22.10.2006
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Education for Maung Setana, New Light of Myanmar,
Advocator of scientific nationalism
_ JODBUR
It was just another lonely day for an ordinary Burmese working in overseas just making ends meet. Days are busy with job commitment and nights are lonely without having loved ones near by; browsing Burmese web sites while sipping a cup of green tea become ritualistic.
A friend forwarded an article, "scientific nationalism", written by Maung Setana recently published in the New Light of Myanmar, military regime's mouthpiece newspaper. Although JORDBUR (Just an ORDinary BURmese) does not earn a PhD in political science or macro economics, he is quite skilled in Googling, has some broken English learnt at U ThawBiTa monaestry, and so here he is going to write an article to give some piece of education to that poor Maung Setana who is living behind bamboo curtain and may or may not have high speed internet access thanks to some scientific nationalist control freaks in Burma.
First of all, that chap seems not to be able to distinguish between -cracies and -isms.
He messed it up so well that even enlightened JORDBUR was lost for a short while. There is no such thing like 3 ways and 3 isms as he stated, -cracies are for governance systems while -isms are ideologies (economic, social, political or religious).
So a progressive leftist parties holding socialist ideology (like Labour party in UK, Democrats in USA, to name a few) could form governments in democratic framework.
The macro economic model may be either capitalistic market driven economy or state controlled heavily centralized economy. Communist Party of China is claiming itself a people's democracy with communist ideology and market driven economy, or at least it is fighting for to be recognized as market economy. It is important to note that Chinese leadership claims to be nationalistic too and it does have elections in municipal level.
So JORDBUR hope scientific nationalism advocates will start to realize whether they are trying to be ambiguous by design for deception or delusion for lack of due diligence.
I hope it is the latter case and here I am trying to enlighten Maung Setana and his folks.
As a reader I took the liberty to assume that in his article, Maung Setana implies liberal representative democracy is not what Burmese wants and therefore all organizations in general and NLD in particular should denounce Daw Aung San Su Kyi, accept ideology the author is advocating and starts building Burma for prosperity and progress under military leadership.
But JORDBUR does not see any reasons why Burmese could not have liberalism, democratically elected majority represented government while respecting and protecting the human rights and religious rights of minorities, why Burma should not have market driven economy and embrace globalization without destroying core values; not all but core values what is meant to be Burmese and not every artifacts we Burmese have now but what good attributes what Burmese should have.
I hope Maung Setana will be enlightened a bit now as JORDBUR needs to sleep for work tomorrow to bring bread on his table and rice on his famiy's table back in Myanmar (Burma).
The following are excerpts from Wikipedia, another example of web democracy.
¨ Nationalism is an ideology that a nation state is the fundamental unit for human social life, and national interest takes precedence over any ideological or other social and political principles.
¨ Liberalism is an ideology and political tradition which holds that individual citizen's liberty is the primary political value. Liberalism has its roots in the Western Enlightenment, but the term now encompasses a diversity of political thought.
Comments:
Boedawgyi said _
Nice work!
Sein said _
Good. You are requested to write Education for Junta Ah Phoe Than Shwe.
Your Comments here_
Request: If you can kindly volunteer to translate BURMA DIGEST English articles into Burmese, please let us know burmadigest@tayzathuria.org.uk .
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