my miserable inbox

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Burma was renamed "Myanmar" by a vicious military junta that has long since opened the country to pillage by global corporate interests and oppresses the population vastly worse than Saddam ever did to anybody. And, well, look, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate perpetually under house arrest in Burma, is the daughter of the semi-good-guy murdered-long-ago leader of the country, and who believes she is the rightful leader of the Burmese. She lived in England for a very long time, but left her husband and family to return to Burma out of some feeling of hereditary duty... entitlement. The junta, of course, is having none of that, and all she's really managed to do is get a whole lot of people killed. Ordinarily, I wouldn't hold that against anyone who was fighting to liberate the oppressed masses, but I never felt sure that's what she was doing at all. Whereas, I'm damn sure that's what the monks and nuns have been doing.

If we were really trying to liberate peoples from brutal regimes, Myanmar/Burma would have been much higher on our list than Iraq, and so would a lot of other countries. So anyone left with the fantasy of our good intentions about this sort of thing can just drop it now. Enough harm has been done. Way more than enough.

And, this problem did not just now spring whole to the world stage. This video has been up for months, since April... and, as if to bear out my words about the global corporate pillage, the media, not even the online one, sure haven't been making much of it all this time, now have they? Not till the monastics got heavy with them:

This horror has been going on for over a decade, and Israel has been supplying the junta with arms the whole time. Their excuse is that Burma was one of the first countries to recognize them as a state. It just seems to me that a few Americans might have the first part of a clue about who needs our solidarity and who absolutely does not if we stopped going into spins over OJ and Anna Nicole and Britney and Paris, quit going apeshit over even things like the changes in SCHIP, if we had the first part of a clue what was going on in the world. But, no. We're dirt ignorant. I wonder...

cui bono...?