Anyway, last weekend I took teachings from Lama Pema Dorje in a form of Tibetan yoga – a relatively gentle form, fairly safe and not “strange and secret”. I wrote about it a little more over on DangZang. Here I will just mention that it was very enjoyable. Apparently Nougat, our large new dog, missed me when I went out on Saturday morning, but then he had some sardines and a bit of a lie down:

… so everything was all right then.

I did, however, notice how security is spreading everywhere. The first time I went to put on my loose-fitting “yoga pants”, I thought it would be discreet to pop out to change in the stairwell. I had just started when a door opened and a man looked out from what I then saw was the “Chinese Massage Parlour”. I had not noticed the dome of the security camera in the ceiling, so I guess he wondered what I was up to. But no harm done! Lesson: examine environment before taking trousers off. What is a Chinese massage parlour anyway?

Feuerberg’s article summarizes a report entitled “Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians,” released on Capitol Hill, June 4 – the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – sponsored by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. Its 80 pages find that four authoritarian states—China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—are setting forth a new authoritarian model for countries to follow, and that they have the resources and sophistication to be highly influential in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Now I have been amongst the many – it seems to be the great majority of those who have expressed an opinion at all – to have commented (in this post and others) on both the sheer stupidity and the political danger of the Australian government’s proposals for mandatory filtering of the internet in this country at ISP level. It may seem, as the few supporters of this scheme might argue, that the Australian proposals are much weaker than those of China, Russia or Iran, and it might be claimed that we can trust the Australian government not to abuse the technical capabilities it wants in the way that those countries do.

Both of these defences have some weight, I freely concede. For the moment. For today. Doubtless also for next month, probably for next year. As for 5 or 10 years time – let’s say I wouldn’t want to take large bets on it. The point, of course, lies not in what the silly current scheme actually is, but where it is going – down the road to authoritarianism, to the evisceration of democracy, to state control of information and in that way to the state control of perception, of history and of thought. If in doubt, refer to China, where many modern Chinese seem to even doubt that Tiananmen Square even happened, let alone know anything of the tens of millions who died in the famine created by the Great Leap Forward, or that Tibetans really are unhappy about being oppressed, imprisoned and killed.

Anyway, all of the above is reasonably well known in the “free world”. Still. What I want to know, although I suspect that the answer is obvious, is this: what is being done in a positive sense to guarantee freedom of information? If a government were truly committed to democracy and freedom, then instead of funding research into internet filtering, it would be funding projects to do exactly the opposite – to develop computer and internet programs and hardware to guarantee such privacy and security that

1) those who provide information can do so without fear of identification or reprisal

2) anyone can access that information without being spied on; this would imply that they can search without the government knowing who is searching for what, and can see and forward information without the government knowing.

Some say we all have an inner child. I suspect that most of us have a inner little right-winger somewhere inside too, and at this point the inner little right-winger may be raising a fist and shouting “But, but… what about the terrorists? Won’t they have free access to learn how to make bombs! They will be able to plot in secret! And the paedophiles! Won’t these people all be able to e-mail each other without us knowing! And won’t terrorist cells be able to co-ordinate without the security forces knowing anything about it! What are you going to do about that?”

The answer has to be – yes, of course those people will do those things. And of course I find those things as evil as anyone else does, and of course we all want to stop them doing those things. But controlling information won’t stop them. Never did, never will. It is often speculated that paedophiles pass their files around in encrypted ways. Much was made a few months ago of a paedophile ring that had been using peer-to-peer networking having been cracked by the security forces – a success that, while perhaps genuine, was trivial. Software and hardware are both evolving at a dizzy rate, and the rest of the offenders, be they paedophiles or bomb-makers, will move on to new methods within weeks. That little success does not justify going further and faster down the path of authoritarian, government control of information. Are we so dazzled by the internet that we have forgotten that people still talk to each other? Still print things or draw diagrams on paper? Still meet in parks, and cafes and bars, still pass manila envelopes from one to the other? Total government control of electronic communications is awkward for such people, to be sure, but it would hardly present an insurmountable problem. Their activities are already, rightly, illegal, and there is no need for further authoritarian mechanisms to control them.

How far will we go to control these bogeymen, the “paedophiles and terrorists”? Destroy all the information we don’t like? Oh yes, book-burning has been done before now. Stop them talking about their ideas? Oh yes, tongues have been cut out before now, as have hands, eyes and ears.

Total government control of information is a genuine but minor hindrance to those bogeymen. The real advantage of such power is that it makes a whole population far easier to control, to manipulate, to swallow the “official story” and look away when elections are rigged, when workers’ health is destroyed or the earth is polluted by bad industrial practice, when people are held without trial and without knowing the charges against them, when the wealth of the powerful grows while the weak are exploited or even enslaved, when whistle-blowers are silenced and activists dissappear.

One test of a true justice system is that even the people for whom we have the greatest distaste, even horror, and whose guilt seems most obvious are given the opportunity to have the charges against them clearly laid, the evidence tested and a proper defence mounted. Similarly, a test of whether we truly support democracy in the information age is whether we allow the genuinely free exchange of information, even knowing that on occasion that freedom will be used for evil purposes, just as writing and talking, looking and listening have been used for evil in the past. And the genuinely free exchange of information can only come about with privacy and security software that protects the identity of publishers and makes information available, while government snoopers know neither what the information is nor who is looking at it.

We should be funding that research, not filters!

Their front page says:

Tibet: China’s brutality on film
The Central Tibetan Administration releases ‘China’s brutality in Tibet exposed’, a documentary film of what they say are Chinese atrocities on the Tibetans.

Even this bit is not perhaps quite advised for the faint-hearted, although the paper has not shown the strongest parts of the video. The CTA clip itself can be seen at http://media.phayul.com/, and this is definitely not for the faint-hearted!

Loud chanting of battle cries, lots of cameras – when people have suffered, it’s hardly surprising that younger demonstrators can get carried away by the urge to somehow, anyhow do something!

There were speeches outside Parliament House, a march to the Chinese Embassy, a touch of rabble-rousing chant, just enough to get some young ones to try to rush the police line, which makes for more dramatic footage. Chants like “Shame, Shame – China Shame”, “Stop Killing – In Tibet”, “Stop Torture – In Tibet”, some silence, some songs.

And that was it really. What’s the point? I think just being there to be counted usually has a point, though it’s obviously very indirect.

Repression has been particularly savage all year, hence the general cancellation of the more joyful celebrations usually associated with the new year; that in turn, has brought more repression, with one monk setting fire to himself just last week in protest. He was shot before the flames were put out, and is presumed dead, but as far as I know nobody knows what happened to the body – “taken to an undisclosed location”, as they say.

So this year I plan to join the coach going to Canberra for the speeches-and-prayers do, provided I can manage to get up at shortly after 4:00 a.m.!

I will report back!

But there was something that struck me as worse. When we give guns to kids and young men, and tell them to go and “keep order” in an occupied territory, there will be atrocities. Think of the Americans at Mai Lai in Vietnam, in Iraq or at the Sand Creek massacre; the British in Northern Ireland (or, if you don’t find that convincing, go back to the days of the Black and Tans) or at the Amritsar massacre; the Japanese at the Nanking massacre; Rwanda; and on; and on.

What frightened me more was the mountaineers. There were about 100 of them in the party. Of those, two (yes, the number after one) of them, having witnessed the murder of defenceless, innocent civilians with their backs to the soldiers, saw it in the first place as their human duty to tell the story to the world. These were the Romanian cameraman Sergiu Matei and American mountain guide Luis Benitez. A couple of the others were more or less cornered into saying something later, which is some credit to them, but essentially the other 98 were more worried about their tourist visas and climbing permits than about state-sanctioned murder.

It is these “98ers” who stand by and let it all go wrong – but which of us can be sure that we are not amongst the 98? I’ve only just seen The Reader – was it not the 98ers who stood by and let Germany turn into Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Is it not 98ers everywhere who let bullying turn into bastardry and bastardry grow into atrocity?

The events of Murder in the Snow took place in 2006; it was the events of 2008 that I referred to a week ago, but in that connection I came across another graphic:

(Courtesy Lhuboom/RFA)

You can get what may have better resolution from Phayul if you want to put a copy elsewhere.

The Tibetan New year is sometimes the same as the Chinese, but sometimes a month apart. This year, the Chinese day was the 26th January, and the Tibetan will be around 25 February. Usually, of course, it’s a time of merriment, visiting, chang-drinking, fire-crackers and so on, but this year the exile community is generally not celebrating; according to the Central Administration, the official celebrations will only comprise the customary religious programmes to mark the Tibetan New Year, “taking into consideration the continuing repression in Tibet and the ruthless crackdown last year which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Tibetans and thousands imprisoned.” See, for example articles archived at the Canada Tibet Committee or at Phayul.

PS: Here’s another relevant link, at the International Campaign for Tibet.

Thanks to Lu for spotting this one!