Friday, March 12, 2021

Karma is real

 As I listened and watched Dr. Sasa, special representative to the UN representing the parliament of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) on BBC's Hard-talk, during which videos showing extreme brutality against peaceful demonstrators in that country were shown, my heart  broke. 

For the benefit of those who have not been keeping up to date with matters there, briefly; on the 1st February 2021, the democratically elected government which was led by Aung San Suu Kyi, was overthrown by the military, and she was put under house arrest. 

Suu Kyi had been a Nobel Prize winner for the years she had stood up to the military rulers there and had endured imprisonment. After much trial and tribulations, she was elected by landslide in 2016 and became prime minister,  In November 2020 she again led her party to victory, but the army refused to accept the results, so like Trump, they claimed the election was stolen and staged a military coup. (Trump would have loved to have the support of the USA army to stage a similar coup on the same  grounds, but all he had was a bunch of morons who wrecked the capitol buildingšŸ˜”!




Since February 2021, a large majority of the voters in Myanmar have been staging peaceful protests against the military, but instead of giving in,  the brutality of the military rulers has been increasing exponentially and the death toll keeps rising daily, as they fire live bullets into crowds of peaceful demonstrators.

In the interview on Hard-talk on March 12th, 2021, Dr. Sasa was begging the free world to come to the assistance of his country, and as I listened to his pleas, memories start to flood in. 

That is, memories of the images of mainly women and children who belonged to the Rohingya tribe.

They had lived in Myanmar for decades, but suddenly, they were being attacked and beaten, raped and brutalized and their homes and villages burnt to the ground by that same military. 

This started in 2017, when the majority people in Buddhist Myanmar decided that they did not want those Muslims around. Of the 1.4 million Rohingya's who lived there, thousands were killed and almost 800,000 now live under the most terrible conditions in camps in Bangladesh.

When those atrocities were being committed against the Rohingya's, the International Curt of Justice, in January 2020, unanimously ordered the government of Myanmar to stop the genocide. 

But guess who had gone to the court in December 2019, to testify court that the military were not committing atrocities against those hapless people?

Aung San Suu Kyi of course!

As I watched the interview with Stephen Sackur on BBCTV, this poem came to me. It is said that the writer is unknown for it had been found in one of the gas chambers in Germany, after the holocausts;

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.

As I listened to the interview, I wondered out loud if Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Myanmar had ever heard that poem!

There is now absolutely no doubt in my mind that Karma is real.


(169) Joan Williams, author - YouTube

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