On Monday, the Dalai Lama again asserted that climate change and the global economy were his prime concerns, and he used them as cause to call for “the oneness of humanity.”
The Dalai Lama’s concentration on climate change and desire to essentially indict all nations for the failures of the global economy are consistent with his reluctance to deal with more prosaic issues, such as the freedom of his own Tibetan people. According to the Guardian, in August 2009, the Dalai Lama told Timothy Roemer, the U.S. ambassador to India, that the U.S. should “engage China on climate change in Tibet, recognizing that Tibetans could wait five to ten years for a political solution.”
The Dalai Lama called himself a Marxist in an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt in 2009, asserting:
I still believe I am a Marxist monk. I don’t see a contradiction here either. In the Marxist theory the focus lies on the just allocation of wealth. From a moral perspective this is a correct claim. Capitalism, on the other hand, values the accruement of wealth – the allocation of it doesn’t matter here initially. In a worst case scenario the rich will keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer.
He reiterated his claim that he is a Marxist in 2015, stating, “As far as socioeconomic theory, I am Marxist … In capitalist countries, there is an increasing gap between the rich and poor. In Marxism, there is emphasis on equal distribution.”
The Tibetan spiritual leader called the election of Barack Obama in 2008 “clear signs of human beings being more mature.”