A Note On That Time When Hannah Black Suggested We Cancel The Dalai Lama Into Oblivion
In which the Dalai Lama who is Hitler for forgiving Hitler is called Hitler by the CCP and scheduled for Cancellation by Western racial politics.
During a teaching with my Lama, I was once told a story about a Dzogchen master who was imprisoned in China for eighteen years. On being released, he was asked what the worst thing about his capture had been. He did not respond by referring to the tyranny of his captors or the deprivation of his personal liberty. Instead he simply said, ‘the worst thing about these eighteen years was the constant threat of losing compassion for the Chinese’.
When it comes to the Dalai Lama himself, might Gyalwa Rinpoche’s compassion be imagined to extend even to the captors of his own nation, the CCP? Perhaps there’s no reason to think otherwise. After all, here is what the Dalai Lama once said about Hitler:
He said, ‘Even Hitler, basically, particularly when young, must be a normal human being, more compassionate.’ The journalist from NDTV then asked, ‘You’re saying you can show compassion for Hitler?’ The 14th Dalai Lama answered, ‘Of course! If I keep hatred, no use. Hitler has already gone.’
In a 2012 article called ‘Chinese State Media Representations’, Kevin Carrico discusses the CCP response to the 2008 Tibetan uprising and the wave of self-immolations that followed. Carrico describes how the state media either misrepresented these events or attempted to reduce them to silence. He analyses just how petty these media responses could get:
Attempts to put an anti-CNN-spin on events, such as the recent state-run website Tibet.cn’s decision to cite anonymous ‘netizens’ expressing their hopes that the Dalai Lama might self-immolate, appear immensely petty by comparison. When people are setting themselves on fire, such responses simply fail.
In Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire, these Chinese state media reactions are described as a type of ‘unending slander’, both national and individual. The Dalai Lama himself, whose ‘splittist clique’ is blamed for everything, is subjected to a calculated wish-fulfilment that he too would go up in flames.
Things were taken a step further in 2013 when Chinese media outlets compared the Dalai Lama to Adolf Hitler. Such a comparison is almost as exaggerated and obscene as the occasion Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the Holocaust on Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini. It also provides the model, bearing in mind differences in detail, for how the US media have portrayed Donald Trump in the last four years.
I promised theoretical gossip from the 21st century in this ‘newsletter’, so here’s some more. The Hannah Black comments about the Dalai Lama alluded to in my title were made in 2018 on Twitter, and so can perhaps be taken with a pinch of Himalayan salt. Is a comment in that place worth taking seriously at all? No, and yes.
Black, who helped formalise the first wave of Anglo-American ‘cancel culture’ under Trump in early 2017 when she told us ‘The Painting Must Go’, also says and/or half-jokes this:
That the Dalai Lama should be ‘cancelled into oblivion’ is not something Black says she wants, not quite (‘it’s just a tweet’, and a loosely riffing one at that). Who could want that? Even if someone said they wanted it, one might choose to believe that they would regret saying it as soon as they did, or at least feel inwardly contradicted.
At the same time, Black does appear to believe or have believed that the Dalai Lama could in some justifiable sense be Cancelled, and with a capital C.
The idea of having more ‘power to Cancel’—with a capital C—is in the air generally right now. And there is, of course, more than one way of looking at it. We may have compassion on all sides, if we choose.
But what did the Dalai Lama actually say at the conference in Malmo, Sweden in 2018?
The comments seem not to have been recorded directly, so all we have are second-hand fragments, with no context. Apparently, what the Dalai Lama said was that Europe was ‘morally responsible’ for helping ‘a refugee really facing danger against their life’.
He is also reported as saying:
Receive them, help them, educate them . . . but ultimately they should develop their own country.
It was in the context of having said the above—which Black does not mention—that he was also reported to say:
I think Europe belongs to the Europeans.
Another piece of the scattered remarks is added in this report:
‘I think Europe belongs to the Europeans’, he said, adding they should make clear to refugees that ‘they ultimately should rebuild their own country’.
As far as I can tell, this is the main gist of the indirectly reported and contextless remarks.
Why would it be surprising for a spiritual leader exiled from his own country, which is being slowly ‘cancelled into oblivion’ by the CCP, to attach some value to the idea of being able to go home?
At the same time as what Simone Weil once called a need for roots is here being affirmed, is it not also integral to the 14th Dalai Lama’s life to have lived with a rare degree of serenity without roots at all?
Here is what Simone Weil actually said about patriotism in The Need for Roots, written in 1943:
From the social point of view, more especially, it will be impossible to avoid considering the notion of patriotism. Not considering it afresh, but considering it for the first time; for, unless I am mistaken, it has never has been considered. Strange indeed, for a notion which has played and still plays so important a rôle, isn’t it? That just shows what sort of a place we really accord to thought.
Weil goes on, with merciless serene irony:
The idea of patriotism had lost all credit among French workmen during the last quarter of a century. The Communists put it into circulation again after 1934, to the accompaniment of plentiful tricolour flags and singing of the Marseillaise. But they hadn’t the least compunction in withdrawing it and placing it on the shelf again a little before the war. It is not in the name of patriotism that they started setting up a resistance. They only began adopting it again about nine months after the defeat. Little by little they have adopted it entirely.
How may one criticise moralising moralisers without being a moraliser oneself? Can one ever ‘Cancel’ with compassion? How did Black’s comments, which are also contextless in their own important way simply by being ‘on Twitter’, micrologically feed into and predict a present in which ‘cancellation’ also incites a negative vortex of national and international needs? Should any such extreme responsibility for the power of words exist, or even be codified? And to what extent is ‘Cancel Culture’, as Black herself personally envisaged it in terms of a painting, usefully coeval with the collective power to contemplate the oblivion of Tibetan culture?
PS. Later on in 2018 the Dalai Lama was asked about his comments and remarked as follows: