[ExI] English-speaking Google News and Myanmar (Burma)

[ben]

The is my personal, unresearched, unsupported opinion, so take it with 
as big a grain of salt as you think appropriate, but i do think it 
explains what happens in these cases:

"The West" just doesn't understand that the Burmese people are the 
property of the Burmese government, and nobody else's business. Aid 
agencies are banging on the door shouting "let us in, we urgently need 
to mess about with how you are dealing with your own property". It's as 
if some stranger tried to come into your house and tell you how you 
should cook your pasta. Now, even if you were cooking pasta in a 
wasteful and sub-optimal way, most people's reaction would be to tell 
the apparently well-meaning stranger to fuck right off. It's my pasta, 
i'll cook it how i like.

Maybe that's an overly cynical view, and maybe i'm dead wrong, but it 
does seem to fit in with how many governments behave. What's the Great 
Firewall of China but an attempt to keep a tight control over the 
property of the Chinese government by keeping it (the people) ignorant 
of certain information and ideas? (I just found out recently that 
apparently there is no mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre in any 
Chinese history books, and a whole generation of Chinese are growing up 
totally ignorant of it).

Maybe it's only the english-speaking part of the world who have this 
crazy idea that people should belong to themselves, and everybody else 
understands that people belong to their respective states, mind, body 
and, er, mind again.

ben zaiboc

PS just in case anyone might think from the wording of this post that i 
endorse these mediaeval concepts of people-ownership, I DONT!. And i 
don't apologise for shouting that out.
It shouldn't need saying, but misunderstandings happen.