Candid Commentary

To Revive Aung San Spirit

 

_ By Dr. Tayza

Like Lenin for Russians, and George Washington for Americans, Aung San is the unrivalled hero of Burma. He is the Architect of Burma’s Independence; the Founder of the Union of Burma; the Creator of Burma’s armed forces called Tatmadaw; the Mentor for all people of Burma; the political God over all Burmese politicians and activists; and, lastly but not least, the natural father of the Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, who is a Nobel Peace Laureate and an international icon of human rights and the legitimate democratically elected leader of Burma, currently being imprisoned by a thuggish military regime which illegally annexed power from the people of Burma.

Why Burmese people worship Aung San? Because he is the founding father of the Union? Actually, it is more than that.

People of Burma love and respect Aung San because he was humble, because he was very intelligent, because he was extraordinarily honest and sincere, because he was absolutely incorruptible and incorrupt, because he lived his rather short life with only one aim “to liberate his people from the yoke of colonialism”, because he had no greed and was totally selfless and lived austerely like a saint all his life, because his love for his country is so immense and his patriotism is so great, because was so brave and determined in his political actions, and he was utterly loyal to his political cause, because he saw all people of Burma regardless of race or religion as true equals, and because he was always kind and sympathetic on his followers and foot soldiers.

As Aung San’s moral virtues are so superhuman in calibre and extremely saintly in nature, many an anecdotes about Aung San’s humbleness and honesty and straightforwardness have become almost legendary; grand-fathers narrating them to the fathers and the fathers retelling them to the sons and the sons recounting them to their own sons down the lines of generations; nevertheless, they are true stories, not fairy tales.

One such much repeated anecdote said that while he was on frontier fighting against Japanese Fascist Imperialist army, Aung San wrote a letter to his wife in which he said one longing he had was to be able to eat some traditional Burmese baked beans. At the time when he wrote that letter he was already the unsurpassed and unequalled supreme leader and hero of all Burmese people. But he was so humble that even his personal and private dreams were not about getting secret bank accounts in Switzerland or about big diamonds for his wife or building palatial homes for his family, but just to eat some traditional baked beans. While the Chairman Mao of Communist China ate a whole chicken a day and rode on a luxurious sedan-chair carried by his soldiers during the falsely famous fake Long March, Aung San of Burma marched on foot and starved along with his soldiers during their revolution for Independence.

But unfortunately, it seems, “Aung San spirits” of humbleness and honesty were killed off in Burma along with his assassination in 1947.

Soon after Aung San’s death, Burmese politicians and ethnic leaders with uncontrollable passions for power and insatiable self interests blew up a bloody civil war, which ended only when General Ne Win with the strongest fighting force under his command came out as the dominant military war-lord or dictator in Burma. Ne Win was the perfect opposite of Aung San. Ne Win was cruel, Ne Win was dishonest, Ne Win was corrupt. And Ne Win had secret bank accounts all over the world, Ne Win stole billions of dollars, and Ne Win was a champion of cronyism and nepotism. Consequently, Ne Win achieved the country a least developing country status within two decades of his much loathed rule.

And nowadays, the seeds of cruelty, dishonesty and corruption sown by Ne Win decades ago have grown into a long line of successive military regimes of similar tyrannical characters.

Today, while people in Burma are starving and dying like flies from TB, malaria and AIDS, military regime leaders are too busy stashing away their ill-gotten million dollars in secret bank accounts in Singapore, buying big diamonds for their wives and daughters, building palatial homes for their families in Burma, and buying pant-houses in Singapore and elsewhere. They even built a grand new exclusive city for the elites of the military regime, naming it “The Abode of the King(s)”, so automatically making it out of bound for ordinary people.

Although the founding father of Burma’s military, Aung San, had lived with only a single mind_ to liberate his people and to make his country strong and prosperous_ current military dictators of Burma have nothing but GREED in their mind, sadly.

Thus, it is very clearly visible now that there is an urgent need to revive Aung San spirit in Burma to save the people from their endless sufferings.