The evil empire is invading. The victims are blamed and called terrorists. The world politely wrings its hands, takes some symbolic action and goes about its business.
It’s Tibet in 2008, but it was also Afghanistan in 1979, when the Soviet Union sent its legions of tanks across the Oxus River to crush Afghan independence. And the U.S.-Afghan experience can teach us a lot about how the United States should deal with China.
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Initially, the United States did little to help Afghanistan during the years immediately following the Soviet invasion besides offering some paltry aid and a boycott of the 1980 Olympics. Meanwhile, the Soviets sent in their troops and their helicopters and slaughtered whole villages of Afghans.
But Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Texas) changed that. As chronicled in George Crile’s extraordinary book “Charlie Wilson’s War” (and the eponymous movie starring Tom Hanks), Wilson saw what few others did: that the mighty Soviet empire could be beaten with a little serious American help.
And so Wilson obtained billions in funding for arms and training for the Afghans, and soon enough the Afghan freedom fighters were downing Soviet helicopters, ultimately forcing the Soviets to withdraw. Suddenly, the myth of Soviet invincibility had been destroyed — and the USSR was no longer able to contain its citizenry’s longing for liberty.
So who will be Tibet’s Charlie Wilson? Who will bring the Chinese empire to its knees? Who will stop it from devouring the Earth’s resources, sponsoring genocidal regimes, displacing its own people by the millions and keeping them in the dark about events within their own country? Who will start funding the Tibetan resistance (and other Chinese resistance movements, such as that of the Uighurs in Northwest China) in a serious way, with serious resources?
Of course, this will require supporting younger, more radical Tibetans who are not as committed to the Dalai Lama’s failed strategy of Gandhian nonviolence and very un-Gandhian nonconfrontation. Mahatma Gandhi was never as restrained as the Dalai Lama. Whereas the Dalai Lama renounced the goal of independence and even defends China’s right to hold the Beijing Olympics (and said he would like to attend the opening ceremonies), Gandhi moved in the opposite direction during his career. He first advocated for mere autonomy, but then, horrified by the British army’s massacre of hundreds of peaceful Indian protesters at Amritsar, embraced the cause of independence and never backed away until India achieved it. What’s more, he actively sought out confrontation with the British army: His march to the sea, his boycott of imported fabric and his general strikes were in large part intended to provoke a British reaction — and lay bare to the world the cruelty and immorality of the British occupation of India.
Of course, there was a fundamental difference between the British empire then and the Chinese empire today. For all their cruelties and senseless abuses, the British were restrained by a democratic system of government and a relatively free press. Because of the relatively free media, Britain’s abuses caused shame within its own populace — leading to restraint on the part of the British forces.
In contrast, the current Chinese regime killed more than 3,000 of its own students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 without remorse, continues to sponsor a genocidal regime in Sudan and has exceeded even the United States in its pollution of the planet. It doesn’t hesitate to expel journalists during crackdowns and imprisons its own people for questioning its policies.
Given the kind of government we’re dealing with, it would be wise to look to Gandhi’s acknowledgments that not every government had the same humanitarian side as the British. Although Gandhi taught that nonviolence was “infinitely superior to violence,” and even suggested that nonviolence could have stopped Nazi atrocities, at other times he admitted that violent resistance to foreign invasion can be appropriate in situations in which peaceful behavior would equal defeat.
“I would risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race,” he wrote. “My method of nonviolence can never lead to loss of strength, but it alone will make it possible, if the nation wills it, to offer disciplined and concerted violence in time of danger.”
To save Tibet from China’s crackdown, the Tibetans will need more than just rhetoric and cheek-turning in the face of a brutal, unfeeling crackdown and ongoing ethnic cleansing — they’ll need real support, real confrontation and a real Charlie Wilson to be their hero. And when that happens, we might just see not only the end of Chinese repression in Tibet but also the end of China’s cruel regime.
Glenn Hurowitz is the author of “Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party” (Maisonneuve Press) and the president of Democratic Courage, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive, courageous and winning candidates.