A message from Maung Zarni

 

“Hollywood women have become soft — victimhood over victory. I don’t want another movie about nuns or purple dresses. I want women who win.”  - Karoline Leavitt, Trump's White House Spokeswoman 

 

 

“When I played Celie in The Color Purple*, or when we made* Sister Act*, we weren’t trying to inspire. We were trying to be heard. Because people like us — women like us — didn’t get stories back then. Not unless they ended in silence.”*

 

-- Whoopi Goldberg in response to Trump's spokeswoman

 

Dear Friends,

 

Several important items, I think, which should be of interest to you.  

 

Yuli Novak, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem's executive director, is quoted as saying, “Nothing prepares you for the realisation that you are part of a society committing genocide. This is a deeply painful moment for us.” 

 

I know exactly that feeling.  Those of us who deem our own human core - the so-called humanity, as such -  more than our own petty tribal identity have learned to make no excuses, nor hold on to patriots' eternal optimism about and possibility of redemption of the (supposed) virtues and goodness of our own beloved tribes and ethno/racial or religious state.

 

By the time a state is committing a genocide the society has lost its moral compass, very likely forever.   Enter Japan that has proven incapable of coming to terms with its own savery towards fellow Asians across the Far East and Southeast Asia.  Or Britain where the vast majority of British have been incapacitated intellectually and spiritually by its world class education:  most of them still don't know or probably don't want to know that  Britain has one of the most despicable criminal records of all Western states.    

 

Or Germany, self-perceived, as "the most rational of all cultures", with its record 3 genocides in 120 years - and still no sign of redemption.   Most of the elites - across different ideological spectrum -  keep their mouth shut as their state supply Israel hundreds of millions of $ worth of weapons as they flick through the livestreamed genocide out of Gaza.  The Feminist Green woman who headed the Foreign Ministry was the worst:  killing children and attacking hospitals were militarily legitimate (she is now President of the UN Security Council).   

 

Of course, whatever is happening to the Palestinians is Hamas' fault.  She at times did sound like David Mencer, former aide to David Lammy, Starmer's foreign secretary, who, now in his capacity as Netanyahu's spokesperson, routinely spits out well-rehearsed Goebbels-esque bullshit - such as "there is no famine, but only the famine of truths" in Gaza or "Hamas is stealing and hoarding UN humanitarian aid to Gaza"

 

Or the United States of America, when it comes to moral and intellectual cowardice - and self-deception of its ruling elite, utterly delusional about their own capacity for redemption.  

 

I am not alone in predicting that what is referred to as "the West" is dead.   Along with nearly half a million Palestinians in Gaza.

 

Forgive my Burmese:  the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck about whatever "the West" has to say about human rights, international law, civilization, humanity, humanitarianism etc.     Yes, the West still has $$$$ and guns: plenty  of both.   The rest of us in the world know we will have to continue to contend with the White Man's guns and money.    

 

But at least, the battle lines have been clearly drawn.   I for one don't split people into "left" or "right".  Just humans and savages.   

 

One thousand years is long enough to realize who is who on this planent.  

 

We are dealing with the Savage Civilization.  Well, we have been since the 1st Crusades.   Hamid Dabashi,  the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is worth quoting:  “According to Hegel, Africans, or any other people, can only become civilized to the degree and so far as they abandoned their own cultures and convert to Christianity, founding a state according to Christian principles.” 

 

You will read his piece below, (if you continue reading this note).  

 

A retired Burmese medical doctor/professor friend just wrote me in response to Dabashi's forthcoming book (reviewed in CounterCurrents), 

 

The European project, birthed in crusades and sustained by conquest, has long cloaked brutality in civilization’s garb. But perhaps the younger generation’s fracture with that legacy signals a tremor of moral renewal—before the curtain falls, or the lights come on.

 

Have a great anti-imperialist day!

 

 Zarni