Editor's Note: Mickey Z (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Soft Skull Press, 2000). He also contributed a chapter called "Saving Private Power" to You Are Being Lied To (New York: Disinfo Books, 2001), edited by Russ Kick.

I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.
~~ Kurt Vonnegut

As Išve proposed in two previous installments, any human we collectively venerate as a "hero" is typically the product of disinformation, historical distortion, or media hype. Here are two sacred cows I first exposed in my book, Saving Private Power.

Felonious Monk

Myth: The Dalai Lama is an innocent bystander and his fellow Tibetans are all pacifists.

Let's open with a January 25, 1997 Chicago Tribune report entitled "The CIA's secret war in Tibet." This uncommon bit of corporate media candor declared: "Little about the CIA's skullduggery in the Himalayas is a real secret anymore except maybe to the U.S. taxpayers who bankrolled it."

Well, them and the entertainment world's financial elite who are suckered in by the Dalai Lama's little boy grin, esoteric lectures, and pacific persona. However, obscured by the depthless media coverage is the reality that, before the Chinese invasion, the world's favorite male-version-of-Mother-Teresa ruled over a harsh feudal serfdom with the proverbial iron fist. As reported by Gary Wilson in Workers World, "While most of the population lived in extreme poverty, the Dalai Lama lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace." Even the omnipresent holy man himself admits to owning slaves during his reign.

In 1959, when the Dalai Lama packed up his riches and scurried into exile in neighboring India, the CIA set up and trained an army of Tibetan contras. Potential recruits were asked only one, rather un-Zen-like question by Air Force pilots working with the Agency: "Do you want to kill Chinese?" The guerrillas were actually trained on US soil and then airdropped into Tibet by what the Tribune calls: "American pilots who would later carry out operations in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War."

Yeah, those guys.

So, how did Mr. Lama and his boyz get away with this? Lend an ear to what Jamyang Norbu, a prominent Tibetan intellectual, informed the Tribune: "For years, the only way Tibetans could get a hearing in the world's capitals was to emphasize our spirituality and helplessness. Tibetans who pick up rifles don't fit into the romantic image we've built up in the Westerner's heads."

And it works. REM's Michael Stipe told the New York Post (February 11, 1997) that "[the Tibetans have] done it peacefully, without raising swords. No matter what hardship these people were under, they would not raise a hand against the enemy."

Wilson's characterization in Workers World lends a little perspective: "The prevalence of anti-communism as a near religion in the United States has made it easy to sell slave masters as humanitarians. The Dalai Lama is not much different from the former slave owners of the Confederate South."

Talk about losing your religion, eh, Stipe?

While the Chicago Tribune claims that the U.S. government's support for Tibet's spiritual contras ended in the 1970s, former CIA agent Ralph McGehee told Workers World that the Agency was "a prime mover behind the new 1990s campaign promoting the cause of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence." McGehee cites the Dalai Lama's eldest brother, a businessman named Gyalo Thondup, as the key player in the new operation.

Roll over Dalai, and tell Richard Gere the news.

By Any Means Necessary

Myth: Yitzhak Shamir and his ilk always looked out for all Jewish people.

As World War II broke out, the primary right-wing organization fighting the British mandate was a group called Irgun Zvai Leumi, inspired by the ideas of Zev Jabotinsky (a moderate in that he only sought territory on "both sides of the River Jordan").

However, when Jabotinsky agreed to suspend military operations against Britain and even hinted at cooperating with them against the Nazis, Avraham Stern broke with Jabotinsky and formed the Stern Gang, "calling for a state that extended from the Nile to the Euphrates and proposing an alliance with Hitler to bring this about," according to Christopher Hitchens.

Stern's dependable deputy and eventual successor was none other than Yitzhak Yezernitsky, later known as Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel.

In the fall of 1940, Shamir and company secured an agreement with Benito Mussolini whereby the Italian fascist would recognize a Zionist state in return for Sternist co-ordination with the Italian Army when the country was to be invaded. Shortly thereafter, in January 1941, Stern put out feelers to the Nazis and dispatched an agent to meet with two of Hitler's emissaries in Beirut.

"Stern's proposal," Hitchens details, "which was rashly put in writing, began by establishing his ideological common ground with Nazism [emphasis added], expressing sympathy with the Hitlerite goal of a Jew-free Europe and speaking of 'the goodwill of the German Reich government . . . toward Zionist activity inside Germany and towards the Zionist emigration plans.' "

Stern proposed the "establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis," promising that the Stern Gang would "actively take part in the war on Germany's side."

As a result of this pact, members of the group would react favorably in public to any news of Nazi victories. Even into 1941, after Stern was killed in a shoot-out and more became known of murderous Nazi policies, Shamir took control of the Stern Gang and never renounced his support for Hitler's goal of a Jewless Europe.