One of the big questions about the Internet is whether governments can control it, and potentially use it to suppress dissent. Quite a few have tried, most notably that of China, and of course we have no idea how much tapping and monitoring the US government has been doing.
Still, recent events in Burma suggest that such attempts may be futile. Despite having had one of the world’s tightest systems of Internet censorship in place for years, the junta there has failed to stem the flow of reports and images out the of the country and has responded by pulling the plug. It’s not clear that this will work, but in any case, it’s not an option open to any country that wants to maintain more than a minimal level of economic activity. It’s not simply a matter of holding things where they were in, say, 1990, before the Internet came along. Attempting to any sort of international business without the Internet is effectively impossible, and the convergence with telephony makes matters even worse. And other info technologies make life even more difficult. A USB Flash drive can hold libraries full of text or hours of compressed video, and they can be duplicated with ease by anyone with a computer. Unless you have completely closed borders, the delay gained by shutting off Internet transmission is no more than a day or so.
It was a lot easier for the old Soviet Union, when photocopiers were the only thing they had to ban (and look how far that got them).
While I’m on the subject, various people have sent me links and info about Burma, mostly related to the position of workers. I haven’t had time to follow them all up, but they may be useful
migrant workers at the Thai-Burma border
Labour Start coverage
Union aid abroad
Burma human rights meeting will take place at 1pm today Friday starting in Queens Park, Brisbane
John Quiggin 
John, A Canadian colleague sent me a link to an online petition seeking to put pressure on China to bring the Burmese junta to heel. It has 600,000 ‘signatures’ already. Your readers may be interested – the site is:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/w.php
hc
It may be a turning point in the history of Burma. The Junta may recognize the importance of good economic management to keep its people occupied in productive activities.
I am puzzled by lack of democracy in most of the Asian countries. Some this countries(Singapore,China, Vietnam etc.) have remarkable growth rates but they are far from being democratic countries(relatively speaking). It would be interesting to observe whether these countries would allow more political freedom after they become economic power houses, in the future.
To those interest in Burma’s economic history I am including the following link:
http://www.econ.mq.edu.au/staff_by_position/staff_-_alphabetical/staff_by_position/sean_turnell
“Attempting to [typo?] any sort of international business without the Internet…”
“A USB Flash drive … can be duplicated with ease by anyone with a computer” – false, it requires a computer with the right hardware, software, and of course a memory stick (I don’t have them, for instance). This is no quibble; those things are comparatively thin on the ground in those countries. More importantly, the bottleneck occurs elsewhere in the information process; it is the modern mobile telephone that is breaking that.
But there’s mopre than one way to skin a cat. Governments don’t need simple suppression – see the USA’s recent history for a case in point. Contra Lincoln – and probably something he knew well and was merely distracting attention away from – it is only necessary to fool enough of the people enough of the time, what with short attention spans and all. Consider the story of the Leprechaun who hid the bush with the hat ribbon that marked the crock of gold without disturbing it, using the simple but extravagant expedient of marking every other bush in the field with such a ribbon (I have often wondered why the Irishman in the story didn’t collect and sell all the ribbons).
Anyhow, the moral is that governments with all their resources don’t have to suppress the signal. All they have to do – and do do – is raise the noise level with conflicting disinformation.
By the way, nobody should get the idea that the “democrats” in Burma are the good guys. There are no good guys and bad guys, just groups with agendas and murky pasts with varying tactics at their disposal. The “democrats” trace back to – and derive current support from the tradition of – an earlier generation of local terrorists, in particular the ones that didn’t win the post-independence power struggle. This explains the lack of democracy thereabouts; they don’t have the tradition of loyal opposition within a larger whole they support, but have divergent aims. They only vary in sometimes using politics as a continuation of war by other means, and they don’t – any of them – want to achieve anything but total victory. The others are enemies, and they want – ideally – to wipe them out. This goes for the Burmese “democrats” too.
P.M.Lawrence, is this the general PoMo perspective on things, or is this ‘no good guys’ situation specific to Burma?
Are you saying that the ‘lack of democracy thereabouts’ can be explained by the fact that the clergy-led opposition is not a ‘loyal opposition within a larger whole they [the opposition] support’?
I’d say that the lack of democracy is a feature of a system that doesn’t permit a ‘loyal’ opposition.
“PoMo”? Where did you get that red herring?
No, it’s a comment on both the cultures and the systems that have endured throughout much of human history, and are still endemic in – among other places – south and/or east Asia. Burma is the case at hand. Note that I am not referring simply to the system and culture there today, but rather the chicken and egg thing that cultures are formed from experience and drive experience by forming systems. Where any group or aggregation thereabouts presents itself as democratic – India is a current situation, like the Burmese opposition – it is less an actual internalisation of values than tactical, sincere in a shallow way, based on a willingness to play along and interpret these things through the eyes of their own philosophies and a very human tendency to act the part of the Devil in the saying “The Devil is ill, the Devil a saint would be, the Devil is well, the Devil a Devil is he”. Once in power, these Burmese “democrats” would use force or fraud as occasion suited and as they found convenient just like the present lot (and any individual who differed would alter or be marginalised). It’s just that at the moment they don’t have the option.
Don’t take this only as a comment on others; it is the human norm, to which our own culture seems to be reverting on a generational time scale. There is nothing holier-than-thou about us.
Oh, I think I see where you got the “PoMo” [post-modernist] thing from, from construing “There are no good guys and bad guys” as “there is no good and bad we can apply to any of these guys”. No, it’s more a G.K. Chesterton reference, to the Father Brown story in which Father Brown – definitely believing in good and bad – nevertheless points out to a questioner who asks whether the good or the bad brother was killed that there was no good brother. It’s not that good or bad are meaningless in Burma but that you can’t sort the groups out that way – not even from their track records, since those say more about their resources than about their virtues and vices. Not to mention that it is stretching things to apply “good” and “bad” to groups anyway; if you do, they only get captured and get all antinomian on you like today’s USA.
Do you think there have ever been any true democrats in all of history? If so, who?
By singling out South/East Asia does this imply that the West actually does have real democrats, as opposed to the phoney Asian variety?
And is it possibly conceivable that SLORC could be replaced by a better regime (not a perfectly ‘good’ one of course, just one that wasn’t so extremely violent and kleptocratic)? Do you really believe that if the National League for Democracy had come to power in 1990 that it would be comparable to SLORC? Do you think that Suu Kyi would order troops to fire into crowds?
I agree there’s no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but I think there is certainly ‘better’ and ‘worse’.
There probably have been true democrats, but the important thing here is whether the culture and institutions are dominated by that spirit. I did not single out South/East Asia; I particularly made the point “Don’t take this only as a comment on others; it is the human norm…” It’s just that this discussion started with Burma, so it made sense to provide some context without diluting it to the point of being too general. And, while today’s regime could in a sense be replaced by a better one, it could not be achieved by removing the present one. If that happened, improvement would have to come later; the only possible improvement inherently involves accomodating all sets of interests in a way that includes tolerance and respect – loyal opposition, and that. Of course a regime change of the simple replacement sort would be comparable; the only variation would be in how far along the slide would be at any calendar date, and which tactics were more convenient and so on. Like I told you, Aung Suu Kyi is in the tradition of her father’s faction. Hypocrisy is worse than overt violence, since it takes you over from within (and, in the end, you get the violence too).
So what advice do you have for those Burmese who want to be rid of SLORC?
Should they try and be a ‘loyal opposition’ – as opposed to the disloyalty of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy which won Burma’s last election?
Should they try to accomodate the interests of their kleptocratic and pathologically violent ruling class with tolerance and respect?
Should they not bother trying to remove the present regime, as a Suu Kyi regime would be no better (or even worse, because hypocrisy is worse than overt violence)?
Is there no hope for democratic change because Burmese culture and institutions are not dominated by a democratic spirit?
“Advice”? I’m in the diagnosis game here, mainly because any action available simply repolarises things; what is needed is much more like demagnetising, degaussing, by repeatedly reversing several times, less and less each time. Their only hope – if they want to get out of the vicious circle – is for a peace of exhaustion, followed by a generational change growing in the necessary cultural and institutional changes. Playing loyal opposition is only realistic once the others are exhausted – degaussed – too. That’s no hope for them personally, because it can’t come in their time.
On the other hand they have every chance of becoming the new top dogs – but staying dogs, with all the uneasy lies the head stuff.