as they are to breathe, to consume
fluids, and to eat, and they could not help this from resulting in
children, it might have seemed that humanity was condemned to an
eternal round of woe as this or that overcrowded group would resort to
warfare.
But today, science has given us the marvelous birth control pill. The
hormones used in it come from plants, not from an exotic source like
pregnant horses, so the problem is solved.
Well, not really. If the population tapers off too suddenly, how will
people be sup****ted when they get too old to work, it might be asked.
But another factor comes into play. We know that men chase after
pretty young women. But that is not the only human instinct involved
in the population problem; if it was, yes, the Pill could make it go
away.
Children play with dolls. People keep dogs and cats as pets.
Taking care of a baby is a lot of work. So that people - and, indeed,
chimpanzees, monkeys, and many, many other kinds of animal - might
*do* this work, Nature has given us another instinct besides the one
which brought a woman to pregnancy in the first place.
There is also the *maternal* instinct.
So the man might chase the pretty girl, but the girl wants the man who
will let her have an adorable cuddly baby to take care of.
This is why contraception is not a magic wand that will make the
population problem go away. And as long as there is a population
problem, people who suffer its consequences will get more short-
tempered, more desperate, and we can expect a lack of regard for the
rights of others to emerge.
Thus, while the day-to-day business of taking care of short-term
problems cannot be avoided, we should not flatter ourselves that this
is solving the fundamental problem. The problem of how we could really
all get along, with everyone being happy, instead of a lot of people
being crushed - say, as one example, by an economic system that limits
population growth by "empowering women" so that the women work in
factories, and only the few rich men can marry - has not been solved.
It is seldom even faced up to. And those who do advocate "zero
population growth" tend not to be particularly imaginative in the
solutions they propose.
John Savard
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