MYANMAR ENTERS WORLD'S WORST GOVERNMENT SWEEPSTAKES

So, the military junta of the Myanmar (not really a) Republic throws their hat into the ring this week for the coveted prize of World's Worst Government. Stricken by a cyclone that killed upwards of a hundred thousand people right off the bat, they now have to deal with almost 2 million displaced people. Huge swaths of the nation are destroyed and under water, the capital city is paralyzed and without utilities or transportation and starvation and plague looms for the stricken nation. So of course the United Nations, The Red Cross and many nations acting on their own send massive amounts of emergency relief to Myanmar in the form of food, medical supplies, generators, earth-moving equipment as well as teams of doctors and disaster response specialists.

So what do the tin soldiers running that country do? As everybody knows by now, they've refused to allow "outsiders" into their little slice of devastated paradise, thus far probably causing hundreds of thousands of further deaths that could have been prevented by timely action. They've taken a lot of the supplies at gunpoint, however, vowing to do the job themselves, but they know and the whole world world knows that is bullshit, they simply cannot and what's worse, will not save their own people.

Myanmar was approaching an important election day next week when the cyclone hit. No public offices are at stake in that election. Those are already taken on a permanent basis by members of the military. The election is only a cosmetic ratification of changes to the Myanmar constitution to give the military even more power. They already control the press, the banks, industry, farming and transportation, making Myanmar basically a prison with the military as the prison guards. What further power they seek is anyone's guess. Maybe they want the power that Chairman Mao had in China to force the entire country to dress in drab grey suits and funny little caps. At any rate, they figure that their rubber stamp election is more important than saving the lives of their own people and they don't don't want any inconvenient foreigners around to notice what a shit hole they've created in Myanmar, even before the cyclone hit.

So, my vote for World's Worst Government goes to the good generals of Myanmar. And once again the United Nations is exposed as the toothless giant that it is. One supposes that a peace organization like the U.N. rightly has no effective troops to force unwilling nations to accept aid for disaster victims, or for the victims of a the daily disaster of starvation that claims 36,000 lives every single day, one every 2.4 seconds. Seems like a change in the U.N. charter is in order to temporarily deputize some of the world's armies instead of the blue-helmeted U.N. troops to help persuade the likes of Myanmar's government to let their people be saved. Those guys think will twice about turning away humanitarian aid with an aircraft carrier and a couple of divisions of Marines parked in their neighborhood.

Nobody wants to invade Myanmar or declare war on them. They're just not that important on any level. But their citizens are human beings who are suffering horribly and so they are important, not the pride of those human failures who need to hurt and control others in order to feel important. When nations keep foreigners from traveling freely in their countries that's always a indication that they have something shameful to hide. Ask anyone going to the Summer Olympics in China this year how freely they were allowed to explore China as tourists. Odds are they won't get to go where they want. These sort of nations employ a lot of people to "check papers" and prevent people from seeing the truth.

What to do about this situation is a hard problem. Do you boycott them and let their innocent citizens suffer, and maybe add to the daily toll of starvation deaths you are seeking to relieve in the first place? Do you strengthen the U.N., hoping it will be less corrupt and inept and biased? And how many nations, our own included, are liable to bow to the authority of the United Nations on their own soil? Tough questions, these. Too bad the people of Myanmar who are watching the bloated bodies of their loved ones floating by don't have all that much time to relax and ponder these questions. But there will be a next time, another Myanmar, another disaster in some hapless nation ruled by secretive tyrants. What will be the story then? Most likely the same story with the starvation disaster, all talk and hand wringing and committees formed to study the problem and a painful death every couple of seconds. Shame on us.