*12-18.03.2006
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NATIONAL DESTRUCTION or REVOLUTION
When you look at a coin, you can look at it in two
ways. Please, let me have a coin. Just for laughs, let me have a coin with
Than Shwe's face on it. What!, you might say. Since when did a coin have
Than Shwe's face on it?
You didn't know? Well, there's bound to be one.
But what USE is there in having a one-kyat coin with Than Shwe's face on it?
There is NO use! That's right, doubly
But bear with me just for more laughs. Let's look
at the Heads or Gaung side. What do you see? Than Shwe with koh-khauk-choh
face. That's one extra fold over the his usual shit-khauk face. (eight-fold,
expression for disgust) Or maybe we should have him with a settikhauk face
since he moved to Kyetpyay on the 11th month. No matter how many folds, one
thing is certain; looking at his face is depressing.....Seik pain dair....Seik
nyit tair......because his face signifies everything that is wrong with our
poor Motherland.
However, the SAME coin, flipped over, has the
Tails, or Pann, in which case, I'd like to nominate the Aung The Byay Pann, or
The Byay Victory Flowers, as a symbol of hope and inspiration.
Myet nhah Than Shwe (With) (the face of Than
Shwe)
Shwe Pann thay (The Golden Flower dies,
euphemism for impotence)
Aung The Byay thee (The Victory Flowers)
Aung Yah Myi! (Will Succeed!)
The point with the Than Shwe / Aung The Byay Coin
is that in Life, we always have choices.
1. We can look at Than Shwe and be miserable,
Seik dat Kyaht., --OR--
2. We can look at the beautiful Aung The Byay and
be motivated, Seik Tet Kywaht. The Choice is ours to make.
With that important introduction, let me tell you
the Story of the Drop of Honey that Ruined a Nation (Pyah Yay Da-Zet Pyi Pyet)
and compare it with the Cassette that Begets a Revolution.
The Drop of Honey that Ruined a Nation.
Long, long ago, in the land of Bah Yah Nathi (Benares
in Anglo-Indian), there was a King who sat down with members of his royal
court to partake of a huge banquet. While eating, the King inadvertently
spilled a drop of honey on the table cloth.....
and a fly landed on the honey.......
(now wait a minute, how can flies be present at
the King's Banquet? keep reading)....
A small house lizard (ein hmyaung) spotted the
fly, darted forward, and ate it.
(oh, no! A lizard at the King's Table? Since
when did royal palaces have lizards? Call the Royal Guards!)
A hungry rat saw the lizard and lunged forward.
As it was chewing it down....
(oh, no, it gets worse and worse......"Put the
Prime Minister in Jail! Yes, YOU, Khin Nyunt, you RAT, letting these
CORRUPTED RATS on my Royal Table!"
At this point, let me remind you of Dr. Blofeld,
the evil genius who sought to destroy the world. In that James Bond movie, you
recall, Dr. Blofeld always fondled a furry cat on his lap. Ever wonder why?
In this story, the Princess also has a furry pussy...I mean pussy cat on her
lap. The reason, for her, is that she can wipe her hands on the fur like a
napkin, while eating.)
Well, the Princess' pussy cat jumps on the table
and gobbles up the rat.
Not to be outdone, the Prince, who has a dog on
his lap, beats his mutt on the butt, and yells, "GO!" and the royal dog
attacks the royal cat.
SSSSNarrll.*%^$ Meeeoww ! &$#!* WOOF-WOOF! )%$# Ppsssssss...&^$
As the two animals fight it out on the Banquet
Table, the Princess screams at the Prince and he barks back at her. The King
and half of the courtiers take the Princess' side while the Queen and the
other half take the Prince's side and the Banquet Hall turns into chaos. The
King calls his bodyguards, the Princess beckons to her ever-ready suitors,
who, along with the Queen' Guards, and the Prince's Security Team all jump
in. These men, by their King on one end and the Prince on the other end go
each other's throats in a free-for-all brawl (like the drunken Chairman Ne
Win vis-a-vis foreign diplomats in the December 1975 Christmas Ball- Brawl at
Inya Lake Hotel in Rangoon)
Messengers are sent out from each side to their
respective headquarters, and a nationwide alert is sounded. The army units on
the King's side prepare for war as do the units on the Queen's side and before
long the entire Nation is embroiled in Civil War, finally ending in Total
Destruction of the Land.
That, Shwe Pwair Lar Et Pareikthat toht, Esteemed
Readers, is an enhanced version of the story we learned as children back in
school. The moral of the story is that a seemingly small inconsequential
event can trigger off a national conflagration, and so we should always be
careful about what we do.
Those of us who remember this story must have
surely remarked about how such a ridiculous thing can ever happen. However,
truth be told, is more elaborate than fiction. This month is March, and the
13th is when Phone Maw, an RIT student, was killed in the demonstrations that
year in 1988. It is now an appropriate time to reconsider what happened that
pivotal year in our Motherland and renew the dedication to our Cause.
It was early March in the township of Gyogon,
about eight miles north of Rangoon, where the great Rangoon Institute of
Technology (RIT) is located. At a cafe, some RIT students and some government
officials sat, drinking tea and listening to music from a cassette player.
One customer told the proprietor to change the
cassette because he did not like the music. There was an argument between the
two groups over which cassette to play, heated remarks followed, and soon
the cafe became a free-for-all brawl like as if Ne Win and his body guards
were punching and slapping the foreign guests at the Inya Lake Hotel.
The name of the cafe, incidentally, was named the
Sanda Win Cafe, after the Chairman's most beloved......daughter, not wife. (
He had eight, like the British King Henry VIII, another whimsical despot. )
On one side were the RIT students, famous for
their MaHoke MaKhan creed (Intolerance of Injustice). On the other side
were local government cronies, Socialist party members, or local Council
members, .....something like that, ....corrupted fattened sycophants all,
whom the impoverished students have detested for a long time.
So you could surmise that the brawl was not really
for a trivial matter like a cassette, but due to deep-seated, long-rooted (or
long-rotted) grievances that were reopened when tempers flared over musical
preferences. Remember in the story about the Drop of Honey, that I raised
issue over how come flies, lizards, and rats could be present at the King's
Banquet? The ancient author probably included them to signify that a nation
can come to ruin if it has corruption. That is the key part our teachers
dared not teach us during the Socialist Error, err, excuse me, Socialist Era
of the Myanmar Sau(k) Shellist (obscenely damn shameless) Lanzin Party. (In
Burmese, the ending consonant, in this case, the K, is silent)
Likewise, how can a single cassette lead to such
furious outrage? No, it was not really just the cassette, but the underlying
decadence, the discontent, that led to the explosion. In the previous year,
1987, bank notes of 15, 35, 75 kyats ( funny figures devised by Ne Win's
stupid, stultifying Socialist economy) were suddenly declared null and void.
Millions of people lost their savings instantly. The Sau(k)shellist
government shamelessly declared the nation bankrupt at the UN in December 1987
while Chairman Ne Win and his grandchildren went to cavort in Disneyland that
same month, wasting one million dollars during that trip. (I found a report of
this outrageous squandering in Arab News, a paper from Riyadh, while
searching in the library of the University of California in Davis) To add
insult upon injury, Shameless Sau(k)shellist Ne Win again went on another
pleasure trip, this time to Switzerland, wasting "only" half-a-million dollars
in April 1988. It was most likely such decadence, such extravaganza,
that fired up nation-wide dissatisfaction. I cite only two examples,
Disneyland and Switzerland, but no doubt there were hundreds more which would
explain why the people were so ready to explode.
To continue with History, students called to the
nearby RIT campus for help. Soon, fellow students came to aid their injured
colleagues. The government cronies, on their part, summoned the police who
overreacted, which ignited demonstrations against police brutality. This
only raised more overreaction by the Lone (security) Htein (maintenance) riot
police and the RIT student Phone Maw was killed in addition to scores wounded.
Now the fat was really in the fire and demonstrations across the
city increased.
In one such event, the police captured dozens of
students and stuffed them like ngapi-nga chin (fermented fish in a pot) into
a police van. Late March is the beginning of the dreaded summer which can be
over 100 degrees fahrenheit. Some forty students, crowded and jammed into a
single vehicle for hours, died of heat stroke.
That escalated the public outcry and
more demonstrations ensued in the following months, most notably the White
Bridge Incident (Dadah Phyu), later renamed Dadah Ni, or Red Bridge, because
of the number of students who were bludgeoned to death by the evil Lone Htein security
forces. They dragged some students into the nearby Inya Lake and forced them
under the water until they drowned.
The rest of the year is History. More blood
flowed on the anniversary of the Seventh of July and the Eighth of August
became the cry of the Nation.
Americans used to say,"Remember the Alamo" when a
couple of hundred patriots died fighting in Texas in the 1850's. Then a new
slogan in the 1900's was "Remember the Maine," a ship that blew up, followed
by "Remember Pearl Harbor!" when the Japanese attacked and killed two
thousand sailors in WW2. Nowadays, they say, "Remember Nine-Eleven" in memory
of the three thousand killed in the terrorist plane attack.
We, the Peoples of Burma, say, "Remember 8-8-88"
when ten thousand were killed in the streets by the Socialist so-called
People's Army.
Of course, there were still more people killed or
captured on 18 September that year when the army took over the government and
dropped that ridiculous epithet, Socialist, and replaced it with the new
SLORCist dictatorship, now renamed SPDC.
In the eighteen years since 1988 under the
malignant SLORCist-SPDC, in the cities, there have been mass arrests, home
evictions, police brutality, and army barbarism. In the countryside,
thousands of villages in the ethnic lands have been burned down, genocide is
wide-spread, and ethnic "cleansing" has forced the mass exodus of
refugees. The kyat has inflated from a dollar-to-fifty kyats now going to
1,200 kyats; historical buildings are being sold off to foreigners by the
government, national resources being depleted, trees getting deforested;
there is more starvation, disease, drug addiction, and topping it all,
there have been repeated government bombings against innocent people.....and
all these are but a few examples of the National Destruction started by the
SLORCist-SPDC junta.
We can, on the one hand, claim that the
proverbial drop of honey -- in this case -- the music cassette, led to the
formation of the SLORC that initiated National Destruction.
During the Socialist Error, we complained of the
PaPaKa, which really stood for Peoples' Corporation, but was mocked as Pyi
Pyet Kain, or Sign of National Ruin, but the destruction during the Socialist
Error was not as horrendous as now, during the SLORCist Era. If the Socialist
used a hammer and sickle, the SLORCists are using a sledgehammer and a chain
saw to disintegrate Burma into pieces.
Yes, that will become totally true if we do
nothing but sit and watch, because Than Shwe and company will ruin the
country and then sell it out -- lock, stock, and barrel to the Chinese and
Indians. Burma will cease to exist, except in the darkest depths of our
depressed minds.
But, as we discussed in the beginning, we always
have the choice to look at a situation from a different angle. Instead
of just sitting and looking at Than Shwe's face in the fabled coin, and in
the newspapers and TV every day and night, we can turn it around and look at
the Aung The Byay Flowers of Victory. We can choose to say the
cassette ignited a National Revolution, not just Destruction.
It is true that our Leader, Ms Aung San, is still
imprisoned and that our ethnodemocratic forces in Burma are weak, compared to
the enemy's.
But our situation has improved. Compared to
March 1988, Ms. Aung San is known throughout the world, and so is the
barbarity of the government. The West, UN, and ASEAN nations have begun to pay
heed to our desperate plight, and we have formed international
Resistance networks. None of that existed before 1988.
And so, fellow comrades, rather than be depressed
with past sorrows of destruction, on this year of 6-6-06, in appreciation of
the many heroes' blood that flowed in 8-8-88, let us combine forces around the
world, become re-inspired, and continue our Revolution.
Aung The Byay thee Aung Yah Myi!
The Flowers of Victory will Succeed!
Yebaw Day
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