In my 2012 polemic Beyond the Left - and elsewhere on this blog - I criticize Western journalists for their fawning treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, known to viewers of Luc Besson's cinematic hagiography as 'The Lady', who by then had long been feted as the poster-girl for Western-style democracy in Myanmar. I suggested that there can be no such thing as a 'progressive' world leader in a global economy driven by profit. And indeed, the liberal commentariat's love affair with Aung San has now ended in tears.

With Dame Suu now in power, Myanmar is now seen by many mainstream commentators as a genocidal state and its Buddhist monks are promoting the military's savage violence and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State (as the American physicist Steven Weinberg is supposed to have said: "With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion").

As the UN yesterday condemned the violence, even the Western media have been obliged to start wagging their fingers. Under fire for failing to curtail calls for genocide on its Burmese platform, Facebook, for example, has just launched its latest high-profile geopolitical intervention, banning several prominent Burmese organizations and individuals from the network and citing the need to get tough on 'hate speech'.

​'The Lady' has well and truly vanished. But Aung San Suu Kyi herself, so far, has survived politically. Most commentators have stopped short of damning her outright or of calling for her to step down from power. There is already too much egg on too many faces and no doubt Suu Kyi, for now, at least, is still seen as the West's best leadership option in the resource-rich region. And anyway, there's no reason why a massacre or two should tarnish one's international reputation when inveterate warmongers like Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama or the recently deceased John McCain are lauded for their contributions to global human rights.

A few takeaways from all of this might be:

​1) The liberal media, no matter how 'progressive' they appear, will always tend to serve the interests of profit and power, not those of ordinary people.

2) While commentators rightly deplore the resurgence of right-wing Christian nationalism across the Western world, we are seeing the rise of reactionary, violent religious nationalism all over the world, for example, in the attacks on Muslims in Modi's India. As for Buddhism, it is just as reactionary as any other religion: even the Dalai Lama, its prime representative and a man who is feted by New Agers and Hollywood celebrities, has equivocated on the war on Iraq and has expressed anti-immigrant and other abhorrent social views

3) The people of the world don't need leaders - even supposedly enlightened, female ones like Aung San Suu Kyi.

I wrote somewhat sceptically about Aung San Suu Kyi's BBC Reith Lecture last year. Now Luc Besson's Suu Kyi biopic The Lady is in cinemas. The film depicts the struggles of Suu Kyi and her political party National League for Democracy against the military régime (it's always 'régime' for them and 'government' for us, remember) that murdered her father, the British-installed Aung San, and kept her under house arrest with only infrequent visits from her two sons and her English husband - an Oxford professor and, it would seem from this film, a perfect klutz in the kitchen.

The film begins bloodily with the assassination of Suu Kyi’s father in Rangoon in 1947. Despite this early violence, its neatly dichotomized moral universe makes the film eminently suitable for children. The non-military population of Burma is good and craves democracy; but the military junta is evil. These rotters hate democracy – although there are signs that even some of the bad guys are susceptible to the saintly Suu’s democratic spell (admittedly, I did find the scene where the ASSK introduces one of the soldiers keeping her under house arrest to liberatory political slogans quite moving). There is also an absurdly superstitious Really Nasty General whose fortuneteller ill-fatedly predicts that a spirit is coming to heal the land – a plot device I haven’t seen handled with such subtlety since Kung Fu Panda 2. Ultimately, the film delivers the inspiring message that with the support of enough domestic servants, monks and history professors (and, one imagines, CIA agents) on your side, Freedom Will Come.

The film really does dodge all of the big questions. Determined to visit a remote mountain area of Burma to spread her people power message, Suu Kyi remarks to her party colleagues: ‘democracy only works when everybody is included’. But Besson shows no interest in explaining how or why Suu Kyi’s Western-backed government would achieve such inclusion better than the Chinese-backed junta. In the end, we are simply asked to believe that all will be well with the Burmese state so long as a Really Nice Woman is at the helm (for variations on this frankly sexist myth see the BBC’s The Amazing Mrs Pritchard or the Danish political drama Borgen, which is currently being broadcast on BBC4).

The film's dialogue is stilted and often comically bathetic. At one point the professor says to his wife, à propos of her house arrest: 'let's pray that this limbo is short-lived'. Later, at the start of one of the couple's cherished telephone calls, he remarks 'what a tonic to hear your voice', while his maid, on hearing of the Burmese authorities' refusal to allow the professor to see his wife, opines that: 'it beggars belief, it really does'. Despite the script's banalities, The Lady is technically proficient. Michelle Yeo is outstanding as ASSK and David Thewlis plays the mild-mannered professor convincingly. The cinematography is workmanlike and respectful (parallel overhead shots, for example, link the killing of Aung San and Suu Kyi's breakdown, four decades later, on hearing of the death of her husband, while slow motion sequences add grandeur to Suu's political speeches). But the narrative's elision of historical and political complexities is painfully apparent. And let's face it - if it's evil Burmese junta action you're after, the last Rambo film was a lot more fun.

It looks like I was right to predict that Besson would deliver a political hagiography. My success here encourages me to dust off my crystal ball and speculate on some forthcoming films. Next up for me is the Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. My hunch is that, like Besson's film, it will tell the story of a feisty woman who was determined never to give up on her dreams and do the right thing for her country.

The Burmese celebrity-politician Aung San Suu Kyi has delivered the first of this year's BBC Reith Lectures. Daw Suu heaped praise upon the BBC as a beacon of liberty and repeated the phrase 'freedom' many times, but said little about how her brand of pro-Western liberal capitalism would help what she called 'the people of Burma'. In answering questions from the audience following the lecture, Aung San Suu Kyi decried those who prize 'power' above 'humanity', while calling for sanctions against the ruling Burmese junta. In the audience, the liberal academic Timothy Garton Ash (a tireless propagandist for the British state criticised recently by me here) and an influential figure in British foreign policy circles, Kieran Prendergast, were on hand to lend their support.

But what political interests lie behind the high-sounding rhetoric and noble sentiments of Aung San Suu Kyi and her Western supporters?

Aung San Suu Kyi is a social democrat and daughter of the British-installed ex-Prime Minister of Burma (Myanmar, for US readers), Aung San. Until November 2010, she had been placed under house arrest by the ruling Burmese junta, which is heavily under the influence of China. Winner of the Nobel peace prize in 1991, she has become a key focus of Western imperial ambition in Burma and the poster girl of ‘pro-democracy’ activists.

Crucially, Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party, the National League for Democracy, is seen by Western states as the best hope of gaining political leverage and curtailing the influence of Chinese imperialism in the region. Although British and US capital investment in Burma is significant, Western states have a clear interest in destabilising the pro-Chinese leadership of a country that is as rich in mineral and gas deposits as it is in geo-strategic potential.

This accounts for the BBC Radio 4 tribute to Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear (18 June 2010) and the welter of fawning features about her in the Western media following her release from house arrest last year. And there's more - much more - to come. Luc Besson's tribute film The Lady is now forthcoming. Some idea of the level of analysis to expect from the movie is suggested by Besson's description of Aung San Suu Kyi as 'very Gandhi like' and 'more of a heroine than Joan of Arc' (although presumably, despite the Buddhist tradition of political self-immolation, this lady is not for burning). At least Michelle Yeoh, who stars in the film, seems to appreciate just what a slender thing Suu Kyi is. Apparently she said of her meeting with The Lady: 'the first thing we did is hug and I thought: "you are really skinny, man".'