folks, how can you know the history simply based on a movie?

Can children not learn their language from their parents? That seems like the best way, since it would be their primary language at home. Who needs to spend an hour a day learning a language they would be using for 5 or 6 hours a day at home with people they know?

Why do you always state "Tibetan Buddhists" as those who are being unfairly treated? It has nothing to do with them being Tibetan, or Buddhist. It has to do with political dissent. If the Chinese government thinks that someone is engaging in acts that threaten their power, they will act as they do with any Chinese citizen, be it Han, Uighur or Tibetan. They are ruthless, oppressive, and authoritarian when it comes to political dissent, this much is true, and it is a sad state of affairs, but it has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with their being threatened politically.

The Chinese government is also guilty of ecocide everywhere in China, and in some places much worse, like the northern industrial centers. Try and find clean drinking water in someplace like Harbin and you could pass for Sherlock Holmes.

I'm reading this again and I still don't see where your point is.

You say, "Children are allowed to learn the Tibetan language in school, but it comes at the expense of taking other classes, other classes which are required to attain an education which will help them post-school. "

This is how it is in every nation with any kind of organized education system. Any class that is not part of the core is done "at the expense of taking other classes, other classes which are required to attain an education which will help them post-school".

Are native Americans given thorough instruction in their native languages in the U.S. ? No, not simply because it is not part of the national requirement, but also because finding people to teach those languages is a difficult enough task as it is.

Nothing is preventing Tibetans from speaking Tibetan, or teaching their children to speak Tibetan. This is far from the situation of Native Americans, where many were actually taken from their parents and taught in boarding schools, where they would abuse them if they spoke in their native language. Or with Aboriginal Australians, whose parental rights are STILL being undermined as a matter of policy by the state.

If the Tibetan Government in Exile REALLY cared about preserving Tibetan culture and language they would put a lot of the money they get toward training teachers in Tibetan language in order to return to Tibet to teach there. As it stands, however, they have a paternalistic attitude that only THEY have the real Tibetan culture, and Tibetans inside Tibet are just poor unfortunate souls who sit and passively let their own culture degenerate. This whole "guardians of culture" attitude is much too elitist for my liking.

As for the Congo, Vietnam, or any other example you can state, these have no bearing on Tibet, and only serve to confuse the issue. Tibet is not the Congo, nor is it Vietnam, the Balkans, Rwanda, Armenia, Palestine, or any other example you could state. They are all subject to their own specific set of circumstances which necessitate different actions be taken.

The Congo, and the "use of the nation as an imperial gain" has no bearing because European colonialism is completely different from what we are talking about in Tibet. Tibet declared independence in the early 1900s during a time when China was in the grips of dealing with not only several European powers, who imposed their own set of colonial agreements on China, but also were fighting wars with Japan, and a civil war with Mao and the communists. Tibet held onto that "de facto" independence for as long as it took the communists to oust the Guomindang. The KMD, now in Taiwan, to this day STILL claims Tibet as a part of China. It was NEVER recognized by any state besides the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo as an independent nation. Even the British, when they took Tibet as a protectorate of the Empire in the early 1900's dealt through China, and ultimately ceded control of it BACK to China after they left.

It may be debatable as to how far back Chinese control of Tibet goes, but one thing is for certain, it was at least controlled by China for a very substantial period during the Qing dynasty (the Chinese govt claims all the way back to the Tang, but that's pretty loose), about 300 years, then there was about 30 years of "de facto" independence where Tibetan claims of independence were the least of China's worries. If the U.S. plunged into all out war with Canada (hypothetical of course) and Alaska declared independence, don't you think we'd try to rectify that once things got back on track?

Nationalism is nationalism. The idea that Tibet can only be free through independence is just simplistic and naive. Independence should be the least of the GIE's concerns, but it is not, because they can't get beyond that mindset that says, "I am different from you, and so I have to have my own state". If that is the case then why not give every ethnic minority in China its own state? The same people who defend multiculturalism here in the U.S. blindly follow the ethnic nationalism of Tibetans. As if in one situation people should be color-blind, and live together in peace, but in another they should be as separate as separate can be. You should hear some of the things I've had Tibetans in exile tell me. They'd be considered borderline racist here in the U.S.

On top of that, the GIE claims all of "cultural Tibet" as its border, which includes many parts of neighboring provinces that have definitely been controlled by China for a LONG time, and which have a very mixed Han/Tibetan (and other minority peoples) population and have for some time. If Hawaii suddenly voted to declare independence, you might rightly think that was pretty logical, but for them to also lay claim to California, because there are Hawaiians there too, that would seem pretty nuts wouldn't it? And yet no one thinks that the GIEs claim to "Greater Tibet" is unreasonable.