Posted by Bob on 10/4/2007, 6:03 am Will the world help? Where is the outrage from the left? After all, these are not Christians being slaughtered in Sudan. These are Buddhist monks, saffron-robed ascetics not entirely unlike the Dalai Lama, revered in both east and west for his pacifism and gentleness. Where is Hollywood? Where are the glitterati? Where is world opinion? Ah, but the monks seem to have made a terrible mistake. They forgot. Democracy is no longer the "in" thing. Freedom no. Stability, security, socialist control, these are what are valued by the people who ten years earlier would have demonstrated wordlwide for the monks. Their miscalculation has proved to be fatal, as attested by their corpses, which fill the Burmese jungles and rivers. [Begin excerpt] As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. One hopes the monks, reported by the BBC to be headed for internment camps, aren't expecting too much from "the world," because not much is coming. If before deciding to fill Rangoon's streets the "saffron-robed" monks had spent more time reading pundits and foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington or Western Europe, they would have known that democracy has been demoted.
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Democracy in Burma is suffering the same fate as its advocates did in 1920-30's Japan: annihilation, concentration camps, mass murder.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110010687
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