Quite likely, it never would have happened if we'd NEVER gone into Vietnam. We destabilized Cambodia which allowed Pol Pot to come to power.
Yeah, we could have probably have never gone to Europe and just put up better defenses against Japan and never gone to Asia, and all the Cambodians would have been happy Japanese laborers or sex slaves instead of getting "destabilized" by bad old us in the 1960's.
We never went into Tibet. It didn't get destabilized. Instead it got annexed. As a result, the entire idea of Tibetan independence and culture will likely vanish in the next 20-40 years, Tibetan women will end up as $5 whores for male Chinese tourists and Tibetan men will end up doing God knows what for the Chinese. But at least Tibet didn't get destabilized, heaven forbid. In 40 year Tibet will go the way of the Mohicans, but at least they didn't get destabilized.
rollingstone.com
The two women had been imprisoned along with a group of other nuns, some for as long as sixteen years. They were first arrested in 1990 for staging a protest in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to demonstrate their outrage over China's continuing presence in their native land. As the women chanted "Free Tibet," Chinese police moved quickly, knocking them to the ground and dragging them to jail before their protest could attract attention. Inside the prison, Chinese authorities subjected the nuns to a brutal routine. "Police stuck electric prods into my vagina and then hung me from the ceiling," Zangmo says softly. Her voice doesn't waver, but she looks away. Some of her friends lost consciousness as soon as guards pushed the cattle prods inside them, but Zangmo remained alert throughout the torture. "I was totally, totally frightened," she says.
When china annexed Tibet in 1959, it savaged the country, unleashing Mao's soldiers to tear apart monasteries, shell ancient structures and kill as many as 1.2 million people.
Prostitution is flourishing in Lhasa. By one estimate there are 10,000 sex workers in the Tibetan capital, which has a population of less than 500,000. The day after visiting the yurt camp, I wander to the core of the city. By four in the afternoon, hookers are pouring into the streets. Along a narrow lane near the holiest temples in Tibetan Buddhism, young women wear knee-high boots, push-up bras and so much eye shadow that they resemble the evil offspring of Courtney Love and Katherine Harris. The girls, many of them no more than adolescents, press themselves against the glass windows of their brothels. As Chinese and Tibetan men stroll by, the hookers run outside, trying to drag them through their doorway.
Inside one brothel, a concrete and metal shack with large windows exposing the front room like a fishbowl, a fourteen-year-old girl takes my hand, leading me into the back. Welts cover her stomach, which is exposed by her tube top. There is nothing on the concrete walls, and the concrete floor is bare save for a small square of moldering linoleum. The girl points to the bed and offers sexual intercourse for ten dollars. When I pull away, she cups her breasts in her hands and halves the price to five dollars.
On a larger boulevard near the brothels, Chinese and Tibetan men saunter through a maze of sex shops that sell dildos, inflatable breasts and other sex toys. Some pick out herbal remedies from the shelves, Viagra-like potions designed to keep you hard all night. Others wander next door to small convenience stores selling massive containers of beer. Behind the convenience shops, the heaviest drinkers have collapsed on the ground, their faces red, their clothes stained with food and feces. Laughing Tibetan children kick a soccer ball around the drunks' prostrate bodies.
In a back alley behind the convenience stores, other prostitutes negotiate with customers. A girl shaped like a child's top offers me oral sex for five bucks. When I turn away she, too, lowers the price -- to three dollars, pleading for me to stay. As I walk away, she shrieks, a pained scream. |
