RE: removing critical articles from the internet,
I found reference to an article in the Boston Globe, I think, about a court case involving a monk (or lama?) in Boston, titled something like "Tibetan Monk Rapes Local Woman". But when I clicked on the link, the article was gone. Was probably several years old anyway, or older. Who makes those decisions, to remove an article? The server? The Globe? Someone else? How do these things work?

Oh, newspapers pull articles off after a while. Maybe nobody's reading them. Maybe they need the server space. Maybe the case was dismissed. There are many reasons, but in general newspapers only keep lead articles up for at all long.

Eloquence and scholarship are naught when used to serve an evil cause.

Remembrance Day is a week away.

Here is a sample of rhetoric from a younger Winston Churchill to justify a bad faith stance towards Turkey during the Great War and the chain of decision making that led to up to the slaughter at Gallipoli.

[www.britishempire.co.uk]

It is ugly for young and idealistic persons to be treated as expendables, whether in service to a guru's lust or to the ambitions of statesmen.

Some background history about the political allegiances of past Dalai Lamas.

This is from a review, published in Tricycle Magazine, Fall 2009, of a book

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia--by James Palmer
New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009
288 pp., $26.95 cloth

Baron Ungern von Sternberg sought to support the Tsarist Romanov regime against the Bolsheviks. Digusted by the defeat of the Russian navy by the Japanese navy in 1906, and what he saw as the lack of discipline among the aristocratic military, Sternberg, after 1917, inspired by his own explorations in esotericism, conceived the project of creating a kingdom in Buddhist Mongolia to defeat the revolution and support the Tsarist government.

And we see that various high lamas, including earlier Dalai Lamas, were political animals. And feared any ideology that threatened their power. In earlier centuries they benefitted from the patronage of successive Chinese emperors, in return for keeping Tibet free from interferance from either Imperial Russia or the British.

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Working with the sparse historical knowledge of the Baron’s shaky psychological moorings and spiritual pursuits, he illuminates the malleable imagination of power, to which Buddhist politics have never been immune.

One of Ungern’s most powerful allies was the 13th Dalai Lama, who, fearing communist inspired revolution in Tibet, sent troops to fight for the White cause. (Following the British invasion of Tibet in 1906, the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia, where he coexisted tenuously with his religious equal, the Bogd Khan.) But the growing Red Army was too powerful even for this alliance. After a Bolshevik defeat that all but sealed his capture, Ungern veered south. His plans for a modern Mongol empire dashed, he plowed ahead, bedraggled troops in tow, toward the last destination in his deranged grasp at spiritual significance—the towering Himalaya. Eventually, betrayed by his own men, he was executed in 1921.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg was undoubtedly psychotic, but he was also human, and his terrible schemes were informed by the most basic assumptions of the culture he grew up in. Easy as it is to dismiss him as the putrid reminder of a barbarous past, the exotic representations of the East that drew Ungern to Mongolia continue to appear in all sorts of Westernized spiritual practices. And as Donald S. Lopez, Jr., reminds us in his groundbreaking book Prisoners of Shangri-La, romanticized misinterpretations of Tibetan Buddhism—and Buddhism generally—are a burden to the individuals expected to uphold the mirage of Oriental authenticity. The Bloody White Baron serves as a warning against clinging to such projections too dearly.

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The Baron’s alchemic mix of spirituality and anticommunist passion inspired his storming of Mongolia. He assumed the role of Shambhalan savior from the north, charging to defend the Bogd Khan (Holy Emperor)—Mongolia’s Buddhist political figurehead—against the recently vanquished Chinese and growing Bolshevik and Japanese threats. When Ungern won Urga, the Mongolian capital, in 1920, he took the religious inheritance no less seriously than the political, declaring himself a reincarnation of the Fifth Bogd Gegen (Holy Shining One). The swastika-emblazoned ruby ring he wore, a gift from the Bogd Khan, was important to him for both its anti- Semitic and its Buddhist symbolism.

But the Baron’s prejudices were strategically narrow in scope. In the attack on Mongolia, he enlisted a broad range of help: his brutally disciplined White cavalry included Japanese, Mongolians, White Russians, Cossacks, and Buriats (Mongol Buddhists of Siberia), many of them forcibly conscripted.

This has been getting much discussion on other venues.

Here is the full text of the Tricycle review

The Bloody White Baron

On the flat Earth of the imperial imagination, most anything is possible. Constraints of geography and time do not limit fantasies of conquest so much as they arm them with rich and varied paints for a worldly canvas. But the many sprawling empires of history, whether Mughal, Japanese, or British, have not arisen easily or overnight. While the unending struggle for dominion may appear in the historical record as so many moves on a chessboard, each pawn’s final farewell is much less graceful in real life.

James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron, a debut work of popular history shortlisted for Britain’s John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, exhumes a historical figure who ended up as a casualty of his own grand scheme: a man who dreamed up a new world order and then chased it across the desolate steppes of northern Asia only to meet his own miserable demise. With this biography of Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, Palmer unearths an easily forgotten episode in early 20th-century Eurasian geopolitics. As the Baron’s story unfolds, the margins of both history and human psychology take center stage in a work that unravels more comfortable accounts of modern nationhood and spirituality.

At first take, there is nothing especially unusual about Ungern’s military life. A minor aristocrat by birth, he rose through the ranks of the counterrevolutionary White Russian army to assemble his own cavalry and briefly conquer Mongolia. It was the Baron’s motivations that distinguished him from any number of sword-wielding European contemporaries— he mounted this eastward crusade in the name of Buddhism. In a short-lived but hugely violent campaign to win a kingdom from which to overthrow the Bolsheviks, Ungern sought to reestablish a monarchical order that he would follow to the Pure Land or death.

Ungern was born in Austria in 1885, to a German mother and an Estonian father of German heritage. Upon his parents’ divorce, the boy was sent with his father to Estonia, then a part of the vast Russian empire. There, his privileged childhood as a son of marginal nobility seems to have been lonely, filled with war games and punctuated by a string of school expulsions. Palmer’s description of the youthful Ungern is unsettling: “I imagine him not to have been a bully as such, but, as his later behavior suggests, rather one of those pupils of whom even the bullies are afraid, the kind who violate the unwritten rules of childhood fights, whom nobody wants to sit near, and who cannot be trusted with compasses or scissors.”

Unsurprisingly, Ungern jumped at the chance to fight for Tsar Nicholas II in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. The tall, athletic soldier reveled in the violent clashes and ascetic discipline of the trans- Siberian cavalry campaigns. Upon Russia’s overwhelming defeat by the Japanese and the popular rebellion of 1905—including the infamous Bloody Sunday, when the Imperial Guard gunned down demonstrators in St. Petersburg—something in Ungern clicked. As the monarchic order spiraled downward, he saw that a reversal of fortune for the upper classes would require more than young blood to contain the uppity peasantry: it called for the rise of a new order to resurrect the old.

Like many upper-class Russians at the time, Ungern dabbled in various spiritual philosophies inspired by Eastern religions and occultism. Although nominally Lutheran, he had connections to the Theosophical Society of St. Petersburg, and while little is known about his motivations or involvement, Palmer tells us that he subscribed to an “esoteric Buddhism.”

The notion of an Eastern “Yellow Peril” that had exploded in 1890s Germany worked wonders on Ungern’s worldview. He caught the bug, but his spiritual investment in “the East” turned it upside down: in his campaign, the “Asiatic hordes” would play the role of heroic ally and redeeming counterbalance, an otherworldly answer to the pleas of the floundering aristocracy.

The Baron’s alchemic mix of spirituality and anticommunist passion inspired his storming of Mongolia. He assumed the role of Shambhalan savior from the north, charging to defend the Bogd Khan (Holy Emperor)—Mongolia’s Buddhist political figurehead—against the recently vanquished Chinese and growing Bolshevik and Japanese threats.

When Ungern won Urga, the Mongolian capital, in 1920, he took the religious inheritance no less seriously than the political, declaring himself a reincarnation of the Fifth Bogd Gegen (Holy Shining One). The swastika-emblazoned ruby ring he wore, a gift from the Bogd Khan, was important to him for both its anti- Semitic and its Buddhist symbolism.

But the Baron’s prejudices were strategically narrow in scope. In the attack on Mongolia, he enlisted a broad range of help: his brutally disciplined White cavalry included Japanese, Mongolians, White Russians, Cossacks, and Buriats (Mongol Buddhists of Siberia), many of them forcibly conscripted.

Palmer picks up on the historian Isaiah Berlin’s idea that individuals born on the fringes of great empires are prone to “borderlands syndrome.” He situates the Baron in a lineage of iron-fisted rulers—including Na poleon (Corsican), Hitler (Austrian), and Stalin (Georgian)—who have fallen victim to what Berlin characterizes as “exaggerated sentiment or contempt for the dominant majority, or else over-intense admiration or even worship of it.”

This view, however, places the burden of history on a few small souls, and The Bloody White Baron, like many biographies, often seems to be doing just that. In the unrelenting parallels to Hitler that Palmer offers as evidence of Ungern’s world-historical significance, the Baron’s “hunger for power” looms larger than life—and indeed, larger than history. Still, the depth of that hunger is intimidating.

In taking Ungern’s devious fantasies seriously, Palmer offers more than an inventory of military excursions. Working with the sparse historical knowledge of the Baron’s shaky psychological moorings and spiritual pursuits, he illuminates the malleable imagination of power, to which Buddhist politics have never been immune. One of Ungern’s most powerful allies was the 13th Dalai Lama, who, fearing communistinspired revolution in Tibet, sent troops to fight for the White cause. (Following the British invasion of Tibet in 1906, the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia, where he coexisted tenuously with his religious equal, the Bogd Khan.) But the growing Red Army was too powerful even for this alliance. After a Bolshevik defeat that all but sealed his capture, Ungern veered south. His plans for a modern Mongol empire dashed, he plowed ahead, bedraggled troops in tow, toward the last destination in his deranged grasp at spiritual significance—the towering Himalaya. Eventually, betrayed by his own men, he was executed in 1921.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg was undoubtedly psychotic, but he was also human, and his terrible schemes were informed by the most basic assumptions of the culture he grew up in. Easy as it is to dismiss him as the putrid reminder of a barbarous past, the exotic representations of the East that drew Ungern to Mongolia continue to appear in all sorts of Westernized spiritual practices. And as Donald S. Lopez, Jr., reminds us in his groundbreaking book Prisoners of Shangri-La, romanticized misinterpretations of Tibetan Buddhism—and Buddhism generally—are a burden to the individuals expected to uphold the mirage of Oriental authenticity. The Bloody White Baron serves as a warning against clinging to such projections too dearly.

Aaron Lackowski, Tricycle’s associate editor, is the Books in Brief reviewer.

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Some quoted reviews from Amazon UK for The Bloody White Baron

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars You think war is mad? Wait until you read this., 23 Mar 2010
By (name omitted) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME) This review is from: The Bloody White Baron (Paperback)

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Ungern Sternberg is a fascinating and deranged individual. The story touching on such major events as the Russo-Japanese War, World War 1, The Russian Revolution and the civil war in China, it also helps show the rise of murderous anti-semitism. As the author keeps reminding the reader many of the stories sound almost medieval but this was of the time of the motorcar and telephone! It also reminds you how awful the 1920's were for most of the world's population where innocents were savaged by roaming bandits of one side or another across Asia and as far as Poland.

and--Readers take note: this same reviewer states:

Quote

The book also does a good job of showing the less glamorous side of Buddhism too (the reviewer writes) don't recall any of my Western Buddhist friends mentioning the high mortality rate of earlier Dalai Lamas).

[www.amazon.co.uk]

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A character too crazy for fiction, 15 April 2008
By

There is a perception in the modern West that Buddhism is perhaps unique amongst the world's major faiths in not lending itself to the kinds of wars and conflicts that, for example, Christianity and Islam have been such prominent players in.

And while its certainly true that Buddhism has been a relatively peaceful religion, history, and certainly this history (of Baron Ungern-Sternberg), shows how even the dharma can be turned towards violence, and how ethnic divisions, superstitions and unjust conditions can be exploited by cunning leaders to turn even the most peaceful doctrine into a permission for bloody conflict.

Ungern was a curious mix of Christian, occultist and mystical Buddhist wannabe, driven by a belief in prophecy and armoring himself with magical charms (who can say they didn't work? He certainly never took a bullet on the battlefield with those charms hanging from his neck). In some ways the template for the kind of Aristocratic European Occultist that would later become such a stock character by way of the Nazis, his life and exploits make for fascinating reading, even if only as a cautionary tale about the kind of beast that wars and prejudice can create out of man.

[www.amazon.co.uk]

RE: the perception that Buddhism isn't given to wars and conflicts--

I've been reading "The Story of Tibet", which is based on a series of conversations with the Dalai Lama, and in it he freely discusses the armed conflicts that used to go on between different monasteries, and he says that when the Chinese invaded Tibet during the 13th Dalai Lama's tenure, soldiers for Tibet's defense were recruited from the monasteries. The monasteries always had large caches of weapons, and a cadre of warrior monks. He explains that to join the effort to defend Tibet, the monks would give back their vows and robes, and afterwards, would retake their vows.

I've heard of the White Baron. That book was first reviewed in Snow Lion Press, I think, after it first was published.

There is a first person account from a monk who went to war and then retook his vows:

[www.theparisreview.org]

It is on the other DL thread here:

[forum.culteducation.com]

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ThomasKent
Oh, newspapers pull articles off after a while. Maybe nobody's reading them. Maybe they need the server space. Maybe the case was dismissed. There are many reasons, but in general newspapers only keep lead articles up for at all long.

Thank you, this is helpful to know.

The solution to this is...find a library that has the relevant newspaper issue on microfilm.

Then go there and spool through the microfilm until you find what you're looking for and snap a picture of it. The librarian in that section of the library will show you how to look for the microfilms and how to operate the reader. And you'll get to meet many interesting people who are at the nearby desks, doing this kind of boots in the mud research.

(Allow for parking time, fees, and make sure to find out the library hours and how much it will cost to make photocopies)

There is life and information to be had, prior to the Internet.

Thanks, corboy. One can also contact the newspaper's archive dept. directly. I was going to try that first.