Former Columnist Jailed for Facebook Criticism of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi

The classic crazy example would be Obama’s prize. It was obviously just a “you're not George W. Bush” prize. Hard to take such a thing seriously. They should stop treating it as “we like your political activism” and start treating it as “you have significantly contributed to world peace.”

That's never going to happen. Nobel Peace Prize is a political tool and has always been so. It has nothing to do with peace but advancing post-colonial european interests. Go read the history of the nobel prize and who has won. The prize was created by alfred nobel, noted for inventing dynamite and being a major war munitions manufacturer.

Why was Suu Kyi given the nobel prize? Because she loved democracy and human rights? Of course not. Lots of people love democracy and human rights and they haven't won the award. She was given the award because the british thought that they could use her to take over mynammar again and they felt that they could control her. Turns out that they couldn't since she's a nationalist, like her father. Think about it. She was given the nobel peace prize in 1991 while there was no democracy or human rights in myanmar ( it was a military dictatorship ). So her award was "forward looking". What were the british looking forward to? Gaining influence in their former colony.

Why was obama awarded the nobel peace prize before he even took office? Because europeans wanted to influence obama going forward. Funnily enough, the nobel peace prize probably influenced obama into helping france and britain by militarily attacking libya. After all, he owed the europeans.

Awards are more about influencing the future rather than celebrating the past. This is especially the case with the nobel peace prize. It's part of what we call soft power.

Guess what? The chinese are playing the same game now. That's right. They have their own "peace" prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Peace_Prize

If you don't execute everyone from the old regime, there are tons of rich people, executives, special interests, influential families, etc, that remain in place and are still important after the transition.

(The post-WWII Germany was full of ex-nazi hardcore sympathizers, and nazi executives and officials in all kinds of positions of power until the 80s or so). De-nazification (not the half-arsed, soon abandoned program of the same name [1]) was a big demand of younger germans in the 60s and 70s.

Now, if you do execute all important people from the old regime, on the other hand, you have now had yourself a taste of big corrupting power over others. And unless you kill every relative, friend, etc as well, you have a recipe for civil war and further bad blood between you and those that remained.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

On top of that, the military had been the only functional institution in Myanmar for over 50 years. During that time, there was no real court system, no free media, no private industry, and no significant educational institutions. Even before the military took over, the majority of the colonial government bureaucracy consisted of Indians that the British brought in with them, the vast majority of whom left with the British, gutting civilian institutions. The military controlled every aspect of everyone's lives. Their retreat from total control left an enormous institutional vacuum, with Buddhist monasteries left as the only nearly national stable institution (which has fed tensions with minority Muslim ethnic groups).

When I was working there a few years ago, people barely knew what the laws were for creating a corporation. No one knew how to verify who owned what land. The military suddenly allowed free press for the first time since the 1960s, and immediately a plethora of dubious publications sprung up to compete with the hilariously inaccurate government-run propaganda rag, the Light of Myanmar. People just weren't equipped to evaluate journalistic quality yet. So fundamental elements of a free society just weren't in place.

And the population was in many ways unprepared for democracy. Atrocious education and decades of propaganda make it difficult to rationally exercise democratic authority. Particularly when there are strong ethnic tensions, because the majority tends to abuse their authority to the detriment of the minority. Hence the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

So Suu Kyi is left in a tenuous position. She can't allow dissent within her own party without risking fragmentation and a loss to a military-centric coalition. She can't let her own party run wild without risking unfettered ethnic cleansing and a military backlash/coup if their special privileges are revoked.

This latest move is disheartening for many reasons, but more than anything it is evidence of just how desperate the situation in Myanmar really is, despite whatever brief optimism grew out of the nation's partial democratization.