Submitted by sra3fk in Decolonisation (edited )

The article is by Tsering Shakya: Blood in the Snows. New Left Review 15, May-June 2002.

An excerpt:

The starting point of Wang Lixiong’s ‘Reflections on Tibet’ is the proposition that the Tibetan people have been active participants in the destruction of their own culture. [1] The logic of the argument is one often employed by those responsible for injustice—that is, to heap the blame on the victim. It is reminiscent of the view once advanced by apologists for the apartheid regime in South Africa: since blacks made up the majority of the police force, and since hundreds of thousands of black people flocked from neighbouring countries to work in South Africa’s dust-choked mines, the system could not be as bad as its critics supposed. But colonialism and injustice are never consensual: they are always achieved through the use of force, and perpetuated through the brutalization and degradation of the native people. It was, after all, Mao who announced that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

3

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

There's nothing here…