Story: "Burma’s generals silenced the Buddhist monks yesterday morning.
For a week and a half, the monks had been on the streets of Rangoon in their tens of thousands, and their angry calm gave courage to the people around them.
But overnight, they were beaten, shot and arrested, and locked in their monasteries. Handfuls of them emerged yesterday – two or three brave individuals, a dozen at most – but nothing to approach the mass marches of the previous nine days. Everyone felt their absence.
...
In the Mwe Kya Kan pagoda in the South Okkala district of Rangoon, it began at 2am, but seven hours later the evidence was plain to see – a dozen thick patches of congealing blood and human tissue splashed about the yard. The windows of the monks’ dormitories were smashed jaggedly by the impact of rubber bullets – hard, round spheres fired from green cartridges that the monks had carefully gathered up and put on display.
Inside everything had been smashed – the thin plywood walls, the monks’ plaster statues of the Buddha – and the thin mattresses were soaked with blood.
“We had to flee for our lives into the neighbourhood,” said a small bespectacled young man named Ashin Thu, one of the few monks to have evaded arrest. “A family let me hide in one of their houses, I was so scared.”"
I was watching this story with fascination, but this is my first post on it.
Here's the gist of the story: Thousands of Buddhist monks filed into the streets several days ago, silently protesting the lack of freedom in Burma. Seeing their religious leaders out, thousands more regular people followed them, in some cities, protests numbering 400,000 or more.
That was all before last night. Burma's military cracked down on them, ravaging Buddhist monasteries and killing civilians.
So there are two things that can happen here.
1. This outrages the populace enough to start a violent revolution, and 2-3 years from now, there will be another military dictatorship set up.
2. Now that one 'revolution' has been shut down, the government becomes more crushing then other.
I think 2 is more likely, and it is a sad day for this poor nation.