Technocrat carries two informative articles on the current savage military lockdown in Burma.
The Risk of Journalism discusses Courage against the Junta, an article I found painful to read.
We disguised his identity before putting the interview to air. Later, I learned he had been arrested by secret police. For telling the world about Burmese political prisoners, he was jailed for seven years. I was shocked someone had been jailed for something I had done. It made me acutely aware of how many thousands of Burmese must feel when their relatives are arrested or killed by the regime. It’s the sense of powerlessness against injustice that is most dehumanising.
It did give me a bit of hope for this age:
The use of mobile phones to capture images of the protests are showing the world what is happening. They are fed back via the internet and opposition television stations run from as far afield as Oslo.
The inaccurately named Profits Trumps Freedom links to several articles regarding how foreign businesses are feeding Burma’s dictatorship, but misses the fact that the central problem are not the corporations that keep doing business with them, but the customers that don’t care and keep giving money to those specific companies. Corporations are not hulking behemoths hell-bent on Evil - they’re hell-bent on profits. Show them that certain business partners have a negative effect on their bottom line, and they’ll change their tune in a blink.
Then again, if you make a decision that 5% savings make it worth your while to deal with someone you consider evil, don’t point any fingers when the company in question does the same.