A More Balanced Outlook
The corporate-control led media will soon use the pictures of rubble to seek increased police and military spending and greater state intervention and surveillance powers…
By: Kanbawza Win
Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com) October 6, 2001
A drunken American once met a Burmese on the street and asked him, "What ese are you." Bewildered the Burmese replied, "What do you mean, sir?" the American replied, "What I mean is, are you a Chinese, a Vietnamese; a Burmese or a Japanese etc etc because you all end in ese. So the Burmese replied "I am Burmese, Sir. By the way, what keys are you?" The American replied, "What do you mean by keys" So the Burmese replied, "What I mean is, are you a monkey, a donkey or a Yankee"
This is a classic example of how an average American treats a non-Caucasian and vice versa. A culture of arrogance and hatred coupled with the habit of a bizarre new world where old rules of social behaviour and morals have completely broken down. A fundamental belief in the equality of all human beings seems to be extinct. The apex of it is the sad episode at the World Trade Centre on September 11th.
It was mere savagery: jet loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human beings. We would like to dismiss televised images of Palestinian expressions of joy while crowds of people in some Muslim countries cheered as the World Trade Center came crashing down and among them are Burmese generals who party at the OSS recreation center in Rangoon and came out all smiling. It has been rumored that some of Bin Laden cells operate in Burma, which the Junta, as usual denied vigorously. It makes one feel sick inside and sometimes one wonders, whether Samuel Huntington's prediction of "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" has come true. He predicted that the conflicts between religious groups would be impossible to manage because they were based on faith and dogma.
There is no such thing as a "terrorist gene" in any homo sapiens. The attackers and their supporters who are born normal were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? It was a cry of despair. Their despair had reached its zenith and become so desperate that they had no choice but to act.
Good-hearted people will mourn along with the Americans in dignity and respect but the corporate-control led media will soon use the pictures of rubble to seek increased police and military spending and greater state intervention and surveillance powers. But what the media seldom display is the picture of half a million children (according to the Health Education Trust of London) who died in Iraq as a result of the medieval embargo imposed by the US. Nobody says anything about 18,000 civilians killed in Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, not to mention the Israeli occupation of Arab land and the dispossession of the Palestinians with US backing and banking. From this aspect it would not be totally wrong to say that Islamic people have been victims of US fundamentalism whose power, in all forms-- military, strategic and economic- is the greatest source of terrorism on earth. The media coverage is exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal and moral screen, projecting positive images of Western values and innocence.
Because of it the Americans fail to realize the vehement hatred of the Third World population. This was shown when a fallen GI was tied to a car and driven along the streets of Somalia. Anti-Americanism is also spawned by more general grievances. The US is a leading status quo power of the world, shoring up grotesque dictators, especially supporting right-wing rule and state terrorism. It promotes a global economic system of vast inequality and incredible poverty. It displays arrogance of power when it rejects and blocks international consensus on issues ranging from environment to the rights of children, to land mines, to an international criminal court, to racism to national missile defense and on and on. A super power, indifferent to the world's opinion and the people's plight, and apparently on the side of their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for their policies.
In defense of their power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free-market" and "free-trade", the injustices are legion, from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, to assaults on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the IMF, which are little more than agents of the US Treasury. It freely encourages the "exploitation of man by man," especially the strongest over the weakest as it forces the poorest nations to repay un-repayable debts.
One should also not forget that the Taliban is just one of the creations of the American CIA that secretly supplied arms and fund them during 80s when the Mujahideen were fighting against the Russians. Again, the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997 just as the Burmese Junta does with the Burmese people. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. In this sense the people of Afghanistan are like the Jews in the concentration camps, or what the Burmese people are facing just now. It has nothing to do with this atrocity. The Afghans were the victims of the perpetrators. The United Nations has estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land-mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.
This does not mean that the American crimes justify terrorism nor are we being callous at a time when the Americans are mourning. The September 11th. episode is absolutely unacceptable, but at the same time we need to stress that terrorist targeting civilians is unpardonable. Obviously we don't want the Americans to copy the methods of the Burmese Junta, by killing innocent civilian but we need to understand the terrain that breeds terrorism and the terrorists. The Third World population that survives in the degrading conditions and daily poverty, the refugee camps where the youths stay idle, not only in the Middle East and Africa but also in the Thailand-Burma border area, are fertile grounds for terrorism. The attacks on the Burmese embassy in Bangkok and the Ratchburi hospital by Burmese students about two years are just some of the signs and who can say whether more may be coming. The message we would like to give is that by reducing injustice can help eliminate the seeds of pain and suffering that nurtures the terrorist impulse and support for them.
Let us not fret about the annals of history reporting that the mightiest super power that has the whole arsenal of atomic and sophisticated weapons at its disposal was stunned by box cutters. So many people were killed with so many economies being destroyed by so few a people. In Burmese we would say "Ko Chin Sa" literally translated is to put oneself in other people's place. The 1988 Burmese pro-democracy demonstration took place in front of the American embassy in Rangoon where the Burmese army unleashed its fire power killing altogether some 20,000 people in Burma's six major cities a figure almost four times higher than of the World Trade Centre and yet the US did not lift a finger help people of Burma.
Now, after the September11th episode the Americans will have some idea of "Ko Chin Sa" and one hope that they will respond positively to the despair and listen to the cries of the suffering of other people. We see that President's Bush speech of "War between Freedom and Fear" is similar to what Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's "Freedom from Fear" which she passionately wrote.
No one will forget that the US has earned its standard of living via hard work, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, promotes freedom of religion, speech, vote and assembly being a big brother if not a big policeman championing Western values and protecting democracy. The point we are driving at is that they must be more magnanimous and have a big heart. The security of the US if not the world lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those it has grievously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War, pay its UN dues and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalization. We are calling on the extraordinary American courage and wisdom to pause for a moment and reflect upon its role as the leader of the world. Its indifference of the suffering of Third World countries and, of course, the insolence of its current President because the world is ready to follow the US lead.