Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThe American position in general and the "Neocon" one more so has been to promote democracy around the world. What may seem like a sensible national quest (to us, of course) plays out in weird ways around the world.
Instead of obtaining democracies, we prop up dictators, which may not be all that awful--as you know, I regard Pervez Musharraf the most democratic and measured of the breed (under his wing, Pakistan's business community and free press have thrived, and his measures against rivals, who often mean democracy much less good, have been preventative of political chaos--but more often, whoever we promote or prop elsewhere puts family on the take right quick (and look not too deeply into human rights abuses and such).
Where most American intercession holds sway against political brutality and anarchy and then mires down with the personalities who produce that, the conflict in Myanmar has a much more straightforward structure to it: 45 years of oligarch in the form of a military junta and a population united in being mad as hell about it and, from time to time, standing up to say it will not take it anymore.
So far, however, it looks like the government has all the guns and the people, monks included, little more than the will to put up nonviolent resistence.
This will be the day to watch the birth or suffocation of another "hot" conflict zone.
Agence France Press reports "four killed, 100 hurt" in the conflict so far. [1]
An Associated Press article in Ft. Wayne, Indiana's Journal Gazette, notes this quote from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: "The age of impunity in neglecting and overriding human rights is over." [2]
Would that it were elsewhere as well as Myanmar.
Nonetheless, whatever part of the world has become Internet empowered, our ability to watch and weigh in on events everywhere on the planet would seem unprecedented.
We're there with the monks this time: it's not history (yet); it's not yesterday's news; it's not "page 3"--it's front page for whoever wishes to make it so. How that cannot have an effect on the internal politics of once isolated states, I do not know. Their leaders, privileged families, associates, and vendors who are also logging on and reading about themselves through every web channel imaginable have always now to live with the separately created but accumulating consensus about themselves.
This is the first time I've used the offered and embedded code that accompanies YouTube videos, but given yesterday's familiar "people's march" and today's dismal and equally familiar violence, I thought I'd play from yesterday in Myanmar right here. [3]
"Juvenilebirds" is, according to the YouTube identification block, 17 years old. The videographer (who is to say whether the shooter is male or female? And should it matter?) has six subscribers listed and the post has been seen 63 times (or possibly just 60 since my machinery reloaded and replayed it about three times).
I'd be surprised if the numbers remained unchanged by this time tomorrow.
As one academic noted while embroiled in a bitter fight about a book and its distribution numbers, the volume of readers may count for a lot less than who those readers are. Some of Juvenilebirds videos have produced a viewing count (in one day) of 239 hits (reference: http://www.youtube.com/user/JUVENILEBIRDS).
The Internet doesn't "invade" countries or break through their boundaries with the content of "enemy" cultures as much as it provides its own alternative "mind space" that essentially defies all government regulation of thought while making it possible for readers to identify, aggregate, and examine leadership personalities, good and bad, across the global campus.
3. Juvenilebirds. "Entered Student Union in Burma - II". YouTube, September 25, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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