Radio War Nerd EP101—Rohingya, Myanmar & The Empire

Guest: Kayleigh Long, journalist The War Nerd digs into the grim history and politics of Mynamar with local journalist Kayleigh Long, to try to make better sense of the Rohingya crisis. The story we're being told is that Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi isn't the peaceful Buddhist that the West made her out to be, and the Rohingya mass expulsions suddenly just happened without context. We look into the brutal British legacy in Burma (Myanmar), the history of ethnic tensions in the part of the Empire where today Rakhine death squads are expelling Rohingya, the mirror Chittagong Hills Tract conflict story ignored by our media, and the CIA-backed Chinese Nationalist KMT army that spent years in northeast Burma running a heroin narco-state ... Afterwards, the War Nerd and Ames take more RWN subscriber call-in questions... Works cited: "Shooting An Elephant" by George Orwell "Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma" by Mary Callahan "Another Man's War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten Army" by Barnaby Phillips Total time: 2:04:44