ATLmalcontent

"What Happened to All the Monks?"

Remember Burma? Remember those two days when the media actually paid attention to a story outside of the U.S. or Iraq?

What have they (we) missed? At best, a forced displacement:

Thousands of Buddhist monks, a fixture in Myanmar's monasteries and temples, have vanished in the wake of the September crackdown by the military junta.

A report in the Dec. 3 issue of Newsweek says the few foreigners, who managed to visit the country since September, have noted how empty these places look in cities like Yangon, formerly Rangoon, and Mandalay.

Meanwhile, in Burma ...

While we've turned our attention elsewhere, monks are being tortured as the junta continues its reign of terror:

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.

And the world yawns.

Giving China the finger ... finally

US President George Bush will risk angering China by attending a ceremony next week to award a Congress medal to the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, at the bastion of American democracy.

Bush is the first American president to appear in public with the Dalai Lama, so he deserves credit, even if he's just trying to curry favor with Richard Gere.

A happy anniversary

(Warning: lefty fashionistas ignorant of history should avoid the following post)

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death, an event that should be celebrated, not mourned. Yet the revisionists persist:

Che the titan standing up to the Yanquis, the world's dominant power. Che the moral guru proclaiming that a New Man, no ego and all ferocious love for the other, had to be forcibly created out of the ruins of the old one. Che the romantic mysteriously leaving the revolution to continue, sick though he might be with asthma, the struggle against oppression and tyranny.

In fact Che was responsible for as much opporession and tyranny as he opposed.

Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.

In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on.

Sounds like a terrorist to me. I'm almost convinced that if Guevara looked like Yuri Andropov he'd be nearly forgotten.

But Guevara's iconic visage sells, and thus we're subjected to a movie like "The Motorcycle Diaries" celebrating Che's earnest "idealism." It'll be interesting to see if Steven Soderbergh maintains that empty-headed romanticism in his forthcoming biopics (the plural is intended) about the late revolutionary. I'm not optimistic.

Propaganda du jour

(via the state-run newspaper in Burma)

Boycott Beijing!

Getting worse in Burma

Government authorities are initiating a media campaign targeting citizen journalists who took footage of government brutality during the recent protests in Rangoon and distributed it to foreign media, according to journalists and reporters in Burma’s former capital.

The government has called upon state-run media agencies and government supporters to publish photographs of citizen journalists and take action against them.

That will make receiving pictures as the one above more difficult; the junta has also shut down the Internet. This much we know: the massacre continues unabated while China -- which purchases oil, natural gas, timber, gems and minerals from Burma -- remains silent.

Bears repeating

"It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead."

--Martin Amis, blasting liberal defenders of Muslim extremists

Send China a message

Sign this online petition supporting the Burmese protesters. Momentum towards a possible Olympic boycott seems to be building.

Everything is fine. Nothing to see here

Who's to blame for the violence in Burma? According to the state-controlled media, Buddhist Monks are the source:

The government has been striving day and night together with the people for the emergence of a peaceful, modern and developed discipline-flourishing democratic nation.

As the government has been endeavouring to ensure stability of State, community peace, the rule of law and national development that are the main requirements, the national races in all regions are practically enjoying the fruits of national peace and development.

However, saboteurs from inside and outside the nation and some foreign radio stations, who are jealous of national peace and development, have been making instigative acts through lies to cause internal instability and civil commotion. Hence, some members of the Sangha, anti-government groups and saboteurs were staging protest walks

Boycott Beijing (cont'd)

Christopher Hitchens presents a clear case:

Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China.