Myanmar is not a country I know too much about, so I did some research due to the coup.
This Al Jazeera documentary from a couple years ago is pretty interesting. It sounds like the military was already mostly in charge, and over the last years they've joined with the Buddhist monks to create something of a Buddhist theocracy, similar to some other countries in the region. Even in 2019 it sounded like Aung San Suu Kyi didn't have all that much influence. In the documentary they partially blamed her for the Rohingya oppression, but in hindsight it seems possible that she was just never in a strong enough position to do much.
Is anyone here from Myanmar? I wonder what it's like on the ground there.
But it would be very helpful to hit them with a brigade of sanctions on both their country as a whole and top people to try to make them fall from within.
Did that help with Cuba, Iran, or North Korea? Sanctions often just give the regime someone to blame, and it's the poor who are hurt the most from them.
Quick Aside before I go into the meat of it - How is pod save the world? Been looking into a new podcast that goes in depth into things and it keeps coming up, but curious on what sort of slant I’ll be getting with it.
They have a heavy neoliberal bias. Similar to FiveThirtyEight, whose podcast I do listen to, but Pod Save the World is much lighter on real info, so I don't find it worth the bias. For in-depth US news, I recommend C-SPAN's podcasts: Washington Today, The Weekly, and After Words. (I don't know of a good one for in-depth world news.)
Will totally take a look at the Al Jazeera documentary, sounds very interesting.
Sanctions may not be amazing and glamorous, but there isn’t really a lot an outside country can do to put pressure on another outside of sanctions. Guess you could freeze assets of people at the top of the military in Myanmar, but that’s typically done alongside sanctions and can only help when the people are storing money at international banks that will listen to US intervention. Totally gives the regime someone to blame, but it does make people within the country angry which could set off a revolution of some sort.
Writing those podcasts down to take a listen to. Not trying to add more neoliberal bias stuff to my feed, get enough of that everyday.
Protests are being seen around the country now though, and they’re all about installing Aung San Suu Kyi back into leadership. People are being arrested, shot at, and being told that if they continue to protest then they’re ‘breaking democracy’ very funny.
