Plan your trip with our routes

Yichiang, the biggest dam in the World

Mao was a man, not god. This is the brilliant claim that the Communist Party, or its marketing department (yes, it has one and it is very good) utilize to try to improve the image of the regime. This way, they assume the mistakes of its leader and at the same time, they excuse him. In other words, they want us to believe that he was an extraordinary guy, almost godlike, but like every other person, made some mistakes. No kidding! Tell that story to the Tibetans, the Mongols, the political prisoners, the thousands of people sentenced to death, and who knows how many more. On the other side, we have Dalai Lama. For the Buddhists it’s a fact that he is god. They call him the living-god. According to their own words, he is the 13^th reincarnation of a monk who lived in the XV century, an enlightened, another Buddha, “the one who has awakened to the truth”.

But we are going to change the title to both of them right now. The first one turns into: “Mao: nor a man, nor god, but a big son of a b…”, although it was not his mother’s fault that he was such a cold and ruthless beast. His ideals of “sharing everything” and “the power is for the people” were very commendable, until the “everybody is the same”, turned into “everybody is the same as me and because I say so”. So similar that at the end it didn’t matter if there were some missing. Nevertheless, we must give him some credit for some of his ideas, like making a Revolution while being in power, it is unique in History. When his wife, he and three others realize that they were losing control of the country, they created the Red Guards, a type of political-party police that was very popular during the Cultural Revolution. Using the ending of corruption as an excuse, they destroyed any attempt of dissidence.

To the “god in Earth” we will give him another motto: “Dalai Lama less prizes and more b…” China is tearing his people into pieces (literally) and he is just watching it from the distance. Indeed, from India, where he’s been living in exile for the last 50 years. At least, doing that, he has demonstrated his divine nature, because an ordinary person would have fought nail and tooth. However, only a god can put out with everything like he did. His only answer to so many aggressions from China has been to ask his people to turn the other cheek and not to lose their faith in a future that will be better. Deep down, nothing change from that day when he, with premeditation and nocturnality, he left Lhasa while his people were surrounding his residence to defend him. The Chinese came to arrest him, but his people refused to turn him in, building a human shield to protect the Potala palace. It is said that it was priceless to see peoples’ faces next morning when they found out that they had been risking their lives for an empty building. Dalai Lama’s excuse was that with his flight he avoided a bloodbath. The reality is that, during his exile, the Chinese have killed at least 1.5 million of Tibetans. It is impossible to know, now, what would have happened if he hadn’t abandoned his people.

This is not a critique against him, and we don’t mean that a Peace man should have stayed and fight for his country. Not at all. We just believe that there are many ways to fight and the one that is expected from the only god-in-Earth that we have is more similar to the one that Gandhi chose, with his non-cooperation movement and his hunger strikes, instead of collecting prizes all over the World. The last one was the Congressional Gold Medal from the Bush administration. Imagine that that day, instead of accepting the medal, in front of President Bush and live, broadcasted for many countries and TV channels, Dalai Lama had rejected the prize alleging that the Western countries are very hypocritical when they give prizes to the Tibetan people with one hand, but with the other they have business with China. Or if he had gone even further, announcing that he was starting a hunger strike until the U.N. put together a table of dialogue to solve the Tibet occupation. Let’s be cynical. He wouldn’t have too much to lose, not even his life. At the most, the few months that he would have to wait for his next reincarnation. His argument to go along with the Western countries is that, this way, his voice has a pulpit from where he can denounce his people’s sufferings. In reality, what he achieved after all these years is to bring Buddhism and himself into fashion, but most of Americans and Europeans have no idea of what is happening in Tibet. What is more, many of them don’t know that Dalai Lamas’ country was invaded by the Chinese 50 years ago and is now one of the provinces of the Red Giant.

Some of you might be wondering why we are so tough on him if Mao was the one who decided to invade Tibet and exterminate half of its population. You don’t expect anything from the devil, but from Dalai Lama we expect everything. We expect absolutely everything except for the surprises that we found in his autobiography, that we keep to ourselves to avoid embarrassment. And we do it because we want to, not because a 300 years oracle is whispering in our ears while possessing the body of a monk. Do you get it?

PS: However, to be fair, he is just a pitiful poor man that one day woke up being god. And that will always be his biggest prison, bigger that his exile. That is the difference between growing big and being born big. For the former the world is small, and for the latter the crown (real or divine) is too big. Maybe because their heads are too small.