Category: The Dish

Dissent of the Day

A reader writes:

Chris Matthews was much more rude and over the top than Jon Stewart was by framing the value of his book by talking about how Bill Clinton got laid in college. This was much more offensive than anything that Jon Stewart said to Chris, unless the rule is that you cannot talk to an author about their book unless you fully accept its premise.

The fact that you gave Chris a pass while going after Jon highlights why we get frustrated outside of the Beltway at times. I thought it was admirable that Jon wanted to engage in a serious conversation about the book. Chris just couldn’t keep up.

As for when they made fun of me, I don’t mean personally. The parody of the Chris Matthews show before the interview was what I had in mind.

Another Boomer Election War?

They can’t help themselves, can they? One of the enduring reasons for cultural polarization in America is that the baby-boomer generation keeps reliving the same, exhausted squabbles they’ve been fighting since Vietnam. Bush vs Gore and Bush vs Kerry were really re-matches of 1968 all over again. If you want one more round of boomer conflict, you couldn’t do better than a Clinton-Giuliani match-up, could you? The nastiest alums of that period reunited to fight each other into the ground, with almost four decades of grudges to settle. Today, Rudy accused Clinton of being like McGovern. Yep: that’s what we need. Another re-hash of that exhausted paradigm. But, hey, the Washington establishment has already decided the primaries: it’s Clinton vs Giuliani. So it’s McGovern and Nixon again. Do I have to remind Democrats who won that battle? And why there’s no one the GOP wants more as the Democratic nominee than Hillary?

Hounding the Bloggers

Monk

More vileness from Burma:

The government has called upon state-run media agencies and government supporters to publish photographs of citizen journalists and take action against them.

In response, here is a very partial list of names of those now missing. George Packer writes about the suddenly iconic image of the murdered monk, posted above and here:

How this particular monk came to be lying face down in a Rangoon stream is not known. But the picture—reminiscent, in a way, of others from places like Rwanda, Iraq, Cambodia, and Nazi Germany—shows totalitarianism in its most physical form: the elimination not just of an individual’s life but of his value. Aye Chan Naing, D.V.B.’s executive director, told me by phone from Oslo that as many as six thousand Burmese, the majority of them monks, have been detained in four locations around Rangoon, and their fate is uncertain. After nightly raids, the monasteries are “totally empty,” and he fears the worst for the detainees.

Please sign the petition.

The Limits Of Non-Violence In Burma

A reader with first-hand experience in the country writes:

I deliver medicine and medical supplies inside Karen State, Burma, to refugees hiding from the junta. I have walked, talked, slept, and eaten with the Karen, while trekking from village to village making medical drops and observing backpacking medics provide primary health care services to internally displaced people. If freedom is to be gained in the near-term, the Burmese junta need to be dealt a death blow that can only be administered through military defeat. Satyagraha merely provides the reason for an SPDC soldier to pull a gun out and blow someone’s head off for defying an order to provide labor, food, possessions, sex slaves, or whatever is demanded by the junta. Perhaps over the longer term the strategy of non-violent resistance could work, but this presumes that the Burmese junta and its allies such as China will come to value and honor the will of the people, which seems unlikely.

The only reason the Karen, Shan and other ethnic peoples still exist is because they have the arms necessary to continue their seemingly endless struggle.

What is called a "civil war" really consists of ethnic militias slowing the approach of SPDC troops so villagers have time to gather their belongings and flee, before anything of value is confiscated and their bamboo huts are burnt to the ground. They have been forced to live as terrorized nomads, in unfamiliar terrain with very high infection rates of malaria and water-borne diseases. They would have been destroyed years ago by brute force if it were possible, but guns in the hands of loosely organized democratic militias has ensured their survival. The junta has made no secret of its desire to exterminate the ethnic minorities who support Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD through it’s "Four Cuts" policy, depriving them of food, money, manpower and intelligence. Starvation, disease, and land mines will finish the job that bullets and shells have not.  Satyagraha or laying down of arms is an invitation to massacre, plain and simple.

Speaking of land mines, they are the progenitor of IED’s and the strategy of random passive attacks. There are untold numbers of land mines in Burma that are unaccounted for. When one side lays them, the other digs them up and moves them. This continues back and forth, and now, nobody is quite sure where they all are. Both sides are reaping the grim rewards of such folly.

An effective, internal, democratic military strategy, organized by the ethnic militias is what is needed to free all Burmese people, but first they need to counter Four Cuts so they can communicate effectively and organize a healthy population. There is no negotiating with SPDC thugs, only submission is tolerated. They are cunning, vicious, and too comfortable in their luxury and power to ever give it up willingly. The democracy movement within Burma cannot count on other nations to overtly come to their aid, and China’s appetite for resources is too sated by the junta for any alteration of diplomatic course.