Politics of history: A brief example

While providing background information on the course readings, my students and I ended up getting a tad sidetracked (people getting sidetracked?  in MY classroom?  shenanigans!) with a discussion of the politics of telling history.  We then added history to a list of value-laden areas of inquiry that are often portrayed as neutral or objective (so far we have knowledge, truth, science, and, now, history).  I used these three excerpts re:Tibet/China to illustrate the idea the politics of recording/transmitting historical "fact."

"The global expansion of Tibetan Buddhism that we are witnessing today did not begin in earnestness until 1959. As is by now well known, after a decade of Chinese military expansion into Tibet, Chinese troops had reached Lha sa. In 1959, a Tibetan uprising against the Chinese authorities led to the flight of the Dalai Lama, who, together with approximately 100,000 Tibetans, sought political asylum in India. The Chinese, with their overwhelming military superiority, established control over the entire country in short order, and began to implement a colonialist policy that has had devastating consequences for Tibetan religion and culture in Tibet" 

Oxford Dictionary of Global Religions, “Tibetan Buddhist Society” by Jose Ignacio Cabezon

“At sixteen, I lost my freedom when Tibet was occupied.  At twenty-four, I lost my country itself when I came into exile.  For forty years now I have lived as a refugee in a foreign country, albeit the one that is my spiritual home.  Throughout this time I have been trying to serve my fellow refugees and, to the extent possible, the Tibetans who remain in Tibet.  Meanwhile, our homeland has known immeasurable destruction and suffering…those eighty-thousand Tibetans who, during the months following my escape into exile left Tibet for the sanctuary offered them by the Indian government.  The conditions they faced were hard in the extreme.  There was little food available and even less medicine.  The refugee camps could offer no better accommodation than canvas tents.  Most people had few possessions beyond the clothes they had left home in.  They wore heavy chubas (the traditional Tibetan dress) appropriate to our harsh winters, when what they really needed in India was the lightest cotton.  And there was terrible sickness from diseases unknown in Tibet.”

14^th Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium pages 54-55

"The Dalai Lama was the overall leader of the Tibetan serf system in 1959 and, when the Chinese government abolished that system, it marked a tremendous step forward for the cause of human rights," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Sunday.

"In the same way, president Lincoln abolished slavery in the United States."

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/83228

Thanks for reading.