Don't go berserk over Tibet

When the Society for Neuroscience invited the Dalai Lama to give the inaugural lecture at its 2005 annual meeting in Washington, DC, more than 500 researchers signed a petition objecting. They claimed it was inappropriate for a religious leader to address a scientific meeting, and that the study of empathy and compassion and how meditation affects brain activity, on which the Dalai Lama had been invited to speak, was too flaky to be taken seriously.

It is unclear if the petitioners' motives were also political — many of the signatories were of Chinese origin. Read more here.

My father and most of my old relatives grew up in China during the reign of the last emperor, but they emigrated because they didn’t like the Red Army who took over the country in 1949.

If they were alive today, my old relatives would be shocked to learn that a large number of mindless oversea Chinese are going berserk whenever someone questions the Red Army’s occupation of Tibet and its massacre of monks, women and children. These berserkers have forgotten that not too long ago, teenage students were being killed in Tiananmen Square, as well as during the Cultural Revolution. [The Red Army calls itself the “People’s Liberation Army”, although they do anything but “liberate” people.]

We should be thankful there are folks in the West who are concerned with human rights and who are willing to speak out against abuses by tyrannical governments. Sure, the human rights groups have all kinds of “agenda”, like spreading democratic values and ideas, and protecting wild life and the environment.

Who would you rather hang out with – people whose only weapons are ideas, or goons in China and Burma armed with main battle tanks, sub-machine guns and missiles to mow down monks, women and students in Tiananmen Square, Lhasa and Rangoon?

As individuals, we can do little, in the physical sense, to fight those who possess military hardware. But at least we remain mindful of the murderous nature of these regimes, and not be overtaken by rabid nationalistic sentiments. One can be proud of being a Chinese while condemning the brutality that the Beijing government and its Red Army inflicted on helpless people in China, Tibet, Sinkiang and other occupied zones.