Why Everyone Loved Tibet
The Aryan's Psychedelic Portal to Asia
Men with grey in their beard remember Tibet. Women who once read Alexandra David-Néel remember Tibet. If you hang around herbalists and folk music festivals—which I do on occasion—you might still hang a prayer flag or ring a singing bowl. But the social movement that united Western governments, Hollywood celebrities, and orgiastic college students to raise tens of millions of dollars is undoubtedly dead.
The Ngram graph of the “Free Tibet” slogan shows a rise from the 1980s, a peak around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and a steady decline until today. While China has grown richer and more hated in this period, global attention has shifted to Xinjiang and Taiwan. What we're seeing isn't just changing priorities but a falling out of love—the death of a particular cultural fascination. Where did it come from, where did it go?
The Tibet movement flourished in an era of ambiguous Asian status in Western racial politics. Before Asians became decisively aligned with the anti-woke coalition, Tibet served as neutral ground for ideological exploration. Was it feminist to denounce harem initiations inside Buddhist centers? Was it social justice to question racial theories that claimed connection between Whites and oppressed third-worlders?
Today, to even ask such questions is absurd. The Schelling point of woke is black bodies, not Eastern spirits. Movements unable to frame themselves in terms of a material, black-against-white struggle will catch no fire. In the evolution of campus protest chic, the Tibetan khata marked an unstable transition between tie-dye’s cosmic ambiguity and the militant certainty of the keffiyeh. It asked, free us… please?
Sex, Drugs, and Secular Buddhism
From the 1960s, hippies looked to Eastern religions for spiritual insight. Some of them studied Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, which demanded austerity and rigor. Tibetan Buddhism, with its promise of quick enlightenment, appealed to the sex and drugs crowd. Timothy Leary’s 1964 guide The Psychedelic Experience claimed to be “based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead”, although Buddhist teachers did not endorse LSD use.
Secular Jewish Buddhists like Allen Ginsberg and Sharon Salzberg repackaged Tibetan religion as therapeutic self-discovery with a social conscience. Just as Thomas Jefferson had stripped the miracles to create his Jefferson Bible, so the “JuBus” extracted meditation from its mystical context. Today's stress-reduction apps and corporate mindfulness programs are the direct descendants of this synthesis.
Traditional Tibetan Buddhism is hierarchical and martial in its imagery: teachers speak of “conquering” ignorance, “wielding the sword” of wisdom, and showing “warrior-like bravery” in facing yourself - language that mirrors Islamic concepts of jihad as spiritual struggle. The Kalachakra tantra even foretells an apocalyptic war where a Buddhist king from a lost country defeats barbarian unbelievers.
The guerrillas in Colorado, who the CIA trained in the ‘50s and ‘60s à la Bay of Pigs to fight Communist China, probably interpreted these prophecies literally. But when Chögyam Trungpa came to America in 1970, he found an audience among antiwar activists, feminists, and environmentalists who reimagined the militancy as metaphorical. The split between the esoteric and the exoteric suited him just fine.
Why don’t we see more of this strategic hypocrisy in today’s left-wing intellectuals? On the whole, they have gotten more stupid. The “JuBus” who took their racial rhetoric seriously ceded leadership positions to their moral betters—African American women—and it is this faction which dominates the Democratic Party today. It is now more common to see Tibet rhetoric from China hawks or even stranger types.
Ooh, Hyperborea Is a Place on Earth
With its warrior monk tradition and nomadic lifestyle, which contrasts sharply with the settled Han farmers on the foothills, historical Tibet appeals to what we might call the “BAP” faction. These are men alienated from their Christian heritage, disgusted by gender-egalitarian material abundance, and in search of a different spiritual path. These days, many choose European neopaganism or Islam.
The more adventurous types of yesteryear elected for the Buddhist sect adopted by Genghis Khan’s descendants—Vajrayana. One was Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a refugee from the 1917 Russian Revolution. He praised Tibetan Buddhism as a manlier alternative to Christianity, which he saw as Jewish poison for Aryan souls. Ungern-Sternberg traveled to Mongolia and aided local theocrats in seceding from China.
In Weimar Germany, a “Study Group for Germanic Antiquity” searched for the origins of the Aryan race in a remote northern region, known in Herodotus’s histories as Thule or Hyperborea. The occultist ideas of the Thule Society were inherited by the Nazi SS-Ahnenerbe organization for “ancestral heritage” research, which organized an expedition to Tibet in 1938. The racial line of inquiry was interrupted by World War 2.
After the war, overt Hitlerism was suppressed, but Esoteric Hitlerism as an intellectual tradition continued through Tibetophiles like Miguel Serrano and Savitri Devi. In his 1984 book Adolf Hitler: The Last Avatar, Serrano explicitly connected the lost cause of an independent Tibet with the lost cause of the Third Reich. Both were united in spiritual warfare against the Jewish forces of rationalism, capitalism, etc.
There was a spiritual bridge set between Berchtesgaden and Lhasa. The proof of this was so can be found in the tragic destiny of Tibet, which fell as an independent nation after the physical defeat of Germany. In a world controlled by Jews the destruction of Tibet, accepted internationally, could not be a coincidence.
But Serrano was Chilean, and the audience for a spiritual connection between Europe and Tibet through a Collective Aryan Unconscious was small—until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Books like The Black Sun of Tashi Lhunpo popularized more esoteric symbols. Used by the Azov Battalion and other Eastern European groups, the Black Sun resisted popular stigma and state censorship of the better-known swastika.
Since 2014 and especially 2022, the most dedicated of these spiritual warriors have fed themselves to the meat grinder of trench warfare against Russia. Among European and white nationalists more broadly, esoteric theories have lost their utility now that overt Hitlerism faces less stigma. Like their Marxist opponents, today's far-right grounds its racial theories in materialism and scientism rather than mysticism.
Free Tibet became Free Palestine
After Mao divested the Tibetan theocracy of temporal power in 1959, many monks set up shop in Western countries, exporting the doctrine of “guru yoga”, or complete devotion to the guru. Practically, this meant students felt obliged to have sex with their guru as an act of devotion. In the case of Osel Tendzin, which became a scandal because he had AIDS, most of his male consorts thought of themselves as straight.
In neighboring Bhutan, traditional religious imagery - like the phallic symbols of the “Divine Madman,”1 a 16th century monk who challenged orthodoxy through shocking sexual behavior - has been repackaged for luxury tourism. Western visitors take pictures at the fertility temple and drink ara rice wine in boutique hotels, titillated by tales of historical polyandry. It’s edgy, but not too edgy. Brown, but not too brown.
By the mid-2010s, Free Tibet was no longer competitive in the attention economy. The Dalai Lama’s statements alienated wokes - like suggesting in 2015 that a female successor should be “attractive” to be useful; or declaring in 2016 that “Europe is for Europeans.” By 2024, the act of self-immolation, which was associated with Tibetan separatists, was associated with an American Zoomer screaming “Free Palestine.”
Social media has also elevated a grug racism that marginalizes intellectuals who draw fine-grain distinctions between “good” and “bad” Asians. A few holdouts like Bronze Age Pervert still romanticize Tibetans as part of a broader “warrior-priest” project, but in an era of immigration anxiety and mass TFR awareness, minority nationalism is a toxic asset. Free Tibet was a perfect product for the ‘90s, but now, nobody’s buying.
Drukpa Kunley. You may recognize this as the pseudonym of a British far-right poaster.
Good post. Not a lot of space for Buddhism in the modern west. Buddhists have no political influence in the West, unlike Hindus and Jews. Buddhism is too alien from Christianity to offer an olive branch to Western Conservatives, but at the same time it finds itself fighting the same Islamic civilization that the Western Left will defend to the bitter end. JuBu is no longer necessary for hippies because they have completed he Cult of Psychoanalysis that was still a work in progress in the 1970s. Also, a lot of Hippies went anti-woke, and are now anti-vax "Orthodox Christian Mystic" conspiracy theorists. And as a cherry on top, the Kung Fu genre is completely dead. A lot of Americans actually believed that Kung Fu could give you superhuman combat abilities until MMA became popular (albeit, I think MMA is not really that accurate a representation of the "best" fighting style)
Good piece. Close parallels with its cousin Hinduism and its changing reception in the west. From yoga, meditation and Upanishads to cow worship and casteism as India and the Indian diaspora’s politics has changed. Indeed, it’s the NatCons who’re willing to see actually-existing political Hinduism as it is. That being said, the Tibetans do have every right to craft their own path to modernity. The argument against ‘theocracy’ (a common Chinese argument that you seem to echo) is real, but not the one against Tibetan sovereignty and self-determination.