Asian Window

Network strengthened by Junta’s crackdown and post-cyclone bungling. From The Washington Post:

Rangoon: They operate in the shadows, slipping by moonlight from safe house to safe house, changing their cellphones to hide their tracks and meeting under cover of monasteries or clinics to plot changes that have eluded their country for 46 years.

If one gets arrested, another steps forward.

“I feel like the last man standing. All the responsibility is on my shoulders. . . . There is no turning back. If I turn back, I betray all my comrades,” said a Burmese activist who heads a leading dissident group, the 88 Generation Students, named for a failed uprising in 1988. He took command after the arrest last August of its five most prominent leaders.

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The road to ‘Animal Farm,’ through Burma

In The Washington Post, a review of Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin:

Fresh out of Eton, George Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman in the colonial service. He left in 1927, fed up with “the dirty work of Empire,” but the country never quite left him. It provided the material for the novel “Burmese Days” and one of his most famous essays, “Shooting an Elephant.” In his final days, as he lay dying of tuberculosis, he sketched out a novella, “A Smoking Room Story,” about a young Englishman changed forever by his experiences in colonial Burma.

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