Our book review for Mikel Dunham's "Buddha's Warriors"
Buddha's Warriors by Mikel Dunham
Flag of the Tibetan resistence in Lithang, 1950's Kham province.
December 4, 2008
Buddha's Warriors by Mikel Dunham is the tragic and real story of the brutal Chinese invasion and destruction of Tibet and the CIA backed Tibetan freedom fighters who tried to stop them.
This book dispels completely the myth that the Tibetans simply just rolled over and accepted their fate at the hands of the invading communist Chinese. First their government pleaded to the world for help. Then they tried in vain to negotiate their freedom with the invaders. Then they tried to survive peacefully at the hands of their abusers and when the destruction became too much, many of them rebelled and some fought back. This is their story.
Once the grim reality of the Chinese atrocities started to escalate, the Tibetans resisted with everything they had. Unfortunately, for Tibet and the rest of us, they faced hundreds of thousands of well trained and equipped communist Chinese troops ironically named "The People's Liberation Army". In bravery, skill and raw determination the Tibetan resistance excelled despite their small numbers and actually managed to win some battles and clear many areas of Tibet of Chinese control for a short period of time.
Eventually the Tibetan resistance caught the attention of the State Department and the CIA who later agreed to train small re-infiltration teams to be air-dropped back into Tibet. Never was this CIA effort conducted in consort with His Holiness or the Kashag government in Lhasa; these infiltration teams were Khampa, Golok and Amdo guerilla fighters from western Tibet and fiercely independent.
Between 1949 and 1951, in the space of these few short years the isolated Buddhist kingdom of Tibet virtually unchanged for many hundreds of years and deeply steeped in its age old traditions of Dharma practice and culture was violently hurled from the Middle Ages to merciless modern warfare, invasion, indoctrination and eventual cultural genocide.
No two different government systems and cultures could possibly be imaged as the ones that existed between China's communist Chairman Mao Tse Tung and Tibet's young boy incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, Avaloketeshvara, the 14th Dalai Lama.
In the end, communist China prevailed with its plans of incorporating the independent nation-state of Tibet into "China's motherland" in the 1950's via fraudulent treaties, genocide, military occupation and political indoctrination and destroyed more than can perhaps ever be known. The loss to the Tibetans concerned was near total and the resultant loss to the rest of the human family is still being calculated.
What remains of Tibet today until it finally achieves its freedom and independence again from the Chinese is but a weak shadow of its former self and a Disney-style theme show for the tourist trade and communist propaganda machine. Six-thousand destroyed monasteries later the Chinese have essentially not changed and their brutal occupation continues.
While Chinese and western tourists watch the faithful pray at the Jokhang in Lhasa, the few remaining monks who survive are under constant watch by the communist authorities. Any political infraction by the monks can land them in jail with torture for years.
We salute Mikel Dunham's tremendous work here. It is required reading for anyone who wants to seriously understand what happened and is still happening inside Tibet.
