Myanmar

One advantage to reading newspapers days, weeks, or even months late (for a long time there I was buying the Sunday New York TImes and just letting it pile up) is that you get to approach and encounter significant events on your own.  Without the crowd din of the obligate, immediate response, you can hear yourself think.  You can feel something in response to the event itself rather than because you are entrained by the rush and roar of collective feeling all around you.

That's also the disadvantage.  When events are in full flood you feel like some sort of narcissistic refusenik for continuing to focus on whatever petty concerns are right in front of your own nose.  You miss the warmth and catharsis of the collective response and you feel guilty for not adding your drop to the wave. 

But the wave ebbs, and the event does not.

So I'm just now beginning to educate myself about what happened and is still happening in Myanmar.  Just two thoughts right now:  one is how shocking it must have been for the Burmese people to see soldiers beating monks.  The violation of this last taboo, the dropping of the last pretense of reverence, must have been deeply psychologically disempowering.  The generals might as well be space aliens for all the human feeling they have.  They have made it clear that they will truly stop at nothing, and nothing is sacred.  That's shock and awe.

The other is a head-shaking wondering what on earth drives certain power-hungry people to possess a country to the point of impoverishing it to the bone.  (The Kims' long death grip on North Korea also comes to mind.)  It seems as mindless as the behavior of parasites that destroy their host.  Of course, this is stupid.  The poorest land contains enough wealth to vastly enrich a few if they are brazen enough to monopolize it.

I guess the great thing about capitalism is that if your drive is to vastly enrich yourself, you can do it without directly impoverishing others.  (Anticapitalists, of course, will immediately point to outsourcing, sweatshop and migrant labor, and the destructive extraction of cheap natural resources.)  You can add value to the game instead of simply redistributing it in a zero-sum way.  Of course, you're not "simply" adding value either.  You're not making something out of nothing.  Nothing is that simple.  But all things considered, running Monsanto is still a less malignant expression of the will to power than running Myanmar. 

Comments

[Tom Strong]

I find the junta which rules Burma to be very mysterious. They make a point of isolating the country and preventing democratization, but it's not clear what ideology informs their choices. At least with Kim, there's clearly a cult of personality thing going on. But the rulers of Burma since 1962 have typically avoided the limelight, AFAIK.

[Adrian]

Actually, when it comes to Korea, I view the South Koreans as the inhuman ones. (I'm living in Seoul this year, btw). I'm amazed in my daily conversation how little the people here care about those who are supposed to be their countrymen. There is far more hatred for America than for the Northern government. And do you remember the case of the Korean missionaries who went to work in hospitals in Afghanistan and were kidnapped? Well everyone here just thought they were idiots - 'why put your life in danger to go help people?' 'they got what they deserved,' etc. Anyway, my point is, I'm shocked by the lack of compassion shown by people here.
I compare it to the Civil War, where countless people were willing to die for some abstract conception of the freedom of strangers of another race. Meanwhile, although South Koreans have more in common with North Koreans than abolitionists had with slaves and although North Koreans actually live in worse conditions than the slaves did, nobody in South Korea seems to really give a damn, let alone willing to die for the cause of freedom.
Anyway, very weird, is all.