Propaganda on the Mountain

By AUNG NAING OO Saturday, September 25, 2010

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The songs translated into something like: “Our guns are good, and the gunpowder explodes. Bang! Bang! Bang! But Khun Sa’s guns get jammed. Chauk! Chauk! Chauk!” (Mimicking the sound of the gun jamming).

I knew the Wa officers often made fun of Khun Sa’s army's weapons, often retelling the tale of how they would try to make 120mm guns, only for the things to explode during testing, killing their own men.

One Wa officer even told me how his unit had captured one of those weapons from Khun Sa’s men, but they never tested it for fear of it blowing up in their faces.

The Wa’s fears of the poor quality of their enemy's weapons might have been justified, but my immediate thought was to wonder what Khun Sa and his men would say about the Wa—and how distant or close it would be from the truth. I had no doubt he would have something to say about them, something negative, some kind of standing jioke—even if it bore little resemblance to the Wa that I knew.

Indeed, war and propaganda are indivisible. And the same applies in the city as to the most remote mountains.

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COMMENTS (1)

Free Man Wrote:

25/09/2010

If my memory doesn't fail me, I think you wrote in one of your books that you realized, only after you had arrived in Thaybawbo Camp, that your belief that all armed groups were “destructive elements bent on destroying the country” and the Karen rebels were “hideous-looking” was wrong. Is that right?

It is sad to see that the term "kalaar" is still used by some media agencies to refer to Indians and/or Muslisms. In fact, some of my teachers even used this term to refer to some Indian students when I was in high school. And the majority of the people of Burma still use the term. Something should be done about this. We should learn to develop empathy.