I suspect that not many people in Western countries have a clear picture of ‘His Holiness’ the Dalai Lama.
Like so many Disney characters, this cute and cuddly fairytale character has a very dark side.
In fact, it is not clear how much of him isn’t dark, and cold, and empty.
This Plastic Bonze is an extremely cunning and manipulative snake-oil salesman who knows how to push the right buttons in the ‘hearts’ of the decadent, irredeemably corrupt, spiritually moribund, intrusively pious, morally degenerate sentimental metropolitan bourgeoisie.
There is no ‘love’ in his worldview.
Only empty, soulless nihilism.
He is a warmongering eugenicist, misogynist and homophobe.
And I am not surprised patriotic Chinese hate him.
He has managed to worm his way into the affections of those who are easily pleased, and whose spirits are easily flattered.
The Dalai Lama is a classic example of that most toxic of historically recent aberrations:
A religious figure who is also a humanitarian.
The Dalai Lama is in love with ‘Humanity.’
It goes without saying he is thereby in love with himself.
The particular as universal.
A true ‘World-Historical figure,’ as Lena Dunham says of Hillary Clinton.
From supporting the Iraq War, to conducting shameless eugenical apologetics, to making off-color jokes about women, to patronizing gay people in a nauseatingly petit-bourgeois ‘hate the sin, but love the sinner’ kind of way…
‘His Material Highness,’ as the late Christopher Hitchens called him, is a fake, a fraud, and true ‘lover of Humanity.’
However, those who support individual liberty, and who value the Greatness of the Individual Good over The Greater Good, cannot remain fooled forever.
Many of you will be undeceived!
The easy way or the hard way, it matters not.
There’s an old saying that the Devil clothes himself as an angel of light.
So also does this dodgy medieval princeling-cleric clothe himself in the false regalia of spiritual beauty, of compassion, and of high truth itself.
Plastic Bonze, Hollywood Lama, call him what you will.
But please do not insult your own intelligence, and that of everyone listening, and call him ‘holy.’
Originally published on Thunderstruck (a journal I used to run on Medium).