I heard a very interesting discussion about this on the Moderate Rebels podcast
yesterday. They interviewed a guy who is a former US marine who became
disenchanted with US foreign policy years ago, I think, after the first US
attack on Iraq by HW Bush. He's been living in Thailand ever since and
functioning as an independent journalist. He describes a much more complicated
situation in Myanmar Than we read about. He says that the rebels are being
funded by the US government and that the US has been interfering all along in
that country as in many others, as part of its war against China. He says that
protests which appear to be composed of members of civil society, like the one
in Hong Kong, have been either started or usurped by US agencies and become
tools to be used to encourage US world domination.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 9:47 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Protests continue in Myanmar in face of military’s
deadly attacks
So much for that idea that advanced weapons somehow stop the class struggle.
Take special note of the part of this article about people fighting back with
bows and arrows.
Protests continue in Myanmar in face of military’s deadly attacks
https://themilitant.com/2021/04/10/69514/
BY SETH GALINSKY
Vol. 85/No. 15
April 19, 2021
April 1 protest against military coup in Tant Se, in Myanmar’s Sagaing Region,
by workers, farmers, Buddhist monks, students from surrounding towns and
villages. Region has history of farmers fight for land, as well as Chin and
other ethnic minorities’ battles for equal rights.
KO SAT
April 1 protest against military coup in Tant Se, in Myanmar’s Sagaing Region,
by workers, farmers, Buddhist monks, students from surrounding towns and
villages. Region has history of farmers fight for land, as well as Chin and
other ethnic minorities’ battles for equal rights.
The junta in Myanmar has been unable to quell daily protest marches,
candlelight vigils and strikes opposing the Feb. 1 military coup despite
killing hundreds of protesters and jailing thousands.
The police pulled over several public transit buses for no reason April
2 in Yangon’s North Okkalapa Township, a working-class stronghold of opposition
to the military regime. “They told the passengers to get off and kneel down.
They beat not only the passengers but also the drivers,”
a witness told Irrawaddy, a news site that backs the Civil Disobedience
Movement.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said April 7 that the death
toll stands at 598, most killed when the police and army units fired on unarmed
demonstrators.
The junta, led by Gen. Min Aung Hliang, seized power after the National League
for Democracy, a capitalist party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won the November
elections in a landslide. Suu Kyi had shared power with the military command
since the party first won an overwhelming majority in the 2015 elections. Under
the 2008 constitution, the high command automatically controls 25% of the seats
in the parliament, and key ministries.
As the military unleashes further repression, working people and youth have
been adjusting their tactics to keep up pressure on the regime while minimizing
their own losses.
In Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and the one that has suffered the brunt of
the repression, smaller groups — including some led by members of the garment
workers union — are carrying out short actions that disperse before the police
or army units have time to attack.
Early in the morning April 6, protesters sprayed messages in red paint all over
Yangon. “The blood has not dried,” read one message. Another appealed to
soldiers: “Don’t kill people just for a small salary as low as the cost of dog
food.”
The junta has relied on the police and elite army units to repress the peaceful
protests and strikes by workers. But the bulk of the soldiers are from rural
farm areas, as well as unemployed youth from the cities.
Unequal combat
Daily protests, some in the thousands, and strikes that have involved tens of
thousands of workers over the past two months, continue.
Workers, farmers and youth in at least a dozen small towns and villages have
stood up to police and military assaults with bows and arrows and hunting
rifles.
In Kalay city, in a majority Chin ethnic area in northern Myanmar, young people
armed with rifles and homemade weapons fought for hours March 28 with soldiers
from an army unit and police who were using machine guns and hand grenades.
Later in the week, seven plainclothes police captured by the protesters were
released in exchange for nine residents detained for violating the evening
curfew imposed by the junta. Unlike the way the junta treats protesters, “We
treated them [the police] well. There were no beatings,”
a protester told Myanmar Now.
History of ethnic divisions
Myanmar’s capitalist rulers have relied on the military to wage a series of
wars with dozens of armed groups in mountainous border areas where ethnic
minorities make up the majority of the population. By 2013 the government had
negotiated de facto, if uneasy, cease-fires with most of them.
These conflicts originate in the divide-and-rule strategy of the British
colonial regime. Their continuation is in part because no revolutionary
working-class leadership emerged from the hard-fought battles that brought
colonial rule to an end. The British rulers had excluded the Bamar majority
from the colonial army, instead recruiting from the Karen, Kachin and Chin
ethnic minorities. For government positions, it brought in officials from India.
After gaining independence in 1948, the new government reversed the
discrimination against the Bamar, but at the expense of the ethnic minorities.
More than a third of the population is made up of 135 ethnic minorities
recognized by the government.
The largest of these are the Shan with 9%, Karen 7%, Rakhine 4% and ethnic
Chinese with 3%. The government does not recognize Rohingya, a Muslim minority
in the west, as an ethnic minority. In 2017 the military carried out deadly
assaults on Rohingya, forcing 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Suu
Kyi’s National League for Democracy defended the repression.
The junta wants to keep the ethnic armies from bolstering the movement against
the coup. At the end of March it announced a unilateral cease-fire to run
through the end of April.
The United Wa State Army, based on the Wa people — one of the smaller ethnic
groups — has not criticized the coup. But it is the largest standing ethnic
army, with 25,000 soldiers, and surface-to-air missiles and heavy artillery
provided by Beijing. It is not willing to jeopardize its long-standing
accommodation with the Myanmar military high command that accepts its control
over a large region along the Chinese border.
A dozen other armed groups have expressed their solidarity with the nationwide
protests against the military junta.
Both the Kachin Independence Army and the Karen National Union have clashed
with the Myanmar military since the coup. The Karen National Union noted in a
March 30 statement that despite a 2013 cease-fire agreement, “the Burmese
military has been expanding its military presence in several Karen territories”
for years.
Some 12,000 Karen people fled their homes in the Papun and Nyaunglebin
districts after the junta carried out airstrikes March 27-31, killing 14
villagers.
Demonstrations in solidarity with those fighting military rule in Myanmar took
place across the U.S. March 28 and April 3. More actions are planned.
James Khyne in Houston contributed to this article.
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Okay, thanks
--
Carl Sagan “It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between
two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are
served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously
those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise
only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you
are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn
anything new.
You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world.
(There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe
once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and
wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about
everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be
standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you
are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense
in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.” ―
Carl Sagan
