Personally, I am driven to follow and write about two world leaders: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Lady, and Donald the Dumb, our fake president. The comparison between the Lady and Donald the Dumb is striking. Burma had its first quasi-election precisely a year before the election of Trump. Trump doesn’t fare well in compassion to his predecessors. However, in comparison to the Lady’s predecessors, she is much better.

In Burma, there was a recent bi-election on April 2. The Lady’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLP) won 9 out of 19 seats in the national and regional parliaments. However, the NLP lost a seat to the military-supported Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in the state of Mon. I was surprised by that loss of a national parliament seat, since Mon is adjacent to Yangon/Rangoon, which a stronghold for the NLP.

From purely a personal point of view, Mon contains the Kyaikthanlan Pagoda in Moulmein where Kipling was said to have written his poem, Mandalay. It is also where the Golden Rock is located. It is also the starting point of the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, which was a 260-mile railway used by the Japanese during WWII.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who is not the official president of Burma/Myanmar. However, she is the first State Counsellor of Myanmar. The Lady is the de facto leader in a country where her party has a majority of the seats in parliament. However, the military junta hold 25% of the seats in parliament. Nevertheless, the military has the veto power over any act of the parliament about which they dislike.

Burma is an emerging nation in the 21st century. It has an endless number of critical issues facing that country. One of the major issues facing the elected government and the military junta with veto power is how the elected parliament is going to address the Rohingya Muslims problem in the Rakhine state. The elected government must deal with the oppression of the Rohingya Muslims without having the military veto that and/or begin again persecuting those opposed to the junta as they have done for decades.

Aung San Suu Kyi recently addressed the criticism of the parliament not doing enough to stop the crackdown on the Muslims. In response to the NLD not doing enough, she said that they “would be more than happy and ready to step aside” if some other party were “more qualified than us to achieve better results.”

The Lady

In America, Donald the Dumb says of all our problems, “I alone can fix it.” The Lady is attempting to resolve issues while Donald the Dumb views himself as some dumb deity.

“I Alone Can Fit It.”

Burmese independence flag

Visit the Burma Independence page to read more about this topic.

Darkest Before Dawn

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An Old Man and His Grandson

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Best and Worst of Times

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Donald the Dumb

Visit the Donald the Dumb page to read more about this topic.

04/12/17