Another Fine Mess

Doh!

There is a letter from Josef Goebbels to Barack Obama in the latest issue of Taki’s Magazine (Dear Barack Obama), an online publication.  What, the long dead Nazi Propaganda Minister to the present Propaganda President; how is such a thing possible?  Apparently the poison dwarf has taken to time travel! 

Actually the letter is from one Gavin McInnes, not at all thankful on this season of Thanksgiving for the outcome of America’s early November jamboree.  It’s a reasonable effort, though personally I think the real Goebbels could have done so much better.  Mister McInnes rambles and digresses just a tad.  Keep the message simple, that’s the key.  Goebbels knew that. 

Still, once the verbal outer leaves have been stripped away, there is a tasty inner core to the McInnes fruit.  It’s this: Obama won on the basis of what is conceivably the emptiest message in American electoral history: there is simply nothing there, nothing of any substance.  It was all about ‘making a difference’.  What difference, what exactly were people voting for, what exactly made their vote count?  Obama's victory was in essence a brilliant propaganda coup: promising nothing while seeming to promise everything.  Come to think of it these are more or less the same thing, nothing and everything.  

Present economic difficulties, of course, are all the fault of George W. Bush.  Let’s see how thin this wears over the next four years.  Barry O, as one of the respondents to Doctor Goebbels said, is Bush on steroids! 

Meanwhile the great Barry treads the world stage anew, as fumbling and as cack-handed as ever.  America’s East Coast liberal press fell on Mitt Romney’s alleged gaffs like a pack of hungry dogs in pursuit of a bone; there is really no surprise in that.  No matter how meaty the Obama bones they remain curiously uninterested, and I don’t suppose there is any surprise in that either.

Here, let me throw some flesh your way. There he was in Asia, meeting Burma’s Ang San Suu Kyi (pronounced Ahng Sahn Soo Chee), possibly the most famous human rights’ activist in the world, long held incommunicado by the country’s military dictatorship.  Associated Press reports that he pronounced her name wrong several times.  She is now seemingly Aung YAN Suu Kyi.  He also made a mess of his greeting to Burma’s new president;

The meeting came after Obama met with Myanmar's reformist new President Thein Sein – a name he also botched.  As the two addressed the media, Obama called his counterpart "President Sein," an awkward, slightly affectionate reference that would make most Burmese cringe.  Note to presidential advisers: For future rounds of diplomacy, the president of Myanmar is President Thein Sein – on first and second reference.

You may recall that Obama once made some abject overtures to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” during his first term as president, decisively snubbed by Iran’s Islamist dictatorship.  The process of appeasement continues.  Burma is the name of the country.  It’s the name that Aung SAN Suu Kyi and the democratic opposition use; it’s the name used by the United Nations; it’s the name used officially by the United States itself.  But Obama continued to refer to ‘Myanmar’, the name preferred by the former military junta and by the present fig-leaf civilian administration.  I expect if he had been around at the time of the Khmer Rouge he would have called Cambodia ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ 

In the Telegraph Neil Gardiner writes;

It is rather embarrassing, as well as sad, that the leader of the free world can’t even pronounce the name of the most famous human rights activist on the planet. Or that he is so quick to appease Burma’s authoritarian regime by calling it “Myanmar”. Barack Obama’s gaffes demonstrate not only a marked lack of attention to detail and a high degree of amateurishness on the part of the White House, but also a disturbing willingness to curry favour with unsavoury regimes. Hardly a good omen for Obama’s second term.

That’s rather well put, I thought, a little more targeted than ‘Doctor Goebbels’ fireworks.  Meanwhile, as far as the real Doctor is concerned, Americans might do well to reflect on the following in the years to come;

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Thinking about Burma

Will the military dictatorship in Burma, Myamnar, if you prefer, survive? An interesting question, I think. I would have to say that Burma shows the very same structural factors that have served to weaken democracy in Pakistan, on the other side of the Indian Subcontinent: it has a strong military tradition, a fairly weak civil society, and a fear of national disintegration. The situation in Burma is further complicated by a fear of outside intervention.

Remember, too, that Burma did not gain its independence by the same political process at work in India and Pakistan. Rather, it emerged as a result of the war against Japanese occupation, involving local Burmese as well as Allied forces. This mean that the significant leaders who emerged in 1945 all had a military, rather than a civilian background. It's one of history's ironies that the greatest of these leaders, Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, the voice of the democratic opposition, is also the iconic figure who has helped sustain the special place of the military in Burmese politics

This has also been supported, as I have said, by the relative weakness of civil society. During the days of British rule the native Burmese played very little part in managing day to day affairs, with administrators being recruited from among colonial Britons or Indians. Excluded from the civil service, the ethnic Burmese nevertheless formed an important part of the police and the army. Although an embryonic native middle-class was beginning to emerge in the course of the early twentieth century, it was almost completely wiped out in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Fear of national disintegration has roots in the early evolution of the Burmese state. In the two hundred years prior to the advent of the British in the 1820s, the Burmese kings had expanded their control out of the lowlands into areas inhabited by different ethnic and linguistic groups. The Shan, the Karen, the Arakanese, the Mon, the Chin, the Karenni and the Kachin, all non-Burmese speaking, now make up approximately one third of the total population, occupying two-thirds of the national territory. Fears that these centrifugal forces will destroy the integrity of the nation have been fueled by the long-standing insurgencies of the Shan and the Karen. The opportunity this might provide for foreign intervention has strengthened the army's sense of paranoia, creating a siege mentality and a persistent mood of xenophobia amongst the generals. As far as the military is concerned it is they who are the guardians of the nation, the one guarantee that Burma will survive as a unitary state