Word(s) Of The Day

War Street, n.


Definition: Collective noun for financial institutions which make immense profits out of fomenting wars, "humanitarian interventions", weapons sold to be used in those wars and "humanitarian interventions", and in the loot of resources and "reconstruction" which is intended to follow said wars and "humanitarian interventions".

Synonyms: Wall Street, military-industrial complex.

China and the Taiwan Question

The end of the American Empire is approaching.

This is not a bad thing. It is not even an unexpected thing. But there is a thing about collapsing empires – rarely do they go gently into the night.

Instead, they tend to deny their own approaching demise, and lash out, attacking real and perceived enemies at random, trying to maintain the illusion that they are still strong, that they still matter, that they can still rule over all.

This has major repercussions for everyone when the empire concerned has the ability to destroy the planet several times over – and when its principal adversaries do so, too.

The fact that the American Empire is ending may be something that the people in power there refuse to admit, but it is perfectly obvious to everyone else – to its own citizens, to the people of all other countries, and most of all to the governments of those countries as well.

One of those major countries happens to be the People’s Republic of China.

It’s a fairly open secret that the ridiculous “Russian collusion” accusations against Donald Trump have nothing to do with Trump; they don’t even have anything directly to do with Russia. Russia, while much stronger than the shambolic wreck that it was twenty years ago, is much smaller and nowhere near as strong politically or militarily as the Soviet Union was even in its period of decline in the 1980s. However, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is not an adversary of China – it is a burgeoning military and political ally and an indispensable economic partner.

And if there is any one nation that can take over the prime leadership role once the American Empire ends, it is that same People’s Republic of China.

This is basically what the “Russian collusion” myth is about. It’s not about Trump, who is just as much a neoliberal puppet as his blood soaked war criminal predecessors Barack Hussein Obama and George W Bush. It’s not even about Russia, which, despite the fevered imaginations of such impeccable organs of truth as the New York Times and the CIA funded Washington Post, has no designs on the slagheaps of the Baltic statelets and has even refused to use force to oust the Nazi coup regime in Rump Ukraine. It is all about containing and weakening China by attacking its friends and bolstering its enemies.

And of those enemies, one name jumps out immediately: Taiwan.

Until 1895, Taiwan was a part of China. Towards the end of the 1894-5 Japanese war against China over Korea, Japan invaded Taiwan and captured it, forcing the decaying Qin Empire to cede it to the Japanese. They held the island for the next fifty years, until defeated in the Second World War, whereupon they handed it back to the then Guomindang (“Kuomintang”) government of Jiang Jieshi (“Chiang Kai-Shek”). In the Chinese civil war that followed, the Guomindang was defeated by the People’s Liberation Army of Mao Zedong and its remnants, abandoning the mainland, fled to Taiwan in 1949. But the rump Guomindang regime on Taiwan continued to pretend that it ruled all China, and therefore continued to recognise that Taiwan was a part of China.

This was the exact same position held by the new People’s Republic of China, which also stated that Taiwan was a part of China. The positions of the two governments – the Communist Party in Beijing and the Guomindang rump on Taiwan – on China’s external borders were largely identical. Incidentally, India found this out in 1962 when, in the act of losing a border war, which he had instigated, to China, Nehru appealed to Taiwan to invade the Chinese mainland. The Guomindang rump regime replied that on the question of the borders of China there was not the slightest difference between it and the People’s Republic.

But that was then. Today the Guomindang, far from being the pretender to rule all China, does not even rule Taiwan. It’s reduced to the status of a second string opposition party. And the successors to it have no desire to attempt to take over China – far from it. The thing they would love to do, if only they could get away with it, is secession.

Until now, that has never been a realistic possibility, because almost everyone is committed to the status quo of a single China with two competing governments. And in recent years the two have increased economic interactions, and the current Taiwan government is perceived to be friendly to China, much more so than the previous one. As far as the current situation of Taiwan vis-a-vis China goes, it is fairly satisfactory for Beijing; about as good as it can get without the island being brought under full formal control, actually.

But this is now. It may not always stay that way.

There are two possible scenarios that would change the status quo.

In the first, the decaying American Empire, in its drive to try and attack Chinese interests in all ways, will incite the Taiwanese rump regime to formally declare independence, promising to come to its aid. Until the Taiwanese rump regime formally declares independence, in fact, America can’t station forces on its territory, because that would constitute an invasion of China; and China is not Syria, riven by violence and loss of state control, where American invaders can operate in relative safety.

So, if the Taiwan rump can be incited to officially announce secession, American rapid deployment forces could be rushed to the island in a matter of days, and then any attempt by China to take the island would risk starting a full on nuclear war.

In the second scenario, the American Empire does not incite the Taiwanese rump to secede; but the Taiwanese regime, watching the decline of the Empire, thinks that it’s its last chance for independence before America gets too weak to help it, and so declares independence unilaterally.

In both circumstances, China will have no option but to retake Taiwan by force. There are two more reasons for this:

The first is common to all multi-ethnic nations, from Turkey to Spain, from India to Nigeria and Pakistan to Russia. If any ethnicity of the nation is allowed to secede, the result is likely to be the secession of other ethnicities as well, causing the disintegration of the state, or at the least a massive, ruinous war to prevent this disintegration. That is the primary reason Spain continues to hold on to Catalonia (or else the Basques would secede), Nigeria to the Ibo areas that used to be Biafra (or else the Muslim Fulani areas of the North would go too), Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran to the Kurdish areas, India to Kashmir and Nagaland, Pakistan to Balochistan, Russia to Chechnya. Nobody wants to end up like another Yugoslavia, where the failure to crush initial secessionism led to the total destruction of the country.

(Czechoslovakia is often held up as an example of how two ethnicities can secede without harming each other. False analogy. The country only had two main ethnic groups, and though they separated into two nations, both of them merely traded their Czechoslovak citizenship for the status of slaves of the European Union and cannon fodder for NATO.)

So, China would have to crush any secession attempt by the Taiwan rump regime; it would be an existential threat to the entire Chinese nation, which is well aware that the same American Empire is stoking secessionism among the Tibetans and Uighurs. It would have no choice; the fact that invading Taiwan will be a difficult and costly business, both in terms of blood and money, makes no difference.

And this is why analyses that claim that the economic and political pain of a military campaign to take Taiwan would be so great that China would be deterred miss the point. Without exception, all these analyses are American, and are therefore the product of an Empire owned by Wall Street, whose entire foreign policy depends on the balance sheets of the oligarchs there. American think tankers can only conceive the world in terms of money; they have long since abandoned all ideas of nationalism except as a tool to brainwash and manipulate the masses. But not all nations think this way. And China, which has had the profoundly scarring experience of a century of humiliation by Western and then Japanese imperialists, from the 1830s to the 1940s, certainly does not think that way.

The second reason China would have to crush Taiwanese separatism has everything to do with that century of humiliation. Perhaps surprisingly, for a nation that covers such an immense land mass, almost all invasions and aggressions against China in the modern era have come from the sea. It is the Western sea-borne foreigners who coerced the Chinese to buy opium at gunpoint, hand over their cities as “settlements”, and virtually become a series of colonial enclaves. It was the sea borne Japanese who also invaded first Korea and then Taiwan; who carved out Manchuria, and then invaded Shanghai and Nanjing, and massacred millions. And it is the sea-borne American fleet which still threatens China today.

For hundreds of years, Chinese seaborne abilities were almost nonexistent – a situation that persisted, in fact, until a few years ago. When in 1996 the American Empire sent an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Straits, China could do nothing, and if the Taiwanese had declared independence at that point could have done little except massed missile barrages and perhaps nuclear war. But it served as a wake up call, and set Chinese defence sights from the land to the sea. Ever since then, the Chinese have been building up their naval capabilities, acquiring new submarines, destroyers, and now aircraft carriers. Most significantly, all the latest acquisitions are not only Chinese built but Chinese designed; in the field of aircraft carriers, for example, China is already decades ahead of Russia and far ahead of India, which has fifty years more experience. This means that, again for the first time ever, China is not beholden to anyone for its naval defence acquisitions.

This naval buildup is inexplicable except as a means of guarding Chinese shores and the increasingly vital trade lanes, including those through the Straits of Malacca, which are chokepoints through which most shipborne Chinese trade passes....and as an essential means to isolate and close off a secessionist Taiwan from American reinforcement.

Simultaneously, the Chinese are urgently building up their Marine Corps – from twenty thousand troops to a hundred thousand – and upgrading their amphibious assault capabilities. China isn’t in the business of invading and annexing other countries, or even sending troops abroad. It’s only now tentatively setting up a military base in Djibouti in East Africa. But it has realised that its security lies in controlling the sea near its shores, and it intends to control it. And for this, and to enforce Chinese territorial claims in the islands of the South China Sea, a strong Marine Corps is essential.

Therefore, if the Taiwanese rump declares independence, China will not just have the compulsion to invade it, it will, for the first time ever, have the ability to do so. This will act as a deterrent against any secessionist attempts by the Taiwanese rump, and help maintain the status quo, which is certainly what China would also prefer. Beijing does not want a war; it will want to wait for economic and social unification to lead to the return of Taiwan to China by peaceful means.

But if it does go to war over Taiwan, it is almost certain that America can be counted on to only respond with bluster and raving – not even the (fairly ineffective) “economic sanctions” it imposed on Russia. Ask yourself this – would the average American Wall Street powermonger (the only creatures who matter in the American political structure) be willing to risk his or her sire, dam, mate, litter-mates and spawn being reduced to nuclear ash over the rump Taiwan regime? Yes or no? The answer is obvious. Look how even North Korea, with its obsolete armed forces, has successfully deterred America with a handful of missiles and nuclear warheads. China can wreak far more destruction on America than North Korea ever could, not to mention American vassals like Japan and South Korea.

Therefore, the chances of actual American help to the rump (as opposed to screaming about going to war, and chest thumping) are minimal. And China will undoubtedly be aware of that.

So let’s imagine a situation arises where China has to invade Taiwan. The Taiwan Strait, while fairly narrow, has strong winds and high seas, so that the window for a successful amphibious invasion is allegedly only a couple of months a year. I say allegedly, because there are few natural barriers that cannot be overcome when the need is there. I strongly suspect that China will be looking to invade not during the “windows of opportunity”, when the invasion is to be expected, but during the period when it is not. Hovercrafts, especially, will play a part.

However, what will not happen is that an invasion will start with a missile barrage, or a blockade, let alone an amphibious landing. What will happen first (and has already started) is normalisation of Chinese troops in close proximity to Taiwan, with regular movement of forces in the locality, movement of ships and aircraft round its perimeter, and increasing presence of marine forces in the mainland within striking distance of Taiwan. The rump regime in Taipei will never be certain when these forces might invade, and, therefore, cannot be tipped off by a slow and visible troop build up.

The second phase will comprise a landing of commando forces in small numbers to set up bases, reconnaissance teams, and assassination squads. This could take place over several months, with the commandos being landed by submarines or small boats, to spread out in those famous jungles and mountains in Taiwan which are supposed to “help” the rump. Instead, the bases would be used to pin down the locations of those equally famous missiles, to be ready to cut off communication links, to guide in air and missile strikes, and, very importantly, to take out rump regime politicians and military officials as soon as the war starts, while the element of surprise is still on the Chinese side.

Once these troops are in place, but before they begin overt hostilities, China can turn on the blockade. Despite all the big talk, the Taiwanese rump is unlikely to be able to fight hard, no matter how “determined” in public relations tub-thumping. Effete capitalist societies grown fat on the profit motive, with the youth obsessed with video games, are not the best material for resistance, no matter how “motivated”. China’s blockade, when it becomes obvious that Warshington’s response will be limited to hooting and howling but no more, will, more likely than not, cause the rump to surrender in a month or less.

But suppose it does not. What then? Then the PRC will launch the commando raids first, followed by the famous missile barrages afterwards. Even assuming that the commandos fail to eliminate the rump military and civilian leadership and it continues to function at full capacity (extremely unlikely), they will still be enormously important. The location of the rump defences will be clear from satellite pictures as well as the commando team information, and they can be taken out by missile and stand-off air strikes with little trouble. Apart from targeting information, the commandos will aid by blowing up bridges, taking out telephone services, and attacking air defence and missile bases. This phase should not take longer than 48-72 hours before rump defences are paralysed. Remember that the Taiwanese will not attempt to defend their entire island, which is impossible; their forces will be gathered on the west coast, especially around Taipei, which means that they are much more concentrated and more easily wiped out by massive missile barrages. Also remember that the total destruction of rump forces is not necessary at this stage; all China needs is to degrade rump capabilities to stop an amphibious invasion. This can be achieved by concentrating on three things: rump missile bases, airports, and naval bases, none of which can be easily concealed. Once these are effectively knocked out, if the rump regime has not already seen the hopelessness of its position and surrendered – and the Chinese will almost certainly offer surrender terms including some degree of face saving autonomy at this stage – then, and only then, will the invasion start.

And by now the military position of the rump will be extremely dire, with its ability to stop an invasion further degraded. To flush out further missile defences, the PRC could well sent disposable remote controlled empty “invasion ships” in the first wave, and then eliminate all missile positions that fire on these ships. The actual invasion forces will land in a second wave, accompanied by heliborne landings which will use dropping zones cleared by the commando teams. Once they are ashore, their qualitative superiority over the rump forces –who by now will be undoubtedly degraded, disorganised, and demoralised – will ensure rapid battlefield dominance. I expect this phase to take no more than three to four days at the most.

At this stage, it is likely that attempts will be made to flee Taiwan en masse by ship by surviving rump politicians, military brass, capitalist fatcats, and sundry civilians, like the “bug out” from Vietnam in 1975. This will fail for two reasons: America will not be able to approach close enough to help without being embroiled in the conflict, and Chinese aircraft carriers, submarines and other ships will have cordoned off the island from the Pacific side. Unless China decides that letting these defeated enemies go would be politically more expedient, they will mostly be sunk or rounded up and brought back.

So, the entire major campaign will be over, from first shot to last, in a week. The question is whether America is then going to attempt to pay for a guerrilla campaign in Taiwan. Such a campaign is most unlikely to succeed just like American-instigated guerrilla campaigns in the 1950s and 60s failed in Tibet. Besides, Taiwan is not Syria, the PRC can lock down the towns without too much trouble, and the effete capitalists I mentioned would not be particularly effective guerrilla fighters anyway.

Again, this is only what would happen if Taiwan upsets the status quo. If it does not upset the status quo, Chinese domination and American decline will mean that Taiwan, in any case, will ultimately be taken over without a shot.

But if the collapsing American Empire continues down its current path, a showdown with China is inevitable; and having once stood up, as Mao Zedong declared, the Chinese nation will not lie down again.

Chinese marines landing with amphibious tanks [Source].

Meanwhile in Myanmar: The Genocide of the Rohingyas

I have never been one of those taken in by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Back in the late 1980s, when she first came on to the international media scene, she was the hot new sensation. The so-called left, including the communist parties in India, idolised her. When the Myanmarese military junta annulled the election that she apparently won, and put her under house arrest, the “left” couldn’t get enough of her. And the then government of India couldn’t bend over backwards enough for her, either.

I remember that when a Myanmarese commercial plane was hijacked to India, the Indian government, instead of arresting the hijackers for terrorism, gave them political asylum – thus setting a precedent that came back to sting India in the arse years later when an Indian plane was hijacked from Nepal to Afghanistan. And I remember the adulation that the Western media had for Aung San Suu Kyi, who was held up as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

Even then, and I was only a teenager, this seemed to be something strange.

After all, I live only a couple of hundred kilometres from the India-Myanmar border, and Myanmarese goods (including clothes and a violently sour and red fruit) are openly available in shops in this town. This part of the country is overflowing with narcotics from the South Asian Golden Triangle, and the Indian insurgent groups that then held this part of the country in a death grip had bases all over north-western Myanmar. More than obviously, it seemed to me, Indian support for Aung San Suu Kyi – unless India was willing to invade Myanmar to put her in power, something nobody ever pretended was going to happen – would achieve nothing except possibly provoke retaliation from the Myanmarese. And they could retaliate effectively simply by making no attempt to hinder Indian insurgents based on their territory, and by allowing the drugs to flow into India unimpeded.

Some of this thinking finally seeped through to the gravel-filled skulls of Indian officials eventually, and from the early 1990s there was a slow but perceptible shift away from Suu Kyi and towards the junta, then self-titled the State Law and Order Restoration Commission, SLORC, if I recall correctly. But of course that made no difference to Hollywood, which continued to make her, and the Myanmarese Buddhists, the symbols of “resistance” against the brutal regime.

There were many things wrong with this.

First, far from being innocent “victims”, Buddhists, whenever they have been in a position of power, have been brutally violent racist jingoists, more than almost any other religion. By the late eighties there was really no excuse for any reasonably informed person to be unaware of this. In 1983, the Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka had turned on the Hindu Tamil population of Colombo, massacred thousands in a days-long pogrom, and forced the survivors to flee. Those with money and skills marketable in the West fled to Europe and Canada; the rest made their way to squalid refugee camps in India, there to languish for decades. Not long afterwards, the Buddhist Bhutanese decided to impose Bhutanese cultural customs, including dress, on all Bhutanese citizens, regardless of ethnicity – and expelled the Hindu ethnic Nepali population when it was reluctant to comply. Those Bhutanese Hindus of Nepalese ethnic origin still eke out an existence in refugee camps in Nepal, but nobody ever talks about them.

Lest anyone think this is a uniquely South Asian phenomenon, that this is something that only South Asian Buddhists do, the Buddhist population of Cambodia has been brutal in its treatment of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese; and the Buddhist Tibetans, before the People’s Liberation Army occupied the territory in 1950, were a serf-owning theocracy which existed only for the benefit of the parasitic lama hierarchy. And yet, as it still does to this day, Hollywood kept pretending that the Buddhists of Myanmar were “peaceful” and “oppressed”, presumably awaiting only the arrival of white American heroes on a mission of liberation.

These were the same Buddhists who had provoked the Christian and native religionist tribes of Myanmar – the Kachin, Karen, and Shan, for example – into rebellion. These were the same Buddhists who were, at that very moment, ethnically cleansing the Rohingyas and driving them into exile.

Oh yes, the Rohingyas. I am going to talk about them.

The Rohingyas are a people of Bengali origin, who have lived in Myanmar for centuries. More had been brought in by the British during their colonial rule of Myanmar, in line with the charming British habit of taking Indian forced labour with them wherever they went – from Guyana to South Africa and Mauritius to Fiji. The majority, though not all, of them are Muslims, and this fact is of extreme importance in understanding what has happened to them in the last few decades. Most of them settled in Rakhine State, along the Bay of Bengal bordering what is now the country of Bangladesh.

During the Second World War, the British – just as they had with Arab militias in the Ottoman Empire in the First World War – armed the Rohingyas to fight the Japanese and their proxies, in this case the Burmese National Army (BNA) of Aung San. This Aung San happens to be the father of the aforementioned Suu Kyi, and is sometimes called the “father” of the Myanmarese state. This fact, that the Rohingyas fought for the British against the Japanese, is still dragged up as “proof” that they cannot be trusted.

I would like to ask a question at this stage. Let’s assume that the Rohingyas are British “imports” from Bengal, and that they – over seventy years ago – fought for the British against the Japanese. Let’s also pretend that the Japanese were “liberators” and not imperialist colonialists who were in many ways even worse than the British they supplanted. Let’s claim that the modern Rohingyas are guilty of these “sins” of their forefathers, and therefore need to be punished.

So how, exactly, is this different from the story of the Sikhs in India?

In the early 1800s, the Sikhs had an empire in the Indian subcontinent, almost all of which lay to the west of the Indus river, in what is now Pakistan. The British conquered them in the 1840s, and then recruited them in huge numbers into the colonial British armed forces. These Sikhs enthusiastically served their new masters, and helped defeat the Indian Independence War of 1857. They continued to serve the British for the next ninety years. In 1919, when the British massacred hundreds of unarmed Indian protestors in Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar, the Sikh clergy in the Golden Temple honoured the perpetrator of the massacre, Brigadier Reginald Dyer, and called him the “Saviour of the Punjab”. And in the Second World War, these same Sikhs fought for the British against the Japanese, who were, presumably, the “liberators” of India as well.

So, my question is this: if the Rohingyas should be persecuted for the sins of their forefathers, should not the modern Indian state massacre the Sikhs, burn their cities and towns and villages, mass-rape their women, and drive them into Pakistan, and take steps to make sure they could never return?

Of course, going by this logic, and no matter how ridiculous it sounds, it should.

Now, unlike the Indian National Army (INA) of Subhas Chandra Bose, which fought the British to the end, the BNA changed sides as soon as it became obvious that the Japanese were going to lose the war. So, if the Rohingyas are guilty for aiding the Japanese, so is Aung San himself – and the Rohingyas, unlike him, never turned coat. They never betrayed anybody.

For some reason the same people who charge the Rohingyas with aiding the British against the Japanese are careful to never mention this fact.

When Pakistan came into existence on 14^th August 1947, what is now Bangladesh was East Pakistan, and some sections of the Rohingyas demanded that Rakhine should be included in the new state. This demand was summarily rejected by the Pakistani government itself, which made no attempt to consider it. And yet, the British, who were still the colonial overlords of Myanmar (or as it was then, Burma), might well have agreed to Pakistan asking for the territory. Whether they would or wouldn’t, in any case, they were never asked about it.

And yet the modern Myanmarese claim that the Pakistanis were trying to foment secessionism among the Rohingyas by 1949 in order to annex the territory. Why on earth would they do so, if only two years earlier they had turned down the opportunity?

The beginning of the end for the Rohingyas began in the early 1960s, when the then Ne Win dictatorship instituted a formally discriminatory policy towards them. Until then, through the 1950s, the Rohingyas had been allowed to live like anyone else, and had achieved a fair degree of integration. The Ne Win government, however, confined them to Rakhine state, restricted them to have no more than two children per couple, and – in a country with virtually no private enterprise at the time – blocked them from government employment. Basically, the Rohingyas became subsistence farmers in a Bantustan, allowed to exist only on sufferance.

This wasn’t enough for the Ne Win regime, which in 1982 instituted the explicitly racist National Races Policy. Under this, only members of eight particular select “national races” could be Myanmarese (or, then, Burmese) citizens. Obviously, the Rohingyas were carefully excluded from the list. In a moment, they were not just a discriminated against minority – they became stateless as well. Even the name “Rohingya” was banned, and the people called “Bangladeshis” or “Bengalis”, a terminological trick pioneered by the zionazis in Occupied Palestine, when they pretended that the Palestinians do not exist.

Anyone familiar with the Nazi policies regarding Jews in the 1930s, will realise that this has been done before: identify a helpless minority to target, call them “foreigners” and “traitors”, bar them from employment, confine them to ghettoes, and then force them out or, if that fails, exterminate them.

Because of the explicitly and formally racist, and implicitly fascist, nature of the Buddhist Myanmarese regime, I shall, from this point on, refer to it as the Buddhist-fascist racist Myanmarese regime, or BFRMR in short.

This extermination of the Rohingyas had already started in the late 1980s, when this account opens. I remember watching videos on Indian television of Rohingya refugees – old men, women, children, emaciated and ragged – arriving on Bangladeshi territory and being interviewed by a Bangladeshi journalist. Over the next two decades, over half the Rohingya population of Myanmar was forced out and into exile.

And yet these days people pretend that the Rohingyas were never targeted before they began to “terrorise” the poor innocent Myanmarese Buddhists a couple of years ago!

Given the decades of constant atrocities, and the systematic ethnic cleansing, it’s in fact fairly amazing that it was only circa 2012 that the Rohingyas finally made attempts to defend themselves. The main resistance group they set up is called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA. 

Despite the impressive sounding name, this is what ARSA looks like:

Not particularly fearsome looking, are they? Nothing like Obama’s cannibal headchoppers of the “Free Syrian Army” who swept over Syria in 2011, murdering and looting all they could? And yet the story is that they are fearsome jihadis who are fighting to establish some kind of mini-caliphate in Rakhine.

The difference from Obama’s “freedom fighter” headhunters is much more than clothing-deep. Anyone who knows about the origin of the 2011 terrorist attack on Syria will be aware that the headchoppers were active right from the beginning, and that they were heavily armed; they had instant Amerikastani and EU backing, and were awash in Turkish and Saudi/Qatari money. In contrast, the terrible terrorists of ARSA are so badly equipped that even this year, five years into their existence, they had to launch human wave attacks on BFRMR military positions, armed with iron rods, machetes, and crude bombs, to capture the few weapons they have. They literally had to pay in blood to get the weapons they needed to fight.

Not, of course, that this will continue. Inevitably, as the BFRMR continues its depredations and refuses to treat the Rohingyas as human beings, ARSA will either become further radicalised, and infiltrated by jihadist elements – or else it will be pushed aside by competing and openly jihadist groups, including ISIS and al Qaeda franchises. I could almost suggest that as the BFRMR continues to massacre, rape and burn out the Rohingyas from the villages they have inhabited for generations, this is exactly what Suu Kyi and her fellow war criminals are hoping for. It will give them the perfect cover for the genocide they are already committing.

I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

-       Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4

In the course of this article I have, as I am well aware, gone against the majority opinion of my fellow leftists. They can be grouped into two broad sections. One still idolises Aung San Suu Kyi and refuses to admit that she can do wrong. These people are beyond help, and I have no time to waste on them.

The other group is more important. They are the ones scarred by the experiences of Serbia and Libya and Syria, and assume that anyone supported by the West - or, in this case, as we shall see, paid lip service by the West - can only be evil. Therefore they are instinctively anti-Rohingya. This next section will be especially addressed to them:

Having read this far, one needs to ask a question.. Why is it that, all of a sudden, after so many decades of being wilfully ignored, the plight of the Rohingyas has made news in the West? I cannot believe this is accidental or coincidental. The media in the West is part of the propaganda arm of the Amerikastani state; it will never dare to say a word without orders from the masters in Warshington.

So what, exactly, lies behind the sudden concern for Rohingyas? The desire to save Muslim lives? That’s a laugh, as any of the Yemenis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Syrians, Somalis, Libyans or Malians – just to name a few – blown to pieces by American bombs or missiles can certify. So what can it be?

I believe the answer lies in the fact that while the Western media has been screaming about the Rohingyas, except for some utterly token acts like renaming students’ halls they have done absolutely nothing to put any actual pressure on Aung San Suu Kyi to mend her ways. We all know that the West imposes sanctions at the drop of a hat on anyone, even on totally fictional grounds like the nonexistent Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. Yet this same West has done nothing, not a single thing, to put a single sanction on Myanmar. It hasn’t even reimposed a single one of the last few sanctions the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama lifted in 2016.

So what is the West up to?

Aung San Suu Kyi was always meant to play a role in the plans of the imperialists of the West. After all, they don’t lionise the political prisoners held by, for example, the zionazi pseudostate in Occupied Palestine. Nor do they give out Nobel “Peace” Prizes to people who actually deserve or have earned them. No, Aung San Suu Kyi was always supposed to be a Western rubber stamp and puppet who, when in power, was supposed to hand over Myanmar to Amerikastani military and economic exploitation, lock, stock, and barrel.

Only, once she got into power, Suu Kyi began getting ideas above her station. She began to get cosy with China, maintain and even expand Myanmar’s links with its northern neighbour, and signally failed to hand over bases or mineral rights to her Western benefactors. She had to be brought to heel, and the Rohingya issue provided, and continues to provide, a good excuse.

Just as the West ignored the existence of the Rohingyas and their genocide for thirty years, the moment Suu Kyi learns her lesson, comes to heel, dumps China and assumes her role as dutiful Western rubber stamp and puppet, the Western media will in an instant forget that the Rohingyas ever existed.

But of course the killing will go on.