Critical Days for Burma

Security forces have fired on pro-democracyprotesters in Myanmar [AP]

Potkin: I remember when I was interviewed by CNN, the presenter tried to sound all doom and gloom and used Burma as an example of a hopeless case where regime change was not possible."
I point out Aung San Suu Kyi who has been under house arrest for 10 years and still no democratic reform there" was the interviewer's exact words.I have been following the events in Burma ever since the brave British national, James Mawdsley, was arrested there for distributing pro human rights leaflets. It fascinated me how the quest for justice motivated a British national to risk his life and freedom for that of others so many miles away.

I admire Aung San Suu Kyi so much as well. She left her comfortable Cambridge life to serve her people, never showing any regret, never losing her determination. Many times, I hoped Parastoo Forouhar, whose parents were stabbed to death by Islamic Republic agents in their home, would be our own Aung San Suu Kyi.Now that thousands of people have taken to the streets in Burma again, it has made me think and reflect over the past years that I have followed news of Burma.

I ask myself, how is it in all these years since Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest, I never heard anyone in the West dare to justify the junta rule in Burma? No junta apologists ever appeared to have a free platform to promote the military dictatorship in Burma. No Burmese official was ever invited to Western universities and received honorary PHD? Yet when it comes to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a religious dictatorship and a religious apartheid, their apologists are given forum after forum to promote and justify the theocracy in Iran.

In fact, ever since the beginning of the Islamic revolution in Iran, outrageous remarks have been expressed in support of the most reactionary despots in the world by influential people in the West. People that you would assume should have a reasonable degree of intellect for the positions they occupy.Andrew Young called Ayatollah Khomeini a Saint! The US ambassador to Iran, at the time of the revolution, David Sullivan, likened the bloodthirsty Khomeini to 'Iran's Gandhi".

Clinton and Armitage, ignored the unelected Guardian Council selection process of candidates, and claimed Iran was a democracy! The principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and a retired US Navy captain, Gary Sick, who has held impressive posts like the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation, has gone out of his way in the past 28 years to buy friends for the Islamic Republic and promote murderers like Rafsanjani as moderates.

If I gave examples of European statesmen, journalists and Left wing admirers of the theocracy in Iran, the list of such absurd adulation for the Islamic Republic and its henchmen will go on and on.Where did we go wrong? Why is our message not getting across? Why is it that Islamic Republic apologists and supporters like Massoud Behnood and Hossein Derakhshan are able to get grants after grants from various foundations and institutions, and yet we struggle to fight a petro-dollar regime, which is a threat to the world, on our shoe string personal budgets?Perhaps that is the answer to all these questions.

The Islamic rulers in Iran are much more cunning and shrewd than their Burmese counterparts. They know how to spend their money to influence the international public opinion and buy their "useful idiots". We on the other hand, have to fight an army of IRI apologists and "useful idiots" before we can even get near to the Islamic Republic.On these critical days for Burma, our hearts and minds are with the people of Burma who have risen against the tyranny of their oppressors.

We express our solidarity with them and wish they can live a peaceful life where they will no longer have to look over their shoulder when they speak, a precious privilege that is so often taken for granted by the people in democratic countries.

UPDATE:

I just found this and this a little bit ago and I think it needs as much support from the internet community as possible. Ko Htike and Dawn are in Myanmar blogging about the protests going on in his country.

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Are we still a Revolutionary Nation?

A Jacksonian just left a most fascintating comment on a previous thread that I had to share with all of you. It's what America is all about. My faith is briefly restored after reading this piece by one of the most intelligent patriots I know. I feel so lucky to have him read my blog and leave priceless original thoughts like the one below:

A Jacksonian has left a new comment on your post "'Fight in Iraq Vital to Stopping Iran'":

This is a bit of a convesation that I have had at Harrison's place:

Amazing how the West thinks in terms of who should and should not be divided! Yes North and South Korea and Vietnam worked out so well... didn't they? How about East and West Berlin and Germany? Why, thank god there are two of them! Lovely palliative, that, to not stand up to totalitarianism and say: we are war weary, don't grab at what you can't grasp as that will come back to haunt you. And so it did, as you note, in Hungary and the welded together Checzoslovakia. Yes, they were one Nation... now two because of incompatabilities in ethnic outlook. Then there is this thing that the West in its grand ideals, made of disparate peoples and called it Yugoslavia. That worked very well, didn't it?

This 'deciding the fate of others' deal has a long history going back further than the Tripartite division of Poland, which resurrected itself out of the ashes of the Empires that divided it, only to be subjugated twice more due to Western inability to stick to its word: first to Fascist Germany and then to the USSR. 'Realism' is an excuse to put money ahead of liberty, and this idea that the West can do more than just guide post-war situations and *not* control them, is something we must get over. Western culture cannot force people to be free, but it can teach what the cost of liberty and freedom *is*.

Whenever we decide on the 'realistic' course, the US denies its history of being a Revolutionary Nation that has long-term commitment to its ideals. Strange to say, but 'idealistic' outlook can be quite pragmatic and yet understand that to coddle tyranny is abhorrent to a Free People.

And how dare the US put 'benchmarks' upon other governments when it can adhere to NONE of its own? While we are, indeed, committed to securing our own liberty, we do forget the responsibility of a post-war situation to help others understand what it means to secure liberty for themselves. That is *not* a cost-free situation, and yet we have a political class that believes otherwise.

No, let some magnificent 'moral equivalence' reign, in which black is white and torture is a bad night's sleep. Or that mere commerce is the be-all, end-all to liberty... forgetting that it is liberty that builds commerce to make one free to utilize the benefits of one's own work. The defeatism that we see is pure cowardice: an unwillingness to put any cost forward as worth it to build freedom and help others realize what it costs to secure liberty.

Fukiyama was blandly incorrect to assume an 'end of history' and the inevitability of Western culture and outlook. There is no such thing as inevitability in history. There may be 'tides in the affairs of men' but men are not King Canute commanding the tide, we ride it and sink or swim on our own basis... and sometimes we can get to higher ground and deny the tide its reach. That is contingency in history, based upon the actions of individuals. Our actions create history, even if the tide runs counter to it actions can and do make a difference. Even with the tide turning on human liberty and so many willing to see it gone, the goal of swimming for liberty and trying to reach higher ground to escape tyranny is worth the cost and struggle.

Because stopping is fatal.

Now we hear the insane ideas that running from helping others will have desireable outcomes... people that we committed to in overthrowing a tyrant. Be it right or wrong to do the overthrowing, the responsibility is to help guide these people on why we did it as a free people, and for them to determine their own course as a free people. I am more than willing to pay that price as a civilization, as *not* to pay it is lethal to us. That poison already drips into our mouths and its bitter taste is awful. Yet the sweet words of 'just swallow the poison' is heard again.

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I do go on quite past that, but, really, the West has failed *whenever* we try to decide the fates of others.

The West, and the US in particular, is hitting the point where the question of actually *standing* for the ideals that we espouse must now be questioned. If you believe in the universal equality of mankind, then there is no *running* from a people who have been under the boot of the tyrant until after you help them to stand up and defend themselves. Then if they tell you to leave, smile and do so! You did all you can and their future, for better or worse, is theirs, not yours. But you do not leave a people who have only known tyranny and repression after they get the first drop of a taste of freedom... that is not a question of economics or lives.... the Revolution in 1776 went far, far beyond *that* cost. If we quiver at the cost of helping others to stand up while we are wealthy, healthy and able to do so with almost NO cost to ourselves, then we are damned and losing our own Liberty and Freedom as it is necessary to re-purchase it blood over and over until all mankind can grasp for that.

We are teaching of the price to be paid to purchase liberty and freedom. It is a hard lesson to teach, that which left 10% of the US dead at the Revolution. Very humbling. And we dare not disgrace ourselves by being any *less* than they were, or we are willing to put the price of liberty at the fear of death. That is an easy coin to pay... expect slavery soon afterwards for a People who do that.

"You must pay the price to secure the blessing." - Andrew Jackson

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I will end this post by quoting Ayaan Hiris Ali.

"You grew up in freedom, and so you can spit on freedom, because you don't know what it is not to have freedom"--Ayaan Hirisi Ali

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