"Truth is true only within a certain period of time. What was truth once may no longer be truth after many months or years."
This book is so good. It was originally published in 2004, and my copy has a new epilogue from 2011, and a lot has changed since that. But it's still worth reading as a vividly paranoid and empathetic look at the culture of information control in Burma/Myanmar that lasted through so much of the country's recent history.
I am afflicted with a profound ignorance of global events typical of US-ians. I went into this book knowing very little about the country, besides the fact that it used to be a British colony, and the recent high profile reporting on the genocide of the Rohingya.
Orwell is not the subject as much as his work and his time as an imperial police officer in Burma is a framing device to entice westerners to care about people in such an isolated, controlled country. The author visits towns where Orwell was stationed, and talks to people who live there about the military regime and what daily life is like. Many of the people she talks to have been imprisoned. Through their stories she draws a direct parallel to the story of 1984 - the constant paranoia that you are being observed and reported on, the looming threat of prison and torture, the whisper network of news, since all publications are heavily censored. "You must look for what's missing, and learn how to find the truth in these absences," one of her subjects explains. "When a subject drops from the news you can be pretty sure there's something going on in that field."
This book does spend time talking about ethnic tensions between the Burmese military government and the many ethnic minorities that live around the country's periphery, though at the time it was written in 2004 the army had waged a campaign against ethnic nationalist groups so brutally and for so long that many of them had brokered treaties. Racialization is also a tactic used by Big Brother in 1984 - violent conflicts can be spun to legitimize authoritarian power. Orwell wrote that "the object of war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact." I think we've all seen, in recent years, that it need not even be war. Any violence against a defined outgroup will do. In the Rangoon chapter, the author describes being passed a quickly scrawled note by one of her Muslim friends asking her to pass on news about a riot that had recently happened in a small town in northern Burma. A local mob set fire to Muslim houses and shops, including a Muslim school. 250 of the 300 boys at the school were still missing.
The regime uses communal violence as a technique to deflect attention from other big news events in the country, and riots are usually instigated by fake monks- soldiers who shave their heads and don robes.
I think what will stick with me the most is the author's inference that Orwell (or Eric Blair, his real name) felt equally trapped and unable to voice dissent with the colonial government. He wrote in his novel Burmese Days, "All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." He also related in The Road to Wigan Pier about how he spent an hour of "safe" conversation with another colonial servant on the train ride to Mandalay before they realized they both hated the imperial government, and were able to speak freely about it to each other. And he was trapped by nothing stronger than social convention.
I leave you with this quote from a conversation Larkin had about the recent death of Ne Win, the founder of the military government that controlled Myanmar for fifty years:
I asked Za Za Win what she thought was the significance of Ne Win's death. "Nothing." she said. "Nothing will change because he's dead. His death makes no difference. It changes nothing." She was probably right: I noticed that even after Ne Win's demise people were still uncomfortable about saying his name out loud in tea shops.
