Michael Parenti on Bullshit! with Penn and Teller
Penn and Teller are libertarians. I usually don’t agree with much of their analysis.
I used to get Showtime and would watch this show in horror.
But this year they decided to do a show on the free Tibet movement, and their guest expert on the issue was none other than Michael Parenti, the political scientist, historian, and socialist author.
Enjoy this, because this is one of the few times that someone of this stature has appeared on US mainstream TV.
“Free Tibet” sounds nice, but it’s really a distraction. If you live in the US or live in another country in the coalition of the willing/bribed, you should be far more concerned about the war in Iraq, which is far worse in terms of the human cost. And if you’re progressive, why do you align with disgusting feudal overlords? This is as true with Tibet as it is with Afghanistan.
Hollywood is good at making stupid movies that defend reactionary interests in this fashion. Seven Years in Tibet has little to do with reality. However, you can be just as easily fooled with the new film Charlie Wilson’s War, which tells half the story about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Bad things happened during that time.
Here’s the trailer:
This film shows how right wing financial interests in the US, the oil kingdoms of the Middle East, and Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan (who killed the first Prime Minister Bhutto– this is mentioned in the film but excused!) financed the mujaheddin to put some lead in commies. And it does so in a patriotic and rollicking manner. What’s missing, of course, is what the heck are the Soviets doing in Afghanistan? It is assumed that’s what commies do to expand their empire.
William Blum gives us some historical analysis of the conflict.
The film is disgusting. It is a moribund attempt at history, and it fails miserably to put these things into a proper context.
I have a simple question for you on both of these case studies: would you rather have these people live in under imperfect socialist or, in the case of Tibet in the PRC, quasi-socialist regimes or in absolute poverty, ruled by religious fanatics?
Neither China nor the Soviet Union are perfect socialist societies (and China has given up on socialism), but both replaced truly reactionary orders that were far worse for the vast majority of their citizens.
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I have to disagree with you here. I have actually been to Tibet. Not just to Lhasa, I’ve actually hitchhiked across the bulk of it, from Kathmandu to Lhasa to Yunann, China.
What’s going on in Tibet is nothing short of ethnic cleansing. In every major town I came to along the way, what I found was a new, modern center filled with ethnic Chinese. There were shopping malls and banks and atms. On the outskirts of town, there was always an old, smaller section where the Tibetans had been forced.
It is perhaps very similar to what happened to the Native Americans in the US. I agree that Tibet has just become a trendy talking point, and most people really don’t give a sh*t about it, or even know anything about it. But ethnic cleansing is and has been going on there for fifty years, and the results are pretty grim.
I can’t believe you deleted my comment. If you disagreed with what I said, you could have at least explained why. Your unwillingness to debate your positions leads me to conclude you have not thoroughly thought them out.
You have just lost one reader of your blog.
Hi Andy,
We didn’t delete your comments, I’m afraid that I only just now got around to approving them (we have a comment filter on the blog). I sent you an email explaining everything.
All the best my friend, and we do of course encourage debate. These are opinions that are ready to e challenged.
UR
Thanks for clarifying, and I apologize for jumping to conclusions.