Why The West Will Not Help Burma
David Warren explains exactly why the west will not do anything about the situation in Burma. It is a short course in how tyrannies actually operate - as opposed to the completely erroneous way some people think the world works.
Looking, through the dusk screen of the media, at the events in Burma, one feels a cold and pointless rage. The vicious regime that has long enslaved that country is again winning a struggle in which they have all the weapons. With the "subtle, malign cunning" (I am quoting Kenneth Denby, writing bravely for the Times of London, from Rangoon) that is possible only to a cat with a cornered mouse, the regime has watched the nation's Buddhist monks lead the people onto the streets. It allowed them nine days to vent their grievances, and is now cutting them down.
But the cutting down has been done with much greater efficiency than after the last demonstrations on this scale, that began August 8, 1988. Perhaps 3,000 were massacred in the course of snuffing out the flame of liberty on that occasion. In this latest reprisal of government against people, it seems only a few dozen have been killed — including the Japanese press photographer, Kenji Nagai, shot down in cold blood to send a message to the other foreign reporters.
We, who do not live under one of the world's thug-socialist regimes, should understand how they operate. Over time, it becomes necessary to kill fewer and fewer people, to keep a population cowed. Yet every generation or so, the people must be forcefully reminded that they are nothing.
This "lesson" to the Burmese people came a bit sooner than the average. But come it did. It is not yet sure how brutal the crackdown was and how high the body count.
Mind you, the west could act. It really could clamp meaningful sanctions on the junta or even possibly perform a military intervention. It could stand up to the killers. But as Warren points out that takes something that is lacking:
But this would require a West assured of its own ideals and principles, generous and willing to make sacrifices for them; a West not debilitated by layer upon layer of "politically-correct" self-doubt. And that simply isn't on the table.
No, it isn't. In fact the European Union was conducting a trade seminar with the Burmese government while heads were being cracked by the junta. So much for moral authority.
World news | Gaius Wednesday, 3 October , 2007
By Ted Goldman, Wednesday, 3 October , 2007 @ 6:42 pm
Burmese citizens burn while Eurpean Union “trade” negotiators fiddle.
Has any Burmese considered sending citizen sharpshooters to several European countires and informing these diplomats that perhaps ,they are doing the wrong thing?
By Gaius, Wednesday, 3 October , 2007 @ 6:47 pm
Just another exercise in soft (in the head) power.