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.
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.
RSS Feed
