{"id":46902,"date":"2014-09-08T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=46902"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:37","slug":"recurring-nightmares-genocide-and-the-long-shadow-of-colonialism-in-burma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/recurring-nightmares-genocide-and-the-long-shadow-of-colonialism-in-burma\/","title":{"rendered":"Recurring Nightmares: Genocide and the Long Shadow of Colonialism in Burma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Countries with a History of Western Colonial Influence Are at a Higher Risk of Genocide<\/em><\/p>\n

\"burma<\/a><\/p>\n

The divide-and-rule tactic of all tyrants of previous epochs had required the creation or exploitation of some specific conflict between warring tribes or groups of men. The novel invention of scientific dialectics, chief among them socialism and ethnic nationalism, consisted in the provision to the ruling clique an ideological ability to modernize and legitimize the millenia-old idiom.<\/em><\/p>\n

Both ideologies allowed scientifically sound, seemingly incontrovertible methods to sell the natural conflict of ethnic or economic social strata independent and irrespective of any specific or tangible social struggle. Precisely because they were so devoid of any concrete\u00a0referent, they could be projected infinitely into the past, and by this mechanism, social war could also persist (and be exploited) indefinitely into the future, culminating only in the elimination of the \u201cundesirables,\u201d in which case a new, equally menacing enemy was instantly conjured to take the terminated or politically-neutralized group\u2019s place. To accomplish this amazing feat they only needed to convince men\u00a0that they had an inborn racial, ethnic, or class-identity that superseded their humanity.
\n— <\/em>Kiersons, MA.\u00a0Mephisto (unpublished manuscript).<\/p>\n

I chose to open this blog with a quotation from my own work because it seemed particularly appropriate this month to take a moment to explore some of the deeper roots of the instability and turmoil that\u00a0seems to persistently\u00a0plague Burma (and many other countries) with no end\u00a0in the foreseeable future. In the past few years we have seen dictatorship after dictatorship, seemingly stable in appearance from the outside, crumble and plunge into the tumult of civil war as if they had never been cleaved together\u00a0by the iron bonds of their former authoritarian masters.<\/p>\n

In early August, a visit<\/a>\u00a0to Burma by the United States Secretary of State John Kerry was marked by\u00a0Kerry\u2019s\u00a0call for continuing reforms<\/a> toward transparency and civilian rule amid\u00a0observations that Burma was back-sliding on rights<\/a>. On August 22 it was revealed that an Arakan group was proposing<\/a> to Thein Sein\u2019s government the forced relocation of countless Rohingya into guarded detention camps while the United Nations reported Rohingya fleeing Bangladesh and Burma by boat\u00a0was up 60%<\/a>. To make matters worse, the government seemed to be stepping up efforts to get the international community to stop using the word \u201cRohingya\u201d <\/a>in an attempt to further erase the identity of the Muslim minority. This move signaled the dictatorship was willing to breach international law<\/a> that recognizes the right of peoples to self-identify.<\/p>\n

Burma is a dictatorship to the very marrow\u00a0of its political culture. The quasi-military, quasi-civilian state continues to fight\u00a0one of the longest civil wars in history<\/a>. Since the 1940s, the spectre of war has haunted\u00a0its\u00a0besieged minorities including Chin, Karen, and Kachin, denying them hope, stability, and the development of civil society. There is an element of truth to the claim that Burma\u2019s dictatorship supplies the ruthless ligature for its continued existence as a state \u2013 a glue of dysfunction, brutality, and fear.<\/p>\n

Burma is not alone. The dissolving of Ba\u2019athist Iraq has resulted in the disappearance of the state in any recognizable form. It has broken apart along ethnic and sectarian lines as anyone familiar with Iraq\u2019s history would have been able to guess long before the current crises emerged. If we performed a thought-experiment with Burma within\u00a0which its dictatorship vanished tomorrow, a similar fate would\u00a0be virtually inevitable: the state would divide into its multitude of perceived communities, ethnicities, and religions, fighting wars over this or that historical gripe, territory, or resource.<\/p>\n

What was it, then, that united the multi-ethnic empires that have been common throughout human history, that would have been recognized by our grandparents or perhaps great grandparents? What was it that caused their downfall \u2013 what caused the perception that every imagined community or race required its own sovereign, independent state to represent its\u00a0\u201cnational interests\u201d within the community\u00a0nations?<\/p>\n

My research into the intellectual, scientific origins of genocide has pointed to the strange commonality that every \u201cmodern\u201d genocide, seemingly without exception, has stemmed in some way from the missteps of modern Western philosophy, from which\u00a0the modern, \u201cscientific\u201d idea of race and ethnicity was drawn. The idea was powered by\u00a0the penchant of science for\u00a0taxonomy, organization, categorization \u2013 first, of the things in the animal and plant kingdoms, and then, invariably, of the perceived varieties of human beings. There is of course, no such thing as a biological race or ethnicity\u00a0– we know now that these are imagined communities on the narrow spectrum of humanity. But the idea of the nation state, thoroughly discredited scientifically-speaking, has persisted to this day sociologically, and in some parts of the world it is stronger than ever.<\/p>\n

The ideas that led to genocide, and that have been dominant in every modern genocide are Nationalism and Socialism, and they originated in Enlightenment Europe. In Armenia, genocide was largely framed as the last-ditch Ottoman\u00a0response to growing Armenian nationalism<\/a>, a movement\u00a0which traced its intellectual\u00a0genesis to the West. In Cambodia, genocide was led by French-educated Politique Potentielle<\/a> or Pol Pot as he became known. In Rwanda, genocide\u00a0was underpinned by European racial identities imposed upon the Hutus and Tutsis<\/a> by the Germans and Belgians during colonial rule. In Sudan, genocide and violence stemmed from Western influence in the colonial period which augmented divisions between Arab northerners and non-Arab (largely Dinka) Southerners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Burma\u2019s<\/a>

Burma\u2019s Rohingya population are increasingly confined to guarded \u201cIDP Camps\u201d \u2013 Sentinel Project photo taken during our visit in July 2014<\/p><\/div>\n

The divide-and-rule strategies of historical despots relied on exploiting specific conflicts between ruled groups, but only the Western colonial powers, with the seemingly infallible dogmas of science, and those influenced by them, succeeded in making ethnic identities permanent, fixed, and founded on the idea that all human \u201craces\u201d were in necessary and interminable conflict. But the prime victory of this idea was that it was sold to the masses, not just the ruling elite. Once people believed in an inborn incommensurability\u00a0with other men, whether by class or race, there was no turning back \u2013 every group\u00a0was at war with every other.<\/p>\n

These ideas which originated in the West during the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution have had a profound effect on Burma and explain why dictatorship is perhaps the only way to rule over\u00a0the state as it exists. The British brought 19th century race-thinking and unknowingly planted its corollary \u2013 nationalism. After their withdrawal, and amid the threat of the division of Burma into a Federal State with autonomous ethnic regions, only Nationalist Socialism offered a way to unite the population by dividing it \u2013 upon economic lines. The Burmese Way to Socialism was one among a multitude\u00a0of ways the Western philosophy of social war was\u00a0adapted to rule nations\u00a0around the world. Nationalism combined with Socialism would become one of the ultimate political weapons against the masses \u2013 because\u00a0people\u00a0believed in the premises of equality, liberation, and brotherhood and because it provided them with enemies, internal and external, to assign blame for their nation\u2019s misfortune when the real cause was the ruling clique.<\/p>\n

Until a federal republic with autonomous states is introduced, or the ideas of race and social war disappear (which one is more likely is hard to say), there can never be a united and democratic Burma. The backslide into authoritarianism and tyranny is only natural to men who perceive themselves to be eternally at war with one another. It is the bulwark against greater civil war and the protection of the racket enjoyed by Burma\u2019s ruling elite.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Formed in 2008, The Sentinel Project is a non-profit organization based in Canada with members in several countries worldwide. Our mission is to prevent the crime of genocide worldwide through effective early warning and cooperation with victimized peoples to carry out non-violent prevention initiatives.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thesentinelproject.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why countries with a history of Western colonial influence are at a higher risk of genocide. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}