All We Are Is Dust In The Wind*

*A line from one of the Myanmar protest songs, originally by the band, Kansas.

22 February 2021

[Above photo: A truckload of Burmese arriving at the Hledan Center protest site. ]

Today is a significant day for the protests.  Three weeks in, it is the first nationwide strike, an augmentation of the Civil Disobedience Movement. It also follows carnage two days ago in Mandalay, the story of which is something close to this:

The Tatmadaw (Burmese military) were trying to force [longshoremen or fishermen] back to work at the port. Shots were fired and two [or up to 9] people were killed and many wounded. Unlike in the US, civilians aren’t armed here. When medical personnel and others went to assist those injured, [snipers or regular military] fired on them, wounding more. The purpose was to intimidate people with force. The Tatmadaw have already tried to spin it, saying that the bullets found were not of the sort they used so the shots must have come from somewhere else. There was also a rumor that those assisting were shot because the military wanted to hide the bodies. Neither of those explanations make sense to me but serve to point out how difficult it is to obtain honest information.

I fear today may be even more confrontative, as the economy has ground to a halt and the military feels a need to assert its dominance over the people.  Kelly did a quick shop for vegetables yesterday, since all the markets will be closed today and who knows for how long. We’ll stay home.

It was surreal in the midst of this to watch the local tennis tournament at l’ Opera yesterday, chatting and sipping a cappuccino on a vine-shaded terrace overlooking Inya Lake.  Then a tasty Linguine con le Vongole as we discussed the rumors and predictions.  And after a taxi ride home, we watched the Djokovic/Medvedev final at the Australian Open.

I’ve just finished reading The Ratline by Phillippe Sands. It traces the life and the post-war hunt for Otto von Waechter, the Austrian Nazi SS Obersturmfuhrer who was responsible for killing a million Jews in Poland during WW 2. He was the governor of Galicia, living in Lemberg (now Lviv). It is difficult not to connect that totalitarian excess with this one. Differences would include that many more ordinary citizens were complicit with that one, the world chose not to observe too closely, we weren’t all connected by TV and internet, and there were not massive public protests or work stoppage in opposition. The cruelty of the leaders, implacable and fabricating rationales, was similar, as has been the impotent but calculated early response of the world.

What Sands, who is a dogged researcher and a master of suspense, taught me as he shone his unflinching light on Rome and the Vatican was how very complicit factions of the Catholic Church were with the Nazis. Since much of Austria and Germany were Catholic and Jews were seen by the Catholic Church as a threat, the Pope (Pius XII) turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the catastrophe unfolding in front of him.

“The Ratline” was the CIA nickname for the clandestine pipeline used to smuggle Nazi war criminals from Italy, to which many of them fled at the end of World War II, to South America where they were welcomed in Argentina, Chile and other countries, quite safe havens all. Sands’ balance and restraint in maintaining relationships over years with the sons of two major war criminals, one son rejecting his father’s actions and the other excusing or denying them, was a study in diplomacy, considering that much of his own family had been “successfully” exterminated by the two generals.  It, along with his East West Street, which is about the time same period but with a different focus, is a magnificent display of human cruelty, culpability, denial, determination, and integrity.

Deer, panthers, lions, impala, mambas, and honey badgers are all alert to seize a meal or avoid becoming one. Our gradual development which is dramatically influenced by our early experiences, aided by a very plastic central nervous system capable of conscious thought and intention, allows for extreme variations in behavior not seen in other, more instinctually-bound animals. Like Stalin and his purges, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Ruanda and the Hutu/Tutsi massacres, and the European settlers in America and the Indigenous Peoples, Hitler was able to fashion his murderous prejudices into a doctrine wedded to intimidation that appealed enough to many so that it was fully enacted.

The blindly irrational acceptance of DT by his followers—To an attendee at a Trump rally, “What do you hope to get here today?” His answer, “The truth”.—isn’t unique, but it is still chilling. In fact, the face of evil may be bland, “the banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt put it, and easily wrapped in a saleable package. My argument, such as it is, goes nowhere except that in order to seek and maintain any kind of equality and kindness in the world requires a lot of constant work, not unlike the salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Just as anti-racism must be active, not passive, in order to preserve as public sentiment and action loving kindness, equality, and acceptance of difference, we must regularly press back against the eternal stream of hatred and divisiveness, the potential for which is within each of us.

As I write this sitting in a privileged position under the mosquito net on my patio I hear a lot of noise—-singing, banging of pots, chanting—in the distance as the young people of this country risk themselves to try to reclaim their government. It feels just awful, knowing the consequences for some.

Hopefully, the current GOP will continue to devour itself and reform as a conservative but moderately compassionate counterbalance to the Dems, spitting out the McConnells, the Cruz’s and the Hawley’s along the way. As for the two Q Anon women in Congress…..they’ll consume themselves if left to their own small and sad devices.