What created the problem in Burma (the name of which was changed to Myanmar by military dictators like General Than Shwe as the Western media just bought in)?
The British Empire was ruthless in dividing and conquering, destroying everything in its wake, leaving behind racism and Orwellian dystopian order that are operating even today as the Theravada nation enters 2026.
George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, and Burmese Days, and the essay Shooting an Elephant, was born here under the British Raj (when it was part of India before the British partitioned it all over the place, after sacking the richest country in the world through the East India Company). He saw what was going on here and in England and wrote that into his novels.
The overthrow of Democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi's father U Aung Ko was fictionalized and shown in the 1995 American movie Beyond Rangoon (with Patricia Arquette)
MANDALAY, Burma - Myanmar is a war-torn country under little known military dictator General Than Shwe, now hiding with his junta and billions of dollars of embezzled funds from resource-rich and utterly impoverished Burma, which Gen. Shwe renamed Myanmar after putting Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest after she won democratic elections.
Ellen Page introduces us to Asia's "Hitler" General Than Shwe of Burma
I sold out to be in Parliament.
(SeeBeyond Rangoon for the Hollywood version and Burma VJ for documentary footage shot during the subsequent "Saffron Revolution," as monks stood up in protest to bring down the corrupt government only to be met with extreme military violence and fake democratic reforms ushered in by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and best-fake president ever, B.S. Obama).
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: Sonny goes to Myanmar, all the way to Mandalay, to see what they eat on the streets and, more importantly, in the temples. Buddhist monks and novices rely on alms, donated food prepared by the local community.
Although the country is very Buddhist, like neighboring Mahayana China, monks may eat most donated things -- even slaughtered animals -- so long as they neither "see, hear, or suspect"that such animals have been killed to feed them. (They do not seem to concern themselves too much with this rule from the Monastic Disciplinary Code or Vinaya, and the locals do not seem to know the rule at all).
So as long as they are neither killing nor tacitly/implicitly approving of killing, all kinds of spicy and somewhat low-grade foods (white rice, stale oils, toxins, preservatives, chemicals, MSG, flavorants, etc.) are donated and consumed. The villagers are poor but generous, and they give the best they have.
To find out what that "mystery dish" the monks eat in the morning is, Sonny becomes a novice orsamanera(a "little shaman," a wandering ascetic in training), a temporarily-ordained monastic, to find out. He gains rare insight into the Theravada monkhood, living conditions in the developing world, Asian customs, and the vulgar "street" food of poor countries. He ordained at AUNG MYAY THAR ZAN MONASTERY, Shwe Sar Yan Pagoda Road, Pathein Gyi Township, Mandalay.
BREAKFAST: Deep fried tofu, fish curry with tomatoes, fried chili with white rice.
At A MYE KAUNG RESTAURANT, 30th Street, between 66th and 67th Street, they dared him to sample stir-fried chicken butts (anus, entrails, offal, intestines, fecal matter tainted flesh) with chopped up veggies and heavy garlic mash. Smoking hot pan of low-grade cooking oil and ginger, garlic, chili, onion, chicken butts (anus tips), carrot, bell pepper, oyster sauce, soy sauce, chicken powder, and salt coated in sweet thick soy sauce and scallion and stirred.
Little has changed in ancient parts of Asia.
He also swallowed boiled beef (cow) tripe (anal tract) and tongue (with white coat of saliva, mucus, and film of bacterial colonies): Tripe and tongue doused in salt, garlic, ginger, and rice wine boiled served with the biel sauce (ground coriander, basil, herbs mix with biel juice).
He also got drunk and tore into grilled sparrows (little city birds) and doves (white pigeons) marinated in pungent garlic, ginger, paprika, and rice wine, then burned to a charcoal crisp headless.
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🥒ABOUT BEFRS: Sonny is from the U.S. currently calling Vietnam home. He’s been living in Asia for 10 years and started making food and travel videos to document his experiences. He travels [like murdered Anthony Bourdain] to different parts of the world, hunting down and documenting unique foods in each country.
If you spot any factual food errors in these videos, please feel free to politely let them know in the comments. Sonny is a huge fan of trying different, interesting foods in each country. This show is from a Western point of view, but more importantly, Sonny's point of view. It is never meant to offend any person or culture.
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country is a 2008 Danish documentary directed by Anders Østergaard. It follows the Saffron Revolution against Gen. Than Shwe's military dictatorship in Burma, which the junta of generals renamed "Myanmar." The "VJ" in the title stands for "video journalist." Some of it was filmed on hand-held cameras. The footage was then smuggled out of the country, physically or over the Internet. Other parts of it were reconstructed, which caused controversy.More
Hypocritical monks call for ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingyas?
(Episode 3, June 20, 2020) One of the initiatives at the Thabarwa Nature Center in Los Angeles is to collect used goods and other donated items and ship them to Burma (Myanmar) by sea. One shipping container returns, and another is sent. The last one arrived just before the Water Festival.
Then the coronavirus lockdown was announced in Burma. Sayadaw Ottamasara had to stay in Burma indefinitely. But no crisis is too large. He began giving Dharma talks to calm the locals and the foreign volunteers. Then he started a new initiative to come up with a better alms food container.
He begins collecting discarded plastic water bottles to reuse them, as well as to manage waste and keep food separated better. Fifteen of the 17 daily almsround routes are cut off. And group size is restricted to just five.
It's an incredible feat what is accomplished, watching the innovation and speed of the main Thabarwa Center in Thanlyin, Burma, in outer Rangoon (Yangon Division). Sayadaw is at the helm, and 4,000 residents with special needs are fed, protected, and cared for. Unique initiatives develop daily.
Pacifica Free Speech Radio Los Angeles (KPFK.org 90.7 FM) recycles.
Rohingya Muslim refugees walk through water after crossing from Burma by boat through the Naf River in Teknaf, Muslim Bangladesh, on 9-7-17 (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters).
This story is a part of Seeking Security Human stories from a world in conflict (PRI)
Burma’s gruesome purge of Rohingya Muslims appears unstoppable
Theravada Buddhist Burma was once great.
It is Asia’s most vicious ethnic cleansing campaign, a purge that has driven Rohingya Muslims screaming from their Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) homeland into the marshlands of Islamic Bangladesh.
Now it is accelerating. Burma’s army, seemingly determined to rid the nation of this ethnic minority, has created a Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh that has topped half a million -- larger than the population of the Bahamas or Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
After a lull for much of 2017, the purge has re-commenced. As many as 270,000 Rohingya have poured out of Burma (now called Myanmar by the dictatorship that rules behind the scenes) in the last two weeks alone, according to the United Nations refugee agency.What triggered this mass exodus?
When Burma became a dictatorship and draconian police state, its ancient monastic institutions continued. Two novices venerate large statue (notjustnut/flickr.com).
.
In recent years, a dysfunctional Rohingya rebel group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army has formed. They have staged sporadic attacks on police outposts.
Here is a statement the group issued this week, labeling Burma's government a "terrorist organization."
The group has a Twitter account but far too few guns to take on Burma’s massive military, which wields rocket-propelled grenades and attack choppers. All evidence suggests new rebel recruits are handed clubs or blades in lieu of rifles.
The rebels' most recent strike, in the last week of August, killed a dozen men from Burma’s security forces. The army has responded with overwhelming force: razing whole villages, ostensibly to flush out militants.
The group are called “terrorists” by the government, but they have largely focused their violence on hard targets, namely, police and troops.
They've abandoned their original name, Harakah al-Yaqin, in favor of the current non-Arabic title -- apparently to ward off accusations that it would attract global jihadists such as Pakistani Taliban or ISIS, both of which have expressed sympathy for their cause.
Local man in Teknaf, Bangladesh, carries elderly Rohingya refugee woman unable to walk after crossing the border from Burma, on Sept. 1, 2017 (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters).
What awaits the refugees when they reach Bangladesh?
Burma does not care about its Buddhists.
Extremely bleak [refugee] camps, battered by heavy monsoon rains, await Rohingya escaping brutality in Burma. New arrivals are directed to mucky fields where they must build their own shelter out of mud, branches, and plastic trash.
Bangladesh is already one of the world’s most crowded nations. Just imagine half of America’s population crammed into Illinois. It is not equipped to care for a massive influx of sick, traumatized people.
Its government has tried to dissuade incoming Rohingya refugees by keeping its camps in a deprived state. One of the larger camps, Kutupalong, is a maze of clay huts, inhabited by naked children and malnourished adults. United Nations officials say this shelter site and others are at a “breaking point.”
So Bangladesh’s officials are now reviving a proposal to ship out all the Rohingya to a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. This would be an extreme solution. The island is barren, roadless, and submerged during high tide.
Why isn’t Aung San Suu Kyi speaking out?
Well, she is -- but she’s not saying what her fans abroad [which includes her many Wisdom Quarterly fans] have hoped she’d say.
Aung San Suu Kyi -- the state councilor of Burma whose party won elections in 2015 after years of Western backing -- is not merely indifferent to the Rohingya plight. She oversees a propaganda machine that works to silence their pleas for help.
Her offices have told UN diplomats that Rohingya are burning down their own homes to make the government look bad. During a wave of well-documented army rapes against the ethnic group, they’ve accused Rohingya women of crying “fake rape.” Her team has even claimed that foreign aid workers are secretly supporting the “terrorists.”
Earlier this year, I asked close colleague of Aung San Suu Kyi whether he thought she privately sympathized w #Rohingya. "No," he said. https://t.co/uVtPCJIbyi — Poppy McPherson (@poppymcp) September 4, 2017
Suu Kyi: I'm kept in the dark!
Leading Western outlets -- like The New York Times and The Washington Post -- seem dismayed by the once-beloved democracy idol’s silence. But she isn’t silent. She’s repeatedly denied that ethnic cleansing is taking place while her staff works to discredit Rohingya grievances.
There's no reason to think Suu Kyi would suddenly reverse course and defend the Rohingya’s right to a homeland in Burma. Besides, she lacks the power to halt the military.
Forget or ignore US statements that Burma has “overcome decades of military rule to achieve a democratic state.” Burma is actually a hybrid military-civilian state in which the military has total control over the police and troops and veto power over the elected parliament.So whom should foreign governments focus on instead?
They should focus on Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing rather than Parliamentarian Suu Kyi. He is the commander in chief of the military -- an abusive institution that has Burma burning at both ends.
This is the person who could put a stop to what UN officials have called a “process of genocide.” It is this person -- not Aung San Suu Kyi -- who could meaningfully root out the soldiers guilty of raping Rohingya teens and women as a military tactic.
But nothing suggests he will reverse course, either. Instead, platoons under his control appear to be planting land mines along the border to prevent refugees from ever returning home [but some are being killed and injured by those mines simply trying to leave]. More
PRI takes a global approach to the news of the day, helping readers understand how what happens around the world matters in Washington, DC and in our neighborhoods. Today more than ever, we need conversations, perspectives, and diverse voices.
When the military deposed Aung San Suu Kyi and took the Buddhist country into decades of military dictatorship, no one could have guessed she would one day join them. Has she?
Side with us, Suu Kyi!You'll never regret it. I'm pres., she's the future-pres. We'll put you in office. What could go wron? We'll rule as the faces of the real rulers.
Burma was, until recently, one of the most Buddhist countries in the world. This was because of it being closed off. It was the source of George Orwell's works: Burmese Days, Animal Farm, Shooting an Elephant (about the futility of imperial British rule in the third world), and NineteenEighty-Four. Orwell, a British citizen and imperial soldier in the service of the crown, was born in India, which then included Colonial Burma as another Asian colony.
Burma, now called Mynamar, got is name changed from Dictator Gen. Than Shwe, the "Asian Hitler." It is a police state that a few years ago took off its Orwell Sad Face and put on a Huxley Happy Face, pretending to be an American-style democracy instead of what it really still is, a totalitarian dictatorship with generals in the new super-secretive capital of Naypyidaw pulling the strings.
The formerly imprisoned and house-arrested heroine Aung San Suu Kyi is now a member of Parliament and the face of the country.
The ruling generals hide with the help of their stolen billions and prop up representatives in the new political system they set up with the help of former US Sec'y of State Hillary Clinton and Pres. B. Obama, who were trying to seduce Burma into a capitalist relationship so that it would distance itself from influential neighbor China.
Barry, you also have a Nobel Peace Prize, what does it feel like to be behind killings? - Uh... uh, Suu Kyi, Lady, umm, don't ask me that. You'll know when you do it. It's part of the Game. Let's hope they don't take our medals back (Pete Souza/White House).
.
Golden Buddhas in splendor in Buddhist hall
When the country was a closed society ruled by dictators, Theravada Buddhism could carry on an unspoiled tradition free of exterior influences (like Tibet once did).
But the Chinese exerted influence, and the ruling junta took advantage of the people. And the nation's heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of its hero Aung San, was put under house arrest.
Soldiers and police beat peaceful monks.
Finally, the Buddhist monks rose up to join then lead the people in what came to be called the Saffron Revolution against the totalitarian government (as seen in the American movie "Beyond Rangoon" with Patricia Arquette).
It did not end well (as seen in the secret documentary "Burma VJ," the VJ standing for video journalist).
But she was not killed because the sheepish people would have risen up at such a provocation. Although she was once democratically-elected, those elections were cancelled when the military took over and declared martial law. She was never allowed to take the highest office. Yet, surprisingly, she was not killed even when she would not submit to the dictators. They had many chances to kill her, but they did not.
Now she is allowed to serve in Parliament. But she is banned from being prime minister. Sadly, recently, she has become a mouthpiece for the real rulers. There is talk of rescinding her Nobel Peace Prize, which they should certainly do for war criminal B. Obama.
Aung San Suu Kyi defends her handling of Burma violence...(Guardian, 9/7/17) Suu Kyi: a post on her Facebook page earlier blamed "terrorists" for "misinformation" about the [state-sponsored rapes, ethnic cleansing, genocide and] violence.
The Lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, whom WQ is devoted to, says it is all a misunderstanding, propaganda, or misinformation. But the long mistreated Rohingya minority is a tantamount to US blacks in the inner city surrounded by intolerant foes. The country is more than 90% Buddhist, but not its impoverished and obedient soldiers, police, and vigilantes.
The corrupt behind-the-scenes government still calls the shots, and they don't seem to tell Suu Kyi much about their real plans, so she is left to try to explain what the international media reports to her as happening on the ground.
Is [Buddhist] Burmese military carrying out genocide against Rohingya [Muslim] minority?
We meant well. It was all part of the plan.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned the brutal Burmese military operation against Rohingya Muslims is at risk of spiraling into an ethnic cleansing campaign, as the violence against the long-persecuted minority group continues.
This war criminal's my mentor and advisor.
The U.N. says almost 150,000 Rohingya have fled the predominantly [Theravada] Buddhist country into neighboring [Islamic] Bangladesh in the last 12 days since the military operation began -- with up to 15,000 more expected to flee every single day this week.
Sec'y of State Clinton is a war criminal.
Advocates say as many as 800 Rohingya civilians, including women and children, have been killed in recent days. For more, we speak with Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation in the U.K. He was born and brought up in Burma’s Arakan state. In 1982, he was rendered effectively stateless along with a million other ethnic Rohingya under a new nationality law. And we speak with Richard Weir, a fellow in the Asia Division covering Burma at Human Rights Watch.
Transcript
World-famous Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, Burma, contains the Buddha's hair relics.
CO-HOST NERMEENSHAIKH: We [now look] at Burma. The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned the brutal Burmese military operation against Rohingya Muslims is at risk of spiraling into an ethnic cleansing campaign as the violence against the long-persecuted minority group continues.
The U.N. says almost 150,000 Rohingyas have fled the predominantly [homogenous] Buddhist country into neighboring Bangladesh in the last 12 days since the military operation began, with up to 15,000 more expected to flee every single day this week.
CO-HOST AMYGOODMAN: Advocates say that as many as 800 Rohingya civilians, including women and children, have been killed [by Burmese soldiers and Buddhist civilians] in recent days.
This is Rohingya Muslim Salma Begum [speaking], one of the tens of thousands who have fled to Bangladesh following the army crackdown, which began last month.
SALMABEGUM: [translated from Burmese] They burned our houses. We could not take our belongings. We were hiding near a hill for two days. We were there in the rain without food and with my children. When we heard the sound of shooting, we took a boat and crossed the sea to come here to Bangladesh. More
Tun Khin is the president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation in the U.K. He was born and brought up in Burma’s Arakan state. In 1982, he was rendered effectively stateless along with a million other ethnic Rohingya under a new nationality law.
Richard Weir is a fellow in the Asia Division covering Burma at Human Rights Watch. He was based in Burma last year.
RANGOON, Burma - A massive precious jade stone recently discovered near a village in
Kachin State’s Hpakant region is believed to weigh 50+ tons.
But
with half the rock yet to be unearthed, its exact mass remains unknown.
After visiting the discovery site and sizing up the raw jade stone in
Wai Ka Village amid tight security, local jade merchant U Cho said
initial reports of its size were likely underestimated.
Jade boulders still buried (The Irrawaddy)
[Prior to becoming a military dictatorship and, along with England, part of the inspiration for George Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burma was the richest country in Southeast Asia. (Orwell was born in British India but stationed in Burma during his military service. SeeShooting an Elephant). It is still a tremendous source of raw resources fought over by the USA and China, both aspiring to strip the land and its corrupt military dictatorship/false front democratically elected parliament to enrich themselves. Dictator and head of the ruling military junta, Gen. Than Shwe took a backseat while still pulling the levers of political control, as former U.S. Sec'y of State, and potential future presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton cut deals and helped put pressure on the junta to give opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi a seat in parliament.]
“We estimate that the stone might be bigger,” he told The Irrawaddy.
“What we had heard [that the stone was thought to weigh about 20 tons]
was because the body of the stone is still buried in the ground. But we
don’t know how much it will be worth.”
Government troops were deployed this week to guard the area where the
jade stone is located. As a result, local small-scale jade miners have
been completely barred from s[caveng]ing for jade in the surrounding area.
The jade [boulder], described by locals as being “as big as a Mitsubishi Pajero truck,” was found by a small-scale miner, Aung Naing Win, on Feb.
9th in Hpakant Township. The region, west of the Kachin State capital
Myitkyina, is known for possessing some of the world’s best jade.
Contacted by The Irrawaddy on Wednesday, a staffer at the state-owned
Myanmar Gems Enterprise in [the new Burmese capital and secretive military headquarters] Naypyidaw (WSJ video) said she was not allowed to
comment on the jade stone discovery in Hpakant. Asked for contact
details for an individual authorized to speak to the media, the staffer
said she was not at liberty to provide that information.
The Myanmar Gems Enterprise operates under Burma’s Ministry of Mines.
Small-scale miners in the region operate unlicensed, and thus have no
legal claim to jade that they discover. Most of them deal in the black
market trade. More
(This World Rocks) Burma with its massive golden, jewel-encrusted Shwedagon Pagoda (housing the Buddha's first relics, a few hairs given to merchants shortly after the great enlightenment and decision to teach, according to legend), a testament to the country's wealth.
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