Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Here we are, sitting at a desk, in front of a computer, relaying all the news updates to the world and yet, we cannot do anything to cease those atrocities. News that we are posting on our blogs and message boards may appear as just news to the outside world. However, for us, those news are made up of heart-wrenching words." [2]
Every military knows it's "C's": Command, Control, Communications.
With Myanmar's generals blocking the country's Internet border, it's more difficult to discern what civilians know about their own fate, much less about fighting.
Ni Thway, the author of the above-quoted block, goes right on to note, "My fellow Burmese people, who are dying, are just ordinary citizens who have absolutely no knowledge in weapons and warfare."
In 1934, artist-intellectual, warrior-poet, eventually French statesman Andrés Malraux published Man's Fate [3], an exploration of the interior of revolutionary fervor hung on the bare bones of warfare. The book opens with an assassin, armed only with a knife, contemplating his act as it is about to take place--and then the Malreaux puts the reader through it with him.
It may be odd, even ironic, to mention Man's Fate as it had as its sympathetic subject the communist struggle for power, but as with most novels, it finds its strength not in cant or propaganda but in mulling the personal and universal in warfare. As such, it has also the side of the guerrilla and terrorist, the man who starts with nothing but a knife, the men who have only a little money for bribing officials and pirating a small arms shipment, the citizen soldiers who, having acquired small arms, take on a police station.
That was then.
As this is now, the lessons for guerrillas have been made plain this past year: mayhem may be hard to stop but the moment fighters coalesce into an army on the field, the greater force kills them: from Lal Masjid in Pakistan to the southern provinces of Afghanistan, picking fights openly with a state's healthy military proves a disaster more often than not.
Still, what to do: make noise, throw rocks?
For the long term, there's the notion that the "better program" wins wars, not ideologues, less so brutality, but simply the favoring--and favors--of civilians (a fourth "C", perhaps, in Burma's troubles) who, by providing aid and comfort to those who may better represent their own position, may without directly fighting nonetheless gamble their lives on the better future possible.
1. All Burma I.T. Students' Union.
2. Ni, Thway. "From the heart of ordinary blogger." ABITSU, October 2, 2007.
3. Malraux, Andrés. Man's Fate. Harrison Smith and Robert Hass, Inc., 1934; New York: Random House, 1984.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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