My review of Mary Callahan's book on Burmese junta

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Enemies-State-Building-Burma/dp/0801472679 8-25-2017 I don’t like Mary Callahan’s views, and was not impressed by her the few times I met her at Burma Studies Conferences between 1994 and 2006. Combining with 2 other well known people, she attacked a paper submitted by 2 colleagues of mine, not on academic or procedural grounds, or on what the paper said, but because they had once been members of ABSDF, All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, an armed group based on the Burma-Thai Border, set up by college students who fled Burma after the clampdown of 1988. Her Burmese colleague then went into a silly rant, about how he loved the country more, quoting Shakespeare. I was so annoyed, I said, “What’s love got to do with it,” quoting a popular song. To which she asked me as I walked past her at lunch time, “Kyi May, Kyi May, do you think I said that because I am white?” !!! ??? What planet do these people live on? Junta la la land no doubt. But when I first met her in perhaps 1994 in DeKalb, IL, where the Burma Studies Center is based, she did tell me something useful and probably true. She said she had been sitting outside one of the big 10th century temples of Bagan (formerly spelled “Pagan”) when soldiers came in trucks, closed off the periphery and then came out about half an hour later with big images wrapped in gunny sacks and drove away. * I consider Callahan a friend and lackey of the Burmese military junta, and an apologist for the military regime. Of these there are several, and my intention is to name them all. The key word and giveaway, is her constant use of the words “tatmadaw” “mother of all forces,” and “Myanmar” the preferred terms the junta uses in referring to itself and the country it has controlled goke see hta te, since 1962. Contrary to what the blurb says, it is not necessary to know “how the junta came to power.” I know very well how the junta came to power. The evening of March 1, 1962, my mother was a judge with Kitty, Mrs. Ne Win at a beauty pageant downtown, where 2 of my classmates competed. Ne Win was then head of the Burmese Army and had already staged a trial coup, like a trainer bike or a trainer bra, I always say. He staged the coup easily because he was already head of the army, so he just sent tanks to the BBS or Burma Broadcasting Station, and sent soldiers to arrest all the cabinet members, and then just announced over the radio that they had taken over power. My sister’s classmate the son of the Nyaungshwe Sawbwa, Myee Myee Thaike, then aged 13, was killed during the coup because he took a ceremonial sword off the wall and aimed it at the soldiers when they raided the house on Goodliffe Road. Myee Myee’s eldest brother, the late Dr. Chao Tzang Yawngwe or Eugene Thaike, wrote a memoir in which he describes rolling off his bed when the soldiers started shooting and crawling through the house, how they hid behind volumes of the Tripitaka which had just been delivered by the publisher, how he came on the body of his brother on the lawn. And Myee was only the first of thousands more to be killed, expelled, tortured and or arrested by the junta. * Post 1962, Ne Win proceeded to justify himself and his cronies. He re-imported a confirmed communist to write him a Burmese Way to Socialism, and an academic from Yale to draft him a “constitution.” There is nothing admirable in any of that. Then he proceeded to arrest people, destroy the economy, expel those with foreigners’ registration, take over the private sector and institute “socialist” and extreme nationalist, i.e. racist policies and play political games, internally purging in time all his rivals or cohorts within the Revolutionary Council itself. There is nothing to admire nor wonder at in the so-called tatmadaw’s “extreme durability.” It hung onto power by shooting people, that’s all. It has staged several brutal clampdowns and genocides, and one, the genocide against the Rohingya Muslims, is still continuing. Don’t buy this disgusting book by a spineless so-called academic. Buy Chao Tzang Yawngwe’s book. Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) 8-25-2017