The Party of Death-Examining the boundless cruelty of the Burmese junta

The Party of Death by Bernard-Henri Levy
Examining the boundless cruelty of the Burmese junta.
Post Date Monday, May 19, 2008



The generals are deaf. As everyone now knows, the regime was warned by weather forecasters in India two days before the cyclone arrived--five days before by forecasters in Thailand--and it refused to listen.

The generals hate their own people. The regime does not merely disdain them, it hates them, and the hate is cold, total and murderous. How else to explain the unimaginable sight of convoys being held by customs at the Thai border? Of planes filled with provisions and forbidden to land? How else to explain that while each hour counted, while each passing minute diminished the chances of finding survivors in the ruins of submerged villages in Bogale or Laputta, food and medicines that could save them were barely trickling in?

The generals are crazy. They are not just cruel but clinically insane and in fact paranoid, which is another key to understanding why this lunatic regime prefers letting its people die to opening its doors to Doctors Without Borders. It claims that the humanitarian workers are really spies, that they are entering the country only to destabilize and ruin it, that the packages from the U.N.'s World Food Program contain poisons more deadly than the toxins given off by the decomposing bodies floating in the Irrawaddy delta. These clinically insane people, these cretins, clearly believe these things.

The generals are racist. Suffice it to say that, yes, Burma is a postcolonial country whose paranoia can perhaps be explained by the fact that long ago it had to endure the miasma of racism's plague. Today it's the regime that is racist, that sees the white man, the Westerner, the American as its natural enemy, that in the purest xenophobic and thus racist tradition sees the foreigner as a germ, a corrupting agent, a virus.

The generals are monomaniacal. This racism, this craziness, also stems from their thinking only of themselves, of their own future and survival. The country is drowning: Two thousand square miles of rice fields are already underwater; the rare witnesses speak of swamps littered with cadavers, of putrid, polluted ground water and children shivering possibly from malaria or dengue fever. And the regime's only interest--incredibly--was the farcical referendum forced upon the people with the sole intention of further cementing the regime's position.

more...

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=464694c5-3bad-4b5a-9dde-8504cf12d783

methinks the junta gets its major support from that trade. It works well; they don't have to worry about public opinion, just make sure that they don't piss off the CIA and other orgs that depend on dope for their ops.

Here's something I posted after the cyclone hit:

OH BOY! YEP! Here we go. Burma—to Bangkok heroin route is the largest in the world. The CIA has been involved in this drug route since WWII, but mostly since the Vietnam War. What happens if the outside world starts snooping around in Burma???

…'.Although it has become the world’s most important source of illicit opium, the Golden Triangle is landlocked, cut off from local and international markets by long distances and rugged terrain. In the early 1970’s, the Golden Triangle’s narcotics followed one of the two “corridors’ to reach the world’s markets---an air route from Vientiane, Laos, to Vietnam, which closed after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and an overland Burma-to-Bangkok route that remains the worlds major source of heroin. The most important route was the overland corridor that began as a maze of mule trails in the Shan hills of northeastern Burma and ended as a four-lane highway in downtown Bankok. Most of Burma’s and Thailand’s opium followed the overland route to Bangkok and from their found its way into interntional markets: Hong Kong, Europe, and America. ......

Since the highland drug farmers require credit and markets to finance each new crop a major expansion of drug production has three requirements—finance, logistics, and politics. Thus, sudden growth of Burma’s opium production in the 1950’s required CIA air logistics, Thai military protection, ;and Taiwanese capital. Similarly, the upsurge of opium production in Afghanistan during the 1980’s relied on the logistaical support of Pakistan’s Inter—Service Intelligence, the cover ofa CIA covert operation, and the services of Pakistani banks, just as the simultaneous expansion of the Colombian cocaine trade required capital from illicit financiers, the loos protection of the Covert Contra war, and the illegal services of banks based in the Caribbean free ports such as Panama City.'...more
Above excerpted from McKoy's "Politics of Heroin".

Wow…that also explains why they took out Noriega in Operation “Just Cause” (1989) after Noriega said about Bush: “I got him by the balls”. Noreiga was a man who knew way too much, he’s lucky he’s still alive in jail in Florida.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3260532

That seems to be the article's point. Reading an article which uses virtually every hate-word there is to describe a group, I tend to think maybe it is biased. And then I recall the results of prior articles....large numbers of dead people on one side, large amounts of profit on the other side.

Not to say anything good about the government of Myanmar, as I don't know anything good about them, but articles such as this stopped moving me towards support of military coups long ago.

Faced with this spectacle, this machine of death, hate and madness, one hesitates between sorrow, pity, a desire to see these assassins brought before an international criminal tribunal that could try these kinds of crimes, and, finally, nostalgia for the days when France created and imposed upon the world the right and the duty to intervene.

We know a little bit about what that did in Iraq, as the UN has estimated 500 thousand children died between the two gulf wars of starvation. I wish people would think for a moment of what it is like to die of starvation, and then what it is like to watch a child die of starvation, and then why we have policies that cause hundreds of thousands of children to die of starvation.

If you followed the riots earlier in the year in Myanmar, the immediate cause was an increase in the subsidized price of gasoline. The cause of this was officially the poor condition of government finances. Whether that is true or not, more expensive gas was the cause of an impoverished people to become more impoverished, and many people wer no longer able to give alms to their local monasteries. The monks in the monasteries were troubled both at their own plight and the plight of the people, and so they protested peacefully. Many were killed. Here it was portrayed as a long awaited popular uprising against the military dictatorship. There it was hungry people protesting for more food...

I blame our miserable media coverage of that event, in part, for the paranoia and reticence of the government in response to offers of aid for the more recent event. How about lifting sanctions? Who would that really harm? We sit in our comfortable houses half a world away and play politics over I am not even sure what point of contention....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma

The people of Myanmar have survived under both military rule and international economic sanctions, led by the US, for many years now. I am not sure which is worse...but it would be a courtesy to the people, (or my own request, if it is worth anything), that a few here might read about this country we have under sanction, during their most recent disaster.

My problem with the OP is it seems intent on nothing but war, and no educated person would advocate that in the case of Myanmar.

right & became a shill for french ruling class perspective. predictably found bashing every ruling class bete du jour & calling for intervention.