It bears mentioning that things seem to have gone entirely to hell in Burma, with reports now coming out that the death toll in the crackdown has been higher than it initially appeared.
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Worse
01 Oct 2007 04:44 pm
Comments (14)
Very sad story, illustrating why Gorbechev was the reason the Soviet Union fell. The linchpin of a brutal dicatatorship, the thing it needs if it will persist, is a dictator willing and able to be brutal. If Gorbachev had any steel in him, the USSR would still be around. It seems Burma in it's present state will be around for a while.
1. j mct: BS. Ceaucescu, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
2. It also seems (unless the situation has since changed), that the Burmese junta is holding the U.N. envoy. At the very least, last I heard, no one had heard from him in at least 24 hours.
Are you going to post anything on the new Iraq casualty numbers?
The question is, who pushed the monks' asses out into the heavy traffic and let them be run over?
1) The Bush Administration's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) ,according to several news reports, was involved in stirring up the Burma protests:
See http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/09/09/myanmar_junta_links_west_to_protesters/
2) The NED's website itself notes that the NED was spending a shitload in Burma last year on "internal organizing/coalition building" --including educating " monks and Buddhist lay people about the nonviolent struggle for democracy in Burma". So how is that working out?
Ref: http://www.ned.org/grants/06programs/grants-asia06.html#burma
3) Back in 2003, Ron Paul gave a rather blistering assessment of the nature of the NED:
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/paul79.html
4) Earlier, David Ignatius at the Washington Post made a similar --albeit less critical -- judgment: http://inthenameofdemocracy.org/en/node/132
Basically, the idea seems similar to what happened in Florida in 2000. Our elites promote "democracy" only because they can't rig an election if no one bothers to hold one.
5) And their opposition to dictators seems to be focused solely on those dictators that turn down bribes by Big Oil. Which explains why Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983 and turning Saddam over to be hung by a mob in 2006.
Maybe the Atlantic could ask the National Endowment for Democracy how much it spent last year on bringing democracy to the oil dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan.
1. j mct: BS. Ceaucescu, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
Hitler and Mussolini went down by losing a war. Ceaucescu went down from the absence of Soviet backing. The Soviet Union would have either have started a war or collapsed unwillingly I expect (just like I expect China will), but it would have occurred later and/or been a lot blodier.
We (and the Russians) got lucky with Gorbechev.
I expect the causualties in Burma will be quite high. This is a full-scale suppression campaign and they ain't fuckin' around none.
max
['It'll just take a while for the information to dribble out.']
And then they wonder why normally peaceful people espouse radical movements, terrorism and head for the maquis...
who pushed the monks' asses out into the heavy traffic and let them be run over
Of course, the entire population of the world just sits around diddling themselves until the CIA tells them what to do.
This asinine post is excellent proof that American exceptionalism is alive in places other than the right wing. Only an American -- no, only an American jackass -- could believe that nothing happens, or could ever happen, without America's hand in it.
Some American jackasses believe that America is behind everything good. Others believe that America is behind everything bad. I believe that both are sick with nationalistic conceit.
As a postscript to sunsin's remarks, it's worth noting that the Associated Press article that Don Williams links to does not contain a "news report" that the NED was involved in stirring up protests in Burma. It contains a news report that the Burmese junta claimed that the NED was behind the protests -- no investigation of the NED's involvement was ever done by the AP.
This is an outrage, and I don't understand why we haven't come down much heavier against Burma in every non-military way possible before now, let alone starting immediately tomorrow.
The Myanmar junta that is destroying Burma and its people is the lowest form of scum and should be frozen out of all economic relations and made to bear a very heavy price.
Unfortunately, with their energy resource reserves and a long history/precedent by all nations of coddling terror and dictators, it's not clear what can be done if China and India refuse to do anything.
This is an issue to be seriously contemplated because we have a situation that is developing into severe structural repression with no global compunction to do anything about it because of diminishing finite energy resource, and those who actually care about human rights, classical liberalism, democracy, etc. should be throwing the bank at investing in more sustainable, renewable energy technologies that also have the benefit of decentralizing the grid and allowing for more community control of power.
Re Doc Memory's comment "It contains a news report that the Burmese junta claimed that the NED was behind the protests -- no investigation of the NED's involvement was ever done by the AP."
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Of course, right below the AP link I put a link to NEP's website in which NEP ITSELF admits it spent a lot of money promoting "democracy" in Burma last year, but Doc Memory's blinkered vision/mind did not allow him to recognize plain English.
Don, nobody is disputing that the NED spent money inside Burma. As you point out, it's on their own website.
What's under dispute is whether they in any way were involved in organizing or inciting this month's protests. So far, the evidence actually presented for that assertion is zero: only the claim of the Burmese junta, and your approving citation of them.
You'll forgive me if I don't take a dictatorship's claim that its domestic opponents are being controlled by "outside agitators" at face value. That's an old song and dance, and we've heard it many times before.
Burma Accuses CIA of Assassination and Terrorist plots
"Accusations of frequent visits to insurgent camps along the Thai-Burma border to provide military aid and training were also thrown at former Military Attache to Burma Robert Helvey"
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/httpwwwnarinjaracomdetailsaspid1434/
before dismissing this as another junta's propaganda, find out...
who is col helvey, ?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein_Institution#Swarming_Adolescents
Comments closed October 15, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Yes, and the regime is rounding up Buddhist monks, putting them in boxcars and shipping them to concentration camps in the north of the country.
Posted by Nour | October 1, 2007 5:02 PM