On 2 May 2008 tropical cyclone Nargis struck Burma with such force that even today nobody knows how many people were killed, although the ruling military junta reported exactly how many chickens died. Here is the special quality of this regime, as Emma Larkin writes in her latest evocative book: 'Events happen in Burma, and then they are systematically unhappened.' Unhappened is a good word, and very Orwellian, an echo perhaps of Larkin's wonderful previous book on Orwell's early years in Burma.
h/t Maz2
Posted by Kate at August 11, 2010 9:37 AMis this post meant to inspire SDA? after all, the burma junta is certainly not made of leftards.
Certainly: They're Jeffersonian statesmen, beagle, and we aspire to be like them.
Well, at least nobody's calling it "Myanmar" anymore.
Posted by: Black Mamba at August 11, 2010 1:26 PM beagle
[....."after all, the burma junta is certainly not made of leftards.....]
That's why it is a clent state of the PRC.....??
Posted by: sasquatch at August 11, 2010 5:52 PMtry again....
That's why it is a client state of the PRC.....??
Posted by: sasquatch at August 11, 2010 5:54 PM"unhappened"
So Canadian. We should use it instead of historical revisionism.
After all Canada has been through a few of these exercises.
Remember when Canada was two Solitudes? The great White North? Now its Multicultural land. Soon to be Islamist land.
Canada. The only Country in Worlds history that changes its identity by fad.
Canada was the first Burma.
Actually, Mr. Revnant, I don't think there ever was a time when Canada was "two solitudes". It was Montreal that was "two solitudes" in the book of that name, a book in which both solitudes were entirely oblivious to the existence of the rest of the world. The phrase got picked up as a shorthand way of saying that nobody in Toronto pays any attention to Montreal, and vice versa. But since nobody in either city pays any attention to anywhere else either, it doesn't actually express anything meaningful about the country.
If a "solitude" is an area that effectively pays no attention to, and is more or less ignored by, the rest of the country, you'd run out of fingers trying to count them. And that hasn't changed in at least a hundred years.
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