Story of Tibet: by Dalai Lama and Thomas Laird.

Work of several hours of interviews of the present Dalai Lama by Thomas Laird, about Tibet, history and religion, and related subjects.

The present Dalai Lama is impressive in his unassuming and friendly manner and a casual, easy demeanor retaining an inner persona of untold stature - whether this was a spiritual achievement early on or a persona that grew through all the travails of his land and people that he suffered along with them, perhaps those closer to him know better.

During a recent speech of his being telecast, one had this uncanny experience of the television channel telecasting the even suddenly going blank, and not recovering for several hours by which time the speech in its entirety was no longer telecast, although short excerpts were - but one never can know which part one would find something of value. This disturbance was obviously due to deliberate intervention by those that would silence all Tibet and especially Dalai Lama, by whatever means possible - Tibet has suffered an unrecognised genocide while US provided billions of dollars and arms to Pakistan to defeat Soviets in Afghanistan, with not a word of even condolences for the genocide of Tibetans through half a century of Chinese occupation.

The only other time I remember a similar television blackout in recent times is when in Germany once CNN was telecasting a program about German racist attacks on foreigners of the "wrong" colour, including one where a middle aged Indian man was beaten up by German youths and thrown on the train tracks with every intention that he should die there - German trains and so forth are extremely punctual to the fraction of a minute and the youth obviously knew about the timings, and it was a deserted site; only, luckily for the frail beaten up unconscious man lying on the tracks, someone discovered him before he was run over and his life was saved.

As I was listening to this, aghast, with more to come about the rest of the country, suddenly the television went blank, at least as far as CNN goes - it was the only English language channel allowed - and obviously the other channels, German, were not going to telecast any of this. CNN returned several hours later, with no repetition of this program.

So are the victims silenced by the bullies with shoutings, obfuscations, threats, and outright yanking of the television and other communication media, if not by threats or outright genocide.

The German teacher that was obviously on job to endoctrinate us misunderstood at first when I began the topic and blamed "a Jew with a big mouth" for foreigners getting the wrong idea about Germany, since he would not shut up about racist and anti semitic incidents in north Germany.

She gave up on us but not before I was given enough clues about what was going on. We were in effect surrounded by those that would keep watch, inform on us, and attempt to inculcate us with the required attitudes.

Others kept away, even friends of long standing. We gave up on them for good. They were friendly before we visited Germany, very. In their own land they dared not befriend foreigners of English speaking variety.

Fortunately some Tibetans have managed to escape such muzzling by managing to escape to India, and fortunately for the world the Dalai Lama is one of them.