Our rights back soon.....

Many years ago, before the Berlin Wall came down, I was in East Berlin. While I am sorry that the Wall, and the Eastern Bloc existed, I am glad to have seen the results first hand. Passing freely through Checkpoint Charley and various other checkpoints into and out of East Germany was something as an American that I was able to do, if you were an East German you had no such rights.

I just came back from Lhasa, Tibet and the the quote above is from our guide, "I hope we have our rights back very soon." Lhasa is currently an occupied city and Tibet an occupied country under the thumb of Communist China. The Chinese are pushing more and more ethnic Chinese into Tibet in order to overwhelm the balance of culture and society; they are forcing the use of the Mandarin language, both spoken and written, at the expense of Tibetenese; they are creating puppet government and religious leaders all the while calling their actions the "liberation" of Tibet. I have never been particularly interested in the politics of this situation but seeing the occupation firsthand gives a great deal of cause for thought.

The following video is of a group of soldiers posted at the crossroads of the "Chinese" and "Tibetan" sections of occupied Lhasa. These soldiers and the hundreds I saw throughout the Tibetan areas of Lhasa have only been at their posts since the Buddhist uprising of 2007.

As a foreigner, had I been caught shooting this, my camera might have been confiscated and destroyed, I might have been harassed or beat up, I might have been "detained" or expelled from the country. If I were a Tibetan caught shooting this I most certainly would have been beaten, arrested, imprisoned and possibly executed for attempting to spy or export "state secrets." In New York, there are many, many soldiers posted as "security"  following the 9/11 attack. The Patriot Act and other Bush era measures have severely damaged our Constitution and civil rights, I hope the United States does not lower itself to the same level of paranoia and total destruction of human and civil rights that currently exists in China and Tibet.