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Professor John Robertson OBA

Counterpunch yesterday had the above, and:

Last month, on the Daily Beast podcast, journalists Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff took turns reeling off a list of famous people who Wolff met while visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan home. The recited names were a who’s who of rich, powerful, and perverted men, many of them recognized Friends of Jeffrey. But one name stood out as unusual: the Dalai Lama.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/29/why-was-the-dalai-lama-at-jeffrey-epsteins-house/

Reading this, I was reminded of two things.

First, the images of the Dalia Lama asking a child to suck his tongue and of the disturbingly young trainees:

Second, I was reminded of how, in 2015, the Herald’s David Leask criticised the SNP:

I wrote in response:

If they go for the obvious line that any relationship with China supports their denial of self-determination to Tibet and, thus, weakens our case for independence, it’s worth reading this below:

While the Chinese regime is undeniably oppressive toward minority groups, it’s less so than many of the UK’s trading partners such as Saudi Arabia or Indonesia. However, there’s another reason. The current situation in Tibet is, for the majority, better than it was under the previous feudal regime. See this extract, from a rarely heard story, with the link to the full piece below:

‘What we don’t hear about Tibet’ by Sorrel Neuss

While the world moralises over China’s occupation, feudalism and abuse in Tibetan culture has been conveniently forgotten. 

Sexual abuse in monasteries and oppressive feudalism in traditional Tibetan society has been factored out of the argument against China‘s occupation, oversimplifying it.

Tibet seems like as a celestial paradise held in chains, but the West’s tendency to romanticise the country’s Buddhist culture has distorted our view. Popular belief is that under the Dalai Lama, Tibetans lived contentedly in a spiritual non-violent culture, uncorrupted by lust or greed: but in reality, society was far more brutal than that vision.

Last December, Ye Xiaowen, head of China’s administration for religious affairs, published a piece in the state-run China Daily newspaper that, although propaganda, rings true. “History clearly reveals that the old Tibet was not the Shangri-La that many imagine”, he wrote “but a society under a system of feudal serfdom.”

Until 1959, when China cracked down on Tibetan rebels and the Dalai Lama fled to northern India, around 98% of the population was enslaved in serfdom. Drepung monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, was one of the world’s largest landowners with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country’s wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/tibet-china-feudalism