Beat the Buddha

I can no longer stand by and hear it without swearing at my car radio. "The government today cracked down on the monks peacefully demonstrating in the streets by rounding them up, beating them with their rifle butts, and hauling them off for interrogation and torture."

Burma. Buddha. Bastards. I hate soldiers, I'm sorry. But I do.

The so-called soldiers who beat unarmed religious men of peace are just plain thugs. The government in Burma isn't doing anything wrong. In fact it isn't doing anything at all. What you see here are blind, stupid thugs.

Individual men devoid of humanity and inflated by the hot air balloon of the state's authority. Not a single thought for themselves, nor of their actions' consequence. The junta government does not exist! The map is not the territory, remember? Right there on the street though, the soldier is the one bashing his rifle butt into the head of a bald, defenseless holy man who he knows will not fight back and represents no threat to his person whatsoever. Just one man brutally beating another while the sun shines and birds sing overhead.

The government doesn't pick up so much as a stick.

How can it? It's a concept. Let me say it again. Look at the people in these pictures. They could all have the same Mom and Dad. They could all switch outfits and look the same. And yet, put an (intimidating) outfit on some of them and they become monsters. Our brains are very tiny things. The government is only as strong as the soldier carrying out its authority. Atrocities are never performed by states or leaders. They are performed by some everyday guy with black hair and crazed with hate at the trigger end of a state-sponsored murder weapon.

Maybe even your brother. Maybe even in Iraq.