Awake & Curious

“Today every citizen is a war correspondent,” said Phillip Knightley, author of “The First Casualty,” a classic history of war reporting that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and ends with the “living room war” in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war that people could watch on television.

“Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war,” he said in an e-mail interview. “You just have to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters have been begging viewers to send their stuff.”

“There are fewer and fewer events that we don’t have film images of: the world is filled with Zapruders,” , referring to Abraham Zapruder, the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. ”

The above quotes are from are from an article in the NYT 10/4/07

I have been watching the goings on in Myanmar, which will always be Burma to me, with painful interest. I have an affinity or at least a respect for Buddhist monks. Seeing images as the one below from the New York times.

showing a Buddhist monk fleeing the scene of a demonstration gone explosive is an attention grabber for me. That, and knowing monks carry neither explosives or gasoline, unless they intend to demonstrate by burning themselves. I assume the Military Junta that runs Myanmar is responsible for the flames engulfing what appears to be a bicycle( one wonders if a monk was riding it at the time of the explosion).

The reference to gasoline and monks , memories from my early childhood; I remember the monks burning,dousing themselves with gasoline and then wush up in flames in protest of the Vietnam War.

Images such as the one above bike in flames, fleeing monk, are moving to me and many.

For the past week images like these have been coming at an alarming rate in the U.S. news services . I begun to wonder what our government was up to. Why all this access to a misery in lands thousands of miles away, in a poor country that has not that much to offer?

I mean I get Iraq interest, Oil and Israel, and yes Alqaeda. (now that we swung opened the borders along Syria and Iran to them). That and the fact that about 4000 of our troops have perished there in the past 4 years.

But why Myanmar?

So much coverage, pictures, a flood-gate of news detailing all the , sufferings and shootings of innocents, willing to stand up against a military Junta that has seriously mismanaged Myanmar’s natural resources . Natural ressources that innclude a large untapped deposit of natural gas, leading to a 30 -60 % increase in inflation since 1997, and starvation for about 25% of their population.

So last April things got ugly when the government voted all a large raise for all government workers, driving prices on consumer goods even higher. Protest, arrests, then more protests and on it went. Until the Junta said playtime had ended , it was tolerating no dissent.

That is what you have been seeing pictures of sent from cell phones and laptops, a world away of monks, (they have as many Buddhist monks as they have soldiers by the way) dissenting in the face of no dissent, no tolerance. Pretty ugly stuff.

Now to tie it to what we talk about here? Why so much coverage? So immediate. I am always skeptical when I am told something more than 5 times a day. Like in 2003 when I heard the phrase Weapons of Mass destruction, until I was ready to puke.

This time nothing so sinister, I think. Though perhaps we don’t mind showing up China/Russia who still trade with Myanmar ( we do not) with out hesitation, In spite of serious human rights violations and the recent violence that has greeted the monk’s peaceful protest of raised prices and deteriorating economic conditions .

It seems nonviolence is in action in vein of MLK/Gandhi with a 21st century twist. Think India Salt March or Bull Conner in all his racsit glory brought to us by that brown-eyed handsome man from Atlanta, Mr. King. Just imagine what these two hellraisers, Gandhi and King, could have done with cell phones, laptops and rss feeds.

This time the monks are using Tmobile and the Internet to get their message across the world. Quite successfully I might add. So successfully that the Military Junta that controls Myanmar shut down the Internet last night.

Wow.

First Iran outlaws DSL (only dial up in Tehran) to control people’s consumption of and the flow of information, and now this. The old adage “if you control information, you control the world” seems applicable here.

On my first post on this blog I wrote about a “wave” coming . The “informaiton wave” is here. Not original I know but I wrote then,

“Resistance to a wave of this magnitude however is pointless, it is going to happen no matter what. This wave, a creative/destructive force, will tear down old worlds and build new ones. Not since the horseless carriage have we seen a wave this big, (as I said resistance is futile, and just so you know the horseless carriage wasn’t actually embraced at its inception either. ”

We see the information wave in action Myanmar, and the response, (shut down the information flow, not forever I hope. )

It bears repeating that teachers had better get a handle on this stuff as best they can, and I am not so sure anyone has the instruction manual on just how to do that.