by Michael O. Billington and Paul B. Gallagher

Construct in your mind's eye two contrasting images. Keep in mind that, although both of these images have specific referents in history, one in the past, the other in the future, nonetheless, each is universal in nature and in time, as potentials imbedded in current history. The first image is the great Eurasian Land-Bridge, sometimes called the New Silk Road. Picture multiple, rail-centered development corridors, arising out of China, and winding through Asia, Central Asia, India, the Middle East, and on into Europe to the north and Africa to the south. Picture the statesmen and the scientists of the three great cultural centers of Eurasia--the Christian West, the Islamic world, and Confucian China--holding great councils, poring over maps, and formulating projects to solve the scientific and technological problems which will arise as the Land-Bridge unfolds. Picture also new universities, in the center of new cities which have appeared along the various prongs of the Land-Bridge, where professors and students from all cultures are gathered to investigate the science and art of Classical civilizations, and are probing the frontiers of knowledge.

Now set a new stage, for a very different drama. Picture several mounted armies of nomads sweeping out of the Mongolian steppes, along the Silk Road, south through China, southwest through the Islamic nations, and east through Russia and into Europe, leaving ancient cities along the way burned to the ground, the population butchered, canals and irrigation systems destroyed, while eliminating every sign of civilization's progress. Note that the hordes stop short of invading Venice, and that Venetian traders, under Mongol protection, are carrying on "free trade" among the carnage of Christendom, Islam, and Confucianism, transporting gold from Baghdad and China, and slaves from Russia, to fuel the Mongol Empire. Note also the stench of renewed death, 100 years after their conquest, as the bubonic plague follows the trail of the Mongol armies, sweeping across Eurasia, reducing the already weakened population by nearly one-half.

The first image, the Land-Bridge (see Figure 1), although not an entirely new idea, is now in process in several parts of Eurasia, and has, for the first time, the potential to become a reality, as is well known to readers of EIR. The second image, that of the Mongol scourge of the 13th and 14th centuries (see Figure 2), is an historical event, but one which is already "in process" again today, in only somewhat altered form, as the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" are spreading death across the globe, and preparing for a final, devastating assault. As in the 13th century, today's horsemen are guided by the Venetian oligarchy, although it has moved its base of operations to London.

It is therefore no accident that London is intent on disrupting the Land-Bridge, by undermining the unity of the Chinese nation, and sabotaging the growing alliance between China and the United States. Nor is it accidental that a major focus of the attack on China is the London-centered campaign to "defend the traditional culture of Tibet from the oppression of Chinese occupation." As we shall demonstrate, that "traditional culture" of Tibet, as practiced under the theocracy of the Dalai Lama, was, in fact, the last surviving remnant of the Mongol-Venetian terror which nearly wiped out the three great centers of Classical civilization.

It is not necessary to imagine Mongolian or Tibetan hordes again laying waste to Eurasia--the British have other means of carrying out such physical destruction. But the ideology represented by so-called "traditional Tibetan culture" is a valuable tool in the hands of the new barbarians in the House of Lords, a tool which has been carefully nurtured over the centuries by the oligarchical powers. So, today, the nest of non-governmental organizations running the destabilization of China, with help from the whores of Hollywood, are under the control of the same British intelligence apparatus which sponsors world terrorism, as has recently been exposed by the leaders of several nations, and documented in EIR (see EIR, Jan. 2, 1998, pp. 60-69).

- The Eurasian Land-Bridge -

Before delving into the history of Tibet's "traditional culture," let us review briefly the two major efforts in modern history to rebuild the ancient Silk Road, bridging the Eurasian continent, and uniting the cultures of Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity. The first of these efforts was that of G.W. Leibniz and his associates at Jean Colbert's Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris at the end of the 17th century. In collaboration with the Jesuit missionary-scientists in China, Leibniz campaigned to ally Europe with China, under the great Qing Dynasty Emperor Kang Xi, in both cultural and economic joint projects. Venetian intrigue within the Catholic Church succeeded in sabotaging that effort, leaving China isolated and, ultimately, vulnerable to British warships and opium dealers in the 19th century.

A second attempt was made at the end of the 19th century, when the leaders of the American System in Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party moved to end the British colonial destruction of Asia (and much of the rest of the world). The primary weapon in their arsenal was transcontinental rail development, based on the model of America's transcontinental railroad and city-building projects after the Civil War. They wanted to "girdle the globe with a tramway of iron," in order to "advance civilization [and] develop the material wealth of people."1 They proposed single-gauge rail lines across Russia, into China, along with telecommunications systems and industrialization. Again, the "Venetian" party in London succeeded in crushing the initiative, although the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed, in fits and starts, by 1917. The father of the Chinese Republic, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a strong supporter of the American System of physical economy, took up the fight in the 1910s and 1920s, and is a key inspiration for the Chinese leadership's renewed efforts today.

- Tibet and the Mongol hordes -

The connection between Tibet's "traditional culture" and the Mongols' devastation was not tangential, but central to the functioning of the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan solidified control over the various Mongol tribes in 1206, burning and looting his way across northern China. But before he entered China, he first carried out, in 1207, the only peaceful conquest of the entire Mongol era: that of Tibet. Genghis Khan sent envoys to Tibet, offering political protection in exchange for religious guidance. Ogadai Khan, his son, strengthened these ties by forming a "priest-patron" relationship with the leading Lama of Tibet (this predated the emergence of the Dalai Lama's sect). This "priest-patron" arrangement meant that in matters of politics and military affairs, the Khan sat higher, while in matters of religion, the Lama sat higher. In other words, the official priesthood of the greatest genocide of history was that of the "traditional culture" of Tibet!

The Mongols seized northern China in 1210, then turned their armies westward. Their policy was to leave no organized population or economic capacity behind them which could potentially threaten their flanks. Thus, nearly every city which fell to the Mongol hordes, whether surrendering without a fight or not, was burned to the ground, and the population annihilated. Waterworks and irrigation systems which had, over centuries, created agriculture and cities out of deserts, were destroyed. Several areas, such as parts of present-day Afghanistan, have never recovered.

In the 1220s, the Mongols conquered Persia and the areas around the Caspian Sea. In 1238, the Mongol commander Subotai and his chieftains met with Venetian emissaries at the Venetian trading city of Tana on the Sea of Azov (the northern extension of the Black Sea), and signed a treaty: full freedom for Venetian intelligence and trade operations in the Mongol Empire, including their projected thrust into Europe, while the Mongols would destroy the trading cities of Venice's opponents. Subotai's forces immediately crossed the Sea of Azov on the ice and destroyed Genoa's trading city, Soldaia. Two years later, in 1240, the invasion of Europe commenced, beginning with the destruction of Kiev and Budapest, two major riverine trade centers not under Venetian control.

In 1258, Baghdad was razed and the population butchered. In 1260, the hordes reached the gates of Jerusalem, only to withdraw due to the death of a leading Khan. Kublai Khan (the fifth ruler of the Empire after Genghis) finished the conquest of China in 1278, crushing the Southern Song Dynasty, which had been the center of the greatest era of science and culture in Chinese history.

The Mongols moved their global headquarters to present-day Beijing, ruling China under a strict racial caste system. Kublai Khan was convinced by Chinese collaborators that more Chinese wealth would be available in the form of loot and taxes if he discontinued the practice of destroying everything and everyone in his path. The gold and other wealth of the Song Dynasty was carted off to the West to sustain the conquests of the various divisions of the Empire. Over the 150 years of Mongol rule, the population of China collapsed from 115 million to 75 million. By the time of Kublai Khan's reign, the leading Tibetan Lama was the Khan's personal instructor. The "priest-patron" relationship was further strengthened, lasting throughout the era of the Mongol destruction of civilization, East and West.

Western readers should not make the mistake of blaming the devastation of the 13th and 14th centuries entirely on "Asian barbarians." The "joint project" agreement signed between Subotai Khan and the Venetians in 1238 was not the first contact between the oligarchs of the West and the nomads of the Central Asian steppes, nor with the Tibetan Lamas. In fact, the various ethnic regions of Central Asia had, for centuries, been a primary center of activity for the gnostic cults and heretical Christian sects centered in Persia. These so-called Chaldean cults, described by St. Paul as the "Whore of Babylon," were used by the Western oligarchy against the influence of Platonism and Christianity. With the rise of Venice in the 10th century, the Venetian oligarchy inherited these Chaldean cults, incorporating them into their global trade and intelligence networks. It was this Western oligarchy which controlled the substantial influence of these cults along the Silk Road in Central Asia.

Between the 7th and 9th centuries, Tibet had a sort of empire of its own, ruling over parts of present-day Yunnan, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Xinjiang provinces in China, including areas dominated by the various Chaldean cults. The Tibetans, at that time, were not Buddhists, but practiced a religion called "Bon-po" (which is also the name used by Tibetans for their country), an admixture of primitive animism and magic. The Bon-po priests not only accommodated themselves to the Persian mysterial religions (and to Buddhism and Daoism from India and China), but they also adopted many of their gods and rituals, assimilating them into their Bon beliefs. In fact, the mythical founder of the Bon-po religion was believed to have been born in Persia!

The largest and most pervasive of the Persian-based cults in Central Asia were Manicheanism and Nestorianism. A review of the nature and influence of these two sects will demonstrate the ideological unity between the Western oligarchy and the Mongol Khans and their Tibetan priests.

- Mani and Nestorius -

The Manichean cult was founded by Mani in the 3rd century A.D. in Persia. Perhaps the most famous adherent to Manicheanism was St. Augustine, who had been a leading spokesman for the sect until his celebrated conversion to Christianity, under the guidance of St. Ambrose, in 386. Since that time, the term "Manichean" is often used not only for the followers of Mani, but for any of the myriad gnostic cults which preach a strict division of the world into a spiritual realm and a material realm. Such sects reject absolutely the Platonic-Christian view that the power of reason provides man with the capacity to master the lawfulness of the physical universe, to "fill the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion over nature." The gnostic sects insist that knowledge of the laws of nature were totally beyond mankind's conceptual capacities, or (essentially the same thing) that such knowledge were only accessible through magic or mystical ritual practice. Such an ideology served the purposes of feudal oligarchs, by conditioning the population to accept their lot as serfs or slaves, living a life not far removed from that of their cows and horses.

Mani himself was sponsored by Shapur, the Sassanid King of Persia, who also sponsored the dominant Zoroastrian priesthood of Persia--the same "Magi" (magician) who had been the common enemy of Philo Judaeus and St. Peter in Rome. Mani viewed himself as a chosen messenger of God, one of several such chosen people granted supernatural powers to guide the human race to enlightenment through mystical rites. He told Shapur: "Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by a messenger, called Buddha to India, in another by Zoroaster to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereupon this revelation has come down and this prophesy has appeared in the form of myself, Mani, the envoy of the true God in the land of Babylon."

(Compare this to Ogadai Khan, the son of Genghis. At the height of the Mongol invasions of Europe, in 1240, Pope Innocent IV sent two Bulls via Franciscan friars to Ogadai. Ogadai replied: "What do you mean, we should become Christians? I am the instrument of your God.... We, worshipping God, have destroyed the whole Earth from the East to the West, in the power of God." A later Khan, Mangu, wrote to Louis IX of France, "In heaven, there is but one eternal God. On Earth there is but one Lord Genghis Khan, the Son of God." Mangu's court was full of Manicheans and Nestorians.)

Manicheanism spread westward into the Christian world, and eastward into India, Central Asia, and China. By the 6th century, Manicheans dominated the trade routes, serving as both the traders and the diviners for most of the Central Asian tribes, recruiting large portions of some of these tribes to their beliefs.

- Nestorius -

After the 5th century, the Nestorians became an even more influential force along the Silk Routes of Central Asia, often closely allied with the Manicheans. The Nestorians came from an explicitly Christian source, named after Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople between 440 and 450, who was declared a heretic and exiled to Persia. The sect emerged from a great schism in the Church in the 5th century, precisely over the issue of the nature of man and God. The debate arose in the era of Roman Imperial domination of the Church, following the declaration by Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D. establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. Church authority resided more in the Roman oligarchy than in the Church leaders themselves. Various heresies arose, with Imperial support, which satisfied the oligarchical view of a stratified society, with a small elite governing over the mass of peasants considered as little better than beasts, as property.

The battle lines were drawn. On the one side, St. Augustine, after renouncing Manicheanism and converting to Christianity, developed the notion of the Trinity, with Christ fully God and fully man through the Holy Spirit. On the other side, Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople, argued that the eternal essence of omnipotent God, and the temporal, earthly, or sensuous nature of man were completely different, opposed, and incompatible, and that therefore the human being Jesus Christ could not partake of God's nature ("image and likeness of God") while yet being man. This was the Manichean duality in a new form, reducing man to a blob of protoplasm, devoid of the divine spark of reason (as seen today in the "low church" cults of Pat Robertson, et al., sponsored directly by the British oligarchy).

Pope Leo I (440-461 A.D.), basing himself on the works of St. Augustine and his mentor, St. Ambrose, mobilized Christendom against this new form of "the Whore of Babylon." In the second half of the 5th century, the entire churches of Persia, Syria, and Arabia passed into a kind of captivity to the Persian throne and its oligarchical priesthood, the Zoroastrian Magi. This was the Nestorian heresy.

The Nestorians became a Persian "state church" in the 6th century, under the supervision of Zoroastrian priests. In tandem with the Manicheans, it spread across Asia into China.

- Tibet and the Mongols -

Both Manicheanism and Nestorianism melded easily with the shamanist and Daoist ideologies of Asia. In China, the Confucian tradition had been severely weakened by the time of the Tang Dynasty (7th to 9th centuries), and Daoism prevailed. The Daoist Yin-Yang, cyclical view of history was practically identical to the Manicheans' World of Light and World of Darkness, and Mani was accepted as one of the several reincarnations of Lao Tze (as was the Buddha).

Similarly, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which emerged from the meeting of Mahayana Buddhism from northern India with Daoism in China, recognized Mani as the Buddha of Light, while Nestorianism was called the "religion of the sacred texts of Persia," or "the religion of light." These were the influences assimilated into the Tibetan Bon-po religion during the 6th to 8th centuries, before the Tibetans relocated back into Tibet proper in the 9th century. At about the same time, a series of Buddhist tantric yogas from northern India travelled to Tibet, bringing with them the most mystical beliefs and practices of Buddhism, often mixed with rituals and gods of the Hindu cult of Shiva. The Bon priests learned these beliefs and rituals, but also retained their existing gods and rites, including those assimilated from Persia. (_EIR_ will shortly publish a further examination of the roots of Tibetan Buddhism.)

Over the coming centuries, this synthetic form of Buddhism became predominant in Tibet, even as it disappeared in India. When Islam swept through India in the 11th century, Buddhism collapsed, leaving Tibet as practically the last repository of the extreme tantric mysticism of the Buddhist-Shiva cults of northern India. The official Chinese history of the Tang Dynasty, compiled contemporaneously, described the Tibetans as follows:

"They sleep in unclean places and they never wash or comb their hair.... They worship the heavens and believe in sorcerers and soothsayers. They do not know the seasons, and their year begins when the barley is ripe.... Their music is conch shells and drums. They have no writing for official purposes.... For punishment, even for small faults, they take out the eyes, or cut off the feet or the nose."

By the 11th and 12th centuries, the Nestorians and Manicheans had been expelled from China, as the Song Dynasty brought about a revival of Confucianism and a renaissance of science and culture. The Persian sects, however, remained predominant in Central Asia, and increasing numbers of the ethnic tribes of that region came under their influence. The Mongols, in particular, were dominated by Nestorians and their Manichean brothers. Genghis Khan, who created the Mongol armies and launched the destructive conquest of the civilized world in 1207, created an aristocracy which was largely made up of Nestorian Christians!

The Nestorians were also busy selling the glories of the Mongol "Christians" to the Vatican and to the nations of Europe. Working by this time with the oligarchical power in Venice, the Nestorians sent letters describing the Mongol Khans as "Prestor John," the legendary Christian warrior king who would arise from the East and rescue the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels. Marco Polo, the Venetian, was sent to China during the Mongol reign of terror. His famous book heaped praise on the greatest butchers of history, while further feeding the "Prestor John" myth. Several real Christians who were in China during the early days of Mongol power sent severe warnings to Europe to prepare for almost certain invasion by the Mongol hordes. The Franciscans condemned the Nestorians and Manicheans as a single, large, influential current within the Mongol administration.

- The Dalai Lama -

Thus did Venice, both through collaboration with the gnostic cults of Persia and through direct contact with the Mongol Khans, oversee the destruction of Christian and Islamic civilization, sustained by the loot from the destroyed Confucian culture of China.

In the 14th century, the Black Death spread out of the Tibetan border regions of China, carried by the Mongol armies, putting the final touches on the depopulation of China, Islam, and Europe. Mongol control over China finally collapsed in 1368. The Tibetan Lama's priest-patron relationship with the Mongol Khans survived the collapse of the Mongol Empire, but in a far more weakened form.

At the end of the 14th century, a new sect arose in Tibet, called the Geluk, or the Yellow Hats. The Geluk based their teachings on the same core of synthetic Tibetan beliefs, but founded their own monastery, and fell into civil and religious conflict with the other sects. After about 100 years, they adopted the tradition of choosing a "reincarnation" of their deceased head Lama, a practice which already existed in other sects.

In 1543, the third reincarnation of the head Lama of the Yellow Hats travelled to Mongolia, reestablishing the priest-patron relationship with the head Khan. They exchanged honorific titles: The Lama praised the Khan as the "King of Religion, majestic purity." The Khan dubbed the Lama the "Dalai," a Mongolian word for "ocean." Henceforth, the Geluk chiefs were known by their Mongolian honorific, the Dalai Lama.

This Dalai Lama (the third, since they posthumously applied the title to his two deceased predecessors) lived out his life in Mongolia, and upon his death, lo and behold, he was reincarnated into the grandson of the Mongol Khan!

A Mongol army then escorted the new Dalai Lama back to Tibet, and declared him to be head of all Lamas, superior to the other sects. Other Lamaist sects resisted this imposition, and the King threatened to take action, recognizing that, with the Mongol army behind him, the Dalai Lama represented a threat to the King's political power. A series of wars ensued, with different Tibetan sects aligning with different Mongol clans. In 1640, a Mongol army defeated the anti-Dalai Lama sects, captured and executed the King, and conferred supreme political authority over Tibet to the (Fifth) Dalai Lama. Henceforth, Tibet was ruled as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama or his regent, enforced by Mongol military power, although this arrangement was regularly interrupted with intrigue and war between forces connected to one or another Mongol clan.

- Kang Xi -

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, during the reign of the great Qing Emperor Kang Xi (the collaborator of Leibniz and the Jesuits), the Yellow Hats called in a particularly fierce faction of Mongols, the Dzungar, to reestablish Geluk power. The Dzungar proved to be most ungracious guests, however, when they proceeded to loot and pillage the country.

Emperor Kang Xi viewed the Dzungars as the only Mongol force with the will and the potential to challenge China. When reports of the Dzungar takeover of Tibet reached Beijing, Kang Xi sent an army into Tibet, where it was welcomed by the Tibetans. The Chinese created a protectorate, stationing troops, while allowing continued rule by the Dalai Lama under Chinese oversight. Chinese troops and officials remained in Tibet until 1911, when the Qing Dynasty fell to the Republican movement led by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.

- The British role -

In the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, with China under the effective control of British opium traders, the British moved into Tibet. A military mission from British India in 1903, led by Francis Younghusband, crushed all resistance, and imposed an "Anglo-Tibetan Convention," leaving a puppet Chinese leadership in command. The British nurtured the 13th Dalai Lama, and later the 14th (the current one), encouraging them to prevent development, to prevent even a single road from being built into Tibet. They wanted Tibet to be a total buffer between republican China and British India--but, even more, they wanted to retain the "traditional culture" of Tibet, of "Shangri-la," the "Valhalla" of the Nazis, as the last bastion of the ideology of the Mongol hordes.

- Tibetan monks under the Dalai Lama -

This report will not discuss the details of the 20th-century British intrigue in and around Tibet. We will end instead with a brief description of the life of the Tibetan people under the Dalai Lama's theocracy.

Before 1949, approximately 2 million Tibetans, an estimated one-fourth, entered the monkhood. The majority of those who were not monks were herdsmen or peasants, working as serfs on land owned by the government or by one of the thousands of monasteries. There was almost total illiteracy among the peasantry, and even, in the monkhood, only a small number were taught to read and write. Life was essentially unchanged from the era described above by the historians of the Tang Dynasty. Wooden plows and yaks were the only aid to a peasant's brute-force labor, and until the 20th century, there were no wheeled vehicles in the country. Justice was entirely at the whim of the nobility and the Dalai Lama, since there was no organized system of courts. Dismemberment was a common punishment for crimes. Polyandry was common, such that a wife was shared with all the brothers of a family. The corpses of the dead were cut up and fed to the dogs and the vultures, while human skulls and bones were used in rituals, as utensils and musical instruments. The art of Tibet reflects the fixation on death, subjugation of commoners by monstrous deities, and orgiastic "enlightenment."

But most revealing is the life of the monks themselves. At the age of about ten or twelve, young boys entered the monkhood. They immediately became the target of fierce competition between organized clubs of monks, fighting over who would get to use the boys for their homosexual pleasures. The clubs, rather like street gangs, with their own "colors" and costumes, were called dob-dobs. To get ahead rapidly in the religious hierarchy, a boy would need the "good luck" to be chosen by an older, established monk as his sex slave. This would assure advancement, although the boy would also have to service the friends of his owner/monk when so instructed.

The higher monks were pledged to celibacy, but that pertained only to restrictions against the penetration of females. Since the land was generally owned by the monasteries, or by the government-priesthood in the Dalai Lama's entourage, the monks would work as supervisors of the peasants and herdsmen, who belonged to their estates. Others ran businesses in Lhasa or in the villages, or were traders. The nation's wealth, although very limited, was entirely in the hands of the religious nobility.

The leading British Tibetan scholar and diplomat through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Hugh Richardson, took up the cause of "Tibetan independence" from China, after the flight of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959. Richardson cried that "a heavy curtain has descended upon Tibet ..., a state of cultural degeneration [!] to which this whole people has now been reduced." What Richardson and the British prize most in the old Tibet, as a model for the world, is captured by the closing statement of his 1968 book, A Cultural History of Tibet: "Apologists [for Chinese policy in Tibet] may point to claims of material and mechanical progress, but even if these benefits ever reach the Tibetan population, the fact remains they were not sought by the Tibetan people themselves, and ... represent the total negation of Tibetan civilization and culture."