My own biases and distinguishing the good from the evil
I claimed earlier that PRC Chinese are deeply manipulated by PRC propaganda. One could turn this around, how am I manipulated by the western propaganda machine?
It is hard argue about Tibetan independence without understanding my own biases and how I could have been manipulated to think one way or the other. In this article, I delve into how my background shaped my opinions.
I was born in Czechoslovakia just emerging from 40 years of dictatorship “of the proletariat”. When I was two years old, the country split in two — Czech republic and Slovakia. As it often is, the pendulum swung the other way after the revolution and I remember my fascination by the USA in my childhood. It was perhaps the constant exposure to the American culture in form of TV shows and movies. East was something not so good, West was something to look up to.
We Czechs are very little religious. We are not atheist, we just do not think about religion too much. We however celebrate Christmas and our gifts are not given by a fat guy going through a chimney but by Baby Jesus with a magical power to teleport. I actually haven’t thought of the connection to the Bible with Baby Jesus until age of 13 or 14, but I knew much earlier that Baby Jesus is actually my dad secretly slipping out of the room through the second door. We also celebrate Eastern in pretty unchristian way. Despite that, our values are quite Christian: lies are bad, cheating is bad, murder is bad.
I see the general trend towards this rationalist perception of religion around the world. In strongly Christian countries like Spain or Germany, people join church just because it has been a tradition and makes them to be part of a group and socialize. They are not necessarily internally convinced about a guy in the clouds who play chess with the people. I am personally convinced that New Testament and Quran has been forward thinking books setting humanity in the right direction, and might be quite outdated for our time. They also caused lots of unnecessary misery in the past and has been misused to manipulate people.
Czech propaganda and nationalistic thinking
So, what does Czech propaganda look like?
We Czechs feel strong about couple of things: period of the king Charles IV — the king of Bohemia in 14th century, protestant Christian movement Hussites, our first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and the period of First Czechoslovak Republic, Munich Agreement, and Soviet occupation after 1968. Oh yea and of course the beer.
The beer
Starting from the back. Czech beer is certainly very cheap. This allows us to champion all rankings in beer consumption. Is it the best though?
The time of Comrades
Each Christmas my family gets together. My grandma —a very sweet lady — always happens to mention how the life was simpler and better before revolution. And that‘s how the Christmas peace ends — with a big fight.
I was born after the revolution; my parents were just at the university when the students went into the streets in 1989 ringing their keys chanting “We have empty hands!”. My father was there. I still can read in their records they were taking Marxism and Leninism courses at uni, which were compulsory, and they were released from taking the exams after the revolution happened.
I believe this was the most devastating period which seriously damaged Czechs and their mindsets. It will take a while to heal the wounds.
My family started a construction business after the revolution. I grew up in relatively poor North West town and was always considered “the rich kid” in class.
I was a son of a businessman. I always as a kid felt bad about us being (considered) rich, I would prefer to be (considered) poor. Also I felt bad about being on top of the class without trying too much. This is the mindset the communist past gave us.
There is something bad about you if you stick out!
Meanwhile the reality was rather different. My father drew rather average salary but spent 200% time working. We have lived very frugal life. (actually my parents still can’t believe how much I am now wasting with my life style in Singapore)
My family was very bad in running this business; they did not understand capitalism and thought that just doing a good job for almost none profit and some growth was the way. In fact it went bankrupt after the 2007 crisis (this would be for an article in itself). My father wasted his productive years on this, I think now looking back he realizes how naive it was.
Munich betrayal
The city of Munich calls in every Czech the feeling of injustice. We were betrayed by our own allies to give up the most strategic areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 just before the war. We call it Munich betrayal and our teachers teach us it was “about us, without us”. Certainly, looking back, it was pretty dummy decision by the British and French politicians not to support Czechoslovaks just to postpone the war by one year. Chamberlain was celebrated coming home to UK after the resolution for securing peace for the world, we know how things turned out.
There was almost 30% of Germans in Bohemia, in the Sudets more than 50%, living peacefully next to Czechs there for centuries. They had been the wealthier part of the population. However after the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the sentiment was against the wealthy Germans and the racial trenches were deepen. Nazis used the situation and then put the wood into the fire to spark the real hatred among Czechs and Germans. There were no United Nations to resolve this and so “suffering” of Germans was a simple excuse for Hitler to pick up a fight with Czechoslovakia.
Czech Communist Party later used this to stir the hatred against the west. So yea, when I hear Munich I get cramps. I do not see it as a huge injustice anymore, but rather lack of experience in diplomacy on our side, and poor judgement of several top politicians.
Good old times
We Czechs are proud of good old times during First Republic (1918–1938). We talk about how developed we were and we feel that if there was no Hitler, we must have been the richest country by now! We certainly must have been more advanced than Austria! That is why Austrian-Hungarian empire from which Czechoslovakia emerged was called Austrian-Czech empire. Oh wait, it was not!
It is true that we were industrialized more than other countries in the Austrian empire. But. Not because Czechs would be more skilled and more clever than their Austrian or Hungarian fellows. The factories were actually built by Austrians or owned by Germans. Czechs were there just as the “cheap labor”. Can China be considered the most developed country just because 90% of things are manufactured there? No.
The period of First Republic was wild and rather unstable. The government offices changed 11 times the seats. The nation was just building up, recovering from the war, and facing the power struggle. But still, Czechoslovakia kept being a democracy, and that should be something to be proud of!
The topic of First Republic actually stirred big discussions in my family circle. My grand dad got extremely angry for me to doubt how great we were. That is how deeply rooted this is in our minds.
Hussites
Hussites was a movement of protestants who raised after execution of Jan Hus in 1415. Hussites then went on a rampage, sacking and plundering Czech lands. This was a result of exploitation by the Catholic church of their powers. Hussites lived in communes and resisted several crusades called by the Pope. This all ended in civil war — struggle between different factions of Hussites.
This is the kind of story which could be in a movie portrayed two ways. I imagine the scene of a plundered city by Hussites with pile of corpses where a knight arrives on a white horse finding a head of a small girl on a pike. Or I imagine the scene similar to the movie 300: millions of arrows falling down on a tiny brave company of Hussites who just protect their families from the corrupt god-like disgusting figures. They deflect all the attacks just to be betrayed by one of their own.
The latter interpretation was certainly very appealing during the communist era. And it stack. Jan Žižka is now a hero, like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, or Julius Cesar are.
I wonder when Hitler will become one!
Can anyone be unbiased?
We are part of this world, nothing is black and white and we are making our opinions as we go on with our life. The problem is that most of the people base their opinions on very few experiences. It is in fact a wonderful feature of the human brain allowing us to learn from very little data and adapt very quickly to a situation.
This is in fact a bit of a contrast to current trends in machine learning and “deep neural networks”. We throw at the machine lots of pictures of cats to recognize a cat. Then if we want it to also recognize a dog, we must throw at it lots of pictures of dogs. Human brain is different—while it might take a while to learn recognize a cat, it is easy to learn how a dog looks like once you can recognize a cat…
But it’s also very dangerous in nowadays society. People make their opinions based on very little data and a set of values given by very small circle of people in their childhood.
It is so easy to fall into thinking that Muslims want to kill us all. Just look at the media — have you seen any peace loving Muslim out there? No, until you went out and actually meet a real Muslim.
I say, one needs to go out into the world and, with each new culture he encounters, question the history and the culture of his “tribe”.
Question yourself!
According to your background, you will draw different conclusions about questions like Tibetan independence, Ukraine war, or independence of Catalonia. People draw their conclusions before they get the insight in the situation.
How to get the insight?
And here is the core issue. Where to get that unbiased information? Story can be told in many ways, one different word can reverse the meaning. Moreover, our common sense is blindfolded when an information is playing with your biases.
Always question what you hear!
We had one decade of the free Internet when the information were truly democratic. This is rapidly changing and it will be harder and harder to distinguish the facts from the fiction.
History does not matter
The conflict of Saudi Arabia and Iran doesn’t go back only to the Iran-Iraq war in 1980s. It has been rooted in 600-years-old conflict dating back to Persian empire. It is hard to resolve anything under such a deeply-rooted animosity.
The history is just an interpretation. It does not matter as much as it seems.
Good guys, Bad guys
We humans find pleasure in recognizing the evil from the good. Just look at all the James Bond movies. There is always the villain girl who does not look like a villain at first. I have wondered if this is common in all cultures or it is just us, westerners.
I guess this all fails when the definition of “good” is different for different people. Researchers have shown that we have instinctive perception of fairness: related to the life and death, the family, and the tribe. But there are higher types of “fairness” dilemma like paying taxes, immigration, or GMO.
When you were taught what is the color blue. You were shown blue car, blue flower, and blue sky (sky is always blue, right?). In similar way, you learned about what is “good”. Pee in the public — bad, pee in a toilet — good, spit in the street — bad, spit on the grass — good. I am choosing intentionally ridiculous examples.
Hitler — extremely bad. Alexander the Great, Cesar, Napoleon — good. But wait. Didn’t they also cause a genocide? My history teacher certainly did not put it that way. Not even Asterix and Obelix made me believe that Julius Cesar was bad and I felt very sad about his assassination.
There is not always the good guy.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a great achievement of human kind and a good first step in finding the bad guys. Philosophers from many cultures worked on this.
Scientific method has proved a pretty useful tool in terms of determining right from wrong. One must be very careful though; science, when done badly, can be terribly misused; in the past it gave rise to antisemitism for example. Also the issue is you cannot really make random experiments with countries to determine the right from wrong.
Tibetan thought experiment
Chinese see themselves as liberators of Tibetan common folk who were oppressed by the monks. And anyway, Tibet has always been Chinese (And PRC owns all Chinese, right?!). And look at Tibet, so poor and undeveloped. They need us, otherwise they still would be traveling on horses and living in tents.
Wait, but they do still travel on horses and live in tents. And they seem to like it!
So ridiculous for average western ears, right? We westerners always like to cheer for the underdogs. It’s the David and Goliath story deeply rooted in our culture. Tibet here is the David and China is the Goliath. This might come ironic after the European colonial past — at certain point before 2nd world war almost 1 billion people lived under colonial rule.
But could be PRC actually the good guys in this story? Did they really free Tibetans from oppression of monks?
I have posed this question to myself for so many times for a reason: many PRC Chinese, I otherwise respect, deeply believe Dalai Lama is a terrorist and it’s pretty ok what has happened there. They also repeat we should respect each other and compare Europeans showing Tibetan flag to them showing Nazi flags.
Hypothesis: Chinese presence brought prosperity to Tibet
I draw from my own experience visiting Tibetan parts of China in 2016 and 2015.
Tibetans are being highly policed, there are cameras everywhere, and PRC policemen in every small village. There is high presence of army in the region. Tibetan villages have been closed on certain occasions, while communication with the outside world completely cut off (I experienced it personally on Dalai Lama birthday — all internet and international calls were blocked). I saw secret police dressed like Tibetans in crowds during public events. Tibetans cannot travel outside without special permit given by PRC authorities. There are many reports of human rights abuses, many random raids. 148 monks self-immolated, 4 this year.
After Xi Jinping was appointed, situation has been loosened and apparently physical abuses are not so common and more Tibetans have say in the local government. PRC tries to invest greatly in the infrastructure. There is now fast train to Lhasa and big highways are being built in very remote areas. All kids can/must go to school which is for free(with PRC curriculum). PRC has built houses for the nomads where they can spend winter. PRC is funding monasteries (after many have been earlier destroyed by PRC). There are heavy subsidies for farmers, many nomads can afford expensive SUVs and electronics. Some emigrants to India returned to China to find a job.
To me, this certainly does not appear as a prospering society celebrating their liberators. It too much reminds me what was happening in Czechoslovakia after Soviet occupation. There are young people putting themselves on fire!
