as opposed to humans

Letter in the Guardian, reprinted in its brain frying entirety. (cheers, Simon)

You wake up to discover Britain has been taken over by aliens. The government and the royal family have fled into exile. National and local government, the army, the police, schools and universities, major banks and businesses and hospitals are now all run by aliens. They don't speak English.

When your children go to school they are told lessons are no longer in English, and they are forced to learn the alien language. British television, radio and newspapers are closed down, replaced by alien publications.
Your home is bulldozed and your family forcibly rehoused in an apartment block. This is to make way for new housing for the thousands of aliens who pour into your town. Soon they outnumber the British three to one. Churches are closed down and ministers imprisoned. One or two important churches are kept as "living museums" so the aliens can pretend they are not suppressing religion.

Traditional British sports are banned, so tennis, rugby and football disappear. Police can enter your home or search you on the street for evidence of Britishness - a union flag, football posters, a banknote with the Queen's head. The penalty is imprisonment and torture.

Slowly and thoroughly everything that stands for Britain is removed: history, culture, traditions, the basic human right to freedom of speech and of religion. And you can do nothing.

Then you wake up and realise it's a nightmare. But it isn't if you're Tibetan. If you live in Tibet or the western provinces of China, this is what is happening. That is why Tibetan men, women and children are protesting - and dying. For them the nightmare is real.

What to say about this sort of stuff? That there was no such thing as Tibetan television before 1949, or that a Buddhist theocracy never had a “basic human right to freedom of speech and religion”, that a list of major Tibetan banks would be very short indeed, that the actual substantive grievance here is that Tibetans can speak and write Tibetan which they learn at school but that they’re denied jobs because they can’t speak Chinese?

And “aliens”…as opposed to “humans”, I suppose.

I dunno. There’s something about Buddhism that seems to send people demented. I can’t think of any other cause in which it’s considered so respectable to lapse into the politics of racial vindication. And if that’s the theory, then this is the practice:

He said that he saw at least five Chinese people being attacked by the crowd, including a motorcyclist in his 20s who he thought was beaten to death. “They got him in the head with a large piece of sidewalk,” he said. “He was down on the ground and he was not moving.”

Not that Beijing isn’t making strides in the same direction.

Comments

[ajay]

What to say about this sort of stuff? That there was no such thing as Tibetan television before 1949, or that a Buddhist theocracy never had a “basic human right to freedom of speech and religion”, that a list of major Tibetan banks would be very short indeed

Nitpicking, there. He's talking about Britain, and so gives a list of Important British Things that have been taken away by the aliens, just as a lot of Important Tibetan Things were taken away by the Chinese. You might as well point out that Tibet didn't have a queen.
I don't see any racial animus in that letter, for that matter - far less than you might see in the average Guardian discussion of, say, the Israel/Palestine issue. You could point out that the Palestinians didn't have many banks or TV stations before 1948 or 1967 either - or, for that matter, a right to freedom of speech as citizens of Jordan or Egypt...
Is it really so irrational to write a letter suggesting that invading and occupying other countries is bad?

[dsquared]

Ajay: I think you're right on the analogy but my instinct then goes the other way - if someone wrote that same letter about the Israeli occupation (and they certainly could), then it would set off my alarm bells that we might be dealing with a nutter. The reality is bad enough without calling people aliens or the like.

[dsquared]

... and I've just realised why. All this "imagine this ..." stuff just really sounds like it's building up to "wouldn't you want to kill the bastards?"

[jamie]

"He's talking about Britain..." Actually, no. She (it's a she) is trying to suggest that things you would miss if you lived in Britain were also present in Tibet, which was why I pointed out the bit about "free speech and religous freedom". It's also not nitpicking to point out false claims in this context: there are a lot more than "one or two" monasteries "kept open for tourist reasons"; there's an entire Tibetan language curriculum, etc.

None of this actually justifies Chinese rule in Tibet. But Chinese oppression in Tibet doesn;t justify a cultural genocide narrative, and I don't see how any of that can't be racially charged.