Cowboy Confessional

It takes a gutsy man to wear saffron robes in public. So it should be no surprise that 1,000 such fellows would have sufficient collective testicular mass to confront heavy-handed thugs.

That’s the state of the state of Burma, which has endured a military monarchy for 45 years. Not that the people of Burma haven’t tried to raise the issue of subjugation from time to time as they did in 1962, 1974, 1988 and a couple of ongoing AK47 protests from guerrilla organizations. Various generals have responded in predictably violent manners, causing the primarily pacifist Buddhist population to suffer silently.

But silence can be an effective tool, depending on who uses it and how.

Enter the monks. Buddhist monks to be specific, who have decided that quiet intervention — ala Mahatma Gandhi — might be helpful. These monks are highly respected and respectable folk. In the dismal philosophy of Buddhism — were life itself is considered an awful affair worth escaping, but to which everyone is perpetually condemned — the monks are considered several steps above mere humans and one step shy of knocking back brews with Siddhartha Gautama himself. Assaulting a monk is considered bad form, so clubbing them bloody and shooting them is simply out of the question.

So 1,000 or so of these peaceful fellows did a walk-by of the home prison of Aung San Suu Kyi, the person who metaphorically peed in the junta’s Wheeties. In 1990 Suu Kyi had the poor judgement of winning the only honest election Burma’s military mutts ever held. Sensing that democracy might actually be more popular with people than overt repression, the thugs du jour nullified the election and told Suu Kyi to stay in her room … for 11 of the last 18 years. To make sure the lesson was well learned, they also prohibited her from leaving to be with her dying husband or their surviving children.
Being a Buddhist herself, she took the moral high ground and kept a low profile. Well, at least as low of a profile as one can keep while winning the Nobel Peace Prize and having every
international human rights and pro-democracy group sending love letters to you trough the Burmese mail system.

The monks evidently decided that she needed more publicity, and staged a quiet protest of sorts. 1,000 of them gathered together in their matching vestments, and walked slowly and determinedly to the concrete police barrier at Suu Kyi’s house. Not even the current crop of criminals in command dared dispute the monk’s authority — moral and otherwise — and they let them pass, stop and speak with the prisoner, and go on their passive way.

I applaud peaceful resilience, though in the long run it may be for naught. Dictators are what they are because they believe themselves superior to everyone and enjoy the accouterments of absolute control, if you can call rape, murder, and pillaging fringe benefits. The only sure cure for despotism is an ample dosage of lead applied through the back of the skull.

Buddhist monks are not of this disposition, so Suu Kyi had best get comfortable in her home-cum-jail. Unless her monks are packing heat under those robes, or can stir the wrath of people who have them hidden under the floorboards, Rangoon’s ruffians will maintain control.

Breaking news as of this morning … the Monk Mob has grown by one order of magnitude. They are now clogging the streets with about 100,000 protesters led by clerics.

And in breaking news of today, the thug government (if I may be redundant) fires back, quite literally. Aside from gunning down nearly a dozen peacefully protesting people, they defiled a number of Buddhist monasteries, throttled the monks therein and arrested about 100. In the crossfire they killed a Japanese journalist. The militarist in Burma are making the Taliban look good by comparison.

Killing the reporter, from the non-aligned nation of Japan, may be a fatal mistake. The media doesn’t mind if you kill peasants, but they get downright indignant when you shoot one of their own. The media was already enamored by the protesting monks, which led to some anti-government bias. Now they have a reason to outright hate the current (and temporary) power in Burma.

Of all the news reporting, perhaps this one passage says all that need be said:

… some protesters shouted “Give us freedom, give us freedom!” at soldiers. Thousands ran through the streets after warning shots were fired into crowds that had swollen to 70,000. Bloody sandals were left lying in the road.

Pissin’ on people’s freedom is a dangerous game.

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