Fifty-seven and a half years ago, China invaded Tibet.
The Communist government introduced far-reaching land reforms and sharply curtailed the power of the monastic orders ... Landholdings were seized, the lamaseries were virtually emptied, and thousands of monks were forced to find other work ...Google News 15 April:
The Cultural Revolution, with its antireligious orientation, was disastrous for highly religious Tibet. Religious practices were banned and over 4,000 monasteries were destroyed. Though the ban was lifted in 1976 and some Buddhist temples have again been in operation since the early 1980s, Tibetans continue to complain of widespread discrimination by the Chinese. Several protests in Tibet in the late 1980s and early 1990s were violently suppressed by the Communist government and martial law was imposed in 1989 ...
There is an ongoing suppression of the Tibetan people. The Chinese government continues to accelerate the political, economic, social and geographical integration of Tibet into China. There is no let-up on many unpopular measures of control imposed by China on the Tibet region such as the “Strike Hard Campaign”, “Patriotic re-education Campaign”, and the establishment of a re-education-through-labor camp in Ngari County in the Tibet Autonomous Region to check the refugee flow.
The “Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy” recorded by the end of December 2004 that there are at least 150 known political prisoners in the various prisons in Tibet. The Chinese Communist Party with the active support of the military presence in Tibet, at least a quarter of a million strong, strictly governs the territory. (UNPO)
Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama maintained Monday that Beijing was carrying out "cultural genocide" in the Himalayan territory ... The Dalai Lama, who is in exile in India after fleeing a failed 1959 uprising, lamented the loss of Tibetan culture under Beijing's so-called autonomy rule ... "With this present arrangement, whether intentionally or unintentionally, some kind of cultural genocide is taking place".Your Holiness. With respect. It is intentional.
And there are some people (who apparently like think of themselves as intellectuals) who maintain that the most damaging ideological force on the planet today is religion? Please.