We should take a moment to honor 22-year-old Ashiq Ahmad Bhat who was killed by Indian occupying forces on Monday & buried yesterday in his family village of Palhalan. His funeral was attended by thousands of people honoring him by chanting & singing freedom slogans & songs. All shops in Palhalan were closed in his honor.

Ashiq’s family members said he was pushed into militancy in 2014 when government forces beat & seriously injured his father, a driver at a saw mill. He went missing later that year after different police stations ordered him to appear on “dozens” of stone-pelting charges. He would likely have ended up in jail & could possibly have been tortured. He was not unwise to leave.

We honor him as a freedom fighter. May he Rest In Peace after a turbulent life lived under occupation & deprived of human freedom. Our condolences & respect to his family for raising such a fine young man.

(Photo of Ashiq Ahmad Bhat from Twitter)

The Irrawaddy is a Burmese publication founded by dissidents in exile who are now whipped puppies to the military junta & supporters of the Rohingya genocide. The Daily Beast reported today that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded by the US Congress gave the publication $150,000 in 2016, donations up to $175,000 every year since 2005, & has been funding it for 20 years.

Rightwing, libertarian, Islamophobic, & even fascist forces denounced the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings & also the 2014 Hong Kong protests as orchestrated by the CIA because the NED gave funding to some of the groups or individuals involved. Consistency is not a political attribute of these rightwing forces, but how do they reconcile NED funding of The Irrawaddy with their support for the Burmese military & the Rohingya genocide?

As a postscript, three journalists from The Irrawaddy resigned over its support for the Rohingya genocide.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson flew from the ASEAN summit in the Philippines to Burma to discuss the Rohingya genocide with General Min Aung Hlaing & Aung San Suu Kyi. Some media reported high expectations for this visit, hoping the US would lower the boom on the military after nearly three months of a genocidal offensive causing close to one million Rohingya to flee for their lives. No media has the right to play that stupid in the face of genocide. Credulity in the epoch of realpolitik can be collusion.

Tillerson spent a total of five hours swapping spit with Suu Kyi & the general. It was a dog & pony show where Tillerson dutifully expressed horror about the “crimes against humanity” in Arakan state, suggested the junta conduct a credible investigation into the charges, said those individuals responsible for “unacceptable” acts should be hit with “targeted sanctions”, expressed his opposition to “broad-based economic sanctions” against Burma, & reaffirmed US commitment to Burma’s transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government. No matter how your parse it, the outcome is that the US will continue to do nothing to stop the genocide or provide humanitarian assistance & asylum to the refugees.

If you read US government documents detailing economic & military sanctions imposed on Burma since 1997 (lifted under Obama in 2012), it’s clear the US knows exactly which Burmese individuals are involved in human rights crimes against the Rohingya people. The US knows the junta controls the Burmese economy, including drug trafficking; it knows the military continues to control the government, that the quasi-civilian government headed by Suu Kyi is a front for the military, & that the civilian government is also directly implicated in the genocide against the Rohingya. But the US, EU, & Canada cultivate the fiction of a civilian government so they can continue to invest in the Burmese neoliberal gold rush. Russia, China, India, & Israel don’t give a rat’s ass if Burma is fascist or not when they sell arms to the junta since they have a way of “handling” dissent.

The body that controls Burmese politics, the highest authority in the government is the 11-member National Defence & Security Council (NDSC) headed by General Min Aung Hlaing. He’s the architect of the Rohingya genocide & has been since he took over the military in 2011. The only civilian members of the NDSC are Suu Kyi, two lawyers from the so-called civilian government, & the two Burmese vice presidents who retired as high-ranking generals to become part of the civilian government. There is no distinction between the military & the civilian government & that is what makes Suu Kyi a partner in genocide with the generals, not a counterbalance to fascism. Burma is a fascist dictatorship & there is no reforming such a regime.

(Photo of Tillerson with General Min Aung Hlaing from Hlaing’s FB wall; photo of Tillerson with Suu Kyi from Yahoo)

That human rights, genocide, death squads, martial law, occupation, carpet bombing of civilians did not come up at the ASEAN summit is no surprise. Coordinating sweatshop economics & militarization in the region are ASEAN’s primary concerns. Despite the Rohingya genocide, Suu Kyi was asked to give the keynote address on the subject of women’s empowerment & human capital development. Isn’t it significant, not to mention absolutely vile, how they use women’s rights to justify Islamophobia, war, occupation, genocide? The sarcasm of Suu Kyi giving a speech on women entrepreneurs is that the Burmese economy is controlled top to bottom by the military junta. If you aren’t a general or a minion or relative of the generals you won’t be negotiating contracts with foreign investors in Burma. Buddhist or not, you’ll be working sweatshops or hauling ass in the mines or oil fields. More importantly, if you are a Rohingya woman, you will be subject to mass rape, murder, & genocide by the military junta. Nevertheless, Suu Kyi’s speech, so chock-full of banalities, was received with frequent applause & even laughter at her lame wit.

To make sure there were no unseemly outbursts of human rights sentiments at the official ASEAN proceedings, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Trudeau from Canada, Turnbull from Australia, & Tillerson from the US all held side meetings with Aung San Suu Kyi about the Rohingya genocide. Given that not one of them has taken decisive action to impose economic or military sanctions on Burma or to provide humanitarian aid to Rohingya refugees, we can be assured she received more cooing than reproach. She just serves too important a role in the neoliberal gold rush in Burma to piss her off.

(Photo is screen shot from video of Suu Kyi speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXG4d3xOMbA)

It’s just so wrong making fun of people but when an amoral scoundrel thinks he’s a superior species above the law he makes himself an irresistible target of ridicule. Trump couldn’t do the Hokey Pokey mastered by most kindergarten kids & we don’t care that he can’t master this simple ASEAN bonding ritual. But he runs the US government & has emboldened the most reactionary forces to come out from under their rocks.

Libertarians skulking coyly toward the politics of Fox News refuse to denounce or protest Trump saying he is just a symptom of capitalism & not the problem. He is in fact the problem because he has made racism, misogyny, ridicule of those with disabilities, Islamophobia, anti-immigration politics & other social hatreds acceptable & emboldened the adherents to action.

Until he’s thrown out on his ass or prosecuted, ridicule is as good a method as any to cope with his tenure. With him in power it’s too hard to distinguish his derangement & amorality from the usual predations of US foreign & domestic policy. Or is this what neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, has come to?

(Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Indian nationalists say the damnedest things. There ought to be a special Facebook wall for their pithy droolings. But I just delete them since after five minutes of reading them & plowing through their insults you find most of them know only two concepts: Kashmiri terrorists & Pandits. If you ask any of them to elaborate on their accusations, they don’t know squat. None of them are people who truly care about justice or human suffering either of Kashmiris or Pandits. It’s a supremacist, militarist, my country-right-or-wrong thing. There’s not a reason in the world to be long-suffering with nationalists because reason has no impact on their thinking. That takes political power. My Facebook wall is to build solidarity with Kashmiris, not engage in pissing contests with nationalist nimrods.