The recent news that Buddhist monks have been shot and killed in a peaceful democratic demonstration in Rangoon, over a raise in the price of gasoline, is shocking!
No question that General Than Shwe is plenty un-American and has a real genocide thing going. Several years ago the rotund general and his fellow thugs ruthlessly gunned down thousands of demonstrators and imprisoned thousands more.
The recent shootings follow reports that junta security forces continue to commit extra-judicial killings, rape, and forcible relocation of persons, use forced labor, and conscript child soldiers.
It is a mystery how Bush could have possibly left Burma, now called Myanmar, out of the Axis of Evil.
Burma's qualifications in the Evil department are impeccable. They torture and burn people alive. Millions have been displaced. General Than Shwe controls the opium trade in Southeast Asia and exports it to American ghettos. Myanmar made the Worst of the Worst list put out by the United Nations several years ago. And last year Parade Magazine named Than Shwe "the third worst dictator in the world."
As President Bush himself said, "The people of Burma live in the darkness of tyranny. But the light of freedom shines in their hearts. The people want their liberty and one day they will have it."
The Burmese themselves have long feared a U.S. invasion, which has been foretold by traditional Burmese fortune-tellers, according to the BBC. Two years ago, the soothsayers told General Than Shwe about a coming U.S. invasion and he immediately moved the capital from the port city of Rangoon to Naypyidaw, a small, rural village, three hundred miles inland.
General Ne Win was born Shu Maung, which means "Apple of one's eye", but eventually changed his name to Ne Win, which means "Brilliant as the Sun" or "Son of Glory."
The leaders are "totally irrational," said Josef Silverstein, a Burma specialist and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University.
"General Ne Win [A.K.A. Big Father, who came to power in 1962 and died in 2002] is totally dependent on their advice. He is once said to have decided to change the direction of traffic overnite (on the advice of the Soothsayers). It caused a huge number of accidents."
Word from Burmese exiles is that the fortune tellers have been advising successor General Than Shwe that a bomb would be good. It is also rumored that a CIA informant, who is an exile, has said that Burma's leader has been negotiating with Kim Jung Il and that a North Korean freighter was seen in the Yangon (Rangoon) harbor offloading suspicious materials.
The Burmese fortune tellers had predicted the violence on the day of the protests, whose digits add up repeatedly to the astrologically powerful number 9: The 27th day of the ninth month in 2007.
And worst of all Burma's oil and gas production is controlled by French oil giant TOTAL and we get none of it. TOTAL is the subject of a European lawsuit for "condoning slavery" in the construction of a pipeline from Burma to Thailand.
CIA commandos have already mapped out invasion scenarios with the support of oppressed ethinic tribes. A quick strike in this misbegotten country would not be difficult.
Finally a war we can win.
If you want to find a really bad guy, forget Ahmadinejad; General Than Shwe is the real deal in the genocide department.
Or maybe we should consider Darfur.
jfleetwood@aol.com