Klipspringer

The political-ideological background attributed to the rebels who were mainly presented as "freedom fighters" in the West even appears questionable to French when he writes: "... the Chushi Gangdrug, an organisation now often depicted as a symbol of militant Tibetan nationalism, was at its inception a movement for the preservation of religion. Its military badge carried the legend 'Guardians of Religion in the Land of Snows.'" The organisation, which today still operates a website from Swiss exile, itself explains the symbolism of its flag: it shows two crossed swords on a yellow background. "Yellow stands for Buddhism (sic!), and we wanted to protect Buddhism(!) from the Communist Chinese. One of the swords is burning and symbolises wisdom. The sword of the wisdom of the Manjushree that can destroy the roots of ignorance. The second sword stands for fearlessness." It was not for nothing that the heading of an interview with the "Dalai Lama's brother," in the American newspaper USNWR read "'Holy War' in Tibet".

French cites a Chushi Gangdrug veteran and former monk named Raduk Ngawang who, in 1958, took part in an attack on the PLA and gives us a small insight into the understanding of Buddhism and the mentality of the insurgents when he acknowledges: "As a Buddhist, the invocation of om mani padme hum comes to my lips when I kill an insect, but I didn't feel sad during that battle. I was happy. The Red Chinese had killed monks and destroyed monasteries [note: not true. Previous parts of the book show the PLA having incredible restraint and respect for Tibetan culture], so we killed them. I felt nothing when I saw them lying there dead. They had no religion."

In the context of the Cold War at the time and the western roll back strategy, all kinds of Communist haters were welcome allies, even if they were reactionary, fanatical, and unscrupulous. Thus, the battle of the Khampa gangs for their good old religion very quickly became a highly secret, because illegal and illegitimate, killing on behalf of the CIA and US interests in eastern Asia. When describing the following events, we again do not want to follow any "Chinese propaganda" but rather focus on "western" sources and sources from Tibetan exiles. Some valuable information may still be marked as classified and top secret and lying around in US archives but a lot of other information is now generally available and has been published by authors from within the US services or even directly from "Buddha warriors" themselves. All of these sources agree that, from very early on, the CIA provided military training for the Khampa fighters, equipped them, supported them logistically and controlled them from a safe distance. That the Dalai Lama's brothers played a key role from the outset. That the "Tibetan struggle for liberation" was at no time "peaceful" or "non-violent" but rather extremely violent, brutal and unscrupulous. And finally that the Dalai Lama lied to the public for decades about the backers and backgrounds of this struggle.

The February 2004 issue of the American newspaper Military History contained an informative article about the "largely unknown struggle" that "got support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sponsored secret training camps and made arms and equipment drops." The text entitled CIA's Secret War in Tibet from the pen of a certain Joe Bageant was published online on 12 th June 2006.

[…]

The article later explains how, in spring 1957, a CIA aircraft flew six Tibetans from Gompo Tashi's group via Bangkok and Okinawa to the island of Saipan in the western Pacific, where they received military training for six months. The leader of this first group (and a later head of the terrorist base in Mustang) was Gompo Tashi's nephew, Wangdu Gyatotsang, who had grown up in the Lithang monastery and is described as "hot tempered from childhood." He was so violent that he became a murderer even before his career as a terrorist began. In the small town of Menling he shot a bodyguard of the local tribal chief, who had rudely asked him to take off his hat. However, he avoided punishment on "account of his family connections."

As a further internet article also divulges, the Dalai Lama's brother Norbu (Taktse Rinpoche) joined the group in Okinawa and fled with them in their C-118 to Saipan. This small volcanic island, which is under US control and belongs to the Mariana islands, was used by the CIA at the time for training anti-Communist espionage, sabotage, torture, and terror specialists from several Asian countries. Alongside Tibetans, Kuomintang Chinese, Koreans and Thais, also Laotians and Vietnamese were trained there for the outbreaking war in Indochina. The CIA agents who were instructing the Tibetan fighters were thus, in part, identical to the soldiers, warhorses, and murderers who would soon be pursuing their criminal activities in Laos or Vietnam. For example, Anthony A. "Tony Poe" Poshepny, who later achieved notoriety in Laos, also spent four years "working" with the Khampa rebels.

In Laos, he became a brutal "jungle warlord," who collected the ears of killed "enemies" (he paid his Hmong child soldiers for this...) and enclosed them with his written success reports to his superiors. He also arranged for severed heads to be dropped over "enemy territory" or skewered on sticks and displayed in the region. The half-crazy film figure of Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in Coppola's Apocalypse Now, was based on him.

The training programme in Saipan included weapon techniques, guerilla tactics, espionage and the use of codes and radios. "We lived only to kill the Chinese," one of the pious warriors said. A later commander of the Chushi Gangdrug, Gyato Wangdu, asked the CIA official Roger McCarthy about a portable atom bomb that he could use in Tibet. He was not given one but the CIA appreciated Wangdu's enthusiastic participation in the explosives training just as much as his ability to handle rocket-powered grenades and grenade launchers. However, there were major difficulties when the Tibetans were to estimate or measure distances, record, or code messages, learn the Morse alphabet etc. Most of them were illiterate and had no previous knowledge. A Tibetan teacher was also needed to teach them initially in their own language, as they could only speak their local dialect and even this with what linguists call a "restricted code."

Towards the end of 1957 the fully-trained CIA Tibetans were dropped from US aeroplanes over their homeplace, where they made contact with Gompo Tashi. The highly secret undertaking was given the code name "ST Circus." Now the CIA was directly involved. When the rebel group, whose name initially referred only to Kham and Amdo, was renamed in summer 1958 to Tensung Dhanglang Magar (Volunteer Armed Forces for Defending Buddhism), this was done under the watchful eyes of two CIA Tibetans, who continually reported to the USA via radio. The first weapons were dropped in July. These were primarily old Lee Enfield guns, whose origin could not be traced back to the US.

The described US intervention took place without the approval of the kashag and Dalai Lama. However, on the Chushi Gangdrug website Khampa rebels complained that the American Foreign Ministry initially demanded "a formal request from the Tibetan government" to authorise the supply of weapons to the insurgents. "General Gompo Tashi" asked Phala, the Dalai Lama's Upper Chamberlain, "for support" and warned that his "troops" would otherwise "run out of ammunition." In 1958, the "Tibetan government" was also asked via "radio messages" to submit "an official request for support" to the USA. "Despite this, and for reasons known only to the government, they ignored all attempts at contact. The guerrillas' situation was becoming critical and the Eisenhower administration gave the CIA the order to start with the support measures. Aeroplanes were to drop material over the region of the freedom fighters. Volunteers were also to be trained. The first, long-awaited supply flights were launched in August 1958, without the authorisation of the Tibetan government."

The Americans did therefore not particularly care about any "sovereignty of the Tibetan government" nor the well-being of the Tibetans; they were even less interested in historical, legal and ethical questions. The Military History article notes that only a few US citizens would have been able to find Tibet on a world map and that even CIA boss Allen Dulles initially looked for Tibet near to Hungary, before one of his agents politely "enlightened" him. However, that did not prevent the US Secret Service from setting up a top-secret training camp for anti-Communist Tibetan fighters in Camp Hale, Colorado, formerly the home of the 10 th Mountain Division of the US army. The "teams" who were then dropped over western China were all equipped with weapons, radios and a potassium cyanide capsule attached to their left wrist. Initial successes by the Buddha warriors encouraged the Agency to launch three more parachute drops of weapons and ammunition in 1958.

-Albert Ettinger, Battleground Tibet: History, Background, and Perspectives of an International Conflict (2018) Pgs. 181-185

EPUB of the book from Anna’s Archive

[…]

The Chushi Gangdruk report on the smuggling of the god-king and his "closest employees" from Tibet to India ended with a new reference to the central role that first made possible "the safe flight of his Holiness." "On 30th March, they crossed the border into India at Chu Tangmo, where they received a warm welcome from the Indian welcome committee." With great foresight, the "costs" that "would be incurred during the trip to India" had been obtained (in Washington?): the CIA Khampas accompanying him gave the god-king 200,000 "Rs." (Indian rupees) at the border for this purpose.

The Dalai Lama had not even reached the Indian border and the western propaganda machine was in full flow. As per Grunfeld there were only "a few voices of reason" at the time. One of these was the Indian ambassador in China, who criticised the "sensational reports from American correspondents and the horror stories written by Taipai agents (sic!) in Hong Kong." Another such voice belonged to David S. Connery, the head of the Time-Life office in New Delhi. "Writing in the Atlantic (significantly not in Time), Connery described how Kalimpong became deluged with journalists from around the world, who were inundated with phone calls from frantic editors pleading for colourful, descriptive accounts of burning monasteries. So relentless was this pursuit of 'information' that one reporter from a major British newspaper was heard to declare in exasperation, 'Fiction is what they want. Pure fiction. Well, by God, fiction is what they are going to get'" Grunfeld comments "And fiction is what they got. Stories circulated of two thousand to one hundred thousand Tibetans killed. Elaborate descriptions of the villages the Dalai Lama was alleged to have passed through were openly plagiarized from a book on village life in the Indian Northeast Frontier Area (NEFA). The London Express reported that the Dalai Lama had arrived at 9.00 P.M., 'under a brilliant starlit sky', when in fact he arrived at noon the following day. The Daily Mail reported that the Dalai Lama was met by monks in bright yellow robes, when Tibetan monks' robes are maroon-colored."

As per Grunfeld, the actions of the Daily Mail journalist Noel Barber were particularly negative. He chartered an aeroplane with which he wanted to fly over the NEFA region and look out for the Tibetan refugee column. As a precaution, he wrote the article about it beforehand, on the ground. The fact that the flight was ultimately cancelled due to the poor weather conditions did not hinder publication of the freely created reportage in any way. The CIA itself fed the media and created bogus media reports. As in the Life International issue from 12 th October, which contained an article and six drawings depicting "Chinese excesses" that were apparently from "refugees." "The drawings had actually been made by the agent trainees at Camp Hale as part of sketching drills during a class on intelligence collection." The "best" of these drawings then found their way via D. Fitzgerald, the Head of the Far East Department, to CIA Director Dulles, who passed them on to the Life International publisher C. D. Jackson with the request to publish them in a corresponding article.

All the stories of atrocities recounted by the rebels and refugees naturally found their way into the media without being verified and are still sold as irrefutable facts today. It was not only the Khampa rebels who claimed that "in the morning of 20th " the Chinese had started with the "bombardment" of the Norbulingka to destroy "the palace and his Holiness" and that "thousands were killed during the bombardment." The western press reported that the summer palace "had been razed to the ground" and the Potala was "heavily damaged." The Drepung and Sera monasteries were also "completely destroyed." Half a century later Franz Alt parrots the lie openly: "On 20 th March 1959, they bombarded and destroyed his summer palace, where they believed he still was." Grunfeld comments: "As to the Norbulingka, the stories of its destruction were meant primarily to incite public sentiment against the Chinese. British visitors in 1962 confirmed that the palace had suffered little damage and there was no evidence of rebuilding. A Tibetan who left in 1969 asserted that as late as 1964 the Norbulingka remained intact." In the meantime, the Norbulingka had been put on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites at the request of the Chinese government. It had still not been destroyed...

Same book above. Pgs. 201-205

Brandolini's law truly comes into play in regards to the entire narrative around Tibet: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

No regular person is gonna read this. They’ll see the usual propaganda repeated and just accept it even if everyone else around them is repeating a narrative drastically at odds wirh reality.

a friend of mine on bluesky is helping raise funds for her friend Eve, who is currently at significant risk of ending up on the streets due to excessive medical bills from emergencies and health issues.

shes only 18, has no supportive family, and is having to decide between going homeless or returning to dangerous (for her) survival sex work.

her gofundme is half funded right now!

please consider a donation - even one as small as $5 will help! - or, at the very least, a signal boost!

$729/$1300 (6/9/26)

(you can also boost on bluesky here)

Call of Duty’s newest installment is set in a renewed Korean War. But Modern Warfare 4 isn’t just a game—it’s a forecast of the genocidal war the US is planning for Korea.

The game’s release trailer shows shocking images of North Korea striking civilian areas—but it was the US that leveled almost every standing building in the north during the Korean War. COD MW4 is part of a larger project to obscure the reality of the Korean War, which was a war waged by the US occupation against Koreans who resisted its division of the country.

Far from a game, millions of Koreans today still live in the distended shadow of the ongoing war—a war that the US is actively stoking the flames for with hundreds of escalatory war games.

This is not the first time COD has completely revised history. In 2019, the franchise laundered the infamous Highway of Death as a massacre by the Russians—not as was in reality, the US.

COD is part of a larger military-entertainment complex that spans the entire entertainment industry from movies to video games, through which the Pentagon actively shapes the narratives of games like MW4 that serve as public relations shields for US imperialism.

Games like Call of Duty also condition young people for recruitment, which recruiters take advantage of by infiltrating gaming platforms, public schools, and gaming conventions. Youth enter the military hoping to be heroes, only to be the world’s most dangerous terrorists.

It’s no coincidence that COD MW4 is set in Korea while US war threats in the region are at an all time high. Many of us are outraged by this depiction of the Korean War—but our task now is to build organized opposition to US imperialism by raising consciousness and solidarity.

It is especially important for those living in the United States to stand with Cuba as our own government threatens to invade and brutally subjugate our dear neighbors, our peaceful friends to the south who have never invaded or subjugated anyone and who have instead brought doctors and life all around the world, just for the crime of pursuing their own freedom at nobody else's expense. Let Cuba live!