Prosopography of the U Nu era Burmese parliament?

All the parliamentary maneuverings in Thailand during the last few weeks have stimulated me to study Lewis Bernstein Namier and also to look further into the U Nu era Burmese parliament. Namier...

"...is best known for his work on parliament and its composition in the latter part of the eighteenth century, which by its very detailed study of individuals caused substantial revision to be made to accounts based on a party system. Namier's best known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, England in The Age of the American Revolution and the History Of Parliament series he edited later in his life. Namier used Prosopography or collective biography of every MP and peer who sat in the British Parliament in later the 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best ones for analyzing small groups like the House of Commons, but was opposed to the application of prosopography on larger groups."

"In addition, Namier used other sources such as wills and tax records to reveal the interests of the MPs. In his time, Namier's methods were innovative and were quite controversial. Namier's obsession with collecting facts such as club membership of various MPs and then attempting to co-relate them to voting patterns led his critics to accuse him of 'taking ideas of history'."

Modern Burmese history and the historical "fallacy of ethnocentrism"

The Pulitzer prize winning historian David Hackett Fischer in his 1970 book on the logic of writing history "Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historic Thought" singles out modern Burmese history as suffering from severe ethnocentrism. Fischer is a precise and thorough traditional narrative historian, but was supposedly severely criticized by an article in the academic journal "History and Theory".

Fischer provides a concise definition of the fallacy at issue: "The fallacy of ethnocentrism is committed by a historian who exaggerates the role of his own group in its interactions with other groups. He discusses Burma in rather emotional terms and errs by using several ethnic and cultural slurs, derogatory references to Burmese culture that seem to be based on very limited knowledge of Burma and its culture, which are hardly acceptable in the world of 2005. Nevertheless, it is worth considering his claims about Burmese historiography circa 1970:

"A striking example is the historiography of modern Burma...many different national groups interacted in the history of Burma; besides the Burmese, there were Chinese, Indians, British, Americans, Frenchmen, Japanese, and others. Fine Anglocentric books about Burma have been written by Maurice Collis, John S. Furnivall, D.G.E. Hall, and G.E. Harvey, to name but a few of many English and Anglo-Burma authors. Other scholars have produced works on the same subject from an American perspective, notably John L. Christian and John F. Cady--works which tend to over-emphasize the admittedly important role of American missionaries in Burma..."

"There are a few histories of Burma from the Japanese point of view -- Willard Alsbree's "Japan's Role in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge, 1953). Still other accounts are Sinocentric, Indocentric, or Francocentric. Each of these apporaches tends to exaggerate the role of a particular ethnic group in a very complex pattern of multiethnic interaction...Histories of Burma by Burmese scholars and statesmen are beginning to appear in quantity. These works are, if anything, more stridently ethnocentric than those which preceded them. They are painful works of pious devotion to the Burmese people..." , p. 228)

He goes on to praise E.R. Leach's "Political Systems of Highland Burma" (London, 1954) for its "comparative abscence of ethnocentrism."

(Note that ethnicity in post-WWII Burma is investigated in depth in a recent paper by Dr. Robert Taylor "Do states make nations? The politics of identity in Myanmar revisited" (Southeast Asia Research, 13, 3, pp. 261-286).)

Tarling's "Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War 1945-19"

Nicholas Tarling. Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War 1945-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x + 488 pp. Maps, references, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-63261-7. Reviewed by: Mark T. Berger , The University of New South Wales.

This book review clearly indicates that this is a book about British diplomacy and does not connect to the social and political history of the newly emergent post-WWII states of Southeast Asia:

"The idea that Southeast Asia has now become a zone of peace, prosperity and stability and that this flows in part from the efforts of British diplomats and colonial officials is connected to what this reviewer regards as the main weakness of the book. This is the way in which the author's tight focus on the "official mind" of British imperialism in Southeast Asia between 1945-1950 leads to the neglect of the wider forces at work in the rise of nationalism, decolonization and nation building in the early Cold War era."

"The highly contingent process of creating nation-states out of the complex and variegated former Western European and U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia ...was at once both stabilising and destabilising. For example, the instability of countries such as Burma and Indonesia is directly linked to way in which the sovereign territory of these new nations was taken to be coterminous with most of their former colonial boundaries.

[...and their pre-colonial boundaries dating at least back to Bayinnaung in the sixteenth century. Are mere boundaries really important here? Isn't the nature of the power relations along the boundary (if such a thing as a clear-cut boundary could even be delineated) between the center and periphery frontier tributary states more important? Even in the post-WWII era the frontier was still an area that the center had only marginal control over with ethnic rebellion and KMT presence and the emergent power of the PRC looming over the border...]

Cold War propaganda war of translations into Burmese

The journalist U Thaung in his 1995 book A Journalist, a General, and an Army in Burma (Bangkok: White Lotus) describes a propaganda war in Burma between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China during the COld War that involved the translation of works into Burmese:

"Americans poured in more money than the Russians. The Russians only helped the hand-picked believers. The American money was grabbed by anyone ready to sell for a price...The book 'I Choose Freedom', written by a Russian diplomat and translated into Burmese, was the first Cold War book to appear in Burma. The printing of that book was believed to be financed by the American Embassy. The book was a success and penetrated the Burmese political climate...[the book] revealed the Russian dictatorial system and was a bombshell in the political arena full of elements that idolized the Soviet Union...This initial book was supposedly followed by more books on the Soviet Union sponsored by the United States embassy.

"Then the Americans broadened the way with American cultural books. They started with translations of American classics and, later on, the American officials would finance anyone who wanted to translate any American book...The financial system was an open secret in the Burmese literary field. Publishing houses could bill for translation fees, the cost of paper, the printing charges, cover art expenses, and so on, for a book that was a translation of an American novel. Their duty was to provide 300 copies to the Embassy out of a normal circulation of 3,000 to 5,000, which they were to sell as regular genuine publication in the book shops...the outcome of the booming business was corruption...speedy translations done by amateurs and fourth-class writers and signed by prominent writers, were plentiful on the market."

The Soviet Union and China eventually entered this propaganda war and this lead to laws restricting this sort of publication:

"Novels written in Chinese, printed in Burmese characters and produced in China, were sold cheaply on Burmese book stalls. I thought it was a dangerous trend for the Burmese press as well as the Burmese public. The Burmese printing industry suffered financial loss. For the Burmese public it was more dangerous to come under Chinese influence. I wrote a strong condemnation of the books in the Burmese language produced in foreign countries. The government accepted my advocacy and made a rule banning the importing of of books in the Burmese language, printed outside Burma... This ban affected the missionary organizations that imported Burmese-language Bibles that were printed outside Burma"(U Thaung (1995) "A Journalist, a General, and an Army in Burma" Bangkok: White Lotus, pp. 22-26).

Even when I lived in Burma in the late 1990's it was common for people to buy old out-of-date magazines in English to read just so they could practice their English, the content was almost irrelevant for them. One could imagine Burmese cultural-intellectual space flooded by foreign ideas from American missionaries, Russian and Chinese communists, and then later on in the U Nu era, to counter-act all of this, the government and army started publishing magazines too in an attempt at "psychological warfare" . As Dr. Mary Callahan mentions in passing:

"Ba Than and Aung Gyi [high ranking military officers] moved quickly into the commercial magazine market, launching their Myawaddy Magazine in 1952 'to provide balance' in a market dominated by anti-government publications. According to Aung Gyi the most popular magazine of the time was Shumawa, which contained many cartoons and articles penned by leftist and authors who criticised the Tatmadaw."

In this "psychological warfare" the military tried to undermine the "leftist" magazine by subsidizing Myawaddy, hiring leftist writers, and sporting covers with "prettier girls" (Callahan, Mary P. (2004) "Making Enemies: and State Building in Burma," p. 183)

All these claims, of course, have to be more rigorously verified. Memoirs can hardly stand on their own as historical evidence.

Post WWII political chaos: a cross-cultural view

In this article on the "Korean My Lai" Cumings points out that chronologically, My Lai -like massacres were happening in the early years of the Korean war right after WWII long before the Vietnam war.

They were also happening in Burma without active participation of any foreign power like the United States. Writing about the early years of the civil war in 1950's U Nu Burma, the journalist U Thaung discusses the public executions by firing squad he covered (p. 14), the murder of the Karen leader Saw Ba U Gyi by Sein Lwin despite his surrender (xi-xii), and the massacre of Karens in downtown Yangon:

"On 1 February 1949, General Smith-Dun, a Karen national, who had led the Burmese army since independence as Commander-in-Chief, was sent on indefinite leave. General Ne Win took over the armed forces. On the next day, 2 February, the Karen National Defence Organization was declared an unlawful association. Ahlone, the area of Rangoon where most Karen nationals lived, was set ablaze. Fire engines were prevented from reaching there. Karen nationals rushing out of their burning houses were shot down. I arrived there as soon as permission was granted...Dead bodies were everywhere in the streets. Many of them were children and young girls."

Of course, one emotional entry in a memoir does not constitute historical proof, but it is worth considering the possibility that political violence and bloody massacres were a common feature of many of the post-WWII political transitions in places as different as South Korea and Burma.

Because of Burma's history of isolation in the post-WWII era it is easy to perpetually find nothing but difference and fall into the "fallacy of difference" which David Hackett Fischer defines as "the tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclution of its generic characteristics." (Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: TOwards a logic of historical thought, p. 222)

Bruce Cumings, North Korea, and Burma...I mean Myanmar

This book review on Korea studies criticizes western "experts" who write about Asian cultures distant from their own without first shedding any baggage of stereotypes and generalizations they may carry with them. This might be a problem with contemporary group-think on Burmese politics.

What I want to argue here is that the intellectual mileau of scholarship on Korean Cold War history is similar to that of Burma's, not that Burma is substantially like North Korea.

"Balance and proportion are vexed questions because of the North Korean regime’s own habit of lying, and its grotesque exaggeration of its achievements and the merits of its leaders. Anyone wanting to find out about the country begins with a farrago of outlandish claims and heroic myths, goes on to what the ‘Dear Leader’ says, what DPRK scribes are told to write, what the outside experts claim, what the reporters report, what some other government offers up..."

[Censorship in Myanmar is notorious]

"The American role since 1945 raises another enormous problem of balance and bias, beginning with the simple fact that Rhee, Park and the KCIA’s Kim would not have come to power without American backing, and continuing with the common assumption that the US has been an innocent bystander for the past sixty years, having nothing to do with the nature of either Korean regime..."

[Biased ethnocentric historiography has been a big problem in the post-WWII era, see David Hackett Fischer (1970) Historians Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Thought, pp. 228-229, for references to Burma]

"Political violence adds an essentially insoluble problem: for example, we know a great deal about North Korean prison camps;..."

[Political prisoners have been a problem since independence]

This book review is by Bruce Cumings author of "The Origins of the Korean War" volumes 1 and 2. Cumings has paid for his attempts to see things from both sides of the fence, in a sense his attempts to be objective. He was blacklisted from South Korea and is often accused of immorally defending the North Korean regime. In the end he was simply wrong about a lot of things and his work discredited:

"In a book concluded in 1990 he argued that the Korean War started as 'a local affair,' and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia. In 1991 Russian authorities started declassifying the Soviet archives, which soon revealed that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event. Initially hailed as 'magisterial,' The Origins of the Korean War soon gathered up its robes and retired to chambers. The book was such a valuable source of information on Korea in the 1940s, however, that many hoped the author would find a way to fix things and put it back into print." [From the Atlantic Magazine]

Can historians make tentative conclusions subject to future revision? Tentative conclusions don't seem to be enough to publish a paper book with, particularly weighty tomes like Cuming's, but an online weblog? The trouble is that historians probably don't want to share their ideas online because they will not receive due credit for these ideas, in academia the citations that translate into reputation and credibility, the coin of the realm in academia (my interpretation). There is no way of citing weblogs or at any rate it would often be difficult to even determine who was the first to come up with an idea if academic publishing was made into a more informal affair.

Women in civil society during the U Nu Era

This link has an interesting mini-biography of Daw Khin Kyi. Who she was isn't nearly as important as the little details of her life, microhistory that provides some idea of what public life was like for the politically involved during the U Nu era:

"Daw Khin Kyi...was one of Burma's most outstanding women politicians. Daw Khin Kyi has succeeded her assassinated husband as a Member of Parliament for the Lanmadaw constituency, but she resigned in 1948 to become the director of the Women and Children Welfare Board and later Chairperson of Social Planning Commission and the Council of Social Services.

"She had traveled extensively in Europe, the US, China and Southeast Asia region before becoming the first Burmese woman to be given an ambassadorial post. She supported U Nu's clean AFPFL when AFPFL split and, she resigned her post from the Council of Social Services. Later she took a post as the Central Committee Chairman of AFPFL Women Department. She supported U Nus faction, she said because U Nu had saved the country when Gen. Aung San and other comrades were assassinated, and similarly he did again in 1948 when Burma was in the midst of internal upheaval.

"She went on an extensive campaign tour in Upper Burma for U Nu's faction. U Nu's clean AFPFL won in the elections. She went on another campaign across the country for the development of the welfare of Burmese women on behalf of AFPFL. She was assigned as the first Burmese women ambassador in July 1960, and she worked as the Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal until she retired in 1967. For her extraordinary performance, she became the most significant symbol of Burmese women in that period.

"During this same period of the U Nu government after independence, there was only one woman Minister. She was Mrs. Ba Maung Chein who worked as Minister for the Karen State from 1952 to 1953. She was the first and only woman who has taken a ministerial position in Burmese history. Among the political organizations, in AFPFL organization, Daw Sein Pu was elected as central executive member in AFPFL's 1958 election. She was also a leader of The League for All Burma Liberated Women Association."

Urban Oral History

When I was searching for a Klong Toey map to send to a visiting client from Singapore, I came across this little article on night entertainment venues in the Klong Toey port area of Bangkok. It has a historical map also. This is not a subject that I would normally be looking for, so I was surprised.

It's basically oral history combined with some photos.

The same approach could be taken for different kinds of urban geography in Yangon from the U Nu era. The reminiscences plus photographs of people in their 60's and 70's could be used. Members of Anglo-Burmese clubs in London or Australia might be one source of information.

The political satire that U Nu wrote before the 1961 election refers to an inerior minister meeting his mistress in Ali Mula Yakwet which seemed to have sinister significance. I made some inquiries and it turns out that this was an area near Bazun-taung (50th street).

Censorship began during the U Nu era

Censorship began during the U Nu era and the practice, once established, continued on into the post-1962 era of military rule. Read this:

"In the 1950s, under Prime Minister U Nu, the press in Burma remained largely unrestricted. The Prime Minister himself was always accessible to journalists, who could easily set up an appointment to meet him at his residence. At that time Burma stood out as one of the few countries in Southeast Asia where journalists enjoyed press freedom."

Not accurate. U Nu put some journalists like Ludu U Hla in jail, although he later blamed it on U Thant (Forthcoming in Christopher Goscha (ed.), Culture of the Cold War (Charney, Michael W. (forthcoming) "Ludu Aung Than: Nu's Burma and the Cold War," in Christopher Goscha (ed.) Culture of Cold War, pp. 11-12).