BY PETER JOHNSTON

Samantha Chen 's recent viewpoint [March 26] has an interesting take on the Tibet situation, and by interesting I mean wrong and profoundly un-American. It's true that the history of the region began long before 1958 and that many Westerners are ignorant of most of what's gone on before or since. These points, however, do not support her larger argument, which is that the Tibetans are wrong, the Chinese right, and anyone saying differently is deliberately biased.

Let's put it this way: facts are biased things. So the British did, as Chen recounts, invade and occupy Tibet, only to be pushed out by the "liberating" Chinese. That does not excuse the outright oppression to which the Chinese have subjected Tibet since then. If anything, it makes the "liberators" hypocrites as well as oppressors.

Chen mentions the Chinese government's current program of importing ethnic Chinese workers to Tibet in order to dilute the population of ethnic Tibetans and then defends this policy as bringing jobs to poor migrant laborers. It makes no difference that the Han Chinese currently displacing Tibet's native population are poor migrant laborers; the perpetrators of every colonialist genocide in human history have fit that description.

Chen's analogy, comparing the migrant Chinese to Americans moving from Colorado to Minnesota is false. For one thing, citizens of those two states live in a free country (which China most certainly is not) and have certain inviolable rights (which no Chinese citizen, of any ethnicity, has). Furthermore, Minnesotans and Coloradans share the same general ethnic makeup, and even if they didn't, it would make no difference in this country, legally speaking. In China, ethnic differences between Han Chinese and Tibetans (and Turkics and Uyghurs and other oppressed minorities) make a great deal of difference.

If we are to draw an American parallel to the Tibet situation, it might be one of the many times the U.S. government used white settlers to displace and destroy Native American populations it found troublesome. Many of those settlers were poor migrant workers, much like the Chinese currently moving into Tibet. Being poor, they are looking for survival and can be expected to gloss over any moral concerns that stand in the way. This is human nature and the Chinese government, by providing subsidies and incentives for the migrants, is exploiting it masterfully.

Chen mentions, in passing, China's failures in human rights, product safety and pollution and proceeds to blame the West for them. Blame can be split pretty evenly between Chinese manufacturers and American vendors for lead-laced toys; China deserves more of the blame for its pollution problem. On the question of human-rights violations, Chen claims that "certain hate crimes" here in the free world have gone underreported, while the media has no qualms about trumpeting Chinese atrocities.

On this question, there is simply no comparison between China's decades of lawless, inhuman treatment of its citizens and "certain hate crimes" here in the free world. If anything, Chinese atrocities have been grossly underreported by the Western media.

Chen complains that Western pro-Tibet activists are ignorant of the region's history. She then takes to task the Tibetans for the violence and apparent irrationality of their behavior. She may be right about the ignorance of "the average 'Free Tibet' activist." However, further knowledge of history will only deepen the activist's sympathy with the Tibetans and increase his understanding of why so many Tibetans are no longer willing to be peaceful. There are very good historical reasons why, as Chen put it, Tibetans' "rage and bitterness have boiled over and caused untold destruction."

Historical examples of this behavior abound from Kosovo to Burma to the Warsaw Ghetto to our very own United States of America. Each of these revolutions was in response to relentless oppression, which all human beings have the right to resist by force. The Tibetans' decision to stand up for this right is overdue and entirely justified.

If Westerners love freedom, we will do everything in our power, including (at the very least) exerting pressure from the media, to aid Tibetans in their fight against oppression.

Unfortunately, the United States has abdicated its responsibility as the leader of the free world. The multi-trillion-dollar federal debt we owe to the Chinese blunts our power to influence them; our own misbehavior in our "war on terror" has destroyed much of the moral authority we need to be truly convincing in taking China to task for its crimes.

Peter Johnston is a BYU student and is from Lexington, Mass.

Copyright Brigham Young University 27 Mar 2008