I haven’t been feeling well for the past month and have been unable to contribute anything new. I’ve noticed that some of you have posted comments on a few of the old blogs, so in order that you have something more up-to-date and relevant to chew on I have inserted two excellent opinion pieces by Christophe Besuchet, a long time Tibet activist. He has already posted them on rangzen.net, but they are so well-written and absolutely incisive about our present political dilemma that I think they should be re-read and discussed widely. JN.
Decapitated, then emasculated
The sort of political sentence pronounced on the Tibetan people resembles the terrible “death by a thousand cuts”. This was a form of execution practiced in China until the early twentieth century, in which the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The punishment is said to work on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.
