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Entries in human rights (61)

Tuesday
Jul072015

Puppet masters in Tibet - TLC 18

The endless Tibetan knot is the cycle of existence, said a monk. Existence is attachment, loss and suffering. Grasping is suffering. Suffering is an illusion. Let go.

Regrets and fears are monkey mind movies.

Pure joy, compassion, gratitude and forgiveness are clear.

Easy to say, hard to do be do.

Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like nobody’s looking. Love like your heart’s never been broken.

Nothing behind. Everything ahead, said Meditation.

Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa informed monks they would increase patriotic re-education classes in monasteries. Re-education Through Reform, ideology, propaganda and fear-based thought control is the way comrades. We have Power and Control using fear and intimidation.

We wash your brain daily.

The Chinese, after looting and destroying 2,700 monasteries and killing millions in Tibet before, during and after the Cultural Revolution restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden. They recruited Tibetans as spies to live and work in monasteries.

This system proved effective from 1966-1976 when family members reported on each other neighbors and capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples’ campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns in monasteries who resisted or questioned this form of subtle or overt patriotic brainwashing risked imprisonment, torture and death. They knew what happened to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi Prison outside Lhasa.

“There are two kinds of suffering,” said a girl weaving wool carpets outside her yurt on the Tibetan plateau hearing wild blue rivers sing below mountains. “Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.”

Inside Drapchi, Chinese guards beat nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand. They applied electric cattle prods to genitals, sending wire-cranked juice into skeletons, extracting screams.

“Denounce the Dalai Lama,” ordered an illiterate PLA soldier from Human Province. He tightened metal around a nun’s wrists until she screamed.

“Never.”

He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased pressure. Someone had to do this dull job.

“Save my face,” sang a Fujian university student, an innocent ignorant invisible victim of the one-child genocide policy. She wrung out a mop of spider webs creating water rainbows before swabbing a classroom. 15,001 students had failed higher-level exams for more prestigious institutions. They settled for this. No choice. She washed uneven crumbling cement floors with strands.

Operatic actors offstage fashioned animist death masks for a performance with a funeral formula.

“This is not a fucking rehearsal,” directed Altman. “Get to the verb.”

“Arrive on time, know your lines and wait for the check,” said the Tibetan weaver as radioactive light shafted mountains.

Rational speaking animals mumbled sounds, words, coalescing consonants, vowels and syllables. Etyms dancing with atoms made up everything with axioms of choice.

 

Thursday
Jan292015

shake your moneymaker

Vietnam is a woman.

Men come and go. Men left me all my life, beginning with my father. I never knew him.

As I was growing up I asked my mother, Where is my father? He’s gone. I never asked again.

I finished 9th grade in my village school and lived at home helping my mother with chores; feeding chickens, shopping, cooking, and cleaning.

She beat me. You are a worthless daughter. You have no future, she screamed at me. I took it silently. I served my older brothers. They were strangers. Little kings.

Growing up I heard stories about making money in Cambodia.

When I was seventeen I packed a bag and crossed the border. I went to Phnom Penh, the capital. I met Vietnamese working girls. They helped me find a simple room in a house for $25 a month. We shared a toilet and kitchen. We became friends. They were my first teachers about life in Cambodia.

I needed a job.

You’re good looking, one said. They gave me advice. You can make good money here. Always look your best and wear high heels. They make you look taller. Men like tall girls. Always negotiate their offer. Get the most you can. Save it. Let them do what they want with you.

Many will be rough and try to hurt you because they think you belong to them. They bought you. You are a money machine. They hate their wives, all their women and will take it out on you. Woman are objects, things to be abused. Learn to be passive. Accept what happens.

Close your eyes, pretend you feel pleasure and learn to close your heart. Close it tight. Don’t become soft and weak and open it for anyone.

The only pain you will feel is physical. It will go away. Always make the men wear a condom. We have local doctors who understand our life and help us. You can choose to be either a bargirl and entertain customers at the bar or a taxi girl. They go to homes and apartments. They make more money but they service more clients. Always give Miss Tan the owner her percentage or she will throw you out.

My head spun from all this.

One night I put on my best red and green dress. I applied makeup and went to the Hello bar with two girlfriends. It was loud and crowded with men and girls. We bought cheap drinks and sat at the bar. My friends introduced me to Miss Tan, the owner.

Her diamond ring flashed. So you’re the new girl. Vietnamese? Yes. You can demand more money. Your skin is pale. Men will want you. You work here as a taxi girl. You go out, you come back. You give me 70%. If you cheat me I kill you. I know everything. Understand?

Yes. We shook hands. Hers were soft.

Get to work girls.

 

Saturday
Jun142014

landmine survivor 

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

  40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

  She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet.

  Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a Banlung shaman.

  Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

A Century is Nothing 

 

 

Wednesday
Jun042014

country of amnesia

We'd like to say hello to all our friends in China.

They cannot read this because 50,000+ internet gremlins block it from their bleeding eyes.

Words like June 4, democracy and freedom are scrubbed.

Today the Country of Amnesia says to the 1.7 billion sheep:

ATTENTION COMRADES!

June 4th, 1989 did not happen. Collective brains were wiped clean. Just blend in. 

Leo remembered hauling buckets of night soil shit to fertilize fields near his straw and mud hovel in the Gobi.

It was the price he’d paid for quest-ioning Authority at Beijing Normal U.

- Why do we have to read Mao’s little red book? It's mush for pigs, he’d asked Authority.

- Because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

- This shit stinks.

- Here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He escaped to Australia.

Living in exile with silence and cunning he burned through levels of existence.

Survivors heard a voice screaming from a classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, said overworked, underpaid and undersexed Chinese teachers named Authority and Social Control.

Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. We will murder your family.

You will be condemned to a Reform Through Re-education Labor Unit near the Gobi.

Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day.

Conformity breeds conformity. Get in line and shut up.

 

Monday
May052014

a Japanese friend translates a poem

We met in Bhaktapur, Nepal three hundred years ago.

He has a famous beard, laughs a lot and writes haiku.

His wife is known for her oils and watercolor paintings with a touch of fantastic harmony and mystery.

Every morning we sat near a Hindu temple when a man rang a huge iron bell at 7:30. Exactly.

Ame ni mo  Makezu (Be not Defeated by the Rain)

 

standing against the rain,

standing against the wind,

standing against the snow,

the intense heat of summer

keeping a strong body

 

free from desire

free from anger

regardless, smiling peacefully

 

four bowls of brown rice

miso, a few vegetables, enough for a day

putting myself aside in everything

taking care of others first

watching, listening carefully to the inner meaning,

appreciating

never forgetting

 

beside the pine forest in the field

sitting in a little thatched roof house

 

hearing news about a sick child in the east

I go and nurse him

hearing news about a tired mother in the west

I go and help her, rice bundles on my back

hearing news about a man on his death bed in the south

I go and comfort him

hearing news about a quarrel or lawsuit in the north

I go and tell them not to be so petty

 

weeping with them in a drought

aimlessly wandering around with them in the cold summer

being called useless by others

never being praised

never receiving complaints

 

such a person

I want to be

Ame ni mo makezu (Be not Defeated by the Rain[1]) is a famous poem written by Kenji Miyazawa,[2] a poet from the northern prefectureof Iwate in Japan who lived from 1896 to 1933. The poem was found posthumously in a small black notebook in one of the poet's trunks.