Myanmar was the name chosen by the military, and some folks refuse to use it because it was chosen by the military.

Info coming out of Burma and into Western media is not too often, mostly because press freedom is curtailed for Burmese journalists, and the Burmese gov’t rarely grants visas to foreign journalists.

The US, for its parts, has tightened sanctions and placed some more on 12 officials of the Burmese regime (I think). It’s also issued a “support” statement, though when asked whether the US will substantially support the pro-democracy movement in Burma, it’s all “hypothetical.”

Support for the Burmese people is being dismissed as a P.R. exercise by the UK/US governments. If the British and American standpoints are PR exercises then what are the Russian and Chinese standpoints representative of ?

Their own PR excercise?? I’m not sure what your point is, without supporting a particular person i support the general quest for representative government in Myanmar (its the officially recognised term and im not going to change the name i use lest i change every other name) but the words of support from the US/UK is just a PR stunt.

Which liberals? I didn’t blog about it only because I had so much other stuff to push through. I’m on the Facebook group dammit!

Just to agree with Leon, really. You have knowledge of this situation that I most certainly do not. Sharing is good. So, please, stick around.

I consider myself important enough for the majestic plural. Reading comments elsewhere led me to believe an article was desired. Noone else did anything; so i thought of a novel way to write and start a discussion about something i didn’t know much about without banally parroting the work of other blogs.

As a rule of thumb i don’t ever take into consideration the knowledge of anyone who’ll read what i write. Good for you if you know more than me about a subject, but i’m hardly likely to respond well to someone asking why their experience wasn’t foremost in my thoughts whilst writing.

I must admit when I read Kulvinder’s piece I thought ‘hang on a sec, you may not know much but I know a bit and known plenty that know more!’ (including a close friend from the country, who with her family, escaped there after the last major crackdown in the late 80s).

Anyway my rambling aside, I mean yes I see your point and want to add, please stick around. The more diverse and informed opinion on here the better.

ha!

Yeah, alright son. You already got done over the name, stop digging that hole. Anna has a point.

But thanks for the comment, Nyrone. Kulvinder, as a long-time reader of this blog I find it really disappointing that you’d respond to reasonable criticism in such a childish way, and this is the kind of shitty not-even-rhetoric that keeps people from taking blogs seriously.

Even now, reading a few of the comments on Burma Videos on Youtube, I can see individuals that have written stuff like “Let’s do it! Let’s free Burma!” and I’m not sure they understand anything about the deep-rooted tension and complexities inside the country…I guess my point is that I don’t just read blogs for the most knowledgeable facts, but also for the unique individual viewpoints and how questions are posed on here too…It’s a conversational debate, not a lecture.

Uhh, speak for yourself, and use “I” rather than “we”. When I did my undergraduate in Canada, Aung San Ruu Kyi was required reading for students studying human rights, and she is fairly widely read. The protests and boycotts against Burma/Myanmar were huge in Canada in the early/mid ’90s. I don’t understand the idea of posting a blog piece that says “I am commenting on this issue to say that I don’t really understand this issue and that because I, Mr Smart-Man-Who-Follows-Politics don’t understand it, I’m going to assume that you don’t either.” Why not just leave the blog piece to someone who is informed or go do some research?

Burma has very large oil reserves.. which it supplies mostly to India and China.

Apparently their oil reserves are ‘only’ around the 3.2 billion barrel mark, they can’t even satisfy their own national demand; to put that in context India – hardly known for its oil industry – has 5.8 billion barrels.

I don’t see why dragging the eighteenth century into this is any more absurd than dragging the nineteenth century into it.