[Note: I use Myanmar and Burma interchangeably for this report, mostly because I don’t know which one is more acceptable so I’m just shamelessly hedging.]
(1) By most measures the Myanmar Civil War is the world’s oldest, still ongoing, civil war. It’s been raging since 1948, but has seen a significant upswing in hostilities and violence ever since 2021, when the Junta (yet again) dissolved the nascent civilian government in a coup-de-tat. The people of Burma, long forgotten by pretty much the entire world have basically had enough. This feels like it for that southeast Asian country.
(2) Myanmar is a region of violently contested nationalities – both dominant and subaltern. More recently, significant generational splits in the dominant Bamar community are coming to a head.
(3) At a more macroscopic level, anecdotally at least, it feels like brute military suppression is fast losing it’s sell-by date for authoritarian, robber baron regimes across the world to maintain power. Information simply cannot be controlled the way it could be, even a decade ago. The asymmetrical warfare of the oppressed also has operational teeth in a manner we’ve rarely seen after gunpowder and aerial bombardment widened the military gap between state militaries and guerilla fighters. On to the reportage…
(4) A World Politics Review report, cited by the Council on Foreign Relations, states that the Junta is “hemorrhaging troops” and has lost control of vast swathes of the country. They are slowly losing this civil war but they are taking as many people down with them as possible. The fact that the Junta never really had control of these territories to begin with is a whole other historical question.
(5) The ethno-national paramilitaries (especially those of the Kachin, Karenni, and Chin ethnicities) fighting the Bamar-majority Junta have always been relatively strong and have maintained militaristic de-facto nation-states of their own. Now they’re training a whole new army of young recruits (including many disillusioned Bamar youth) as People’s Defense Forces. This is changing the game on the ground and resulting in brutality from the skies.
(6) Resorting increasingly to devastating air raids as they’re unable to defeat the combined forces of the various paramilitaries and the PDF on the ground, the Junta’s days might well be numbered (but that number is still large and very bloody).
(6) The Brookings Institute wonders if this long ignored civil war is a new battle front in a new cold war between America and China? It’s no secret that, without Chinese support, the Junta in Myanmar couldn’t have survived this long. What is less known is the fact that there is scant, and mostly only back-channel, Western support for the various ethno-national paramilitaries for decades now. The West really doesn’t have as much of a foothold in Burma as the Brookings folks might think (or wish). This feels like cold war hype rather than any real boots-on-the-ground research.
(7) But the paramilitaries and PDF can convert this disadvantage to an advantage in their war against the Junta. If they can take on the tough task of making themselves and their struggle apparent to the Western media and finding a spot in the public narrative (This is something the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t have a problem with). Velvet chair foreign policy analysts in DC would love for America to look like the savior of the Burmese people. At the cost of sounding a little cold and calculating, it feels like the people of Myanmar can use this to their advantage in their ongoing civil war. To do so they might have to publicize easily accessible imagery, social media communiques in English, and stories of defiance to strike a romantic revolutionary chord and create traction in the emotional psyche of the West.
(8) Now, how might this apply to Israel and it’s current ongoing war with Hamas?
This is speculative, but all signs point to this latest bloody conflict in Israel-Palestine being an Israeli false flag operation gone wrong, an operation aimed at whipping up national sentiment at a time of political-economic crisis, with the larger goal of annexing the entirety of Gaza and the West Bank. (Below is a picture of him at the UN showing exactly this in his map of “The New Middle East”).
Netanyahu and the Israeli far right might just be working towards their multi-generational dream of a single Jewish supremacist state over all of historic Palestine, with a combination of partial genocide, partial conversion of the occupied population into second class citizens, and a slow ethnic cleansing to follow.
This is their plan, but it’s mind bogglingly stupid.
For this is where Burma comes in.
Israel has just created for itself a civil war to end all civil wars.
They are the new Junta of the Middle East.
And the people have had enough, all ways around.
This feels like the beginning of something much more ominous and threatening to our species.
Love is not so much an option as much as it is the only part of the human condition we hold onto to maintain our sanity.
Well…
Love and absurdity.
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Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 10 2023
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