I asked Soi Min where he was stationed, “Mizoram, Bangladesh and Chin State in Northern Burma.”

I asked what he ate, “Bamboo shoots and snails,” he smiled, like a fox, swallowing a mouthful of buttered yam. I asked about rice, “We carried only rice and matches. Sometimes only matches.”

He said that that the Mizoram, clans from Northeast India, supplied (and supply) medicine and beans. Sometimes his unit and other rebel units cultivated gourd and corn in the jungle. During seasonal Spring and Harvest they bought pigs and feasted with villagers. During monsoon they hid in bamboo thickets so thick that nobody bothered them except leaches and mosquitoes.

I told him that I know all about Himalayan leaches! How they stick like the worst kind of booger! Like sticky white rice, only sucking your blood at a magnificent rate, all brown and hard and swollen on the main vein of your thigh.

He said he had to carry netting with him at all times but had got malaria anyways. I told him I’d seen the clouds of mosquitoes but he just laughed at me, this guy!

He did this for three years, while his wife, also a Burmese refugee in India, snuck into Burma to hand out anti-government pamphlets.

This was in Mizoram State, a border-state full of jungles and no-man’s lands, one of the most beautiful places in the world. One of the poorest – and richest.

Burma has always been one of Asia’s richest countries in natural resources.

Rubies, lots. Oil and gas. Teak. Hydropower. Any gemstone or metal imaginable almost.

And the people in Burma, nothing but poverty, brutality and despair for 99% of the population.

The Junta Formerly Known as SLORC (as I like to call them in honor of the artist formerly known as Prince) uses the methods of George Orwell in 1984. Newspeak. Thoughtcrime.

Newspeak is a clever form of linguistic segregation. Although linguistic segregation exists everywhere around the world and in every culture, the Burmese Junta takes it to it to the extreme.

They use that shifting of words, changing definitions that Orwell wrote about. For example, SLORC or State Law and Order Council. Their actual mission is to break laws and create disorder.

The name SLORC changed after a bit, just as names do in Newspeak. They changed to SPDC, State Peace and Development Council, whose mission it is to be violent and destroy. Eventually this name will change, and then finally there will some man from 1984, beating you to death, until you finally understand his logic. He holds up three fingers and says, “How many?” You answer, “five,” and he tells you that your mind is getting healthier every day.

Understand?

This is Newspeak, and so we will speak new, today. That sort of thing.

Burma’s junta calls Burma The Union of Myanmar. Would you guess that it’s the same kind of union we have in America? No? No – and yes.

The Union of Burma is actually a bunch of warring clans. Each clan, each village, speaks a different language and has different customs. The communication difficulty creates culture shock and xenophobia, and so not only do the clans fight against one another, but each village hates the next village, each family hates the next family, and so on and so forth as it’s been since before written text, in them thar hills; Himalayan Hatfield and McCoy, Bloods and Crips, Blacks and Whites, so on and so forth.

On a national level the government promotes the kind of xenophobia that would make the folks at Fox News envious – with huge rallies against all outsiders at any level, whom they accuse of being, “democratic,” (which in Burma’s Newspeak, means to be a western colonial power like America or England).

Oh yes, the Burmese know all about Christopher Columbus.

The military leaders in the meantime do not allow any minority languages in the schools (like America’s English Only Laws).

This means each minority is bound to fail in school (like in America) because they only know the language that they spoke at home most of their lives, on some giant hill a three days walk from school. In each village the people have spoken nothing but clan languages for centuries and consider it a point of pride to maintain their identity (like minorities in America).

Language segregation has been used, successfully, by Burma’s rulers for centuries also, so it should be no wonder that George Orwell discovered his muse for three different novels, 1984, Animal Farm, and Burmese Days, in those jungly hill stations that Soi Min kept telling me me about.

To Be Continued…..

Posted in 1, American Economy, Asia America, burma, burma student leader, Democratic Voice of Burma, Indian Education, myanmar, rambo, SLORC, southeast asia, SPDC, state law and order resoration council, state peace and development council, TESOL, Travel Vignettes and Advice, walt kowalski