When woke becomes toxic: unpacking the backlash against the people of Myanmar
“Myanmar deserves this coup.” “Karma sucks, doesn’t it?” In recent days, we Burmese have seen a shocking wave of anti-Myanmar rhetoric and vitriol from netizens and pundits alike, making wholly uninformed opinions, based on quick soundbites about the Rohingya crisis. Here are my two cents.
A disclaimer
I will caveat that by no means is Aung San Suu Kyi is exonerated from the Rohingya crisis (this deserves a separate post altogether). But surfacing the Rohingya conflict is a lazy red herring that only distracts policymakers and netizens alike from how best to intervene meaningfully in Myanmar’s current political crisis, in the wake of the military coup on 1 February. Context matters, but using the Rohingya crisis to excuse the international community from intervening is just intellectually dishonest at best, and self-serving at worst.
50 years of military occupation
The very notion of a military that is accountable to the people or accountable to a civilian-elected government simply does not exist in Myanmar. Since Ne Win became the Tatmadaw’s top commander 72 years ago in 1949, no civilian has ever appointed a commander-in-chief, let alone become the commander-in-chief (as is the case of the United States). To put that into perspective, that’s nearly a century of a broken institution accountable to nothing but itself. Kayin State’s chief minister was recently jailed, simply for the crime of pointing out that Myanmar’s taxpayers fund the military.
Unlike other military regimes in Asia (e.g., Indonesia, Taiwan, or South Korea), Myanmar’s military never sought to strengthen other institutions, like its education system or bureaucracy, which were more well-equipped to govern the country and effectively address its complex problems. In fact, it’s been far more effective at intellectually bankrupting and kneecapping these institutions. From all this emerged one single state institution that became extremely good at maintaining its power, but absolutely terrible at nation-building.
Societal decay and breakdown
Myanmar was occupied by the British for 124 years, and subsequently occupied by its own military for another 50+ years. The collective trauma on our society and people can be directly traced back to this legacy, creating the myriad ethnic conflicts in Myanmar’s borderlands and the toxic nationalism intertwined with religious identity that persist to this day.
“Wrongs become rights with time.” — Burmese aphorism
There is a Burmese aphorism, “wrongs become rights with time” (အမှားကြာတော့ အမှန်ဖြစ်), that U Ko Ni, a prominent legal scholar, so poignantly opined, shortly before being assassinated for speaking out against the military. Over time, we have become desensitised as to how things ought to work, ranging from the mundane like paying bribes, to grave injustices like the military’s ongoing operations in ethnic areas. Ordinary people have struggled for generations to meet basic safety and psychological needs in Maslow’s hierarchy, let alone make sense of the nuances and the broader themes underlying our own oppression.
In this vacuum emerged the very potent concept of a saviour who could address these seemingly intractable issues that we have faced for generations. For better or for worse, that saviour is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She is far from perfect, but only a civilian-elected government can steer us closer to the destiny we so desire for our future generations. The sea of red —NLD flags, shirts, and banners — is beginning to stain with blood.
But these protests are not about one Nobel Prize winner against the military, nor about a faction of politicians against the military. These protests are about the kind of nation we want to rebuild. To charter a new course forward that not only reckons with the trauma our nation has faced, but makes amends to all who have been hurt in the process.
The bottom line
One thing is crystal clear. Nobody in Myanmar wins if the military coup succeeds, not the Rohingyas, not the Karens, nobody. If left to fester, the internal conflicts will inevitably escalate, with hundreds of thousands of innocent lives caught in the crossfire. Since the coup, the military has pressed ahead with an ongoing military campaign that has displaced thousands of ethnic Karen villagers, and thousands more have been displaced in Shan State due to fighting against the Restoration Council of Shan State, which has publicly condemned the coup.
“When someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them.” — Maya Angelou
On 20 February, the regime unleashed the same infantry troops used in Rohingya operations on unarmed protesters in Mandalay, killing 2 and injuring 20. Between November and January 2021, the military redeployed half of its reserve troops into the country’s urban centres in preparation for this showdown. Time is running out…
More reading
- Saya Iwasaki’s “The Atrocities in Myanmar Can’t Be Summed Up in a Tweet.”
- Sharon Seah’s “The Coup in Myanmar: ASEAN Is Not Without Options”
- #WhatsHappeninglnMyanmar, #SaveMyanmar, #HearTheVoiceOfMyanmar, #RespectOurVotes on Twitter
- Local news sources: Myanmar Now, Frontier Myanmar, Myanmar Times
