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	International Communist Workers Party
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A Los Angeles bus operator was talking to a comrade about the reactionary role of religion in the US presidential campaign. 
He mentioned the collaboration of Rev. Norman Vincent Peale with the Nazis before World War II and his close association with Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan afterward. 
Then he suggested, “You should write about the Dalai Lama’s connection to the Nazis. All the liberals think he’s so great.”
“Okay,” the comrade responded.  “But let’s also write about the class struggle of the Tibetan serfs who overthrew the feudal system he led.” 
This article is the first in a two-part series.  The second article will explain the strengths and weaknesses of the communist-led struggle for socialism and against religion in Tibet.
The 14th Dalai Lama (now 80 years old) was tutored in his youth by Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and a former SS sergeant.  He has openly described his fascination with Nazis and their weaponry.
 The Dalai Lama was friends with Bruno Beger, jailed for his so-called “research” on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.  He buddied up with Miguel Serrano, head of the Chilean Nazi Party. He personally intervened for Pinochet, the Butcher of Chile, when he was about to be tried for crimes against humanity in Spain in 1998.  In 2006-2007, he publicly blessed the pro-Nazi Austrian politician Jorge Haider.
Anti-communist academics try to minimize the significance of Nazi-Tibetan Buddhist connections.  But the historian George André Morin has disproved them. 
Harrer joined a Nazi expedition to Tibet to research the origins of the so-called “Aryan race.”  The Nazis based their swastika on swastikas of Tibetan monasteries.  The 13th Dalai Lama started translating Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Tibetan.
The Nazis hoped to use Tibet to attack China and British-ruled India.  Europe’s fascist dictatorships and the Vatican were the only governments to recognize a Tibetan “state” in the 1930s.

But the history of class struggle in Tibet best exposes the reactionary hypocrisy of the 14th Dalai Lama.
Sixty years ago the Tibetan masses lived under brutal serfdom and sometimes slavery.  The ruling class — manorial lords and a handful of wealthy monks — exploited them relentlessly.  They tortured serfs and slaves horribly and routinely. 
Even most monks — those from serf families -– were often physically and sexually abused, half-starved and prevented from reading holy texts. 
The god-king of this hell on earth was the Dalai Lama.  He embodied the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine that told serfs they deserved their suffering because of their “karma.”
In 1951 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forged a deal with the Dalai Lama and other “progressive” lords and high lamas.  Five years later it organized these forces to sit down with serf representatives to begin forming a new “democratic” Tibetan government that would abolish serfdom. 
By then the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had begun organizing work-teams to mobilize the Tibetan masses to destroy the old system.  But they didn’t mobilize them for communism.  Instead they organized for “democratic reform” (abolition of serfdom). 
The old feudal rulers then staged an armed uprising with CIA help.  The PLA mobilized Tibetan serfs who quickly put it down.  In the process the masses confronted their former masters.  With their own hands they destroyed the instruments of torture.  They burned the papers that had documented feudal debts and legally defined them as property. (See photo) Many poor lamas exercised their new freedom of religion by leaving the monasteries in which they had been “slaves in a monk’s robe.”

“We smashed the old system with our own hands,” ex-serfs said proudly, “and will build a new world with them too!”
Meanwhile the Dalai Lama fled to India with the unsuccessful feudal rebels – and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of treasure, wrested from the serfs’ sweat and blood. 
From 1958-1974 he personally received US$186,000/year for the use of his government-in-exile.  He repaid the favor by backing Washington’s anti-communist “holy war” against China. 
Today the Dalai Lama’s defenders continue this tradition.  Their “Free Tibet” movement serves US imperialism in its escalating rivalry with rising Chinese imperialism.

Further reading: 
Anna Louise Strong, “When Serfs Stood up in Tibet” (1959) available at Marxists Internet Archive
Michael Parenti, “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” (updated January 2007)  michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

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