Burma: blog by "Finding George Orwell in Burma" author

Emma Larkin (a pseudonym) is the author of the book Finding George Orwell in Burma, and she recently returned from a couple of weeks in that country. She is now blogging on the Penguin USA website (that's her publisher) about the ongoing, violent crackdown by the military regime. Larkin has previously written about the state's brutal response to peaceful protests by Buddhist monks, and attempts to block information about human rights violations by blocking internet access.

Snip from today's post:

As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta’s Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: “Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!” Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: “Everyone is just pretending,” she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…

Link to full text of post. (Thanks, Sarah Odio)

[#1 posted by anthropomorphictoast , October 19, 2007 10:11 AM]

I didn't get a chance to read the whole book yet, but of what I read was pretty horrifying, and makes me wonder how far off America is from degrading a different way, but with the same effect.

[#2 posted by Peterus , October 19, 2007 11:00 AM]

@Anthropo
Open your eyes, will you?
I could be ranting for hours about what's wrong with Poland and many Poles. How it's far worse on many levels than US and better on just a few.

But i will never say it's "same effect" of "different degradadation" as Burma! It's insane overstatement for Poland and even bigger for US.

As long as immigration>emmigration it's pretty darn great country - comparing to the rest of the world. So stop emo-level whining lefty and - if u actually wannt do it - go try changing things for the better.

[#3 posted by alphabunny , October 19, 2007 8:27 PM]

s lng s chn mks th gns nd s lng s brm rmns strtgc pnt f ntrst fr chn, mltrly nd rsrc-ws nthng wll chng.

s b h. wht th hll s nyn gng t d bt t?