Since independence we Bama have been living a collective lie that is both hegemonic and myopically nationalistic. The supposedly linear progression of Burma or Myanmar, save the colonial interlude of 120 years, from a Buddhist kingdom originating in Pagan to today's modern nation-state is a complete fallacy, devoid of any empirical evidence.
The "we" here refers to post-colonial ethnic Bama, civilian and military, exiles and in-country compatriots, who unquestioningly embrace and ritualistically recycle our popular nationalist historiography, according to which Myanmar, or Burma as we know it, has been in existence since time immemorial.
As a post-colonial society, we have been stuck in class and ethnicity-based political conflicts since independence from Britain. According to the reactive version of Bama-centered nationalist historiography on which our history curriculum rests, we are but a post-colonial mess left behind by the British Raj.
However, these nationalist discourses are not fully honest intellectually, although there is a tinge of truth to them. They are largely silent about our own troubled pre-colonial pasts. Our pre-colonial histories are marked by local imperialisms, brutal slave raids, rigidly enforced caste-like social stratification, institutionalized gender oppression, monopolistic economic exploitation of peasantries by ruling feudal houses, and wasteful and gigantic pagoda and palace building projects, be they of the Bama, Arakanese, Mon, Shan, etc.
Since the early days of what may be considered "the emergence of a modern Burmese nationalism" around the turn of the 20th century, members of our chattering classes—from U May Oung and Dr Ba Han, writing about their colonial Burma in the now defunct Journal of Burma Research Society, to the nationalist folklorist Maung Htin Aung, who authored, among many other books,“The Stricken Peacock: An Account of Anglo-Burmese Relations 1752-1948” (Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), from ex-Brigadier Maung Maung, Ne Win's deputy and author of “Burmese Nationalist Movements (1940-48)” (Kiscadale, 1994), to (Dr)Thant Myint-U of “The River of the Lost Footsteps: A Personal History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)—have recycled this old Bama-centered and irredeemably elitist historiography.
Misinformed by the skewered readings of our past, the dominant Bamas imagine ourselves as a historically cohesive nation whose organizational integration with minority peripheries only needs to be completed either democratically or by force.
In fact, the history of post-colonial Burma centers on a pathological process of neo-colonization of non-dominant members of the Union at the hands of the dominant Bama elite, who subscribe to the deeply problematic ideological view of "Burma"—where the Bamas, urban elites and males, and now soldiers, are more equal than other ethnic communities, classes and females.
Following independence, Bama politicians and soldiers alike have resumed this old expansionist mission in the name of post-colonial nation-state building. During a lengthy tape-recorded interview in 1994, ex-Colonel Chit Myaing, a Revolutionary Council member and the well-known deputy-commander of the Burma Rifle No. 5, told me frankly that as early as 1952 Bama nationalist soldiers, with political support from leading nationalist politicians from the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL), built Ba Htoo army-town as the first military base on Shan soil. It was a preemptive military move against the Shans, who the Bama nationalists feared might exercise their right of secession as guaranteed (to them and the Karenni) by modern Burma's founding Constitution of 1947.
Also the late U Chan Tun, the chief legal advisor to Aung San and subsequently the Chief Justice of independent Burma, reportedly confessed that even that Constitution was federal only in name, but unitary in both nature and substance.
While the dominant elite built the Bama-centered unitary state under the disguise of a federal union immediately after independence, the non-dominant groups, for their part, waged resistance against this Bama imperialist revival, igniting equally problematic
mono-ethno-nationalisms.