WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL

We've taken care of everything 
The words you hear, the songs you sing 
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes 
It's one for all and all for one 
We work together, common sons 
Never need to wonder how or why

In class yesterday we all wrote quotes/ideas on the board from our current readings from Tibet, Tibet.  The topic of duscssion was “vulnerable populations,” and my first thought was the word “control.”  The past few chapters (7-10) have hit heavily on the idea that the Tibetan people are suppressed and their freedom is stripped, and thereafter or maybe beforehand control is assumed by the superior party.  There are subtle and overt ways that the Chinese have taken power from Tibetans: religion was taken, religious buidlings destroyed, propaganda against their beliefs enforced, etc.  The quotes that I chose to write on the board go as follows:

"They control us very closely, and stop us from practising our religion" (p. 82).
"They teach us propaganda against His Holiness the Dalai Lama and then test us on it, to make sure we know the phrases.  We will resolutely oppose the scheming activities of the tiny number of Tibetan pro-independence elements! We will safeguard the four basic principles and oppose bourgeois liberalisation!" (pp. 82-83)
"We have to do what the Democratic Management Committee says, or we risk being expelled" (p. 82).
"I have never taken part in a demonstration.  If you do that, you might die" (p. 81).
"Nuns and monks had been at the vanguard of public protests in Tibet in the late 1980s, and there were many documented cases of their being molested, tortured and killed, or driven to suicide while in prison" (p. 78).
"...with much of eastern Tibet in open mutiny, truth was less important than adherence to the line emanating from the Chairman" (p. 68).
"Anyone who displayed religious faith in Tibet, the Panchen explained, was persecuted as superstitious..." (p. 64).

The word "control" pervaded my thoughts throughout these chapters, and then one of my favorite Rush songs, 2112, joined the word control.  As I mentioned in class, "Big Brother" has always terrified me since I was a kid, and even more so after reading 1984, Animal Farm, and other literature like this.  It frightened me because it was so obviously easy for a group of people to lose total control and freedom to another group.  A quote a once read in my history class in high school by Adolf Hitler said, "What good fortune for the government that the people do not think."

In looking at my diagram on the board I felt a sense of sadness and pain.  It reminded me a lot of my students because they are in a definite position where advantage could be taken of them, and especially even 30 years ago.  The way genocide happens is through a dictator or more powerful person/people taking control or freedom from an inferior counterpart.