Myanmar {work in progress}

10/4/07

It is not at all difficult to imagine Bush, Cheney and the rest of the neocon junta salivating over the reports coming out of Myanmar detailing their government’s decision to simply shut down internet access in a rather successful attempt to quell the considerable insurrection in that country.

This is a demonstration of just how vital the ‘internets’ are as a communications/information medium and just how effective shutting it down, or in China’s case severely restricting access, can be as a method of censorship. Ironically, such a method is not entirely dissimilar to the restrictions imposed by the Bush junta on reporting about the occupation of Iraq. Luckily for the citizens who actually care, while the mainstream corporate news has for all practical purposes been cancelled, this country still does have total internet access and it should not be taken for granted.

While Vice President Al Gore obviously did not “invent the internet,” as he is so painfully often misquoted, he most certainly did champion the web when it was still in its relative infancy and it goes to show the tremendous foresight this man had and still has regarding the future of how we communicate and what the implications of that are pertaining to the spread of information. To quote _________, “there are thousands of [Abraham] Zapruders out there,” referring to the man who filmed the most frequently employed footage of the Kennedy assassination.

Thus whether a nation is headed by a real junta or a junta posing as a democracy, the free flow of information is not at all a good thing. For some odd reason, a sentence that resonates a great deal can be found in a NY Times article regarding Myanmar, “the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to silence opposition: fear.”