Witoubou Newmai
More important is commitment to common aspiration
What the protestors in today’s Myanmar have in common is “more the sense of the common evil” i.e. the Tatmadaw, while we have a great degree of hesitation to comment on the common aspirations of the people of that country for ample reasons.
Given the Myanmar apparatus, the February 1 coup did not surprise people. The coup is one of the symptoms of the Myanmar configuration. As long as the current configuration prevails, symptoms of varied degrees are bound to crop up at times of the Tatmadaw’s choosing.
Media reports state that according to the constitution of Myanmar (2008), the army chief of Myanmar can assume full power during emergencies. It states that in addition to this clause of the constitution, 25% of seats in the parliament and three cabinet posts, including the Interior Ministry, are reserved for the nominees of Tatmadaw. Reports also add that the Interior Ministry is one of the most important ones. In short, this mechanism paves a veto for the Tatmadaw.
Nonetheless, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD), who are very much aware of the dangerously configured Myanmar, came smiling all along with the Tatmadaw from the time they shared power with the army until the February 1, 2021 coup. Regarding this, one may recall on the position of Aung San Suu Kyi or the NLD with regard to “the brutal violence against the Rohingyas in Rakhine”, jailing of journalists, locking up of critics and other cases of human rights violation in that country when they were in power.
Were all these postures of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner and the NLD a sort of Freudian’s defense mechanism of “reaction formation”? This is a mechanism where one acts “the opposite way that the unconscious instructs a person to behave, ‘often exaggerated and obsessive’”, according to Wikipedia site. This encyclopedia gives one example as: “If a wife is infatuated with a man who is not her husband, reaction formation may cause her to – rather than cheat – become obsessed with showing her husband signs of love and affection.”
As for the prevailing situation in Myanmar, the cascading protests will bear no worth if they fail to go beyond the “common evil” in order to commit to the common aspirations of democracy and human rights. This is stated because an apparatus when treated only as a fate, and not as a project that encapsulates the ‘method’, one is only committing a terrible mistake. The problems of many societies germinate from such mistakes.
‘Evil’ will not show its real characters all the time, obviously, since it is a project. Getting solidarity and unity by reflecting the “common evil” is fine. But such unity, if not gone beyond the “common evil” to commit to common aspirations, often fails to withstand the smokescreens of the ‘evil’ which are seductive.
