The Socialist Republic of Burma Days

Myanmar/Burma ranks with North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe as four prime examples of socialism gone horribly wrong, which it inevitably always does.

And like its sisters in workers' paradise, Myanmar/Burma has outdone George Orwell's wildest imagination, A perusal of his book Burma Days indicts British colonialism, but the terrors of independence have been magnified by the international cancer of socialism. Here is the Wiki version:

Democratic rule ended in 1962 when General Ne Win led a military coup d'état. He ruled for nearly 26 years and pursued policies under the rubric of the Burmese Way to Socialism. Between 1962 and 1974, Burma was ruled by a Revolutionary Council headed by the general, and almost all aspects of society (business, media, production) were nationalized or brought under government control (including the Boy Scouts).[27] In an effort to consolidate power, General Ne Win and many top generals resigned from the military and took civilian posts and, from 1974, instituted elections in a one party system. Between 1974 and 1988, Burma was effectively ruled by General Ne Win through the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP).

Out of the 6000 & counting stories on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, the MSM will not employ the "word which must not be uttered" in connection with the non-responsive utterly unaccountable authoritarian disaster which is the "Burmese Way to Socialism."
Because it kind of looks like the socialist disasters in other autocratic family enterprises like N. Korea, Cuba, and Mugabe [though Bob might leave "without issue," as the dynastic diaries of EUtopia once put it.]

Although the PRC was saved from a similar fate by Premier Deng, that nation has built its economy on the natural talents of its citizens left unfettered by the odious shackles egomaniacs like Mugabe, Castro, and Kim Jung-iI have clamped on their countries. Like those sad examples, the privileged oligarchies around the ruling clique in Burma control the range of economic levers in the impoverished state.

Stateside, the tenured liars in Academentia studiously overlook the crimes committed on behalf of the indoctrination they force down the throats of hapless students.

Can anyone imagine the thrashing & verbal uproar that a right-wing government's similar actions would raise---especially in the UN? When S. Africa had a much milder regime, student agitation about apartheid was non-stop. Not a peep on the campuses of the socialist democide factories around the planet. When 2 million died of starvation in the late '90s, did that stop Bubba from sending his bulbous SecState to waddle around Pyongyang making a fool of herself [or in this case, a bigger fool]. The chief opponent to the regime was awarded a Nobel in 1988, but the world doesn't care about failed regimes, especially if they are socialist.

Anecdotal aside: A friend at State told me that all FSOs were invited to say goodbye to chubby Maddy and no one showed up---so cadres were sent from office to office to beg the lower six floors to send photo-op fodder to the seventh so Maddy would have a quorum [or at least a few dozen] diplomats saying farewell. The biggest failure diplomatically since Cy Vance. Or Warren Christopher.

I'll end this sad piece by noting that Amoco had a prospering project in Myanmar while I worked there, and the only people who bothered us with petitions were Catholic nuns & charities. The rest of the eleemosynary community is too socialist to care.

UPDATE Just saw the end of CNN's Christiane Amanpout [whom I met in Dhahran during the Gulf War] special on North Korea and she was quite upbeat about the non-issue of the Yongbon [?] reactor's shutdown. Thimble-wit Christiane failed to mention that the template for the Syrian reactor the Israelis wrecked last September is Yongbon, which was a source of hard cash for Kim's imported hookers & booze & movie cache. The North Koreans sold the Syrians the nuke breeder using Iranian money, giving new meaning to The Axis of Evil. Meantioning such a story on CNN would be journalism, and CNN & Christiane avoid that at all costs. Might cost them what Peter Arnett paid so dearly to Saddam Hussein for. Access.