How Memoirs by American Officials Leave the CIA Out of U.S. Policy in Burma
Burma/Myanmar is a remote corner of the world for American foreign policy. The United States only became involved during World War II, when the Japanese-occupied British colony was a battleground between British Indi, and China on one side, and Japan on the other. As allies of the British and Chinese, the United States played a significant role in organizing local military units of Kachin, Karen, and others to fight against the Japanese through the work of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). On the side of the Japanese from 1942-1944 was the Burma National Army, dominated by ethnic Burmese and led by General Aung San, father of now-imprisoned Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counselor of Myanmar from 2016-2021. Notably, the Burma National Army switched sides in 1945 and eventually helped drive the Japanese from Burma. In the end, British Burma suffered some of the highest death rates of any British colony during World War II, with 250,000-1 million dead.
After World War II the OSS, which became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Burma shifted from being a battleground against the Japanese to being a front-line against the Chinese Communists, who in 1949 drove out the former Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai Shek. The bulk of the Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan to establish a Chinese government in exile. Less well-known is that the Nationalist armies from southern China retreated into northern Burma. With the support of CIA-coordinated supply flights from Taiwan and Thailand, these Nationalist Chinese armies would harry the Chinese Communists for another 20 years. At the same time, the Nationalist Chinese armies developed a side-show in the cultivation of opium and the refining of heroin, a program to which the CIA turned a blind eye because of their larger interest in battling Communism in China. The heroin itself found a ready market among the US soldiers in Vietnam, who in turn would introduce the drug to the inner cities of the United States by the 1970s.
Permitting the emergence of heroin labs in northern Burma was of course a strategic mistake by the CIA. President Nixon in response established the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1972, which was assigned the task of eradicating the heroin labs in northern Burma, Laos, and Thailand, which were supplying much of the world’s heroin supply. Clandestine DEA agents were assigned to Thailand and Burma to counter the new trade in heroin which the CIA, while focused on anti-Communism, had let thrive in Burma. The DEA battles in northern Burma would go on for decades more—in fact, they are undoubtedly on-going today. Despite the efforts of the DEA, through a surfeit of arrest warrants and sanctions against Burmese drug dealers and generals, drug production was not eliminated. Rather, it shifted from heroin to methamphetamine in the 1990s.
The involvement of American clandestine services, both the CIA and DEA facilitated by the State Department, in the suppression of both Communism and drug production are hardly unknown stories. Journalists, academics, and retired agents have for decades written about the involvement of the CIA and DEA, particularly in northern Burma. Movies as spectacular as Rambo IV, and the Free Burma Rangers Movie dramatized the role of Americans in Burma battling for righteousness. CIA and DEA agents are known, and many named in print, including three of the four authors reviewed here. All four were deeply involved with the CIA, DEA, and State Department in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. To make the American exceptionalism story-line work, in all four books, the Burmese military is cast as the villains, while the “highland tribes” are the victims. The Americans and their aid programs, of course, are rescuers. This is despite the fact that a former British police officer in the 1920s Burmese Colonial service, George Orwell, shows that hegemony is not always what the powerful say it is.
Barry Broman—Trawling for Traitors
Barry Broman. Risk Taker, Spy Maker: Tales of a CIA Case Officer. Casement Books. 2020.
Barry Broman’s final gig was as a CIA operative in Yangon, Burma, from which he retired in 1996. Broman had an unusual history in Southeast Asia, which makes for an interesting and engaging autobiography. In the early 1960s as a 19-year-old, he spent a year or so as an AP photographer in Bangkok. He then returned to the United States to attend the University of Washington. On graduation with a master’s in Asian studies, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, and sent to Quantico for Marine officer training where he learned to “fire every weapon organic to a Marine infantry battalion” including a napalm flame thrower which at one point to his chagrin literally backfired on him. In 1968 he was sent to Vietnam where there were indeed swell adventures, and learned the skills of a Recon Unit whose motto was “Swift, Silent, and Deadly.” His 7-month tour of duty on the battle front was full of helicopters, explosions, firefights, jungle patrols, bombing and adrenaline. And judging from his writing, he liked it! Lucky to survive, he was moved to back offices, and to Thailand where he dealt with “R and R” for American soldiers, which presumably involved making sure young soldiers did not get into too much trouble with drugs and prostitutes.
From Thailand, Broman was sent back to California, where he was recruited by the CIA. He rushed toward the opportunity, requesting that he be assigned to “operations,” which is the directorate where foreign spies are recruited. Broman trained at “The Farm,” the secretive but not-so-secret CIA training facility in northern Virginia. There he learned how to get foreign nationals to spy on behalf of the United States with appeals to ideology, money, and threats. Broman claims that the CIA was scrupulous in following American law, but he points out that the methods need not be legal under local law, which often put “informants” at risk. The CIA used carrots of cash and a visas to the United States to entice foreign nationals. Broman was proud that so far as he knew, none of the informants he recruited were ever caught, imprisoned, or executed, a claim that few of the Cold War CIA recruiters could make.
(Note: Compare Scott Anderson who quotes CIA sources claiming that all of the agents infiltrated into the former Soviet Union or China in the 1950s and 1960s were captured, and Patrick Winn’s account of the torture of DEA confidential informant Saw Lu by both Burmese and Wa forces in Myanmar during the 1990s and 2000s.)
Broman’s relevance to Burma accelerated in the 1990s, when he was assigned to manage spies in Yangon. It was a tough time to collect information—The State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) was at the height of its most repressive powers. It must have been tough to recruit American spies in a city which was paranoid, and itself specialized in black arts of spying, torture, and imprisonment. From what can be gleaned from Broman’s writing, as well as that of Bertil Lintner and Patrick Winn, it seems that the American CIA and DEA, with the focus on China and anti-drug policing, were deeply involved with the regime, despite official sanctions from the State Department to protest major human rights abuses.
New York warrants for the arrest of drug lords Khun Sa, and Lo Hsing Han were issued in the early 1990s which Americans like Broman presumably tried to serve. This of course never quite happened, as both of the drug lords from the north retired to Yangon as old men, under the protection of SLORC and its successor military regime. Khun Sa moved with his fortune to Yangon and with four young Shan mistresses in 1996 and died at age 73 in 2007. Lo Hsing Han did the same, passing away in 2012. Both merited an obituary in The Economist. Broman’s view is different of course—he repeats CIA dogma and claims that Khun Sa died under carefully supervised house arrest. The fact of the matter is that the indictments were never served like they were on Panama’s President Manuel Noriega in 1990. The United States has not been quite as powerful in Burma, as in Central America.
As for Burma’s drug trade itself, it has survived and thrived in the chaos of the North. Started after World War II with CIA help, northern Burma transformed itself from the world’s greatest producer of heroin to the greatest producer of methamphetamine. About this longer-term context, though, Broman does not comment. But Broman himself apparently did quite well. After retiring from the CIA in 1996, he took up a new career as a photographer and travel writer. He specialized in Burma and used his contacts with the ruling junta to gain access to areas normally off limits to tourists and journalists. He took fantastic photos of remote mountain tribes for National Geographic while protected by the Burmese military. In the end of this section, one is left wondering about what was actually going on between the CIA and the Burmese generals in the 1990s. The State Department publicly was imposing sanctions for human rights abuses and toppling a democratically elected government in 1990-1991, but apparently Broman curried enough favor to get special treatment after transitioning to a career as a travel writer.
Erin Murphy—The CIA Organizes Humanitarianism, the Seventh Fleet, and Hillary Clinton’s Visit
Erin Murphy. Burmese Haze: The US and Myanmar’s Opening and Closing. Columbia University Press. 2022.
Erin Murphy had a more conventional career at the CIA, having degrees from Tufts and Johns Hopkins Universities, two years in Japan as an English teacher, followed by positions in Washington area consultancies. From there she was hired by the CIA, where she was the desk officer for Burma from 2007-2011, and later reassigned to Hillary Clinton’s State Department for a brief time in 2011-2012 when Burma was transitioning from strict military control to a semi-democratic regime.
Murphy’s first major concern as the CIA desk officer was Typhoon Nargis which emerged in late April 2008 from the Bay of Bengal, just as she took over the Burma desk in Washington. Her account of how the typhoon was dealt with is interesting, not just for the logistics involved which were impressive, but also for how the American diplomatic regime viewed the problem. To recap, just as Burma was getting ready for elections scheduled for May 2008, Typhoon Nargis arrived in Myanmar on April 27. Nargis would remain until May 7, causing unprecedented destruction and death in the densely populated Irrawaddy River Delta.
As is well-documented, the response of the military government to Typhoon Nargis was weak; the military lacked the resources and legitimacy to undertake even the most basic survey and rescue work. Ever-wary of foreigners, the military did not seek the assistance of the United States or the other nations proffering resources.
In hopes of being invited to deliver relief supplies, President George W. Bush, with the advice of Burma analysts like Erin Murphy, sent the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and offered to use American military assets to provide humanitarian relief. The Burmese military government, paranoid about foreign involvement after decades of interference from the British, Japanese, Americans, and Chinese, was hesitant about inviting the American military into Burma, particularly given the reputation of the Seventh Fleet. Besides supporting operations in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Seventh Fleet is remembered well in Southeast Asia for having supported Pakistan during Bangladesh’s Revolution in 1971, as well as the American operations in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
The story of American-Myanmar relations in 2008 became particularly strange, as Murphy relates how the Myanmar military government finally relented and allowed American relief flights to land at the Yangon airport. The capacity of the air control staff was inadequate she writes, for the suddenly increased flight schedule, and the large American military planes. Murphy boasts that this problem was quickly addressed when US embassy personnel rushed in to take charge of flight operations at the Yangon Airport, facilitating the arrival of humanitarian relief. Why the US Embassy had flight controllers on staff, Murphy never says—or perhaps the reason was redacted by the CIA censors of her book.
The rest of Murphy’s time on the CIA’s Burma desk was spent watching rapidly unfolding events, some of which led to the happier result of a “democratic transition” which underpinned freer elections in the 2010s. She tells the story well of the rather strange election in May 2008, which approved the new Constitution. This election was notable due to implausibly massive voter turnout, even in the flooded Irrawaddy River Delta. This was followed by the 2010 election in which the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) boycotted. The military parties easily won, but also released NLD’s leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the country’s founder General Aung San, after their victory.
The 2010 election and the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi were opportunities the United States needed to reset relations. In November-December 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited both the new military leader General Thein Sein and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the first visit by an American Secretary of State to Myanmar. Murphy was deeply involved in planning this visit and provides detail about the logistics involved, including the film and book library carried on Clinton’s plane, and the fact that Nay Pyi Taw’s airport was too small to receive Clinton’s plane safely (the Americans suggested that one of Nay Pyi Taw’s roads be cleared instead). The talks of course were formal and diplomatic. Murphy describes with pride how smart Clinton was in dealing with her Burmese counterparts, including bringing dog toys for Daw Aung San Kyi’s canine friends. Murphy was particularly pleased that Myanmar’s Parliamentary Speaker Shwe Mann refrained from a long lecture on Burmese-American history, which would have presumably been about CIA involvement in northern Burma. Speaker Mann also seemed responsive, Murphy writes, to Clinton’s demands for American-style financial accountability.
The by-election of April 1, 2012, was the first open election in Myanmar for decades and the NLD swept 43 of 45 available seats, so General Aung San’s daughter entered Parliament as the new leader of the opposition. Justifiably, this was viewed as a triumph of western diplomacy. Americans and others proudly (and prematurely) pointed to the successful transition to open markets and democracy. As for Murphy, she resigned from government service in 2013 and set up a consulting company in Washington to help funnel US aid to Burma, particularly with respect to joint ventures between American and Myanmar companies. But then on February 1, 2021, the results of the elections of 2012, 2015, and 2020 were annulled in a coup. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was again imprisoned, and the military resumed control.
Scot Maciel—Official America’s See No CIA Policy?
Scot Macial. Imperfect Partners: The United States and Southeast Asia. Stanford: Rowman and Littlefield. 2023.
Scot Maciel was not with the CIA, but the State Department. He had a diplomatic career, starting in The Philippines in 1985-1986, and in the early 1990s, he helped establish the US Embassy in Hanoi (1993-1996) after the two countries established diplomatic relations. He then moved on to Hong Kong and was present during the handover from Great Britain to China in 1997.
Maciel eventually moved on to senior positions, mostly in Southeast Asia and/or in Washington DC. From 2008-2010 he was Ambassador to ASEAN based in Washington, then Ambassador to Indonesia (2010-2013), and Ambassador to Burma (2016-2020). As Ambassador to Burma, he was in charge of the ten buildings of the new US Embassy built on ten acres on Inya Lake completed in 2007, the same place that Erin Murphy would claim air traffic controllers popped out of during the Typhoon Nargis relief operation in 2008. According to leaked documents, this building is the site of a major intelligence gathering operation for the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA).
Maciel’s book is primarily about why the US view of the “partnership” with often-times authoritarian regimes of Southeast Asia are so difficult. The Southeast Asians are “imperfect partners,” for the United States because of long-term anti-democratic practices including military rule, thwarted elections, authoritarianism and human rights abuses in countries like Burma. But really, this is only one side of the “imperfection.” The other side is long-term American policies of siding with the same authoritarianism which Maciel ironically critiques.
The United States has a deep history in Southeast Asia, having fought its first war in 1898-1902 in order to become the colonizer in the Philippines (1898-1946). The United States was also the protagonist in what Vietnamese call “The American War” (1954-1975), and based troops throughout the region before and after their war in Vietnam. As a world power, the United States often chose sides in coup-prone region, selecting “partners” in The Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar.
Given America’s central role in the region for the last century, and the fact that the OSS and CIA were early participants in the Cold War, it would be expected that a book called Imperfect Partners would put the CIA at the center. But the CIA (and OSS and DEA) do not even merit an index entry in Maciel’s book. For scholars of Southeast Asia, this is a gaping lacuna. I would presume that as a US ambassador with a deep knowledge of Southeast Asia, Maciel knew Erin Murphy, and Barry Broman, but they too are missing from the book. As is Amaryllis Fox, and of course Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. The statues of the World War II-era OSS officer and his Kachin guide erected on the grounds of the massive US compound in Yangon are also not mentioned. Such omissions are glaring in a book sub-titled Imperfect Partners.
Amaryllis Fox—Lone Hero Serving Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the Resistance
Amaryllis Fox. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA. Random House. 2019.
Amaryllis Fox has perhaps the most fantastical Burma story of the three CIA officials reviewed here. She claims to have gotten her start in spycraft as a freelance 19-year-old volunteering in Mae Sot, Thailand, on Burma’s border for a dissident magazine, after having done a high school report about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s record as a non-violent activist. In Mae Sot, the young idealist became a “pigeon,” i.e. a courier, smuggling contraband for the resistance. On a tourist trip to Yangon she claims she taped a personal interview with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi which, she smuggled out in a body cavity. Arrested on her way out of the country, she spent a brief time in custody where she heard prisoners being tortured, before flying back to Bangkok. The police did not apparently discover the well-hidden interview tape. Amaryllis Fox’s book is criticized by reviewers as being implausible—the details in places are sometimes wrong and it seems highly unlikely that an inexperienced 19 year old would have been granted the level of trust by dissidents, the NLD, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi herself.
On the basis of such work, Amaryllis Fox went to Oxford receiving a Bachelor’s degree, and followed onto Georgetown University to study National Security Studies. Here the idealist was recruited by the CIA. She was sent for training as a CIA undercover operative at “The Farm.” She briefly worked for the CIA near Washington DC where she interviewed prisoners from the Global War on Terror, and helped identify targets for “rendition” to CIA prisons. Later she worked undercover as an art dealer mostly in the Middle East and China for seven years, seeking assets willing to betray their country during the War on Terror. After finishing her CIA work she wrote this book, and became a radio and television personality campaigning for peace. She also married Robert F. Kennedy III and in 2024 was the Campaign Director for her Father-in-Law, Robert F. Kennedy II in his campaign for US President.
Of the memoirists reviewed here, Fox is the only one to have a moral imagination when it comes to the foreign policy of the United States and the practices of the CIA. She left the CIA questioning how damaged the reputation of the United States abroad became as a result of its policies that value American life over all others. An exchange she recalled during her assignment at CIA headquarters is telling. She had identified how the CIA routinely kidnapped (renditioned) innocent people in the Global War on Terror due to systematic translation errors.
“Okay,” [Fox’s supervisor] says, eyes still glued to her screen. “You’re authorized to fix it.”
I’m at a loss for what to say. I’m a first-year trainee. How am I supposed to fix it? For a second, there’s just the clicking of her fingers on the keys.
“Fine,” I reply, “but you need to stop the renditions until I do.”
Now she looks at me. “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
“We’re kidnapping random, innocent people—”
She interrupts me: “You want to answer to Congress, kid? Come another 9/11, I’d rather say we rendered a hundred innocent assholes than tell them we let one fucking terrorist go free.”
“I think you have it backward,” I mumble.
“What?”
“The quote. It’s Benjamin Franklin. ‘Better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.’”
She locks eyes with me and says, “He was talking about Americans.” (pp. 86-87).
America’s Rambo Problem and the CIA
John Rambo is a fictional character and Sylvester Stallone is a movie maker, not an American intelligence agent. The film franchise is about a veteran of the Vietnam War who feels betrayed by the incompetence of the desk bound policymakers (like Murphy and Maciel). These policies were viewed as ones that put so many perfect American youth in danger, and then abandoned them and their Vietnamese allies to evil Asian enemies. The only solution is to go rogue. Rambo concludes, write your own rules, break local laws, and triumph in the end. In other words, to be as Barry Brogan learned in the Marines, “swift, silent, and deadly.”
The fourth film of the Rambo franchise is about an operation to rescue kidnapped American Christian missionaries living in Burma. Rambo being Rambo, he goes in guns blazing and by some counts kills 400 Burmese soldiers almost singlehandedly. He then rescues the family with the help of Christian Karen rebels. As an American archetype, the story is well, archetypical. An American hero is at the center who shoots straight, fairly, and always wins against the bad guys. As for the Burmese military they do not shoot straight, fight unfairly, and in the end lose.
The Rambo movie was not so popular in official Myanmar and was banned by a government embarrassed about the fictional incompetence of the ferocious Tatmadaw. (Which of course made the film even more of a delight for the Karen National Army soldiers, who enjoyed watching the demise of the hated Burmese army, even in fiction.) In other words, Rambo IV is a movie version of the Kachin-OSS statues on the grounds of the US Embassy in Yangon.
I bring up the Rambo tale told by Sylvester Stallone because in an exaggerated way (after all it is a movie!), the archetype is reflected in the writing of the three CIA agents in particular. The CIA’s “Farm” creates an illusion that foreign policy can be steered through the work of secret agents, people who are able to monopolize information that others do not have, and cleverly dominate in the name of a perfect American righteousness, be they John Rambo, Amarylis Fox, or Barry Broman. The problem is that the analysts like Erin Murphy and Scot Maciel get caught up in the belief in America’s exceptional righteousness and come up with the fiction that the Seventh Fleet and the CIA are effective tools to deliver humanitarian relief, or that American-style elections will provide enough political legitimacy to avoid a coup. As in Rambo’s fictional world the individual hero is central, which is perhaps why the Rambo franchise sells so well with American audiences who dream of a righteous world.
American Policy Toward Myanmar: The Imperfect American Partners
Sometime in 2003, American OSS veterans visited the Kachin State capital of Myitkyina in northern Myanmar. There they found a memorial to the defeated Japanese soldiers killed during World War II. They resolved to build a monument to American OSS Detachment 101. They supported the Kachin military units’ fight against the Japanese alongside the colonial British Army.
The American OSS agents commemorated had parachuted in to work with the Kachin and were known for their stealth, bravery, and skill. From 1942-1945 they helped organize espionage and sabotage operations against the Japanese and Japan’s ally, the Burma National Army (BNA), which was led by General Aung San. Their war with Japan and their allies was indeed swift, silent, and deadly, and both Japanese soldiers and Burmese civilians died in great numbers.
Following the Allied victory, the Kachin units were re-integrated into the British Colonial army. By the end of 1945, the British wrested control over the colony from both the Japanese and General Aung San’s independence forces, with the assistance of their swift, silent, and deadly American allies.
General Aung San, former Minister of Defense in the Japanese-led government, was of course disappointed. He sought independence from first the British (1930s-1942), but also the Japanese (1944-1945). Despite a brief alliance with the Allies in 1945, he wanted independence from all foreign powers. As for the Kachin soldiers, they remained a unit of the British military after World War II, before being briefly folded into the new Burma Army after independence in 1948. Remnants of these forces would return to Kachin State, where they cooperated with the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) starting in the Burmese Civil War (1948-1950) and again when the Kachin revolt restarted in the 1960s in cooperation with the BCP.
Elements of this revolt continue today, which is why the statue intended for erection in Myitkyina, was instead flown to Yangon where it was eventually installed at the massive new US Embassy compound then under construction. As for the second statue, the police showed up at the artist’s studio one day, seized the statue (which is rumored to still be at the bottom of the Irrawaddy River), and arrested the artist. The artist fortunately escaped and was granted asylum by the United States. A smaller version (6” tall “maquette”) of the statue was eventually found at the bottom of the Irrawaddy, and now has an honored place at Washington’s CIA headquarters. The US embassy of course asserts the statue is a symbol of United States-Burmese cooperation.
This is a round-about way of saying that relations with the United States and Burma are complicated, and very imperfect. From the Burmese perspective. This goes back to World War II when the clandestine OSS, renamed as the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, began picking and choosing allies in pursuit of American geo-political goals. An early choice made during World War II was to support the British against the Japanese invaders and their Burmese allies. I suspect from the Burmese military perspective the statue reflects a story of division, and betrayal. After all, the Kachin soldier was not only allied with the American OSS spy, he was also a tool of British colonialism. Since at least 1961, he has also been a symbol of the revolts in the north of Burma against the central government which continue today.
Hubris is how Hegemonic Empire Works
The four books reviewed here were all written about by Americans who were trained by the CIA, US military, and the State Department, i.e. “official America.” They share a world view, cultivated on “The Farm” in northern Virginia and in the initiation rituals of the US military and State Department. This world view cultivated consistently puts the lone American at the center of the fight with Soviet Communists, Nazis, Muslim terrorists, Colombian drug dealers, and of course, Burmese generals. It is a Manichaean world in which the Americans are good and their enemies evil, or as President George W. Bush put it after 9/11, “you are either with us or against us.”
And this of course is the ethic that moves consistently throughout the books reviewed here. It is seen in the actions of the former OSS agents who commissioned the statues, the policies in America’s War on Drugs, and filmmakers like Sylvester Stallone. Only Amaryllis Fox began to question such assumptions, wondering how her supervisor could misuse the Benjamin Franklin quote to justify the kidnapping of innocent people. None of the four books acknowledge the substantial public literature about CIA involvement in Myanmar since World War II even though ironically, Broman himself gave interviews to Patrick Winn for his book Narcotopia, describing CIA/DEA turf fights in Burma, which go unremarked upon in Broman’s own book. (Note: Winn p. 341 n. 23 for mention of Broman. See also Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Bertil Lintner’s Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 for extensive histories of the CIA and DEA activity in northern Burma.)
George Orwell is perhaps the greatest English writer Burma ever produced. He was a colonial officer in Burma who knew something about the hubris of the powerful outsider and used it to write an important essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” about the folly of being a powerful man with a gun in colonial Burma. As Orwell emphasizes in his essay, even though you have the biggest gun and you shoot the elephant to please the crowd, the crowd still hates you because you represent the outside colonizer. The same applies to the Americans with their Seventh Fleet and long arm of the CIA. You can deliver humanitarian aid from the Seventh Fleet, but the Seventh Fleet is, by its very nature, an existential threat.
Emma Larkin in her literary biography of Orwell, Finding George Orwell in Burma recalled what one wise Burmese man told her about Orwell, hubris, and Burma. The man said Orwell was The Prophet for predicting the catastrophe of twentieth century Burmese history. Orwell’s first book was Burmese Days, which was about the futility of British colonialist hubris. The next was Animal Farm, which was about the Burmese army would emerge from 1962-1990 to rule as an authoritarian dictatorship isolated from the broader world. The third was the most terrifying of all. 1984, which predicted the totalitarian police state known by its Orwellian acronym SLORC in the 1990s when Barry Broman was in Yangon. This was the Burmese military government which developed its totalitarian police apparatus to its most perfect level.
But ultimately, hubris is how a hegemonic globe-straddling empire works. This is not a uniquely American quality, even today. The Chinese are implementing an ambitious plan for building railways across Burma and the rest of Asia. The Burmese generals today share the hubristic idea that they can rule the whole territory inherited from British Burma, despite chronic revolt by the Kachin and many others in what is now known (hubristically perhaps) as the world’s longest on-going civil war.
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