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)
40 people dead after paraglider drops bombs on festival
(AFP via MSN)
At least forty people have died after a paraglider dropped bombs on a festival in Burma (which the military junta renamed Myanmar). Hundreds of people were gathered in the Chaung U Township for the Thadingyut full moon festival on Monday evening when the military dropped bombs on the crowd, according to a member of the committee that organized the event. 40 people dead after paraglider drops bombs on festival
Horror in Myanmar: Paraglider drops bombs on festival crowd, killing at least 40
(New York Post) Oct. 8, 2025: At least 40 people, including children, were killed and 80 injured after a Burmese military paraglider dropped bombs on a religious festival in Burma’s Chuang U Township. The attack targeted attendees marking the Thadingyut full moon festival, many of whom were protesting the junta’s dictatorial rule. Footage shows the devastating aftermath as survivors search through debris. #myanmar #Burmese #Thadingyut
An Unholy Alliance: Monks and the Military in Myanmar
(Al Jazeera English, March 18, 2019) With almost 90 percent of Myanmar/Burma's population being devoted Theravada Buddhists, the religion [like neighboring Thailand] has been at the heart of the nation's very identity for centuries.
But while the pillars of Buddhist teachings are love (metta), compassion, and peace, there is a very different variation to the philosophy being taught at the Ma Ba Tha ("Patriotic Association of Myanmar") monastery in Yangon/Rangoon's Insein township.
The monks there are connected to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, the systematic persecution and genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state.
Al Jazeera's unprecedented access to the Ma Ba Tha monastery and its leaders offers a glimpse into how their ultra-nationalist agenda is becoming the blueprint for the political structure of the country.
Is the joining of forces between monks and the dictatorial generals threatening Myanmar's young and fragile parliamentary democracy that incorporates Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi?
(The Daily Show) Trevor Noah looks at anti-Muslim violence by monks and citizens in Myanmar.
I lost everything for Burma.
The Patriotic Association of Myanmar, abbreviated Ma Ba Tha(မဘသ) in Burmese, is variously translated into English as the "Association for the Protection of Race and Religion," the "Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion," and the "Committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion." It is an ultra nationalist Buddhist organization based in Myanmar (Burma). Some members are connected to the 969 Movement. In May 2017, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which regulates the Buddhist monastics in the country, ordered the group disbanded. The group renamed itself as the Buddha Dhamma Charity Foundation, which government officials have also outlawed, according to government officials. More
In Myanmar (Burma), different groups of Theravada Buddhist monks are battling with how to deal with the country’s minority Muslim (Rohingya) population. While some Buddhist monks advocate peace, others, such as the extremist Ma Ba Tha*or Patriotic Association of Myanmar, are stoking up racist hatred and violence. The Guardian visited Myanmar to investigate how the monks’ actions are threatening to destabilize the country’s new parliamentary democracy under discredited Aung San Suu Kyi.
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?
Sayadaw Ashin Ottamathara Dhamma talk, Thabarwa Meditation Center, Thanlyin, Burma (Myanmar, April 2, 2020); Sayalay Aloka, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
The Zen-like philosophy of Ven. Ottamasara
Sayadaw Ottamathara (Ottamasara) of the Thabarwa Meditation Center outside of Rangoon, Burma (renamed "Yangon, Myanmar" by the military dictatorship of "Asia's Hitler," Gen. Than Shwe, and his junta's SLORC, which his PR firm renamed the SPDC when then U.S. Sec'y of State Hillary Clinton visited and made quiet backdoor deals, co-opting beloved Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and positioning her in the corrupt ruling party's parliament with its transparent veneer of its in-name-only democracy, assuming she would defeat Trump and ascend to the presidency) gives aDharma talk to the international volunteers, many of them Westerners, concerning COVID-19.
We're scared of SARS-2! What sould we do?
This is an opportunity to work with the government and correct the issues at his massive meditation center in the town of Thanlyin. The ashin ("teacher") teaches that "good deeds" -- mindful charity, detachment (nonclinging), kindness, and seeing things as they naturally (Burmese thabarwa, Sanskrit svabhava) are -- are the keys to happiness and success in life and meditation, even in surviving the pandemic.
(UnitedNaturesMedia.com) The documentary Spiritually Incorrect features the former Western Burmese Buddhist monk Alan Clements (worlddharma.com). Due for release in 2020, it is directed by Peter Charles Downey with music by Sacred Earth (sacredearthmusic.com).
Western monks are treated like royalty in Burma.
The question is, Who's Alan Clements? If only they made a movie about this author, social activist, war journalist, stand up artist, and former Buddhist monk. He was one of the first Westerners to go from America to Burma to ordain since the very first Westerner to become a Theravada Buddhist monk -- Irishman Laurence Carroll or U Dhammaloka (The Dharma Bum).
Alan Clements dropped out of the University of Virginia, went East, and became one of the first Westerners to ordain as a Buddhist monk in Burma, where he lived at Mahasi Sayadaw's Mindfulness Meditation Center, Rangoon, for nearly five years.
He trained in the practice and teaching of mindfulness insight (vipassana) meditation and Buddhist psychology (Abhidharma), under the guidance of his preceptor Mahasi Sayadaw and his successor Sayadaw U Pandita.
In 1984 he was forced to leave the monastery by Burma’s military authorities with no reason given. So Clements returned to the West and was invited to lecture widely on the “wisdom of mindfulness.”
In addition to leading numerous mindfulness-based meditation retreats and trainings throughout the U.S., Australia, and Canada. This included assisting in a three-month mindfulness teacher training with Sayadaw U Pandita at Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts.
In 1988 he integrated his classical Buddhist training and his political awareness of global human rights, environmental sanity, democracy, and the preciousness of everyday freedom. His efforts working on behalf of oppressed peoples has led a former director of Amnesty International to call Clements “one of the most important and compelling voices of our times.”
As an investigative journalist he has lived in some of the world's most volatile areas. In the jungles of Burma in 1990, he was one of the first eyewitnesses to document the mass oppression of ethnic minorities by Burma’s military, which resulted in his first book, Burma: The Next Killing Fields?, which includes a foreword by the Dalai Lama. More
In Burma’s Rakhine state, hundreds of new houses have been handed over to families displaced by the state's violence against the Muslim minority Rohingya population crisis in 2017 when many were chased into neighboring Muslim Bangladesh. But none of these homes were for the Muslim minority group. Almost two years on, there’s no sign the 700,000 Rohingyas who fled across the border to Bangladesh will be returning anytime soon. The Burmese government continues to deny its military troops carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide. The BBC's Myanmar (Burma) Correspondent Nick Beake has gained rare access to the affected part of Rakhine state. More
Associated Press (ap.org); Andrew Win, Crystal Q. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Kyi Lin, center, the gunman who shot a prominent Muslim lawyer who was a close adviser of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, is escorted by police at Yangon Northern District Court in Yangon, Friday, Feb. 15, 2019 (AP).
George Orwell, who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, was talking about England and Burma, then under British rule as part of India, and the troubles and police state he described are still going strong. Of course, the book best describes life in the USA as a surveillance state somewhat akin to Huxley's Brave New World.
Court sentences 2 to death for killing Suu Kyi aide
RANGOON, Burma - A
court in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar) on Friday sentenced two men to death for the [assassination] of
a prominent Muslim lawyer who was a close adviser to the country's top
leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Yangon (Rangoon) Northern District Court found the
gunman, Kyi Lin, guilty of premeditated murder and illegal weapons
possession for the Jan. 29, 2017 shooting of Ko Ni in broad daylight at
Yangon airport. An accomplice involved in planning the killing was also
sentenced to death, and two other men involved in the crime received
prison sentences.
A fifth suspect thought to be the crime's
mastermind remains at large. Ko Ni was shot in the head at close range
on Jan. 29, 2017, as he walked out of the airport after returning from a
working trip to Indonesia. Closed-circuit television footage showed he
was shot near a taxi stand as he held his 5-year-old grandchild.
Onlookers chased down the gunman, catching him only
after he also shot dead a taxi driver who was one of his pursuers. An
ex-convict previously imprisoned for illegally trading in antiquities
such as sculptures of Buddha, Kyi Lin also received a 20-year sentence
for killing the taxi driver.
The death penalty in Myanmar is carried out by
hanging but no executions appear to have been carried out since 1988.
Many prisoners on death row have had their sentences commuted. The
failure to apprehend the crime's alleged mastermind left many questions
about the motivation for the killing, especially with the defendants
offering contradictory testimony.
Speculation
about the reasons Ko Ni was targeted focused on two possibilities. Ko
Ni was noted for criticizing army interference in politics and advised
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy on ways to get around articles
in the army-imposed constitution that give the military wide powers even
after Myanmar's transition to democracy. Her party got around a ban on
her becoming president by simply creating a new executive post, state
counsellor, with presidential powers.
The fact that two of the defendants are former army
officers fueled theories that the military was involved with the crime,
an accusation it denies. As a prominent advocate for the Muslim
minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar, Ko Ni was also a target of
abuse from ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks and their allies, some of
whom publicly gloated after his death.
Burma has been gripped by
anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years after deadly communal violence in
the western state of Rakhine, home to many Muslims from the Rohingya
ethnic minority. More
Pope Francis is welcomed at Yangon Airport, Burma, Nov. 27, 2017 (Max Rossi/Reuters)
.
Hey, these Asian Buddhists are funny (SL).
The [current Catholic] pope may not use the term "Rohingya" during his trip to Burma [called "Myanmar" by Burma's lingering military dictators led by Gen. Than Shwe from their newly built semi-underground capital at Naypyidaw]. Here's why.
Pope Francis on Monday arrived in Rangoon, Burma (Yangon, Myanmar) -- the first stop of his six-day trip to Burma and neighboring [Muslim majority, Buddhist minority] Bangladesh.
The pontiff’s visit comes as Burma is being accused of
violently [conducting a genocide and] pushing out hundreds of thousands of minority Rohingya
Muslims. The United Nations and US Secretary of State [former Exxon CEO] Rex Tillerson have
accused the country’s army, the Tatmadaw, of conducting a campaign of
"ethnic cleansing" against the Rohingya.
Don't worry, Dictator Than Shwe, I will not say "Rohingya." I'll call them "Bengalis."
As the pope embarked on his visit on Monday, many were
waiting to see whether he would use the term "Rohingya" to describe
the group. The word is not used in Burma; there, the group is
described as "Bengalis" -- even by former dissident and current face of the country, Aung San Suu Kyi] -- suggesting they are [illegal migrants] from Bangladesh [who came to settle and sided with the Colonial British who were defeated when Burma, like neighboring India, gained its independence].
I call them Bengalis, Mr. Pope. How about you?
The pope has used the word Rohingya in previous speeches
but has been advised by the church’s sole Catholic cardinal in Burma to forgo using the term, so as not to stir up violence in
Buddhist-majority Burma, where Catholics make up approximately 1
percent of the total population.
Despite testimony by refugees pointing to a widespread campaign of rape, murder, and arson, Burma denies any wrongdoing. More
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporting was used in this story. Listen to an interview with The World Correspondent Jasmine Garsd, who's on the ground in
Bangladesh.
Hmm, did England (the British) steal Buddhist Burma's treasured ruby? (myanmars.net)
The world-famous Shwedagon Pagoda housing the Buddha's hair relics, Rangoon, Burma
Who stole Burma's royal ruby?
Asian Hitler: Dictator Gen. Than Shwe
When Britain [UK] conquered Buddhist Burma [which its current dictator and his military junta -- who secretly rule from their secretive new capital of Naypyidaw after changing the country name to Myanmar, while Aung San Suu Kyi takes all the heat with no political power but a bully pulpit she dare not use for fear of being deposed or assassinated -- control from behind the scenes directing the military to commit genocide on Rakhine state's Muslim minority Rohingya, whom Suu Kyi calls "foreigners" and "Bengalis"], the last king's most treasured possession -- an enormous, priceless ruby -- disappeared. Who took it, where did it go, and where is it now?More
The reign of the last Burmese royals lasted just seven years when King Thibaw Min was defeated in the Third Anglo-Burmese War and forced to abdicate by the British in 1885.
On November 25, 1885 they were taken away in a covered carriage, leaving Mandalay Palace by the southern gate of the walled city along the streets lined by British soldiers and their wailing subjects, to the River Irrawaddy where a steamboat called Thuriya (the "Sun" or Suriya) awaited. King Thibaw was 27 and Queen Supayalat 26.
The Lady who would be queen of Burma
Queen Supayalat never lost her composure and was said to have asked a British soldier by the wayside for a light to smoke a Burmese cheroot [country cigarette].
She was pregnant and accompanied by her husband, their two daughters,
her two sisters, and her mother; the rest of their party followed on
foot.
Our superheroine gone bad
The troops had nicknamed her "Soup Plate," and in the commotion
and haste that attended their abduction, some of the crown jewels disappeared including a large ruby called Nga Mauk that Colonel Sladen had insisted on being handed over for safekeeping.
King Thibaw saw an opportunity in 1911 when King George V visited India,
and he wrote for the return of the Burmese crown jewels.
Tell them you happy, Suu Kyi, we not kill you.
But he only received
a reply that Col. Sladen had died in 1890. Nga Mauk was believed to
have subsequently turned up as the largest ruby on theBritish crown [pure pirate booty from amazing Asia]; it was recognized by Princess of Kyundaung in whose charge the ruby used to be... More
Vice.com US News; Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; Dem Now
Trump Demands Border Wall in Exchange for Helping DREAMers
The
White House has sent Congress a list of desired changes to immigration
laws, including new restrictions on family members of residents, new
ways to deport those in search of asylum, and perhaps most critically,
measures to get a border wall erected. President Trump said these planks
"must" be included in any deal to protect DACA recipients. In response,
Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi said the
administration could not be serious about "helping the Dreamers if they
begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers."—VICE News
Republican Senator Says Trump Risks Starting"'World War III"
Tennessee
US senator Bob Corker warned the president's behavior was in danger of
putting the US "on the path to World War III." The head of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee said the White House was turning into "an
adult day care center" and later explained he was genuinely troubled
that administration staff appeared to spend each day "trying to contain"
Trump.—The New York Times
NFL Players Association Responds to Mike Pence Walkout
After
the vice president left Sunday's Indianapolis Colts game against the
San Francisco 49ers early because some stars kneeled during the anthem,
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones also vowed to bench anyone who does
something "disrespectful to the flag." But NFL players aren't having it.
"We should not stifle these discussions and cannot allow our rights to
become subservient to the very opinions our Constitution protects," the
association said in a statement Sunday night.—The Hill
Harvey Weinstein Ousted from His Company
The
Weinstein Company's board has decided to dismiss the Hollywood producer
"in light of new information about misconduct." [Information we had but now that all of you know it, too, his employment at the Weinstein Company has become untenable.] His termination follows
last week's report in the New York Times detailing sexual
harassment allegations against Weinstein spanning multiple decades. He
and his brother, Bob, reportedly still retain 42 percent ownership of
the company they founded.—The New York Times
Mass exodus of half million Rohingya Muslims from Burma to Bangladesh for survival
At Least a Dozen Rohingya Drown After Boat Capsizes
Bangladeshi
police said at least 12 people were killed after a vessel transporting
Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar overturned in the Naf River, along the
border between the two countries. Ten of those discovered thus far were
children. Bangladeshi officials are now searching for others, with some
sources saying up to 100 people may have been onboard.—BBC News
Wall Street Journal finally explains the deep reasons for Aung San Suu Kyi, her silence on the Rohingya genocide, her powerlessness serving under the military leaders who wield all the power from behind the scenes, her loss of status as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Kim Jong-un Gives His Sister a Senior Role
Kim
Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's 30-year-old younger sister, has been
appointed as an alternate to the politburo, the country's central
governing authority. She previously served as the deputy director of
political communication and "agitation" for the national Communist
Party.—CNN
Hundreds of Thousands Rally Against Independence in Catalonia
According
to a police estimate, a crowd of roughly 350,000 people assembled in
the Catalan capital of Barcelona Sunday to advocate for the region
remaining part of Spain. The demonstration follows a referendum last
weekend in which roughly 90 percent of Catalan residents backed
independence but only 43 percent voted, sparking a constitutional
crisis.—Reuters
Five Killed in Drive-By Shooting in Pakistan
Two
gunmen on a motorcycle fatally shot the driver of a van and four others
in the vehicle at a market area in Quetta. Police said the attack was
deliberately directed at the Hazara Shia minority known to use the
vegetable market. No group had yet claimed responsibility for the act.—Al Jazeera
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