QFT. Nice post.
I didn’t say they were ascended beings. I said they were two people who held to their declared ideals even after gaining power.
Yes, I don’t think hoping leaders won’t commit a genocide is holding them to an impossible standard.
Humans are of course flawed. However millions of people spend their lives a) trying to do a good job and b) trying to avoid hurting anyone. That’s all that’s required here.
Right. Many “freedom fighters” are really just fighting for freedom for their side or ethnic group. They don’t care about noble principles in general. Once they come to power, they are perfectly happy to oppress those opposed to them.
I don’t think people criticize politicians for being human. That would be inane.
Flawed individuals can still do their best to make rational and humane policy decisions. Politicians seem so often unable to do this, hence the criticism.
Oh, but certainly. The leaders who walked the talk once they got into power are admired because they did so even though they would be just as tempted to abuse it as the next guy, but did not.
What some of us are pointing out is that this particular leader was among those who were overly exalted mostly on account of merely being the face of resistane.
No they do not think they are doing so. But by the ricochet in having expectations that are not set against any real human behaviour but idealizations they do.
Rather people do not like to recognize how much their ‘preferrences’ contain things of inherent contradictions and expect the magical resolutions.
so much of criticisism of “typeical politicians” is really about the non recognition of the general flaws and the strong tendency to idealize - and the lack of the self-awareness of their own demands being contradictory.
So the cycle of disappointment with non politicians to politicians.
Bumped.
ASSK says genocide claims are ‘misleading’: Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi says genocide claims against Myanmar are 'misleading' | CNN
I don’t know if they necessarily become the new bad guy, but it seems pretty clear from history that in a lot of cases, rebels/reformers are good at being rebels and reformers, but not good once they’ve won at the mundane business of running an organization from day to day, especially if they weren’t statesmen/politicians to begin with.
Wow. If your strongest argument against claims of genocide is that they are “incomplete and misleading,” that’s a big red flag right there.
I’d like to think, if I ran a country, that I could respond to allegations of genocide with a categorical “We are not killing people.”
Gaining power is one thing, keeping it is another matter altogether.
Better still to be able to do so truthfully.
There’s a huge difference between a flawed politician and a facilitator of genocide.
Yes, politicians are flawed like all people are flawed. Genocide is not a run-of-the-mill flaw.
It is true that no one is faultless, but there is a bit of a gap between having faults and presiding over ethnic cleansing.
ETA: What Acsenray said.
Maybe she’s powerless to do anything. Myanmar was a military regime before she took office, and currently they usually hold all top cabinet and ministry positions. Scolding words don’t do much against weapons.
That’s a bit out of date. Prior to 2008, the government was a military junta; since then, they have much less control of government (but are still entitled to seats in the legislature). Regardless, I very much doubt she’d agree to serve as a figurehead.
Gaining power is one thing, keeping it is another matter.
That wasn’t ever a realistic option for Myanmar. They have multiple separatist movements. One is among the Rohingya. The Rohingya have a couple decades of sporadic armed insurrections to try and achieve those separatist goals.
Simply allowing the Rohingya to separate would encourage all the other separatist movements to use force. It would also create friction points for different interethnic violence as new states with new minorities struggled with the changes. Reforms that reduce the perceived injustices, like the Rohingya being legally barred from citizenship in Myanmar, could certainly help reduce both the numbers of and support for the separatists. That doesn’t completely remove the threat though. Security forces will still need to use violence as part of the package especially during the transition when people might not be as trusting of the new reforms. Sometimes that will result in killing people.
That absolutely doesn’t excuse how Myanmar’s security forces are using force. Pretending that there is a simple way out of this situation without killing anyone isn’t very realistic.
What makes people think the military is not still in charge of the government of Myanmar? Here is a great explanation of the current situation in the country:
So, yeah. It’s supposedly not as bad as before, but the government reform looks a lot like window-dressing to me.
If keeping power requires to be complicit in an ethnic cleansing campaign, well, I don’t think I need to elaborate on what kind of people would have any part in that.