Some comments about the coup in Burma

As a first point, my understanding is that it is the military, or Tatmadaw as they are known, who are pushing the use of Myanmar. The world agreed to use the word after the sham agreement to what I term a 49% democracy - a situation where the military had a guaranteed 25% of seats in Parliament, guaranteed key Ministerial positions, and had shut Aung San Suu Kyi out of any significant governmental position.

No, the military had fairly good deal in many ways (as opposed to the people of Burma) - so it is surprising (to me - not others) that they have now committed a coup, but they may have been encouraged by what had happened in Thailand a few years earlier: a coup that, despite claims of elections within a year or so, has left the military exercising dictatorial power allegedly on behalf of a monarchy.

Having committed the coup, for now and the foreseeable future (possibly several years given what happened in Thailand - although active, well-organised and effective resistance started immediately in Burma, and that may have a limiting influence on the life of the coup - if there is enough international support), there will be a socially regressive, politically repressive and authoritarian regime in Burma - one that is more hardline than the regime in Thailand, maybe matches or exceeds the increasingly actively repressive regime in Cambodia, and is somewhat aligned in its controlling attitudes with the CCP (although the CCP is far more cyber savvy, and is trying to create a façade of democracy - what John  Keane, in “Enter the Dragon” in Australian Foreign Affairs Journal No. 11 “The March of Autocracy” [Amazon] describes as a “phantom democracy”).

Burma has been bad since the 1960s in the modern era, but in the 1700s it was an aggressively expansionist empire that drove the Rohingya out (and then had the gall to describe them as being from another land when they returned) and was only brought to heel by the even more aggressive and expansionist (and better armed) British Empire.

None of this did the everyday people in that area any good: the absence of active war was more than offset by the repression of everyday people.

More recently, however, including since  World War Two colonised people have been reclaiming - or trying to reclaim - their freedom. In some cases, they’ve been claiming it for the first time.

This is good for them as people, good for their nations, and good for the health and wellbeing of the region their nation is in (modern wars and unrest are costly both in terms of human suffering and financial costs).

Furthermore, a region that is full of stable, free and traditionally or culturally democratic nations is more likely to have a beneficial or at least neutral influence on others.

It won’t always - Europe during the colonisation era and the USA in the 20^th Century, particularly the Cold War, show the harms that can happen - although it could reasonably be argued that the nations concerned, particularly during the colonisation era were not truly democracies. In fact, at times, the USA has not been a very good democracy (e.g., during the McCarthy era, and under trump).

The UK and USA have quite deliberately exported trouble, though, even when they were supposedly democratic - for instance, in Iran throughout the 20^th Century with two  coups (that came back to haunt them since the resulting revolution in 1979 in so many ways - including the Iran-Iraq war and what was done to prop up Saddam Hussein [and what he did thereafter], the existentialist threat against Israel and the hard line mindset that has contributed to, the exporting of instability and insurrection).

Nevertheless, compare that to the devastation exported by fascist Germany and Italy in the 1930s (World War Two: over 70 million dead), by Russia (internal massacres and famines that killed around  7 to 9  million) through the first half of the 20^th century, and now what China (on top of what  it  did the 20^th century) is doing  in  the  21^st  Century.

For much of my life, my view was: if a nation is more strongly troubled than the strength of the democracy in nations about it, trouble may spread - just as if a nation has a strong tradition, culture and history of democracy, that influence may spread.

I now consider the situation far more complex (for instance, see here, here, here, and here), but as flawed example of a strong system spreading, in the late 1910s and the 1920s, Russia’s communist influence touched a flame in the misery and suffering of many nations, and other places set up or tried to set up communist states.

And that was disastrous for many nations, as shown by the rapidity of the fall of communism in 1989, when a series of nations rapidly tried to move towards freer states of being. (Sadly, with a strong tradition and culture of democracy, a significant number of those nations [including Russia, Poland, and Hungary] are now backsliding.)

On the other hand, the suffering caused by World War Two led many nations to demand better, and colonialism was largely reversed - badly, partly because of the Cold War, partly because of white supremacism, and partly incompetence, but there was significant reversal, albeit with the damage caused by colonialism largely left and not compensated for.

However, some of those decolonialised nations, and other nations in South East Asia, are going backwards - including Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and Bangladesh. The latter is struggling partly because of endemic poverty, and partly because Burma has - again - sent Rohingya fleeing there. IMO, what could happen in Bangladesh depends partly on what sort of influence Burma is having (there is also a hardline nationalism similar, in some ways, to what is happening in India). In fact, there is a potential for what is happening in Burma to have a wider regional influence in my opinion, but I’m going to have to leave that to when I have time to think, research and write that up properly (I started writing it up, but wasn't satisfied with the result). 

PS - this article gets into the sort of insights I was working towards writing about.