Jim Woolsey, a hippie and early-ish computer hacker from New Hope, Pennsylvania, was an important and early force in the digitization of the Tibetan language. This interview[0] with him from 1993 is a fascinating time capsule, and interesting in its own right. He was a family friend and I always admired his singular commitment to this important and underappreciated work.
If you doubt the computer’s influence has made its way into every walk of life, you haven’t met New Hope’s Jim Woolsey.
For a decade, Woolsey has worked with the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmshala, India, to put the Tibetan language on computer.
The free-lance computer whiz has compiled a source book of Tibetan literature and also has worked to create a Tibetan computer keyboard for the exiles from that ancient Asian kingdom. In the course of his work, he’s met the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political leader since placed under house arrest in that country.
Both leaders are recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, the Dalai Lama in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.
“If the Tibetan language isn’t put on computers — because of the fact that there are fewer than 1,000 Tibetan typewriters in the world and they’re more expensive than computers –the Tibetan language might not be saved from being put on the shelf with all those other dusty, musty languages of the scholars,” said Woolsey. “This is its only hope.”
Woolsey’s work with the Tibetan Buddhist government-in-exile in India began with an interest in Tibetan literature.
Formerly a technician with various rock’n’roll groups in the 1970s, he would read anything he could lay his hands on concerning Tibet, then enter the titles of the books in a bibliography he kept. He was traveling both for work and pleasure, and decided it was time to journey to one of the farthest corners of the globe.
“I booked a 120-day round-trip ticket to India,” he said. “I threw on my backpack and went to India. I was coming in from the airport in New Delhi at 3 o’clock in the morning and passed a camel pulling a cart down the street. I said, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.'”
He saw a sign for Tibet House in Dharmshala and decided to go there, even though he had no idea what Dharmshala was like or what awaited him there. His first trip to the Tibetan exiles’ home was a short one, and he later traveled to Kashmir, Darjeeling and Nepal.
By the time he returned to Dharmshala in 1983, the Tibetans knew him.
“Before I left, the Office of Tibet in New York asked me if they could have a copy of the notes that I had been keeping on my computer about Tibetan studies, mainly my reading list,” he explained. “I looked at it and it was a mess. I thought I had better clean it up. I wrote a couple computer programs to make it an organized matter. I printed it up and gave them a copy.”
A friend who was learning word processing wanted a copy and Woolsey also gave him one.
“He sent a copy to the Dalai Lama,” said Woolsey. “The Dalai Lama must have figured it was going to be published, so he wrote a forward to it.
“By the time I got back to the library in Dharmshala, I didn’t know anything about this. I got to the Western reference section and they said to me, ‘Oh, we’ve been wanting to meet you.'”
They asked Woolsey at the library what his background was and he answered rock’n’roll. They asked who his teacher was and he told them he didn’t have one. They asked if he was a Tibetan Buddhist and he said no. They asked if he wanted to become one, and he again answered no.
“I was raised a Quaker, and that was close enough,” he said. “They meditate, but they don’t call it that.”
At the Tibetans’ request, Woolsey settled down to begin work organizing by computer the chaos that was the Dharmshala Library.
Realizing the power of the age of information had fallen into their laps, the Tibetans decided he was to be their computer guru, and designated him as such.
They told him he could consider them his affiliation in the academic world.
The chaos inflicted on the Tibetans by the Chinese invasion of the late 1950s had not yet been alleviated. Books and manuscripts lay in unsorted piles in the library, so Woolsey’s computer was the perfect tool to help put things in order.
“Later on, in 1984, they sent me a list of letters to all the high lamas in the United States, from the director of the library, telling them that I was their computer guy, and would they please aid and abet me in my endeavors,” said Woolsey. “Of course, they sent them the letters before they sent me one asking me if I wanted to do it, which makes it a little strange.”
Woolsey returned to India several times at the invitation of the Tibetans. He had discovered in the United States that no one was working on computerizing the Tibetan language with much interest.
By 1985, he was acting as the consultant to the library in developing the language on computer.
Once he was given the assignment, he was besieged with students, one of whom was the abbot of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple in St. Petersburg, Russia. Tenzing Samaev was visiting Dharmshala in 1990, and Woolsey had arrived just after Tibetan New Year.
“This Tibetan brought over a monk and said ‘He wants to know something about computers,'” said Woolsey. “I said, ‘OK.’ I answered his question.”
The monk returned after the New Year with two more questions, and then the next day with two more, and then two more the next morning, and two more by that noon.
This went on for four days.
“Tenzing, in the true Tibetan tradition, formally presented himself and requested me to become his teacher, to accept him as a student,” said Woolsey.
The abbot came to this country in 1991 and went home with a computer and laser printer. With Woolsey’s help he set up the computer to work in Cyrillic, the alphabet used in Russia, and is now publishing the temple’s newsletters and other proclamations on it.
Norbu Chompel, director of book sales for the Office of Tibet in New York City, said, “Jim has done quite a lot. He’s the main person responsible for introducing computers to the Tibetan administration … He came with a lap-top and talked computers to several staff members. That’s how computers came.
“Before, we used to use typewriters,” Chompel said. “He taught computers, and then everybody got into buying computers.” With all the work he was doing for the Tibetans becoming known, perhaps it was inevitable that the Dalai Lama take more notice of him.
The Tibetan spiritual leader wanted to know what was going on with the development of Tibetan on computer, Woolsey said.
“A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity to brief the Dalai Lama about what’s going on,” said Woolsey. “We had some interesting conversation, but I feel that he’s got better things to do.”
The Dalai Lama had the pursuits of freeing his country from Chinese domination and leading his people in their exile as more pressing problems.
Aung San Suu Kyi also had more important pursuits to consider.
Woolsey met her in Dharmshala, prior to her house arrest in Burma (now officially called the Union of Myanmar) as a political dissident.
She’s been detained by the Burmese government for the last four years because of her political activities and her great personal power. Her father, Aung San, founded modern Burma and was assassinated in 1947.
She has followed in his footsteps in an attempt to free her people from military rule.
Woolsey recounted an incident at a rally in which Aung San Suu Kyi prevented a slaughter by the army of an unarmed crowd of 20,000 people. The army approached to smash the rally, Aung San Suu Kyi positioned herself between the crowd and the soldiers and halted the military with her words.
“She told 20,000 people to sit down and be quiet and they sat down and were quiet,” said Woolsey. “She out-positioned the army and did it non-violently. That’s the key, non-violence.
“She’s a very, very learned person,” continued Woolsey. “She really has the rights of her people in her heart more than worries about herself.”
As is the case with Woolsey and the Tibetans.
Woolsey’s source book of Tibetan literature is under consideration for Internet, the international computer-user network.
With his help, Tibetan might go from being an endangered language to one available to everyone who can hook up a computer to a phone line.
And that might bring an ancient kingdom into today’s electronic age.
“I feel that you should be able to leapfrog over the industrial age into the information age as an agricultural society, and perhaps be farther ahead than where we in the West are trying to get to,” said Woolsey.
Push a few computer keys and it might happen.
Originally Published: October 8, 1993 at 4:00 a.m.
Im not normally one for rigid copyright enforcement, but cut-and-pasting an entire article for no other purpose of bypassing a copyright restriction? I too regularly hit the "not in your region" block but there are more legal ways around such things.
"more legal" ? Nothing but consuming the site as-they-publish-it, including letting all of their malware have its way with you including forcing you to suck down region-appropriate verification cans, is legal from the view of the copyright maximalists.
The main legal difference between pasting the text here and sites such as archive.?? is that the latter creates centralized targets for legal destruction xor capital intermediation depending on whether such sites achieve "success". Either way once they get popular enough, we lose.
The sheer majority of the web would be better off if entire pages/sites were shared by value instead of by reference. The main problem with pasting whole articles here is that it makes a big wall of text. But still, I applaud it.
In some countries, legal documents are required to not have any paragraph breaks, so you can have a document with one paragraph spanning 100s of pages. OpenOffice has a hard limit of 65534 per paragraph, and it took LibreOffice quite some work to left it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30668
So you can consistantly cite line numbers. Always the same number of lines per page. As with many legal writing rules, it probably made more sense back when journals were written with quills.
I never thought about this element of cross language structure before. Text direction, diacritics, punctuation, sure - but I always assumed that chunking was universal. Turns out no:
“the typographical notion of the paragraph does not really exist in a Tibetan text the way it does in European languages. As a result, Tibetan texts often need to be processed as a long stream of uninterrupted text with no forced line breaks, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of pages. “
The same applies to old Chinese, and in fact most ancient languages. Latin and Greek were originally written in scriptio continua, meaning no punctuation or spacing:
That kind of organization takes time, editing, multiple revisions to get right, etc.
And a mindset that it is useful. In many cases (like if you’re a religious caste), having a giant wall of text that requires skill to identify elements from, is a plus.
Do you want your ciphertexts formatted into paragraphs too?
Are you really saying that Tibetan doesn't use spaces and paragraphs because the creators or perhaps all Tibetans don't want to spend time editing or can't organize their writing well enough?
Not saying can’t. Arguably, there isn’t anything anyone can’t do. At least until they go broke.
I’m saying that different societies have different priorities/expectations/motivations, and there is clearly a reason they don’t do it, or it wouldn’t be so consistent eh?
It’s not like white space isn’t the default on a writing surface.
Do you have any alternative theories?
I could also imagine scrolls being expensive, so ‘fluff’ like white space is discouraged, and not easily re-used or overwritten based on the inks, so re-editing or the like doesn’t actually work.
But I’m just speculating here.
Edit: the scripta continua link above had a good reference to Greek/roman examples where they were transcriptions by slaves of spoken monologues. They didn’t have paragraphs or the like because people don’t speak in paragraphs.
They also don’t edit their words when they speak, and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Footnotes, bibliographic references, etc. also don’t really make sense in the way we might think if it’s ’a record of spoken words’ vs ‘words representing ideas on their own’.
So writing used more like transcriptions of famous speeches or lectures, less as standalone and independent works.
And I assume every culture has the equivalent of 2 hour long speeches that could have been a one page email.
“Before and after the advent of the codex, Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.”
I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear.
> and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter.
Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section.
The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.
I have no evidence and also very little contextual knowledge of Tibetan language and culture. Anything I said would likely turn out to be worthless and, worse, false.
Sometimes inaccessibility is a feature. Probably the Tibetans monks wanted their scrolls to look imposing and almost beyond human comprehension, so they would look like magic to the common folk and the educated few would marvel at their ability to memorize and understand them.
Which is why this isnt a about saving a language, rather preserving it in a paticular state. They dont want it to evolve into the modern world as a living language. They want to lock it into the rules of a paticular time. That means not accomidating recent innovations so that, hopefully, they are never encorporated.
This change doesn't do anything to prevent in this case Tibetan from "accommodating recent changes".
It makes it possible to support the language as it was used historically and as I understand it is used presently. Even if it were to change presently, there are still historical documents which should be supported.
It sounds like you want to force change (and specifically change in the direction of what more common languages do), as opposed to "accomodate" it.
i would say that making software more flexible to handle more unusual things actually "accomodates innovation" in all languages the software supports. The more things you can support, instead of requiring everything to work the same, the more you are actually accommodating innovation.
Paragraphs in the west as, indentation or separation of text, are not even a thousand years old. In the ancient world a paragraph was denoted with a typographical mark.
i don't know how it is phrased in the book itself but in Tibetan Buddhism there is no god. And their innovation is far beyond this book (at least the plot summary on wikipedia).
Although there is no God, there are many gods (lha, sometimes translated as deity).
To add to the confusion, the same word is used for the so-called mundane gods like elementals and supramundane gods, i.e. beings who transcended subject-object dychotomy and can manifest also under a form of a god, whatever it may be. An inspiration for Clarke could be the famous Mañjuśrīnāmasamgīti or "Chanting the names of Manjushri".
To add even more confusion, if instead of gods we consider God and identify that being with characteristics such as omnipresence, all-pervasiveness, being beyond ordinary mind and so on - then one could attempt do identify it with the central topic of all Tibetan Buddhist tradition that exists under various names (primordial wisdom, the union of appearance and emptiness, self-existing wisdom and so on).
"asimovfan", would you say the same type of criticism of Asimov's injection of the Cristian God in "the Last question"?
In this story from Clarke, the sentiment you just portrayed is acknowledged, and the point of the whole story.
The two westerners cannot understand not only the grand project being undertaken by the monks, but also what "god" even is to them. Before they can really understand, their project is completed and reality changes.
Hmm without getting too esoteric and the disclosure that I am not a Bhuddist, your point is one of the inferences the reader can make from the story.
-the vendors can't see the point in this 'fruitless' endeavor to build a database of their god's names for some godly/spiritual reason.
-The buddhists can't understand and importantly have no need to understand why the vendors need to "understand" their task, which, they never clarify to us.
That said, obviousley CLarke probably had no idea about proper bhuddist theology. But I like to hope that the idea is still proper?
The concept of "god" is considered a problem in Buddhism, its a wrongly held belief (superstition) that Buddha actively speaks against and refutes (in debate). Also in Buddhism there is no further religious knowledge to be gained or mystery to be solved.
Buddhists would really like everyone to understand their task.
There is no trace of Buddhism in that story really.
That being said, i am not sure i understand your question. What is supposed to be proper?
"... relatively short paragraphs (possibly up to a few pages)"
I love things like this that just shows me how much I view the world from a certain perspective. I don't think I've ever had a paragraph even on one page! The closest I know is that some writer, that I forgot the name of, had several pages of stream of consciousness that I think was without paragraphs and punctuations.
But also Saramago, Gadda, García Márquez, or Victor Hugo and his 800+ words sentence. Stream of consciousness usually has long paragraphs, but it’s quite common in other genres (I feel like genres is not the right word for it. Techniques?). Popular fiction is the only one that usually avoids long sentences/paragraphs/chapters.
Saramago is a great example. He writes in Portuguese that is easily and closely translated to Spanish which is my native language. When I first read Saramago it was really difficult to get used to his long sentences with only commas and no dots. But after a while it starts flowing.
This has been in the works for a while. There is an old HyperCard stack to teach Tibetan pronunciation (with 16bit sound) you can try: https://hcsimulator.com/Learn-Tibetan
The site seems incomplete. Tibetan does have 5 vowels, and it looks like the non intrinsic vowels are written at the bottom section of the view, but I can't get them to work. I assume the intention would be that you click one of the other vowels to toggle it, but it no worky.
It's bit surprising that word processors would struggle with long paragraphs considering that various stream-of-consciousness and related styles of writing also eschew paragraphs and possibly other conventional structures. They might not be super common, but not exactly unheard of either. I'd assume writers and publishers manage them somehow.
Pretty short change for reducing O(n^2) impact with a cache.
This change includes the following scalability improvements for
documents containing extremely large paragraphs:
- Reduces the size of layout contexts to account for LF control chars.
- Due to typical access patterns while laying out paragraphs, VCL was
making O(n^2) calls to vcl::ScriptRun::next(). VCL now uses an
existing global LRU cache for script runs, avoiding much of this
overhead.
Probably shows a bit how little that software is used with Tibetan text if this bug was able to stay open for almost 10 years for what ultimately was a 5 line fix.
The fix looks like a 5 line fix because it is a last step in a very long process of optimizing LibreOffice text layout that started years ago. This 5 line fix could not have been possible 10 years ago simply because the code it is fixing didn't exist back then.
While the scripts (Bengali/Assamese and Tibetan) both evolved from the Gupta script, the actual languages are very different. Bengali and Assamese are Indo-Aryan, while Tibetan is from a completely different language family (Sino-Tibetan).
When I (bengali speaker) visited Bhutan where they speak a language that is 50% mutually intelligble with Tibetan I didn't understand anything. I was surprised because I thought they might use a number of buddhist loan words, but even the words for dharma, karma, etc. sound completely different in tibetan
Languages, are very interesting beasts. As in, they are easy to learn and marshal communication across large swaths of the world- or they are hard to master and allow to construct very complex constructs and ideas- which are then transported from one speaker to another. In which part of the field does the Tibetan language fall?
I mean, a highly technical subject will have highly technical jargon. but I am not convinced that the amount of subtle nuance in the language has a relationship to the complexity of ideas you can express in that language.
Hey everyone, I'm Eyal, a LibreOffice project volunteer who does a lot of QA regarding Right-to-Left and Complex-Text-Layout scripts (= written languages). I want to thank thunderbong3 for posting a link to that post - and heartily thank Jonathan Clark, the new RTL-CTL-CJK-focused developer at The Document Foundation, who implemented the performance improvement for Tibetan.
Most bugs we encounter and report in LibreOffice are more general, and aren't script specific (e.g. code which forgets that the content may be right-to-left resulting in wrong behavior in those cases); and a lot of the script-specific bugs are about the most popular script, which is Arabic (that is also used for Farsi, Urdu, Javanese etc.)
But we do have some issues regarding less-commonly-used scripts,
like Tibetan or Mongolian. Here:
is the meta-bug which tracks issues with: Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Zhuang,Kazak, Xibo, Dai, Yi, Miao, Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu, Wa, etc.
We don't know if there are really very few issues specific to those languages (which is quite possible), or whether it's just that they're not used so much and the users aren't motivated enough to file bugs.
Still, as Jonathan's recent fix demonstrates, there is certainly the interest to address them when developer-time-resources become available.
I would like to encourage everyone who cares about these scripts, and "document editing fairness" across countries and cultures, to consider:
1. Try using LibreOffice with such languages which you know at least a little bit of - and if you find any bugs, file them at our BugZilla: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
2. Consider supproting The Document Foundation, which manages the LibreOffice project, financially:
We are one of the larger FOSS projects in the world, with tens of Millions of regular users (if not > 100 Million) and a board of trustees with members from dozens of countries; but - we don't have large corporations investing money nor time in the project. While a few commercial companies do contribute to LibreOffice (like Collabora and Allotropia) - many fundamental issues are not close enough to their customers' needs - which is why it was decided to hire Jonathan directly to give RTL-CTL-CJK support a boost. Individual user donations are what enables this work.
Well, the "minimal" support is there, as buovjaga noted - but... we need you to tell us what aspects of that support is missing - by filing bugs, or at the very least talking to us about this (for example - there are "LibreOffice RTL" and a "LibreOffice CJK" groups on Telegram).
Honestly, given the particularities of Tibetan, I'm surprised it didn't adapt to the digital world. So while I'd congratulate the LibreOffice developers for improving their software, as least in displaying legacy text, I would expect Tibetan to evolve just like almost any writing system has done over time, and introduce some spaces and paragraphs.
An actively used written script is not "legacy text". We're not talking about some ancient, dead language, but even if it was that, there's merit in being able to accurately display it digitally just from an academic standpoint of making historical research easier.
Sure, I understand the merit of it being displayed properly, that's something worthwhile.
But at the same time, if it's an actively used script, don't you think current users should consider changing its conventions?
My point was that all writing systems change, especially when the medium changes. Modern punctuation was invented at some point simply because the previous form of writing words one glued to the other was not ideal.
Tibetan script has been in Unicode since version 2 from 1996, with some characters added in later versions. Is there are particular human script you want added to Unicode?
But it sure seems like they greatly exceeded your initial expectations, no? They aren't adding it today, they already did it in 1996! Maybe they aren't what you thought they were?
> I mean, they're too busy adding emojis over there to work on support for human scripts any more...
What makes you say that there are human scripts being left out, or which nobody is working on (or that the work is displaced by emoji support)?
One challenge of large projects is that what's essential for some users is not even within the experience of other users. Sometimes humans make the fundemental error of thinking the range of their own experience defines the range of everyone's experiences, when the truth is that each of us sees only a tiny portion of an enormous canvas.
This is a well-established phrase in computer science and programming languages, and it’s likely that its use here is meant to be evocative of those principles rather than of an anthropomorphic sense.
Can you give an example or two of the type of terminology you have in mind? Something like first tier, or high level, or primary, or what? Almost any term that I could think of still carries with it a sense of politics. Perhaps someone from the first class citizen language, like English or French doesn’t really notice this dynamic, but someone who uses these other languages sure notice the lack of importance, or urgency, when they can’t live digitally with their own language. Whether or not they use the term,” political”, it’s still there. But I’m curious to see what your suggestions might include.
I suspected what I was pointing out a tad too nuanced for hn, nevertheless, the word citizen very much has a political implication although not entirely, it can certainly stir up thoughts of being a citizen of a given country or not. First-class citizen has even more charged political implication, the image of people living in a ghetto v lush suburbs immediately comes to mind. After all you guys pushed to change master to main, but no way there is anything remotely true about using literal words that since the ancient Greek times have been used to mean a very specific thing and only that thing.
Tibet as a land and people should be made a first class citizen of the physical and political world as well. I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe, but less than 75 years ago, China forcibly and illegally took over Tibet and since then has been engaged in a forced reeducation and erasure of the people and their culture (Sinicization):
> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe
Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going. With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of entropy.
People, even very passionate and politically active people, moved on to causes with at least some hope, or at least the perception of hope.
What? From my recollection, when it was decided to admit China in the WTO, every problem was set aside for the asserted belief that growth would result in democracy, human rights and hence the solution of those problems.
By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the manufacturing).
Even with reshoring, it's not as though China would just shrug and give up Tibet, and a military confrontation with them over Tibet would be profoundly unpopular in any reasonably foreseeable political landscape. There is no underlying racial animus to drive focus on the issue, as there is with conflicts in the Middle East. For most Americans Tibet is a place they've never been, know precious little about, and while they may feel badly when the situation is explained, it isn't going to weigh heavily on them. It would be hard to explain why that's something to be prioritized over the MENA region, Russia and Ukraine, or places like Mali, Niger, and Sudan.
Is it just due to numbers? Middle East conflict has Muslims all over the world engaging and amplifying the issue. But there are few Tibetans and no allies of theirs to really speak of in the same way (as with the international Muslim community).
> I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe
The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people money.
I'm inclined to agree with you politically (with what little I know about this conflict which admittedly is... almost nothing), but I don't think this kind of political discourse is very appropriate for HN. You can already see from some of the replies to your comment how the quality of the discussion deteriorates.
I get what you’re saying but I shared it because the motives are the same. Why does Tibetan language matter at all? This BDRC article about digital representation of the language is tied back to that motivation. And the language is under threat due to Sinicization (the program of brainwashing Tibet so it looks like the rest of China). In other words, this discussions around a digital effort is tied to a greater effort to preserve Tibet (land, people, culture).
From my point of view, representation of minority languages matters no matter the political situation. I'm aware that this isn't always (and wasn't always) universally accepted, but I would still think that it's less controversial than political autonomy.
For example, people can support increased representation of the Welsh language without wanting Wales to secede from the UK.
Just last weekend in Manhattan I saw a group of young people protesting for a free Tibet along with signs in support of Palestine. It was small, but as someone in their 40s who saw a lot of protests calling for a free Tibet in the 90s, it was really nice to see.
> Or maybe not, because Tibetans at least can still live there?
Well, Palestinians do live there: in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in Israel/Egypt-blockaded Gaza, and in Israel proper, under the name of “Arab citizens of Israel”, many of whom identify as Palestinian
While many Arabs fled or were expelled in 1948, not all of them were. Israel wants to call them “Arab citizens of Israel” or “Arab Israelis” not “Palestinians”: some want to go along with that terminological preference, a growing number don’t
(Not all Arab citizens of Israel are of Palestinian origin - some of them are Maronite refugees from Lebanon; there are also many Jewish Israelis of Jewish Arab descent, but in an Israeli context they are identified as Jewish not Arab. There are also Arabs in Israeli-occupied Syria, the Golan Heights, the majority of whom don’t have Israeli citizenship, but a minority do.)
If you believe Wikipedia’s Palestinian population figures [0] - 3.19 million in West Bank, 2.17 million in Gaza, 2.037 million in Israel proper - that adds up to 7.397 million. Wikipedia gives a total population of 14.3 million worldwide. 7.397/14.3 = 51.7%. So a majority of Palestinians still reside in Israel/Palestine today.
To "a large majority expelled (from the current Israel) in 1948" you replied with the *current* number of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza?
It’s also weird that Xinjiang and the Uyghur genocide get almost no commentary from the Arab Islamic world, even though the scale of violence against Muslims is far greater than the Israel-Arab conflict, by several orders of magnitude. To me it looks a lot like antisemitism - the smaller conflict matters only because it involves Jews.
> To me it looks a lot like antisemitism - the smaller conflict matters only because it involves Jews
Jerusalem has a long-standing theological significance in Islam: it was originally the target of Muslim prayer (the qibla), until Mecca replaced it; Quran 17:1 mentions Muhammad’s supernatural “Night Journey” to the “Farthest Mosque”, which Islamic tradition identifies with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Sunni eschatological traditions also mention Jerusalem as having a role to play in the “end times”.
Aside from theology, Jerusalem also has a great historical significance, in that its reconquest from the Crusaders was considered an important turning point in global Islamic history. Given its position in-between Egypt and Syria, control of Jerusalem has been contested between competing Islamic empires many times over the centuries
By contrast, Xinjiang has no established theological significance in Islam, and its history is a footnote in the overall history of Islam
> Quran 17:1 mentions Muhammad’s supernatural “Night Journey” to the “Farthest Mosque”, which Islamic tradition identifies with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The Farthest (Al-Aqsa) Mosque being in Jerusalem is a recent invention. The night journey is said to have happened in 621, but the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in 637 when the Muslims captured Jerusalem. So the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Quran is not the one currently called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
> The Farthest (Al-Aqsa) Mosque being in Jerusalem is a recent invention.
Do you have any evidence that Muslims have only "recently" started to claim it is in Jerusalem? From what I understand, they were already claiming that well over 1000 years ago.
> The night journey is said to have happened in 621, but the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in 637 when the Muslims captured Jerusalem. So the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Quran is not the one currently called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Standard explanation for this: "Al-Aqsa Mosque" has two senses, a broad sense and a narrow sense. In the broad sense, it is the entire complex of Islamic religious structures on the Temple Mount, centered on the Dome of the Rock. In a narrow sense, it is the main congregational prayer hall in that complex, the current building of which was constructed in the 1030s. The 637 structure you mention was a temporary wooden structure, which by the next century was replaced by a much grander stone one, which went on to twice be destroyed by earthquakes.
So, since in the broad sense "Al-Aqsa Mosque" means the whole Temple Mount complex, of course the Temple Mount pre-existed the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 637 (around 5 years after Muhammad's death), and it was there for Muhammad to have supernaturally visited in 621 (if one believes he went on such a supernatural journey, I personally don't)
Indeed, according to many Muslim accounts, the site Muhammad visited in 621 was not the site of the narrow sense mosque, it was the rock which the Dome of the Rock now covers.
I don’t fully understand this. Jewish people lived in that region long before Islam was even invented. How could Muslims now claim that it has some sort of indispensable significance to their belief system? It is a region that already had a people and holds significance to others. Isn’t this just manufacturing an artificial claim?
Jewish people lived in that region long before Islam was even invented.
As did other dominant groups before and after them. In any case the Jewish population's size and influence peaked after a major catastrophe (the Bar Kokhba revolt) some 500 years before the first wave of Islamization even reached the region.
Isn’t this just manufacturing an artificial claim?
What they did was no different from the inevitable self-imprinting both religious movements and settler groups do in places the get traction in - they started to believe in a part-mythical, part factual "origin story" of how they got there and assumed dominance, and that was that. In essence no more "artificial" from the imprinting of any other group that attains dominance in a region over time (including that of the Jews in the area, many centuries previously).
Islam's telling to itself seems to go about like this:
By way of context: (1) it took a long time for this to happen (specifically in two waves about 550 years apart), and (2) even by the first wave, the Jewish community had already been vastly diminished (in part by expulsion, in part by assimilation as the other commenter notes), and the region had already been long since Christianized.
So there was no major Jewish imprinting to dismantle or oppose by then - or even make reference to, by then. If anything (with Christianity's imprint melting away before them) the region probably started to appear as a tabula rasa to them, in short enough order.
From the very beginning, Islam positioned itself as a successor to Judaism and Christianity - it is unsurprising that even early Islam classified as a holy city the city which both of its predecessors (from its own perspective) viewed as the holiest city on Earth. As a non-Muslim I don’t believe that Muhammad was a genuine prophet, but I doubt he was a conscious fraud either - I think he genuinely believed his revelations were from God, even if they actually arose somehow from his unconscious mind. He came out of a community of Arabs (the Hanifs) who were attracted to monotheism and dissatisfied with the traditional Arab polytheist religion, but who at the same time viewed both Judaism and Christianity as too “foreign”-they viewed Judaism’s religious laws as overly onerous, and as an ethnic religion, conversion to Judaism involved effectively giving up their pre-existing Arabic ethnic identity for a new Jewish one; Christianity was the state religion of their external Byzantine enemy, plus its Trinitarianism seemed too close to the polytheism they’d rejected. Coming out of this milieu, Muhammad was familiar with the idea of Jerusalem as a holy city from both of those religions, so he essentially “split the difference”: proposed Mecca and Medina as holy cities of his own, while simultaneously inheriting the idea of Jerusalem as holy from those two earlier monotheistic religions which he positioned his own as a replacement for. And to reiterate, even if this was his unconscious logic, consciously he was just doing and saying whatever God told him to.
Also, it wasn’t just Jewish people who lived in what is now the territory of Israel in ancient times - it always had a significant population of polytheists (Canaanite, Phoenician, etc), plus two thousand years ago the Samaritans were a massive community of military significance, not the tiny minority they are today. Most of its non-Jewish population converted to Christianity - along with a significant chunk of its Jewish population. And then when Islam came along, the majority of its Christian population converted to Islam (a slow process over many centuries). Arguably, Palestinians are just as much descendants of its ancient population as Jews are, indeed, Palestinians are likely in part descended from Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam.
Far greater is very debatable, you get a similar number of killings only if the organ harvesting allegations are true.
The Arab-islamic world is made up of autocracies; they don't need to care about a lot, and they indeed showed extremely little concern for the Palestinians as well.
Egypt is an autocracy because the US sends it billions of dollars to keep it an autocracy. Neither the US nor Israel want Egypt to be anything other than an autocracy.
Regarding organ harvesting, the FBI arrested Israeli-connected illegal organ harvesters in the US, as reported by the New York Times. The Palestinians have complained about Israeli organ harvesting, and apparently the US is concerned about their illegal organ harvesting networks too.
As OP notes, the 'Free Tibet' cause was very popular in the 90s when the US was not seen as being in a great-power conflict with China. So I don't think your 2nd sentence is correct. Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism
It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement.
Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.
There’s an expiration date on being able to do anything on this kind of conquest and forceful relocations.
I’m personally more concerned with China’s genocide of the Uyghur because you can’t undo such atrocities after a population is gone as happened to many Native American populations. There’s a few relatively tiny “Native American” populations that are still genetically distinct, but a wide range of cultures have been effectively erased with only fragments remaining. Hundreds of dead languages we don’t even know enough about to classify let alone stories.
Imagine if everything from Spain to Japan was referenced as Eurasian culture and thrown into basically the same bucket.
Native Americans have far more consideration than Tibetans do. They are free to live per their culture. They can practice their religion. They can use their language. They are afforded every right American citizens are. There are several hundred Indian reservations, totaling something like 2.5% of US soil.
This is by no means a justification for the genocide of native Americans or a way to say they’ve been made whole. But there is simply no fair comparison between their situation today (despite huge injustices in the past) and the situation of Tibetans.
The arc of history is usually this: minorities are viciously attacked when they still represent some political power and are seen as a threat by the majority, and they are cherished and afforded the rights and considerations you mention when they have almost disappeared and have become a harmless item of nostalgia and exotic charm.
You can see this dynamic play out across all cultures.
They're supposed to be separate Nations. State government even invade these supposed sovereign Nations enforce their own laws on them. California had a ban on slot machines in went into the reservations and remove the slot machines from them because it was against California law.
There's thousands of contracts (treaties) that have been broken and voided by the courts as being essentially too old or unenforceable in a modern era because of other other issues such as local populations.
They can't make their own property laws. They're not allowed to own the land and it must be put to trust for the entire tribe that way they can't use it for anything like loan collateral they can't sell it to somebody they can't start businesses easily since that form a collateral isn't available to them. The bureau of Indian affairs forces various Federal regulations on them they shouldn't have to oblige.
The federal government basically tells them what their culture is and often groups fighting to defend those imposed laws are pure whites who have no idea what they are talking about and will not let them improve and advance at all because they have this romantic notion of what it means to be an American Indian I want them still living in hide huts so they can go visit them like a zoo. I shouldn't have to bring up brave New world for this.
Look at the big kerfuffle over the Seminole mascot at the University of Florida. There are many from the tribe that actually liked it because it brought recognition to the tribe but a bunch of do-gooders came in and made a big deal about it even though they had no connection to the tribe. It should have been something for them to discuss and not have to worry about anybody else coming in and trying to force their opinion.
It wasn't too long ago that the trail of tears and forced relocation was the policy we even have the $20 bill with the guy who did that.
You need to rethink what it means to be a sovereign Nation. If the EU came in and took over the US basically said it's for your own good what would you think?
Native Americans have significantly more rights than, for instance, Indigenous Australians do.
Federally recognised tribes get to run their own elected governments, police forces, court systems, make their own laws, even exempt themselves from provisions of state law in certain cases. Indigenous Australians don’t get any of that
You are right that there are cases in which states or the federal government infringe tribal sovereignty - but at least they have it to begin with. And attempted infringements don’t always succeed - consider the 2020 US Supreme Court case McGirt v Oklahoma, which found that Oklahoma state courts lack criminal jurisdiction (for “major crimes”, which includes murder, manslaughter, rape, arson and burglary) over Native American defendants in the eastern half of the state, such jurisdiction only being possessed by the tribal and federal governments, not the state of Oklahoma.
A very loaded and weird take comparing tibetan culture to the worst denominator of cannibalism, scientology and brainwashing. We have much to learn from Eastern wisdom as we already find with TCM, meditation, Ayurveda and yoga to mention a few.
Read about what kind of tortures the lamas brought to serfs and slaves. Beware, because it's highly NSFW. And I don't support the CCCP in any case, but Tibet wasn't Disneyland as HNers believe.
If the only problem the previous commenter stated was just some kind of a cult, well, if woudn't be half-bad. But upon reading about the Tibet and basically the Asian Inquisition (not the Spanish one, but the actual witch-burning one from Central Europe), you will see the Tibet in a very different way.
You're definitely bringing up issues that are worth consideration.
The low-resolution view of Tibet that is/has been popular among (usually liberal, middle-to-upper class) Westerners following a kinda Buddhism-lite trend is that it was actually Shambhala/Shangri-la. You can see how gorgeous parts of Tibet are by looking up photos, and the assumption is that society there was as beautiful as the landscapes and thangka paintings.
But in fact Tibet was in many ways just about as far from Disneyland as can be conceived. Even by the early 20th century, it was a medieval-esque serfdom and theocracy. It doesn't matter how technical or philosophical someone gets about how Buddhism is non-theistic and Vajrayana is some kind of system of applied psychology, the fact is that powerful lamas were viewed as actual gods and, like a caste system, the underprivileged were regarded as deserving of their lot due to karma. There was a centuries-in-the-making ingrained resistance to outside ideas throughout the region, and those which would include things like modernity and human rights. While the rest of the world was getting stuff like penicillin and effective surgery, the stranglehold that the monastic institutions had on the education-deprived Tibetans prevented any meaningful cross-border dialogue.
All that being said, the CCP was not (and China still is not) some kind of bastion of human rights and openness to ideas. The People's Army would have never been so much as scratched by whatever barely passed for Tibetan soldiers, so they arguably did not need to be nearly so heavy-handed. Assuming it's actually anyone's legitimate responsibility to 'liberate' that place, I suppose that some 'force' might've been required to crack the nut of that massively insular Tibetan world, but there's no way that it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and erasure.
In a parallel universe, the world of Tibet could have been introduced to modernity without being placed under the thumb of the Chinese monolith. So I guess I'm just trying to provide a balanced perspective.
Well, hopefully your preferred beliefs and way of life stay in favor with the majority, otherwise it could get awkward. In the case they do not, perhaps you can reflect upon your comment here and reassure yourself that your persecution is not unjustified.
Not so clear. Should cultures who beliefs include jihad and war be persecuted in the name of safety or should we allow freedom of religion including those that involve cannibalism?
China’s fight against religion and culture is about control. This is due to their modern support of Communism, which tries to eliminate every threat to its ideology (it cannot survive otherwise). That’s why texts on Communism and Socialism often call for the elimination of religion, family structures, etc. It’s not about fighting a “cult” for some virtuous reason. If anything, authoritarianism and Communism are cults, and the Chinese version was visible clearly in the cultural revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds). I’d also note that the absence of religion isn’t cult-free, and there are many cultish movements in the world even from non-religious parts of the world.
From the Chinese perspective pre-Communism, there would be no issue with Tibetan culture. But even if there were, it isn’t for them to care about or interfere with right?
As for your other comparisons. I don’t see cannibalism or Islamic fundamentalism (Jihad) as being comparable to Tibetan culture. Islam has explicit calls for violence against other belief systems. Tibetan culture does not. I can see treating Islam as a threat because of what it states openly, but it would be weird to group that with Tibetan culture, whether before or after Buddhism.
This is not true. The Chinese view tibetan culture as if it was scientology. There is a lot of evidence of injustices and really cult like backwards practices arising from the culture.
The Four Old motto died with Deng XIaoping. And, on family values... you would be surprised on
how conservative the Chinese, Romanian and Soviet (Stalin era) were.
[0] https://www.mcall.com/1993/10/08/new-hope-man-computer-guru-...