But watching these people fighting for democracy also made me depressed, knowing how corporate-capitalism has rendered democracy in the "advanced" countries into a revolting farce (with the current absolute stupidity of the two parties of Wall Street in the USA showing the absolute depths that pure capitalist culture can drag a political culture down to).
As well, watching the movie made me think about the futility of traditional tactics of pro-democracy movements, both in the world's dictatorships and in the nominal democracies. You see, in the film, the dictatorship doubles the price fuel, which effectively doubled the price of many necessities (bus fares, food, cooking oil, etc.,) and this sparks massive discontent. The dissent is muted however because the dictatorship has thousands upon thousands of spies and informants everywhere and if one is heard criticizing the regime it could lead to imprisonment and torture. Over a couple of days, first a single protester, then a small group of protesters, stage anti-government demonstrations in Rangoon's market, which are quickly smashed. But then, Buddhist monks march to protest the economic policies and the suppression of democracy and the government is temporarily confused. The people are devoutly Buddhist and monks aren't supposed to be touched. For four days the monks march and more and more people join them, and I could imagine the generals arguing whether to let them march and let the movement peter-out, or whether to crush them before the protests turn into a whirlwind that can't be controlled.
In the end, the monks are attacked in the night and only a few manage to make it out to the next day's protests which are led mostly by students. But against the students the government has no compunction about firing live ammunition and the protests are destroyed. And the thirty-year dictatorship survives to oppress for another year or decade or whatever. The VJ's, by smuggling out the images of the protests help tell the world about this democracy movement, the weakness of the regime, and the violence of the authorities.
It's depressing to watch. Both because the protests are crushed but also because of the wider reality. At certain points in the movie, these people trapped in this horrible situation wonder if the rest of the world cares about what's happening in Burma. I could tell them that people do care, just like they care about Darfur, and Haiti, and Pakistan, and everywhere. The problem is that people's knowledge about what to do is hampered by ignorance as to how the world works and ignorance about the culpability and evil of their own governments. At one point in the film, the importance of the VJ's work is shown by a clip of the embarrassingly stupid bush II stumbling through a statement about the horrible oppression of the Burmese dictatorship! To the sane minority in the world, listening to a moronic war criminal exercising his ginormous hypocrisy muscles is painful in the extreme, but far too many millions of people saw him as the "leader of the free world" the "world's greatest democracy" and they expect that the USA will right wrongs and defend the weak anywhere and wonder why it doesn't.
Finally, what I've been saying for quite a while as "thwap," ... we really don't know how to respond to this evil. In Burma, they marched and the shouted, until they were attacked, imprisoned, or mowed-down in the streets, upon which they stopped marching and shouting. Here in Canada, where our masters have the inconvenience of our already possessing certain political and civil rights, work mightily to nullify these rights. They have ENTIRELY SUCCESSFULLY engineered a transfer of wealth from the vast majority to a tiny minority and through propaganda and outright lies have managed to make the middle-levels blame the poorest and the weakest for their problems. In this process, the lies and propaganda and the POWER of the capitalist elites have even served to make left-wing politicians move steadily rightward as their own thinkers come to see the failed neo-liberal consensus as the only option.
The small minority of people who actively protest are marginalized, demonized, attacked and their civil rights are routinely violated, and the general public yawns in indifference at this and at wholesale shredding of the democratic process and the rule of law. But even this small minority of people who know better than most can't seem to shake the delusion that we can change our evil elites by marching and shouting. If only there are enough of us marching and shouting, things will change.
No. The situation in Burma shows that IF we were to somehow miraculously break through the barriers of delusion and apathy created by the dominant propaganda, and we were to get millions of people in the streets across Canada, if our elites were truly threatened, they would simply turn the guns on us. If things got that bad that we could get millions into the streets, the elites would have been simultaneously getting thousands of assholes onside with paid positions as informants and spies, the police would be staffed by people who hate and loathe the poor, and the loathsome brutality of the Toronto G-20 would be magnified a hundred-fold. Finally, the military, fed a steady drum-beat of anti-democratic sentiment (going on now I'll bet as their officers explain that dissent against the occupation of Afghanistan is the equivalent of spitting in their faces and wishing for their deaths) would turn their guns on us with the same efficiency of the Burmese military.
We need street protests, speeches. We need an activist oppositional newsmedia. We need a coherent theory of political-economic democracy. We need a courageous and militant political party. We need a courageous and militant protest movement. And we need to think seriously of getting all these things to work in the face of a capitalist elite that suffers no moral qualms over employing DEATH SQUADS to destroy opposition to a system that perpetuates massive inequality.
It's a huge job.
No comments:
Post a Comment