On Tibet and Propaganda

Breakfast where the news is read

Television children fed

Unborn living, living, dead

Bullet strikes the helmet’s head

  Jim Morrison,The Unknown Soldier

PROPAGANDA- ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause

The propaganda war is on.

I recently posted a You Tube clip of CCTV’s view of Tibetan History. Alert readers immediately and correctly observed that it contained Chinese propaganda from the state media machine (as I indicated in my story).

It was rather obvious as the Chinese are not particularly good at propaganda outside of their sphere of influence.  Their expertise is to control the narrative by shutting down sources of information internally. This naturally raises the hackles of those that favor a  Free Press. In these times of immediate access to damn near everything, this is a losing battle for the Chinese. I can assure you that most 13 year-old kids there know about proxy servers.  

The stifling of information also gives any opposition ammunition to fill the void with their “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause”. The propaganda war is on and it is reminiscent of a past time in history, The Cold War. The players are the same.

This is where the news is fed….

Point in fact for the purpose of this discussion: The Chinese media is controlled by the government. No question.

It is difficult to get information out of Tibet. We are forced to rely on other sources. The leading sources of “information” from Tibet and into Tibet is Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a private radio station funded by the United States Congress that broadcasts in nine Asian languages.

Radio Free Asia was originally a radio station broadcasting propaganda for the US-American government in local languages to mostly communist countries in Asia. It was originally founded and funded in 1950 by the CIA.

Wiki

I didn’t understand how a “private” radio station can be  funded by the American Government and I became worried about the CIA link to RFA so I researched farther.

I was relieved to discover that RFA is not controlled or funded presently by the CIA.

Whew, I feel better now knowing RFA is funded and regulated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

But then I wondered who is on the Broadcasting Board of Governors. I discovered that it is headed by Bush apointee, James K. Glassman. Reading his bio, I then discovered Glassman is a Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute.

from wiki…

AEI lists their scholars and fellows on their web site. Some prominent current or former AEI scholars and fellows include the following:

   * John R. Bolton, former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

   * Lynne Cheney, wife of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, AEI senior fellow.

   * Jeffrey Gedmin, former resident scholar and Executive Director of AEI’s New Atlantic Initiative, current President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

   * Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow. He is the director of the Project for the New American Century’s Middle East Initiative and a former Middle East specialist at the CIA.

   * Newt Gingrich, member of the Republican Party and Speaker of the United States House of Representatives between 1995 and 1999, is a senior fellow at AEI.

   * Frederick Kagan is a military historian and signatory of Project for the New American Century manifesto titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000) along with his brother Robert (co-founder of the PNAC) and his father and fellow neo-conservative, Donald Kagan.

   * Alan Keyes, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, was an AEI resident scholar.

   * Michael Ledeen was previously involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair – an adventure that he documented in his book, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider’s Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.    

   * Richard Perle served on the United States Defense Policy Board and is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

   * Paul Wolfowitz (Visiting Scholar), A “major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy and, within the [George W. Bush] Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate.

   * John Yoo, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, and a professor at Boalt Hall, is a visiting scholar.

Now I’m worried again. I want to know what’s actually going on in Tibet.  DO I trust information that I know is strongly influenced by the AEI? No, and neither should you no matter how much empathy you feel for the people of Tibet.

As you can see from the stellar list of war criminals pigs above, the AEI is an arm of  Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

PNAC’s credo is officially to muster “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests”. PNAC states that the US must be sure of “deterring any potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” –

The death of the NeoCon movement has been greatly exaggerated. They are alive and well and up to their old games.

The return of The Cold Warriors.

The war against those evil, pinko commie basitds.

Remembering the deceit and criminal actions of these Chickenhawks responsible for the current fustercluck in the Middle East, are we to trust them at all in controlling the information coming from and going into Tibet and neighboring regions?  

Are the Tibetans to be the new Iraqis, pawns in a global game of world domination proposed by the rogues gallery listed above?

We have seen distortions by all sides in this current situation in Tibet.  Examples of the MSM mis-reporting, cropping and mis-captioning photos from the riots are disturbing to me and give me cause to reflect back in time to “Operation Mockingbird“.

Here’s what I’m talkin’ about:

James Miles, a reporter for The Economist and BBC, was in Lhasa by chance when the riots broke out.  Below are some cuts of his eyewitness account that was shown on CNN International on March 20th .

Q. How easy was it for you to see what you wanted to see?

A. Well remarkably so, given that the authorities are normally extremely sensitive about the presence of foreign journalists when this kind of incident occurs.

Q. What you say you saw corroborates the official version. What exactly did you see?

A. What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves. Those businesses were left intact.

At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop. It was a remarkable explosion of simmering ethnic grievances in the city.

Q. Did you see other weapons?

A. I saw them carrying traditional Tibetan swords, I didn’t actually see them getting them out and intimidating people with them. But clearly the purpose of carrying them was to scare people. And speaking later to ethnic Han Chinese, that was one point that they frequently drew attention to. That these people were armed and very intimidating.

Q. There was an official response to this. In some reporting, info coming from Tibetan exiles, there was keenness to report it as Tiananmen.  

A. Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. Because you would expect at the first sings of any unrest in Lhasa, which is a city on a knife-edge at the best of times. That the response would be immediate and decisive. That they would cordon off whatever section of the city involved, that they would grab the people involved in the unrest. In fact what we saw, and I was watching it at the earliest stages, was complete inaction on the part of the authorities. It seemed as if they were paralyzed by indecision over how to handle this. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, this main central thoroughfare of Lhasa, into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. But I didn’t see any attempt in those early hours by the authorities to intervene

Q. Did you actually see clashes between security forces and Tibetan protesters?

A. Well what I saw and at this stage, the situation around my hotel which was right in the middle of the old Tibetan quarter, was very tense indeed and quite dangerous so it was difficult for me to freely walk around the streets. But what I saw was small groups of Tibetans, and this was on the second day of the protests, throwing stones towards what I assumed to be, and they were slightly out of vision, members of the security forces.

snip

What I did not hear was repeated bursts of machine gun fire, I didn’t have that same sense of an all out onslaught of massive firepower that I sensed here in Beijing when I was covering the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in June, 1989.

Q. When you were told to leave, what were you told?

A. Well I had an 8-day permit to be in Lhasa. That permit began two days before the rioting, on March 12, and was due to run out on March 19. My official schedule was basically abandoned after a couple days of this. Many of the places on my official itinerary turned out to be hotspots in the middle of this unrest. They left me to my own devices. I was stopped by the police at one point, taken to a police station. They made a few phone calls and then let me go back out on the streets full of troops and police carrying out the security crackdown. They insisted however that when my permit did expire on the 19th that I had to leave. I asked for an extension and they said decisively no.

Compared to this:

The Tibetan government-in-exile says up to 140 were killed in the protests … The U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia said Saturday it had unconfirmed …

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080405/ap_on_re_as/china_tibet

And there have been some reports on Radio Free Asia that two people were …. Tibetan rights groups say nearly 140 Tibetans were killed, including 19 in …

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88236362&ft=1&f=2100302 –

Mar 18, 2008 … “We have unconfirmed reports that about 100 people have been killed … US-based Radio Free Asia on Saturday also quoted Tibetans in Lhasa …

www.thaindian.com/news-snippet/

Mar 18, 2008 … Radio Free Asia, a radio station funded by the U.S. government, …. in India said about 100 were believed dead, citing unconfirmed sources. …

forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php?t=116551

Radio Free Asia, funded by the U.S. government, quoted a Lhasa resident saying that as Tibetan rioters ransacked shops, police were firing “live ammunition” …

www.thestar.com/printArticle/346411

The U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia said it had unconfirmed reports …Forbes

Apr 5, 2008 … The London-based Free Tibet Campaign said Friday police fired on … The U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia said it had unconfirmed …ABC

All of these “unconfirmed” originating from Radio Free Asia reports appear to contradict an eyewitness report from a BBC reporter.

Watch and listen to this from an Exile Government spokesperson Dawa Tsering. This is the epitome of bad PR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

OPINION

I’ve previously written on the geo-political and socio-economic forces that must be considered in this region. If you haven’t read this, please do so. (Speed reading is allowed).

DKos Diary

DocuDharma Essay  

I tried to remove religion from the issue as much as possible (It’s impossible).

In my opinion, the PNAC, AEI scumbags are using the religious issue to accomplish their political goal.  They are manipulating the news we receive forcing the framing as a Human Right issue, driven by repression of religious freedom.  They are also manipulating information going into Tibet in an attempt to inflame the situation.

The Chinese Hardliners are putting this forth as a political issue stating that the deal breaker is separatism from the Motherland and not a repression of religious beliefs. The answer to anything that threatens the Motherland is to crackdown on demonstrations and tighten media control.

I am so tempted to draw a parallel to the current state of Democracy in America but I think everyone here is aware of the sad irony and will leave that for discussion another day.

The PNAC crowd and their tool George W. Bush are promoting the current instability in Tibet using the wedge issues of Human Rights and Freedom of Religion to further their goal of A New American Century.  They could actually care less about why people are fighting, just as long as they are fighting.  And if people need a little nudge, they can catapult just about anything they believe to be disruptive into not only the MSM but the only source of information available to the victims of their twisted worldview, The Tibetans, via Radio Free Asia.

The result is the angry confrontation of two different groups staunchly arguing two different arguments benefiting only those that desire instability in the area.

Remember this, it got a smattering of coverage in America when Bush said this during a BBC interview just this past February.

 People have written off the Middle East. It’s impossible to change the conditions there. Let’s just ignore it. Or let’s promote stability, which was part of the foreign policy of the past. I chose a different course. Stability didn’t work. Stability created the conditions that were right for these terrorists to emerge and recruit.

During the same interview he also said..

There’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine, about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dali Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and… I am not gonna you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way ’cause I do it all the time with the president. I mean. So, people are gonna be able to choose – pick and choose how they view the Olympics.

…in a public way?  What does he do in “a private way”? Easy answer, he lets his catapulters do it in the dark, behind the scenes. Stability doesn’t work you know?

We are caught in the middle (information-wise) in The War of Propaganda, some of us are aware of this.  Others that rely solely on news from The Main Stream Media are not aware of the powerful people that catapult the propaganda and are easily swayed by emotional images, distortion, and the omission of facts.

The Tibetans are being used.

Is there a solution? Perhaps, but it will not please everyone.

The “Free Tibet” movement is touting “The Middle Way” which is not the middle way by the way.  It is the same demand the Dalai Lama has made since his first contact with the Chinese government.

His “Zone of Peace” consisting of Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces is the deal breaker. Many uninformed people don’t know that this involves more than the Province of Tibet, but a territory that makes up nearly 1/3 of The Republic of China.

If you read my linked diary above, perhaps you can understand why the Chinese can never accept this. If you haven’t, I’ll summarize it here in 2 words. OIL & WATER.  Well, 3 words if you count “and”.  Here’s the link again.

 DKos Diary

DocuDharma Essay

Behind the scenes, I think, our administration is encouraging the Dalai Lama’s “Zone of Peace” demands simply because they are unobtainable. Since 1942 when FDR sent in the first 2 CIA agents (originally known as the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) in the fight against Japan in Asia when we needed China and Tibet and continuing through the CIA support during the 1950’s and 1960’s when we needed Tibet during The Cold War, The American government uses them (or the Kurds, Afghans, etc..). when it serves their purposes.  

If you doubt this, I suggest you read this State Department document.

“Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XXX, China, Department of State, Washington, DC, Questions Pertaining to Tibet. …

SUBJECT

Review of Tibetan Operations

1. Summary–The CIA Tibetan Activity consists of political action, propaganda, and paramilitary activity. The purpose of the program at this stage is to keep the political concept of an autonomous Tibet alive within Tibet and among foreign nations, principally India, and to build a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Communist China.

2. Problem–To explain Agency expenditures in support of the Tibetan program.

3. Background and Objectives–At a 13 December 1963 meeting “The Special Group approved the continuation of CIA controlled Tibetan Operations [1 line of source text not declassified].” Previous operations had gone to support isolated Tibetan resistance groups within Tibet and to the creation of a paramilitary force on the Nepal/Tibet border of approximately 2,000 men, 800 of whom were armed by [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] airdrop in January 1961. In 1963, as a result of the [2 lines of source text not declassified] and as a result of the cited Special Group meeting, the Agency began a more broadly based political program with the exiled Tibetans. This included bringing 133 Tibetans to the United States for training in political, propaganda and paramilitary techniques; continuing the support subsidy to the Dalai Lama’s entourage at Dharmsala, India; continuing support to the Nepal based Tibetan guerrillas;

snip…

The cost of the Tibetan Program for FY 1964 can be summarized in approximate figures as follows:

a. Support of 2100 Tibetan guerrillas based in Nepal–$ 500,000

b. Subsidy to the Dalai Lama–$ 180,000

c. [1 line of source text not declassified] (equipment, transportation, installation, and operator training costs)–$ 225,000

d. Expenses of covert training site in Colorado–$ 400,000

e. Tibet Houses in New York, Geneva, and [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] ( 1/2 year )–$ 75,000

f. Black air transportation of Tibetan trainees from Colorado to India–$ 185,000

g. Miscellaneous (operating expenses of [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] equipment and supplies to reconnaissance teams, caching program, air resupply–not overflights, preparation stages for agent network in Tibet, agent salaries, etc.)–$ 125,000

h. Educational program for 20 selected junior Tibetan officers– $ 45,000

Total–$ 1,735,000

This was from a period in time when it was of interest to America to destabilize the area and any area adjacent to Communist China.  Similar efforts were underway in Vietnam and Mongolia at the same time.  

Of course we abandoned the Dalai Lama after Nixon’s trip to China and the trade envoys were dispatched to Beijing. The Tibetan issue was forgotten by all except the Dalai Lama who has clung to his dream.  It is a good dream and I wish the entire planet could be transformed into a Zone of Peace, but it’s not gonna happen in the real world. Sad but true.

The NeoCons don’t want it to happen.  

How can you sell weapons in a Zone of Peace?

This was at the height of the Cold War and it is my opinion that the NeoCons are stuck in the same Cold War Mindset and now it is convenient to fire up some instability in the region to prevent China from moving ahead of the USA in terms of the World Power that the NeoCons covet.  Examples: Bring the Dalai Lama to our boy W’s White House, ratchet up the rhetoric in Tibet on RFA, plant false stories in the worldwide media. Conflict by proxy. The PNAC sickos will dump the Tibetans when they are no longer needed as history tells us.

This is why China will not allow pictures of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.  Not because of his religious teachings, but because of his political actions in the past as a pawn of American war mongers. The Chinese cannot forget this.  Hell, they’re still pissed at the Japanese from the 1920’s.

The Chickenhawks have turned it into a religious issue which then creates the PNAC desired Human Rights issue which if they can properly stoke the fires of fear and hatred, will turn prosperous China into a group of warring states. America (hell yeah) wins.  Perhaps millions will die and the entire earth will become a “Zone of War”, but America wins.

In closing, there has to be a better solution for Tibet, China, America and the World than falling into the PNAC trap. Demonstrating against a flame serves no one but those that thrive on fanning fires of hatred.  An Olympic boycott serves no one but those that try to divide nations instead of uniting them even if it’s only to play games peacefully for a few weeks in August of 2008.

Heping (peace)