Positive Liberty

In response to my too-brief challenge yesterday, we’ve been sent a couple of YouTube videos. The audio isn’t safe for work in either, but they’re both worth seeing:

…and…

As to the first video, I find the interviewer slightly dishonest, in that popes certainly have condemned many of the very same sexual practices that the Dalai Lama has condemned. The biggest exception is daytime sex, which remains okay for (married, non-contraceptive using, heterosexual, penis-in-vagina-intercourse) Catholics. Still, it’s startling to see how conservative the Dalai Lama really is, and this is part of the reason I brought up the subject.

As to the second video, I think the most important claim is that the new Tibet would be “like the old Tibet with a few reforms.” Would it be? Or would it be more like a liberal democracy? It’s hard to say, but I think Michael Parenti makes a very poor case for the former. Look at the dates of his sources in the article I originally cited. These are ancient history. Tibetan feudalism isn’t coming back, not after the complete shattering of Tibetan society in the last several decades.

The type of society the Tibetans are likely to produce is one better than the Chinese communists’ oppression. Will it be a utopia? Of course not. Will it be evil? In some ways, certainly. But then, I say the same thing about the policies of the United States. Even if a free Tibet were deeply flawed, which I expect, it will be worth our moral support. Just not for all the Hollywood reasons.

So, yes. The enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend, but not all enemies are equally evil — and this distinction is still important. John Paul II, who can hardly be praised enough for his courage in resisting communism, was still a sexually repressive religious leader who earns my severe disapproval in other areas, too. Since when is life “all for” or “all against”? Only in politics, which has never made sense to me.

And this from Parenti strikes me as well-justified:

To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity.”

One common complaint among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet’s religious culture is being undermined by the Chinese occupation. To some extent this seems to be the case. Many of the monasteries are closed, and much of the theocracy seems to have passed into history. Whether Chinese rule has brought betterment or disaster is not the central issue here. The question is what kind of country was old Tibet. What I am disputing is the supposedly pristine spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. We can advocate religious freedom and independence for a new Tibet without having to embrace the mythology about old Tibet.

This versus this.

I know what I think. What do you think?

Those interested in following the story my colleague Mr. Kuznicki discusses below should read Scott Horton’s lengthy report in Harper’s entitled “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle.”

I take no position on the particulars of Mr. Horton’s story. I have not read the “heavily redacted” 1,700 page U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service report following the deaths officially described as suicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo on June 9,2006. Nor have I examined any of the evidence either Mr. Horton or the NCIS has apparently relied upon.

Thus, I will say only this. If the United States wishes to hold its system of justice up as an example to the rest of the world, then at the very least we must hold both our military and our civilian officials to the same standards we purport to uphold. Nothing less will suffice for the rest of the world to take us seriously and nothing less should suffice for us, either.

From the Department of Dumb in a No-Dumb Zone:

“U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes.“

University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos has an excellent article in WSJ Online adding some welcome perspective to our national paranoia over the threat of terrorist acts and our nanny state’s response to that paranoia in what Campos aptly calls “the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.” Definitely worth a read.