It's annoying that this stuff always comes up but since it has, here goes... Will & Others: for a counterpoint to Parenti's "flawed history of Tibet," check out Joshua Schrei's rigorous dissection here:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/20/18487287.php?printable=true

An excerpt:

In his descriptions of old Tibet, Parenti predominantly draws on the work of four historians - Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart Gelder. The fact that all of these historians had a romantic predilection towards Maoism and drew mostly on Chinese government statistics should surely be cause for concern as far as their legitimacy as source material. One certainly wouldn't trust the Indonesian government's party line on Aceh or East Timor. Or, for that matter, the U.S. government's continued assertion that the Iraqi people welcome the current American occupation. Such manipulations of public sentiment, in which an occupation is presented as 'the will of the people,' are – as a rule – only employed to further the agenda of the occupier.

For the most part, Parenti and the handful of historians who have adopted the view of old Tibet as a despotic feudal theocracy have had little if no contact with actual Tibetans either in or outside Tibet. Therefore, they have no real way of gauging the sentiments of the Tibetan people. Neither Parenti, Strong, Grunfeld, nor the Gelders speak Tibetan - or Chinese for that matter- so the body of historical literature on the Tibet issue that is available to them is extremely limited. Tom Grunfeld never went to Tibet until after his book was published. Anna Louise Strong – a diehard Marxist – was given a tightly monitored Chinese government tour of Lhasa and then went on to proclaim that "a million Tibetan serfs have stood up! They are burying the old serfdom and building a new tomorrow!" One might say that one doesn't need to go to Paris to know the Eiffel tower exists. However, before dismissing an entire culture's history as despotically repressive it is perhaps worth speaking to a few of its representatives.

Instead, Grunfeld repeatedly draws on the writings of a handful of British colonial explorers, who - as explorers often do - wrote down every piece of suspicious folklore and hearsay as fact. Grunfeld's source material for his depictions of Tibetans as cannibals, barbarians, and superstitious fanatics is no more credible than are the testimonials of early European explorers to Africa who spun yarns of three-headed natives. None of these depictions are corroborated by traditional Tibetan, Chinese, or Indian histories, which of course were not available to Grunfeld because of his lack of interest in learning the local language.

Grunfeld also makes extensive use of the writings of Sir Charles Bell, who he quotes regularly and with no apparent regard for context. Bell's stance was actually that Tibetans had been brutalized by the Chinese army and that Tibet was an independent nation of far greater 'character' than its neighbor. This seems to elude Grunfeld, who chops up Bell's sentences in order to isolate the worst and most sensational aspects of Tibetan society and present them as fact. Grunfeld also makes cultural blunders that would make freshmen history students squirm. As award-winning author Jamyang Norbu points out in his brilliant essay The Acme of Obscenity, Grunfeld even mistranslates the Tibetan word for 'Tibet'!

Parenti does little better in his treatment of history, erroneously stating that the first Dalai Lama was installed by 'the Chinese army'. One would presume that a Yale Ph.D. would know the difference between Chinese and Mongols. But apparently, in the Parenti-Grunfeld-Strong school of history, one word is as good as another and a Chinese is as good as a Mongol, as long as the point gets across.

With such evisceration of history as common practice it quickly becomes obvious that none these historians' writings on Tibet exist to illuminate true Tibetan history. In fact, neither Grunfeld, nor Strong, nor Parenti seem remotely interested in the specifics of the culture they're discussing.

And the conclusion:

There is one statement in Parenti's thesis that summarizes how completely disconnected he is from any kind of Tibetan reality. In his thesis, he states that old Tibet was a society that was 'damaging to the human spirit.' Any person who has spent any time with the Tibetan people would laugh at the irony. Being with Tibetans of all walks of life, inside and outside of Tibet, one is always struck by the incredible, contagious spirit of Tibetan culture. From the Khampa drinking songs to the picnics that are the preferred activity of all Tibetans, Tibetan society is known for its passion and exuberance. This spirit is something that grows directly from the culture that Parenti is so intent on debasing. This spirit is what the Chinese government has tried so desperately to crush – making the singing of freedom songs illegal and prohibiting traditional Tibetan festivals. The struggle against totalitarianism is precisely a struggle for spirit, and I'm willing to wager that a populist like Mr. Parenti would find far more joy drinking chang and singing songs with a party of exiled Tibetans than he ever would at a Chinese cadre meeting; sadly, he won't ever get to find out. He's chosen his bedfellows, and more power to him. In the end it is the Tibetan people who will be the arbiters of their own fate. By the time that fate is decided Parenti will be long gone, onto some other issue, and Tibetans will be no worse off because of it.

@MOTISBEARD: Dude, with all due respect (very little, frankly), you don't know what you're talking about. Your 'Tibetan monks protesting Chinese rule = Confederate Colonels protesting Yankee rule" (why Colonels?... not Generals? Or Majors?) shows you're clueless about Tibetan culture and politics. You equate average monks in Tibet today – when the theocratic system you rightly disparage has been gone for decades – to the feudal landowning lords of the monasteries of times long gone. Tibetan monasteries have no real corollary to institutions in the 'democratic' West. And indeed they have always been seats of power, and as such thay have also been – like within any society past or present that you or I can name – places where people conspired to concentrate power, corrupt authority, and repress others for cynical gain. But in Tibet, monks and nuns make up a relatively enormous percentage of the population. I'm really not sure but something like 1/5... maybe only 15%...I'm not sure (Tibetan independence activist and uncompromising gadfly Jamyang Norbu has written about how this phenomenon has contributed significantly to 'holding Tibetan culture back' in modern times). Regardless, Tibetan monks and nuns come from all walks of life and can hardly be said to represent any sort of monolithic social class that seeks the return of feudal theocratic rule. Most of them would not by any means benefit from such a (counter-)revolution. Furthermore, the most important thing you fail to understand is that the monasteries remain the one institution within Tibetan social and political life that the Chinese government have not completely destroyed. Of course, the Chinese have paid spies and infiltrated and reduced the numbers of monks and/or nuns to small percentages of original populations at all the monasteries. But inside Tibet, the monasteries remain a place – the only place – where Tibetans live together in large groups, with a common purpose, spiritually dedicated to a common teacher (guess who?) and maintain the intimacy required to coordinate plans under the most frightening and repressive conditions. No, not a den of counter-reactionaries, dumbass. A group of like-minded patriotic Tibetans (like millions throughout the country) who happen to have the benefit – and recognize the responsibility – of being in a situation that enables them to organize resistance against their oppressors. Your insinuation that Tibetan monks are automatically part of the Tibetan ruling class is absurd and would be comical if it wasn't used so often by pretend-lefties to disparage the legitimate independence struggle of the Tibetan people.