Tibet: a great question

I’m now listening to a fantastic podcast posted by the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies. It is a panel discussion entitled:

Tibet’s Future . . .Does It Have One?

The panel was hosted (oddly) by the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation (it’s main page hosts a large banner asking “What Would Regan Do?”) and includes left-wing hippy Buddhist Columbia University professor (my hero!) Robert Thurman – also known as Uma Thurman’s dad. It also includes John Kenneth Knaus, a former CIA guy and Harvard scholar, who talks about how he and the rest of the CIA “fell in love” with the Tibetans they worked with in the 1960s, training many of them in Colorado to return to Tibet as gorilla fighters (there is a lovely video documenting the CIA operations in Tibet called Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet).

Anyhow – from hippy professors to the CIA, an interesting story and a great podcast no doubt… more to blog on tomorrow. For now I just want to post a quote from the panel, which comes from Amit A. Panya. He asks the following very pressing question(s) that I think follows well what I have noted in my previous posts:

Is Tibet, in fact, any different from any other vulnerable culture? Beautiful, sensitive, peaceful, but any other small and vulnerable culture, facing extinction, at the hands not only off tyrants and dictators, but really facing extinction in our world at the hands of the unelectable forces of economic progress and development. This huge juggernaut that is destroying main streets in small American towns in the Midwest. Or that is destroying my culture of origin in India. Is, in fact, what Tibet faces just a more accute version of something that is larger…?