"Pagodas, Police and Politics in Burma"

...Although Burma is a socialist country, Buddhism is almost the state religion...

...One can explain many things in Burma by its precarious position next to Red China and by the fact that stretches of the back and hill country are still held by Red Flag (Trotskyist) and White Flag (Communist) guerrillas, as well as rebel groups of Kachins, Shans and other linguistic and tribal groups which refuse to accept Burmese hegemony...

...Since these men, young as they are, are the teachers of the next generation, and Asia, as U Nu himself knows, is a continent where the volatile students can abruptly change political balances, these economists hold the future in their hands...

...If the various hill insurrections were to end, national income, it is said, would jump 20 per cent (although some people, one observer commented sourly, particularly in the Army and ministries, have a vested interest now in these rebellions...

...Burma is building a large steel mill, though it has no coal, iron ore or other resources other than a huge amount of steel scrap left over from the war...

...The Burmese language itself is a precarious unifier, since many of the country's intellectuals rarely use it—English is the common tongue of communication and the only language used in the University —and often they can't write it...

...His close advisers complain that on important occasions he will ignore all the evidence that has been painfully accumulated on a subject and act on an impulse...

...other persons, heads bowed, forehead touching the ground, pray and seek inspiration...

...He has written for Commentary, Encounter, Preuves and scholarly journals in the United States and Europe...

...I asked...

...There are, as in India and Ceylon, the divisive pulls of linguistic and tribal groups...

...the military leader of the resistance, was assassinated in 1947...

...On numerous occasions, one found them talking privately of the need for an opposition party, not for the sake of any ideology but simply for the right to criticize openly and freely...

...It is not so quixotic, perhaps, that David Riesman's Lonely Crowd is favorite reading among young Burmese intellectuals and that the problem they talk about most is how to rouse Burma out of its tradition-ridden habits and provide some ambitious, inner-directed drive in its people...

...On this day, the compound was thronged with thousands of persons, mostly village people, who came in different colored longhis and shirts...

...A former editor of The New Leader, Mr...

...The dancing was continuous, the rhythms slow and jerky, with each dancer actually shifting poses rather than moving, as hands and shoulders adopted many different, graceful postures...

...The remaining leaders, headed by U Nu, repudiated fascist and Communist ideology and declared themselves socialists, but traces of the old ideologies persist...

...Aung San, the great hero of Burmese liberation, whose picture hangs in almost every Burmese home, wrote in 1941 while living in Tokyo: "We should have no nonsense about individualism and parliamentary opposition.' The draft constitution which he prepared was patterned on that of Germany and Italy, "with strong leadership and the state supreme...

...The purification ceremony was mixed in with other legends, the chief one having to do with a story of a dying god...

...Yet, the new masters are intent on large-scale industrialization and socialization which go far beyond the capacity of its physical resources and, particularly, its trained personnel...

...During the war, the thakins collaborated with the Japanese—U Nu was briefly foreign minister of the Japanese puppet government—but turned against them when they realized that the Japanese promises were spurious...

...A politician must often rely on his instincts when the situation is a political one, but not when these fly in the face of hard economic realities...

...children scamper, play, urinate...

...Ultimately, however, the future of Burma may lie in the success or failure of U Nu to win the support of the new, younger generation of intellectuals who lack the early burning faith of nationalism which gave the older generation its goals...

...The "cave" is actually a large, blue-tiled assembly hall, fitted with all modern conveniences of light and amplification, but it stands encased within a rough-hewn shell which, from the flat countryside, looks like a mound of rubble, carted there from the city...

...the head had to be carried constantly by holy men, and, on the New Year, there was a changing of the guard...

...The main New Year's celebration was held at the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, that fantastic compound of hundreds of golden Buddhas topped by a large, 50-foot pagoda, all in gold...

...The rains came, and the cement dissolved into sticky heaps on the docks...

...A Government official dreads making a mistake, because it might be interpreted as a wilful act of sabotage or corruption...

...The history of Burma's struggle for independence is a confused record of ideological meanderings...

...The mill is highly uneconomic, but Burma feels that it would not be a "modern" state unless it had a steel mill...

...A clammy sense of fear now pervades all Government offices, paralyzing all initiative...

...But, beyond that, the problems Burma faces seems insurmountable...

...In fact, to my great surprise, criticism of the regime is voiced only sotto voce...

...shortly after Burma gained its independence, and the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, which he had formed as an all-party combination, almost fell apart when the different Communist factions went into rebellion...

...Even among the young intellectuals, these early ideas seem unknown...

...Some time ago, Burma sent a purchasing mission to Russia, which ordered a fantastic amount of cement in a barter deal...

...People sit, stroll, eat, drink...

...Each group had its own drums, pipes and dancers, the latter with faces whitened and wearing a head-dress of small, semi-precious stones, topaz or peridot, that are common in the area...

...The BSI has become a fearsome moloch, with powers to arrest first and investigate later...

...In 1953, U Nu, worried about the possibilities of corruption and citing the glaring example of the Kuomintang as a government undermined by corruption, instituted a Bureau of Special Investigation...

...Tun Thin, the brightest economist in Burma, won the David Wells prize at Harvard for a doctoral dissertation on the Theory of Markets, no mean accomplishment for a foreign student...

...The lack of trained personnel has multiplied Burma's woes...

...When I asked some to explain the reasons for such views, they seemed nonplussed that Aung San had ever expressed them...

...I can go to a minister and tell him privately that I think an economic policy is wrong," one man at the University told me, "but if I were to say so publicly there might be repercussions...

...Many of these young thakins, including U Nu's closesc co-workers, Than Tun and Thakin So, became Communists...

...He has built around him a small group of young economic experts, few of whom are bound to the ideologies and struggles for independence (an obvious political handicap) but most of whom have been trained abroad—at the London School, Harvard and other universities...

...Later, I found out that Burma has a secret police with extraordinary powers...

...Burma has five semi-autonomous states of different stocks, the largest of them the Kachins, Karens and Shans, each speaking different languages...

...Perhaps such snarls are inevitable in a new state trying to do so much at once...

...U Nu, the Prime Minister, has a great reputation as a democrat, and Burma is ruled by the Socialist party with small parliamentary opposition...

...Western-trained, they seem immune to Communist appeals, but most seem discouraged and their resentment becomes canalized against the fagade of democracy which masks the one-party rule by the Socialists and one-man rule by U Nu...

...Next week: Bombay, India...

...It's not rowdyism," said my host Tun Thin as we drove from the airport to the University area, "simply the Burmese New Year...

...Rangoon, with its buildings in disrepair, its uncollected garbage, its smelly ditches, its people sleeping in the streets, its ubiquitous smells, comes closest to resembling Calcutta of any city in Southeast Asia...

...others became infected with fascist ideology...

...On the New Year, it appears, the fun-loving Burmese organize a Mardi Gras, with evening competitions between different groups in singing, dancing, costumes and the like...

...When it arrived, there was no place to store it...

...later, he became a resistance leader and general secretary of the AntiFascist People's Freedom League...

...The temples are supported by state subsidy, and, in celebration of the 2,500th year of the Buddha, U Nu ordered and built a "cave," a replica of the cave in which the Gautama compiled his teachings, for a conclave of Buddhist scholars who would make a new, authoritative collation of his writings...

...In many ways, his strengths and weaknesses are those of Nehru...

...He only shrugged...

...At one point, when one of the priests was leading a section of the throng in responsive prayer, I surreptitiously sought to take a picture of the ceremony, whereupon the high priest motioned me forward and commanded me to take a series of pictures of him leading the prayers, with the admonition that I should not forget to publish these in the foreign press...

...Nor could Burma sell it to neighboring India, since the Russians were selling the same cement more cheaply to India...

...In its desire for showpieces, Burma has built a huge modern airport (three times larger than any in India) and an eight-story hospital (though there are few trained nurses...

...Work is a problem...

...These traces show up most of all in the doctrinaire approach to socialization...

...Although Burma is a Buddhist country, the legend, with its cycle of "rebirth" and its coincidence By Daniel Bell with spring, seems to come straight out of The Golden Bough...

...Since it was 95°, an auto running the gantlet had the choice of closing its windows and suffocating in the oppressive heat, or risking a shower of water...

...The god of the upper world and the god of the lower world once engaged in combat, and the god of the lower world lost his head...

...A socialist, Kyaw Nien is less doctrinaire than most in the party and willing to learn from experience...

...At the age of 27, Kyaw Nien was Vice Foreign Minister under the Japanese...

...Most of the young intellectuals, teachers at the University, are unhappy at this state support of Buddhism but rarely say so openly...

...He can be genuinely humble, deeply religious, and warm and outgoing to people—but, at the same time, highly capricious...

...The Burmese are overindulgent, easygoing people, unwilling as a rule to work hard...

...or Britain...

...At the end of the ceremony, he circled the pagoda, stepping on the prostrate bodies of the entranced faithful who flung themselves down before him either to receive a blessing by having holy feet touch them or to prevent the holy feet from becoming soiled in the dirtied water which had flooded the temple ground...

...Only recently has the Government become troubled...

...And no one was immune...

...When I questioned a Government official, he seemed surprised to learn that I was aware of the BSI—it may be an instance of how poor is the foreign reporting in Burma, or how favorable a press U Nu commands, that few foreign journalists I questioned in India and Japan knew of its existence—but he argued, simply, that it was a necessary watchdog on government...

...On New Year's Day, all the Buddhas are lovingly "purified" with water, but gradually, in the general fun-fest, it became common to turn the hose on one's neighbors and friends...

...But many of Burma's defects —and positive sides, too—are summed up in the personality of Premier Nu...

...The mood of all the groups was childlike, even the orange-robed priests...

...The nationalist movement was led by a group of voung students and teachers who called themselves "thakins" or "masters," a term of address usually reserved for Europeans and adopted by the Burmese to demonstrate their equality with the colonial rulers...

...But, more than that, the BSI has become in ellecl a political police, and a number of persons, I was told, were being held without trial for "investigation" because they had expressed critical opinions...

...U Nu himself is just over 50, but the "strong man" in the Government and most intelligent planner, Deputy Premier Kyaw (pronounced Chyaw) Nien, is only 42...

...A Buddhist place of worship has little of the sense of awe and mystery that other religions seek to create...

...Before the war, Burma was a province of British India and was administered largely by Indian and British civil servants...

...Of what kind...

...Burma is primarily an agricultural country, with a normal rice surplus for export...

...One American observer cited numerous instances where Government ventures are failing because everyone is afraid to take responsibility...

...Tun Thin, who is only 30, left the Government recently because of his clashes with the bureaucracy and has returned to the University of Rangoon, where he is building a small research group...

...Initially its motives were pure...

...Bell was on a year's leave from Fortune magazine (where he is associate editor and labor specialist) organizing international academic seminars for the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Bell is author of Work and Its Discontents, editor of The New American Right, a contributor to Princeton's history of American Socialism, and a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University...

...The latter, as I can testify from personal discussion, is as sharp and bright as any group of social scientists in the U.S...

...But, as one probes a bit beneath the surface, one finds that Burma is actually a one-party state and that criticism is not taken very easily...

...The day I arrived in Rangoon, exuberant crowds of youths were ranging the roads, dousing pails of water on passersby or aiming homemade water guns, usually converted bicycle pumps, at passing autos...

...The remarkable fact about the ruling group of Burma, despite its long history of political activity, is its youth...

...If his head touched the earth, the soil would become sterile, and if it touched the waters the oceans would dry up...

...Aung San...