Burma killed by tyranny

But what's worse this time is that Gore's blundering attempts to blame global warming for Burma's agony distracts attention from the real causes of this catastrophe - despicable causes we may at least hope to do something about.

If Cyclone Nargis had struck not Rangoon, but Melbourne or Tokyo, it is unlikely more than a few dozen people, if that, would have died. And that's because we are free, and rich - as free people tend to be with capitalism. Even Bangkok would have survived this far, far easier.

But in Burma as many as 100,000 are now feared dead - victims not of global warming, but of a tyranny that has left them poor and defenceless.

Burma, a former British colony, was once the rice-bowl of South-East Asia, but in 1962 a bunch of generals took over with a misty-eyed plan to impose on their 50 million people the "Burmese Way to Socialism".

Their brand of politics was of the kind still distressingly popular at RMIT and Victoria University, and produced exactly the misery it's inflicted from Cuba to Russia.

The economy collapsed, and Burma went from bread-basket to basket-case. No wonder so many people today still live in shacks and shanties that were no protection against last Friday's high winds and storm surge.

Let us not be sidetracked. These are people killed not by Gore's global warming, or even by Friday's Cyclone Nargis - but by a filthy band of rapacious dictators who have left their people beggared and blinded, at the mercy of even the wind and waves.

And the world sits on its hands and watches. Time and time again.

Thomas Sowell notes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals that although Christianity coexisted with slavery from the inception of Christianity to the 18th Century, Christianity became adamantly abolitionist over the 19th Century. And that no other religion, nor atheism, has ever motivated its adherents to risk their lives for the freedom of people to whom they are not related. Not in antiquity, and not in modern times. Only post-17th Century Christianity.
So why think that it could be any different today? If America and Britain don't do it, it won't be done. Not in Darfur, and not in Rowanda, and not in Burma. If the leading Christian powers don't intervene for the powerless, the powerless simply die. That's it.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, if you actually consider the words as written in the context of 1861, is essentially a recruiting jingle for the Union Army. To get men to volunteer to face a determined enemy firing real bullets in order to free the slaves in the South. You will search in vain for any such a composition for any such purpose, appealing to any deity other than Christ.

Whenever the Burmese people tried to protest against this junta-made poverty, and to demand democracy, they were shot - so often and in such numbers that China is now about the only ally the junta has left. In this way does resource-ravenous China, Olympics host, export its tyranny to the world.

So slow has the junta been to let in help, that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, founder of aid group Medicins Sans Frontieres, suggested the UN Security Council adopt a resolution allowing aid to be flown into the country by force. China, naturally, is against such interference in the affairs of its "friend".

China is not fit to host the Olmypics.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. "

- Declaration of Independence

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