Originally published at: Aung San Suu Kyi deposed by military in Myanmar coup | Boing Boing
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One can’t help but think that events in the US encouraged this. Every time you lose an election it must be because the other side is cheating.
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Wow, that’s a lot to unpack. I can’t even with these people anymore.
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It’s a bit weird to call a military coup “cancel culture”
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The highly questionable capitalization did not help with that unpacking.
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Myanmar is finally following in the footsteps of America when it comes to democracy…just not in the right direction.
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The relationship between Aung San Su Kyi’s release and ascendancy and the fate of the Rohingya is difficult to unpack. The military didn’t really actively start attempting genocide until after she was released but before she became president? Is that right? She’s clearly been under threat of a coup for her entire presidency.
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Especially as the army has cancelled democracy (or pseudo-democracy), not any one individual. Aung Sang Suu Kyu being a self-cancelling hypocrite doesn’t mean that the coup doesn’t make any difference.
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I refuse to refer to that country as anything other than ‘Burma’; and can a country that is, for all intents & purposes, run by the military legitimately call itself a ‘Democracy’? What a disappointment Aung San Suu Kyi turned out to be.
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In situations where everyone’s bad, feel free to cheer for no one
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the army already ran the country, they had ultimate veto power in parliament, this is just a streamlining. Also Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like most world leaders, is a bad person.
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Meanwhile, Trump laments that it almost happened for him.
He is now looking to hire the new Myanmar leader for his 2024 campaign committee.
You’re not the only one to make that connection.
Extreme steps were necessary, [state TV] said, because of voter fraud. The General had stopped the steal.
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Burma was under military rule in the sixties. I don’t think that changed until relatively recently, and even then, apparently not.
This isn’t a new thing, it’s a reversion to the old.
Long one because this is a situation I’m close to. TLDR yup it’s messy and no it isn’t cancel culture and indeed Aung San Suu Kyi has not won fans abroad re Rohingya but there are shared beliefs with the people who have voted her back in.
This is definitely not cancel culture coming to depose DASSK. It’s the guys who conducted the genocide and are already sanctioned by the US (among others), brushing aside the results of the November elections as “fraud.” Sound familiar? Except they can get away with it.
To the best of my recollection that is right. Also they had rounded up all the student activists and put her under house arrest circa 1988-1990 (and then intermittently for the next 20 years) and around that same time they were destroying hundreds of Rohingya mosques, not to mention ongoing incursions to try to secure their control of many ethnic regions that were calling for independence. That was part of the gov’t pattern, a xenophobic and ethnophobic political appeal to the ethnic/religious majority of Burman Buddhists who do not believe the Rohingya have an ancient historical presence or traditional land rights, though academic and older English surveys and texts say otherwise.
In terms of referring to it as Burma vs. Myanmar, Tom Pepinsky’s explanation was great. To counter accusations of being only focused on the interests of the Burman majority, they changed the name from Burma to Myanmar, which is actually more generous to the full span of nationalities than referring to it as Burma which was in part a construct of the British empire (similar to other empires everywhere who chose the winning ethnicities and thus the “national identity”). There are 32 or so major ethnic groups and something like 232 subgroups.
I will say nearly all Burmese including all of the leaders of the 1988 uprising have thrown in the towel on that and now call it Myanmar, including Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party the NLD. It used to be painful for me to hear Americans pronouncing that word to my Burmese friends, all of whom were asylees and many of whom bear torture scars from their time in the junta’s prisons or have had friends or family members “disappeared.” But again, they have survived and now have bigger fish to fry.
Well, this much is true: they do look at the current pulse of the world and attempt to mimic it to justify their own crackdowns. Not just the military but some of the average citizens. One told me “if you look at a map you can see this (Rohingya) is Isis wanting to establish a caliphate spanning the coasts from Africa to Indonesia, and Myanmar is the big missing piece” and also that Isis is living/recruiting within the completely ravaged, apolitical communities of the Rohingya. Zero evidence, no Isis style events ever in Myanmar. But, in terms of the timing of yesterday’s events, it is specifically to do with elections which were held for the first time in five years.
It may appear they’re exploiting the fact that Biden is just finding his footing but that’s really not it. Um, I have to qualify that. Actually, not Biden per se, but it is very possible they planned this election date years ago to coincide with US elections in order to do just that for whoever was the transition team. For everything that makes the world think these people are idiots in the Burmese military, they are very shrewd in how they time their actions. And, the exact timing of this coup is because the swearing in of Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of her party was scheduled for TODAY.
Something that endeared Aung San Suu Kyi to all of the other ethnic groups (at least non-Rohingya) was that she toured the entire country as they prepared for the 1990 elections and in each region she wore the regional dress instead of the traditional clothing of the Burman Buddhists. She is kind of a god figure, as the spirit of her father General Aung San hovers over the entire nation. A close family friend from one of the other ethnic groups was thought to have similar properties (she had escaped death while her husband was killed and went on to lead troops against the regimes in the jungles - having previously had the title of Miss Burma). I have seen, up close, people from Burma meeting her and meeting Aung San Suu Kyi and in both cases they were absolutely trembling - especially the older ones who remember the full histories.
It was her father Aung San who as a student leader approached Japan in the 1930s, received training and aided Japan in taking control of Burma from the British. Under Japanese rule, things were much worse and he realized he’d made the wrong bet, THEN negotiated with the British to liberate the country from British rule in exchange for helping them kick the Japanese out, which he did. So in short, although Britain ultimately gave up just about their entire empire by 1949 anyway, Aung San is widely credited at having accomplished it in Burma. And he was the founder of Burma’s armed forces. So you get these two groups dueling over his legacy - his daughter, who had been living in Oxford until the chaos of 1988, and the military who claim to be following in his footsteps and “never abandoned the country.”
Yeah, it’s a mess.
I do find it interesting that while DASSK calls it Myanmar now, the US gov’t does not.
The “elephant in the room” as it were is Covid. In previous revolts the military have shot doctors and nurses who were trying to treat the citizens they had also just fired on. So a lot of doctors left the country, and it took time to rebuild the medical knowledge and infrastructure. Overall that has been accomplished and they do have modern medical (and dental practice) infrastructure in the main cities as well as fairly reliable traditional medicines.
Military leaders, beginning with Ne Win in 1962, have been notoriously anti-academic. You’ll hear of all kinds of superstitious and befuddling practices in the military based on crazy ideas. I’d describe some but they’d need a trigger warning. So there is great worry that they’re going to screw up the Covid response. I’d been seeing some of the craziness early on (like “eat this fruit and you won’t get covid” kind of stuff) in Burmese feeds, but that seems to have gone away. And, at least the regime isn’t talking like the President of Brazil yet.
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After the military coup borrowed voter fraud as their excuse from America, QAnon is now grabbing it back and citing it as proof.
Around and around it goes…
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Is Myanmar one of the those nations where f_c_book IS the internet?
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I’d been curious about what was going on. Thank you for the very cogent explanation.
Kinda yes kinda no. They have access to all the apps and are especially drawn to the other chat apps. FB Messenger may be what drew many to the full FB appl. There is a great deal of media coverage re fckbk in Myanmar and FB has tried to rectify. I’ve seen some horrific hate cartoons about the Rohingya. Etc.
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