Monday, August 11, 2008

My friends, please, translate it in your native languages and distribute it. Thank you.

TIBET: message from Marco Pannella to the Tibetan militants on a thirst-strike in India.

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"Unfortunately, I just saw the news today that was announced on August 4 that a number of marchers on their way to Tibet have undertaken a thirst and hunger-strike.”
In our urgency, we have sent this message to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and the Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government in Exile.
We invite all to translate this message into Tibetan, Chinese, Uyghur, Montagnard, Cechen, Laotian, Vietnamese, Birmese and Esperanto (and any other languages) and to forward it.
Dear Comrades in the struggle for hope and idealism,
I just read that you have reached the fourth or fifth day in a thirst-strike in your effort to give voice, body and strength to your response of nonviolence, that is, the love of truth, because even those who may allude to the use of violence is reached by your hope and faith and an affirmation of the life-choice of freedom and compassion.
I wish to beg of you to never forget, today and always, that nonviolence means risking life not death. Every death is a defeat, every death in our struggle as well as those which are certain from life’s inertia represent a painful defeat for us.
We must absolutely avoid falling into the temptation of hurling our bodies as a weapon against our “enemy.” The distorted use of nonviolence, especially in the West, has led to this error where striking out with our own bodies against our aggressors transforms them into murderers. We must know and remember that every martyr, each martyr has a human cost matched by that of the assassin that we have inadvertently created. The opposite is true, however, of our honourable pacifism but never passivity, armed with nonviolence and compassion.
Despite my very different personal history, I feel that, more and more, Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is perhaps our greatest spiritual, that is to say vital treasure. For me, it is what is meant when we refer to “soul.”
I am also convinced that His Holiness the Dalai Lama can or could have made political mistakes with his government. At least as far as I can discern from his own statements regarding reforms that he has imagined over the last ten years for a liberated Tibet, not only from its violators, its occupiers, but also regarding the harmonious balance between science and nature in respect to the Earth, politics, and Humanity.
I think I understand, as I’ve had the honour and love of being heard and listened to by Him even in criticisms, that even this Master remains well aware that understanding and acting on prophetic signs are steps to be taken with the gentlest, most cautious care and love.
With these thoughts, with this struggle like that carried out by us at the Nonviolent Radical Party with our comrades and our Uyghur, Mongol, and Montagnard comrades and those oppressed peoples in Vietnam, Laos, Birmania, Chechnya, and North Korea, we are all beginning to better understand that the struggle for Tibet, along with all the others in the territories of the far East and those not so far, is also a conscious struggle for a Free China.
Our very force excludes caving in to desperation, to anger, to scourn and the blindness of rage, to cruelty, to the violence of the powerful, for millenium the embodiment of madness induced by the impotence provoked by illusions of violence. These are the thoughts at the heart of our Party and you inspire us. You have our gratitude and you are our hope, even though you may lose hope yourselves sometimes, and, for this, now and tomorrow, I will continue to lay myself out besides you and implore you: never choose death, never die for a lack of prudence and hope, for anger and hate against those who oppress you and want your deaths, the end of what we are and for what we hope.
Even in a thirst-strike, we are responsible for all good and all bad, of all life and all death, with which we will ultimately create. I await your reply with faith, love and strength. For today, for these hours and these days so common, but also for the rest of our lives and our nonviolent struggle. I truly hope that this reaches all of you, without exception, alive, and with this opportunity to grow together in the strength of the truth and nonviolence.

http://www.radicalparty.org

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