George Orwell, wrote “Animal Farm” and “1984” whilst living on the Scottish island of Jura after the 2nd World War, but had also been a colonial police officer in Moulmein, Burma in the 1920s, where he wrote “Burmese Days”.
He would have recognised the parallel ironies in the brutality of the current crackdown in Rangoon and other Burmese cities, where troops have killed, beaten up, imprisoned and tortured monks and others marching against the junta.
To him, cruelty damaged the strong as well as the seemingly weak, in this case those in saffron robes chanting and offering 'Metta Sutta’ - loving kindness - as they took their braved the phalanxes of heavily armed troops in the equally hard and heavy rain.
Strangely ironic, too, but not overly surprising, humiliation by foreign powers in the 19th century, inhibits China from rushing at Western insistence to intervene in Burma's internal affairs in the 21st century.
Yet another irony is that even the Chinese have used the 'D' word this time. The Xinhua news agency paraphrased a Chinese official last week admonishing a Burmese special envoy to "push forward a democracy process appropriate for the country".
Burma's strategic value as buffer territory, ready market for Chinese arms and abundant source of raw materials explain China's close ties with the regime. But China also wants to counter Western threats to brand the 2008 Beijing Olympics the 'genocide games' for conducting business as usual with the junta.
The Chinese reference is doubly ironic in that the Burma approach is a whispered echo, a misbegotten echo but still an echo, of China's top-down system aimed at ensuring stability, necessitated and justified by harmony in the Confucianism sense, pre-empting human rights and political diversity.
While the Chinese Communist Party hangs on to legitimacy by spreading the fruits of economic modernisation and expansion, the Burmese regime alienates itself from the people, mismanaging the economy on top of trying to maintain stability through repression and coercion, using New Speak’ to manipulate its media, like a despotic “Big Brother” producer – always watching; maintaining fear of fear!
The irony is more striking in that Burma is a country rich in vast natural resources. If the junta had the breadth of vision, intention and action to tap the land's mineral wealth, reweave and fill what used to be Asia's rice basket and educate its intelligent and hardworking citizens, the economy would have flourished, with or without the globalised economics now enveloping neighbouring nations.
Instead, the regime has so reduced the nation's economic circumstances that it started the equivalent of rationing coal in Newcastle when it had to raise petrol prices fivefold in August, sparking the first of the recent demonstrations.
A booming economy and fair redistribution would at least have made it easier to deflect or to accommodate demands for political participation, rights for individuals and minorities and social justice.
The monks - numbering 400,000, similar in strength to the soldiers - would perhaps have been a willing ally, not a resolute adversary, given that Buddhism, like Confucianism, advocates harmony and eschews extremism. At the same time, a genuine constitutional process could have produced a viable political arrangement.
Demonstrations of solidarity with the Burmese people, such as that exemplified by Forthview, have taken place in here in Thailand as they have elsewhere throughout the world, where-ever it is possible to use 'our liberty to support theirs.'
The hope here on the border – and inside Burma itself – is that is not too late for the junta to attempt genuine national reconciliation by reopening dialogue with the democracy movement, notably Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD.
Whatever the 'democracy' that emerges from such reconciliation - the extent to which it requires opening up political space, formal recognition of human and minority rights, liberty, equality and other 'democratic' necessities - is for the Burmese peoples to decide.
Education, mutual learning and understanding is what our relationship with Hlee Bee is all about!
