Mark:

But does anyone think we’d be seeing all this commotion over Tibet in Paris and San Francisco if the ChiComs were still in their Maoist stage, sending educated people to work in the countryside and spouting all that revolutionary class struggle baloney? Of course not.

I was hanging out with Tibetans in the early 1980s, when China was just emerging from Maoism. The driving spirits of the Tibet Society in London were old Indian Army and Colonial Office types. There was a sprinkling of academics from SOAS, and a few of the older type of socks’n’sandals Mysterians with Aldous Huxley books in their knapsacks. No real lefties. We made as much commotion as we could.

It’s only because China’s in its Pinochet/Franco stage that lefty “world opinion” now has its knickers in a twist about their hip imaginary Tibetan friends, the monks of Shangri-la.

All right, I’m out of touch, but is “lefty ‘world opinion’” really pro-Tibet? I hadn’t noticed. Can a leftist really get worked up over monks and nuns? And China is a Leninist despotism, nothing much like Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile as I recall them. Above a low level, there is no real private enterprise. The state is supreme. Brezhnev is a closer analogy — Brezhnev with corner stores and Gucci franchises.

If you’re a Tibetan trying to free your country from the clutches of the gangster regime in Peking, you’ll take your allies wherever you can find them.

Damn right.

But the trendiness and superficiality of this “free Tibet” business, from people who couldn’t recognize Tibet if they tripped over it in the street, is striking.

I think that’s unfair. There have been an awful lot of books on Tibet this past 50 years, describing very graphically, often with first-person accounts, the cruelty and cynicism of the Maoists and the tremendous sufferings of Tibetans. A lot of people have read those books and been roused to sympathy for a grossly mistreated nation. I don’t deny there’s a chic fringe to the “Free Tibet” movement, but that’s not Tibet’s fault. Most pro-Tibet agitation arises from genuine, and very well-justified, sympathy.

Prof. Hanson:

Liberals, as are all Americans, are rightly angry over Tibet … But in Iraq, where we do have leverage and capability, an elected government is trying to ward off fundamentalist terrorists of all stripes — and yet from the recent reaction to the Petraeus/Crocker testimonies, liberals seem eager to leave the Iraqi democrats to fend for themselves.

Liberals are scum, and I hold no brief for them on this or anything. Is it not the policy of the administration, though, that Iraqis should fend for themselves? While our entire dilemma in Iraq is their disinclination to do so? Seems to me there’s a false parallel lurking here.