Abstract
This chapter describes how Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win, the founding Prime Ministers of Burma (1946–1962), set about creating a new narrative of Burmese history which justified the emergence of the newly independent nation. They traced Burmese military exceptionalism to the age of ancient Burmese kings. And placed what became Bamar Buddhist culture at the center of history. General Ne Win was to consolidate this view within the army, which fought foreigners in the north, and rebellious highlanders. This led to a conclusion in 1962 that foreigners were to be excluded from the new Burma, while ethnic minorities were to be assimilated into the superior culture. This happened in the context of a difficult independence in which the peripheries were in revolt, and foreign militaries sought to use Burma as first a proxy during World War II, and later in the Cold War.
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Notes
- 1.
U Nu wrote “Under no circumstances can we allow Taingyintha unity to be destroyed. Shan, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon and Burman must be united. The great mass of Taingyintha in the union must be united. Our Union of Burma cannot go back to the fragmented ‘everyman to his own chief’ way that we’ve been—apart from during the reigns of (kKngs) Anawrahta, Alaungphya, and Bayinnaung—through Burmese history” (U Nu 2013: 66, quoted in Cheesman 2016: 4).
- 2.
Pocket armies are small locally organized militia that emerges in Burma in times of trouble. The Burmese word for them is Tat. Tat were present in pre-colonial day, and today (2023) are called People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). Such pocket armies are described well in Callahan (2003).
- 3.
To understand how common and taken for granted such “psychological warfare” directorates became, one only needs to look at the more or less transparent involvement of the US military at football games, and the manner the United States Navy cooperates with the “Top Gun” movie franchise. Such rituals in the United States and elsewhere are designed to raise the status of the military.
- 4.
Two key aides of Ne Win were named Maung Maung. Colonel Maung Maung (1920–2009) served in the Tatmadaw with General Ne Win in the post-world War II wars. He was important in the 1962 coup. He fell out of favor with Ne Win, though, and was sent to serve abroad as Ambassador Extraordinaire with the Foreign Service. Professor Dr. Maung Maung (1925–1994) was an academic who was closely allied with the Tatmadaw, but never an officer. He eventually became Attorney General, Chief Justice, and for a month in 1988 was Prime Minister.
- 5.
Such white operations were being made all over the rapidly decolonizing world. Benedict Anderson (1983/1991: 163–186) describes this process well, when he writes about the role of Maps, Censuses, and Museums in modern nation-building. Museums and histories in particular are obviously designed to make a population sympathetic to the central story. But so are assertions made about boundaries (maps) and classification of peoples (censuses). In Anderson’s chapter, he writes about the role that British map-makers played in defining the boundary of Thailand and British Burma, and the emergence of census categories in British Malaya. In the case of museum pieces, Anderson writes about the role that the Buddhist temple of Borobadur played in representing the new Islamic nation of Indonesia.
- 6.
Chao Tzang Yanghwe (1987: 98–99), a Shan leader believed that the insurgency was actually slown down by the U Nu government which used a variety of both hard and soft power. He wrote that “By the mid-1950s, thanks to the support of the Shan, Kachin, and Chin, all immediate dangers to the AFPFL of U Nu had faced— the military strength of the leftist Communists and the Karen movement was losing steam and coherence after the death of its undisputed leader Saw Ba U Gyi (in 1950).”
- 7.
In the 1990s, Callahan (2003: 208) still saw posters in Yangon which she called “straight out of the Fort Bragg psychological war manuals of the 1950.” The slogans proclaimed things like “Down with the minions of colonialism” and “Crush all destructive elements.” Not elegant by the PSYOPS standards of the United States in Iraq perhaps, but still good enough for the still ruling Tatmadaw to use.
- 8.
The military graciously accepted the defeat, returned to the barracks, and General Ne Win was awarded a Magsaysay Prize in 1960 for “maintaining democracy in Burma.” which he turned down on the grounds that he only did his duty. See https://www.irrawaddy.com/specials/on-this-day/day-dictator-ne-win-won-asias-nobelprize.html (Wei Aung Aung 2019). Other records indicate that his reasons for turning down the award was that the award committee had connections to the American CIA.
- 9.
See Ministry of Defense, May Yu Special Issue for Tatmadaw, 1961, pp. 3–4.
- 10.
Tatmadaw military governments have routinely misread the mood of the public. In more or less free elections in 1960, 1990, 2012, 2015, and 2020, the Tatmadaw has routinely subject themselves to evaluation by the people, and lost handsomely. Only the NLD parliamentarians elected in 2012, and 2015 even governed for more than a year or so, and then only at the suffrage of the military. A coup ousted the Parliamentarians in 1962, and those elected in 1990, and 2020 were never seated.
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Eh Htoo, S., Waters, T. (2024). Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win Create a New Country (1948–1962). In: General Ne Win’s Legacy of Burmanization in Myanmar. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1270-0_4
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