How To Build A Revolution: Myanmar, Part 1

Part 1 of a 5 part series on Myanmar’s spring revolution. James and Robert document the first year of Myanmar’s revolution through the stories of its participants”

Music for this series was provided by Rebel Riot, check out their Bandcamp here https://therebelriot.bandcamp.com/album/one-day

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Ah demon crazy died word in Millions of Americans took
to the streets to protest police violence. They were met
with police violence on a massive scale. Shootings, vehicle attacks,

(00:30):
and assassinations occurred alongside these protests, often in defense of
the police, and in total, at least twenty five Americans died.
We now know that President Trump repeatedly urged General Mark
Milly to deploy U S military forces to crack down
violently on demonstrations. Milly claims that Trump told him to
have his soldiers cracked skulls, beat the funk out of

(00:52):
and just shoot protesters. In the end, we were all lucky.
Military leaders, including General Milly, resisted calls to use their
men to suppress domestic descent. National Guard were called in
to police several major cities, but in many cases their
behavior was tame compared to the militarized police who were
reliably shot and beat protesters. For millions of Americans, twenty

(01:15):
twenty was their first exposure to the violence the state
will do to avoid change. And then Trump lost the election.
He and his followers tried to carry out a coup
but failed. For now and millions of Americans who'd taken
to the streets, mostly went back to their lives. Some
were satisfied justice had been done. Others were furious to

(01:35):
have stopped short of instituting real change. But at the
end of the day, business went on as usual. A
version of normal prevailed. In one the military of Myanmar,
known as the Topmadau, overthrew the elected government in a coup.
Hundreds of thousands of citizens, most of them young, gen
z and millennial men and women, took to the streets.

(01:57):
Police responded with tear gas, water cannon, and eventually bullets.
The international community expressed its horror at the brutality of
the Top Medal, but that's all they did. Over the
course of several months, the military pushed protesters mostly out
of the cities, and a protest movement against the military
coup turned into a civil war. Now those same protesters,

(02:19):
mostly kids who wanted nothing more than a normal life,
have become revolutionaries. With homemade guns, three D printed rockets
and stolen rifles, they battled the Totmadal. Some of them
fight in the jungles, some of them fight in the cities,
and some of them fight on the internet. This is
their story. We're sitting in a large suburban home in

(02:42):
my Soft, Thailand, a small city on the border of Myanmar.
The boys singing and playing music around us range an
age from seventeen to twenty two. Their existence in Thailand
is a crime. If they are caught here, they'll be
forced across the border into Myanmar, whose government executed their
friends and sold the organs for profit. But tonight they're

(03:02):
playing music. We're drinking beer. Later, James Stout and I
will play pool with them and get our asses just
catastrophically wrecked. We met Andy, age two and head of
the family for his Instagram page. That's not his real name,
but for obvious reasons, we can't identify him. We first

(03:24):
met when I sent him a d M asking we
could buy one of his photos for our first series
on Me and mar He was a bit skeptical, but
I tried my best to get him to see we
just wanted to give him money and promote his work.
Over the next six months or so, we weren't from
talking on the phone to messaging almost every day, to
Robert and I booking tickets to Thailand, to sitting on
the top floor of their house. It used to be

(03:46):
his landlord's office, but now it's home to Andy and
his partner Sarah. That's also not her real name, because
she's a citizen of a Western nation working in Thailand.
The boys we talk about are brothers, his cousin and friends.
They live at a small building across the garden, and
in the daytime they sit under a gazeeba and play
their guitars. The first night we met Andy and Sarah,

(04:08):
we sat behind a barn and unpaved alleyway. We drank
beer out of sippy cups because selling beer is still
banned at the local COVID regulations, but apparently the cops
don't check sippy cups. We drank far too much, in fact,
and the next day I worked up with a headache
and a blurry photo of me, Robert and Andy engaged
in a post which was half hug and half mutual
support structure. We walked home and according to my phone,

(04:32):
at some point we took photos of a puppy and
and hopefully unrelated incident. At some point I started bleeding.
It was immediately obvious that Andy needed the chance to
blow off some steam. Over the last year and change,
he has chronicled every stage of the coup in its aftermath.
In early videos, we see joyous protests, moments of resistance

(04:53):
and splendor in the streets of cities like me Audi.
Later we see violence, death, and guerrilla warfare. And he
didn't have what you would call an easy childhood, thanks
in part to me and mouths long history of revolutions
being crushed by the army. People there, like people everywhere,
I want to be free and determine their own futures.

(05:13):
And so each generation has its own uprising, and each
generation has its own massacre and very little progress to
show for it. I was born in two thousand, so Um,
when I was seven seven there was a revolution. It's
called Staffron revolutions. It wasn't it wasn't like this, you know,
it wasn't like what happened now. But like, there were

(05:33):
a lot of people that were involved in a lot
of people that killed Um. A lot of people left
Neanmar and came to the refugee counts in here, and
we were one of the families that came to the
refugee counts. Um and yeah in thainand Yeah. Andy's mother
is Buma, the dominant ethnic group in Myanmar due to
their decades long control of the military and government. His

(05:55):
father is Karin, the ethnic group once used by the
British government as soldiers. Since nineteen forty nine, the Karin
have fought a war in the mountains against the Top Medal.
Their name is often anglicized to be spelled just like
the English name Karen, which, given present internet trends, makes
explaining the conflict sometimes awkward. Andy primarily identifies as and

(06:16):
was raised Mamma. His family left after the Saffron Revolution.
They did not flee to escape political repression, but because
the economy had collapsed. This put them in an awkward
position in the camps, which were filled mostly with Karin
people who had fled state violence. We weren't refugees, right,
We were more like, how do you say, like economic refugees.

(06:38):
You know, we go because not because our village has
been burned down, in our families being killed, you know.
So then if we were to go back to Yangon,
we still could find a job, We still could find
you know. Um. And then for these current people, like
this place is the only place that they could exist
at that moment, right and probably still now too. So yeah,

(07:00):
so they said that, but that that education wasn't very
good there. That the life wasn't good, you know, it wasn't.
It wasn't. It was very bad. Honestly, it was very bad.
It was a lot of violence, a lot of hate,
a lot of understandable you know, like these people have
gone through so much ship and so much trauma that
and nothing. No one is coming there too, but fix that.
So they had a lot of anger, they had a

(07:22):
lot of problems. Um, but my my mom said, yeah,
we're going back because the education here is very bad.
And if you go back to Minama, at least, you know,
if you do like the thing that people do, maybe
you'll get somewhere in the future. Here there's no future,
That's what she said. So we went back, Um, and
I stay in Yrmar for like four years. Andy had

(07:44):
never been very political. His family was more or less neutral,
tending to side with the military more often than not
out of a sense of inertia. Me and mart tended
to cartwheel between attempts at democracy and military dictatorship. So
when the world media celebrated their first democratic elections in
twenty five years, Andy was not particularly excited. Yeah, So,

(08:05):
I mean, we we did realize that there was a
change in the country, right because we grew up in
the military to take your ship. But then when contensity
take over took over, there were some changes, like the
phones got cheaper, the internet got cheaper, and if you
look back then you can see big, big changes. But

(08:27):
the thing is it was never real democracy. And I
think a lot of people in the western countries thought
that it was democracy when all Sensi took over. A
song Suchi came to prominence during a nineteen eighty eight
uprising against the military, which ended in bloodshed in the
streets of Yang Gone, and she'd been a long time
democratic activist. As Andy noted, westerners celebrated her election as

(08:51):
the first democratic head of state for Myanmar. She even
won a Nobel prize. But the agreement her party had
made with the military gave the generals significant permanent control
over the government. But I think most of the people
in the country knew it wasn't real democracy because you know,
the military always had twenty five seats in the parliament,

(09:12):
right like they were always they were in charge of electricity,
entered all these all these big things that weapons army,
like the military itself, they are in charge of all
these things, and they make it very clear. And even
with a Nobel Prize on song SUCHI did not fight
to stop the top Mada from pursuing their decades long
wars against the ethnic armed organizations in the Hills, nor

(09:34):
did she act to stop their ethnic cleansing of the
Rohinga people. In fact, she and others in her party
didn't even call them Rohinga. They called them Bengali and
insisted they were illegally residing in Myanmar, despite mountains of
evidence documenting a group by that name living in what
is now the Rocking State. I think most Americans and
Westerners in general can empathize with the feeling of electing

(09:55):
someone who promises change and then getting very little of
what you'd expected. I think all Sensuchi used to be
this hope that that was like the opposition against the military.
But I think when she got powered, um she couldn't
do all the things that she promised to do or
like you know, we we looked at her before, we

(10:18):
looked at her as something, you know, something hope for everyone,
for you know, for all the athnic groups and for
everyone in the country. But then when she became empowered,
she mainly focused all these changes for the Bama people, Well,
you know, the more the mainland people, like the military

(10:38):
was still fucking killing people and killing ethnic groups, they
did they do something, you know, like, so then for
the athnic groups, what's the difference? And so while Andy
was hopeful that his country might take a better path,
he was not exactly convinced that things were going to
get better. Conflict within his family eventually pushed him to
make the decision to leave. My dad was very abusive.

(11:00):
He would be the ship out of my mom every
day like that. It was fine, Like it was fine
when when we were younger, we couldn't do anything, you know,
we just kind of watched it, right, But the older
we got, the more we involved, the more we try
to stop it. Um. But then we were fight with
him too, you know, and that so at some point
it became too much, and so I left my home,

(11:20):
I think in two just by myself. And I was like,
I've been to Massa, I will go back here, you know.
So Andy lived across the border on his own for
more than five years. He'd fallen in love, gotten a
home of his own, and set himself up in the
sort of odd jobs you can do without papers or
legal residency. And that's where things were for him. When
the TOPMA dog carried out their coup in early two

(11:43):
thousand February one, I was a mess. I was here
and yeah, in the morning, I woke up, called me
my girlfriend and as she said, the military just did
a coup in your country, you should call your family.
The military claimed voter fraud and used that is the
pretext to stay in power. It's a situation that should
be unsettlingly familiar to most of our audience. For a

(12:06):
while safe in Masat, Andy watched it in horror as
he texted with friends and family across the border. The
arrest alsen Zugi and all the big leaders right at
the top. So we were kind of like, okay, is
someone going to tell us what to do? And especially
for us, we didn't have any experiences. We didn't know
anything about any of this that I'm talking about right now.

(12:26):
I didn't have any knowledge of that. But yeah, so
after I think six day the most, you cut off
the internet, like for like two days, and I've lost
all contact with everyone inside my family, my friends, And
that's the night I started planning it, Like I started
thinking a funk, I should go back and like, and
I saw the protest photos from yeng On. They looked amazing, right,

(12:47):
and I'm like, I'm a photographer. I should be there
and you know, document that. While Andy was staring at

(13:08):
the protest photo it's from the capital of Myanmar, napid Or,
as well as Meaty and the largest city, Yangon, wondering
if you should take his camera and document yet another
rising for democracy in his home country. A young woman
named a Mirror was in the thick of those protests
in Yangon when the coup started. A Mirror, aged seventeen,

(13:28):
had just finished high school. She was looking forward to
university and more oppressingly, looking forward to playing footsore with
her friends. She liked to spend a day's crafting, he says,
making little things to gift or to keep, like every
other day. When she woke up, she spent ten minutes
in medication before facing the world on the first of February.

(13:49):
An Sam Suki was her hero, she says in our interview.
Her boyfriend translated for her. We'll get to their story later,
but when the coup began, they lived a world apart.
They joined the whole generation and feeling in rage, but
Tapma door trying to rip the freedom their parents had
fought for from them. A mirror took her rage into
the street. Someone gave her a bullhorn because of her wife,

(14:12):
and then she became the leader, you know with the bullhorn. Yeah,
what kind of stuff would you say to the boat
through the bullhorn? Hello, you don't want a you doble?

(14:33):
Oh she's saying, uh, this is and fell and then
uh this is what? Oh that the erastian that Asansoti
is a and fell not fair? Okay, okay, yeah. And
then and then she believed that, uh, she believed in

(14:54):
what the san sugi said, like everything is paused of
all and we haven't do anything. We haven't studied yet,
and then but when we studied and then we can
finish it. It's so everything is possible. So so that's
what she believe in. So she she went on the

(15:16):
road and then she put us across the city from
a mirror. On co Dayak's girlfriend woke him up with
the news that the government they had voted for had
been arrested. We're calling him Yak here because that's his name.
In the revolution, everyone has one a mirror is his baby,
because she's so young yet so fierce. Yeah, if you're wondering,

(15:37):
means monkey. These revolutionaries who have risked life and limb
for each other didn't know the legal names of the
people they call their revolution family because it's safer that way.
And we don't either. Miall could spend the night. Well,
I'll let you hear Harry phrase. Actually I would, just
like I was tailing with my scared for her, you know, tail,

(15:58):
and we were you know, Neflist and Chay like one
in January. Neflist and I think it's a Sunday. I
think it's Sunday. Nele and Chay we will sleep together.
If you didn't catch that, there were Netflix and Chilling,
you know. I was literally no wake up by any
Louder show. I was so sleep but but at the

(16:21):
four a m. There's a phone rains and I suddenly
wake up. That's phone rain from my girlfriend, her anti
call call Call call hat and she said there's a
cool defeat. Oh and she wake up. She told me
there's a cool and didn't you know, I don't believe it.
I believe it. I didn't believe it. So other time

(16:43):
I chaed the social media, Oh ship, may I at
actually do this. I'm so angry and I'm so angry,
you know. I was gold down downstairs and I told
to my family, there's a cool everyone's angry, and I
dot time the internet they cut off the next revolutionary
we're going to mean it's a fellow. Will call doctor

(17:05):
Wonder because that's his revolution name. When the coup started,
he was just waking up after a twenty four hour
shift at the hospital and Yangon where he worked. Doctors
were some of the earliest and most visible dissidents in
the protest. Their rarity and therefore their relative value to
the regime made them a potent symbol of the pro
democracy movement, but, as doctor Wondered me clear, many older

(17:28):
medical professionals not at all certain that resistance was a
right move here at the morning I saw the news
that bad, really really bad news for us. It was
how would I say that? Ah, name bro you know, yeah,
name broke our future. Doctors were some of the earliest,

(17:51):
most visible dissidents in the pro democracy protests. Their rarity
and relative value to the regime made them a potent
symbol of the pro democa movement, but as doctor Wonder
made clear many older medical professionals were not at all
certain that resistance was a right move on that money,
we go back to our h I also said, our

(18:15):
hospital we are end died, you know, or professors or concerts.
They not much interest about it because they told us, um,
you know, whoever rules our campee, this is not our business.
This is one of our seniors. Doctors from our society

(18:39):
for our department pool us like that. But we reply him, no,
it should be the last time. You didn't catch that.
He said, it should be the last time, the last
time kids had to die in the streets. They didn't
want another generation to have to go through the same thing.
So they got together a proposal, a sort of manifesto

(19:01):
for peaceful, non violent resistance, and they submitted it to
their seniors. We negotiated with our ship you know, young resident,
our society, and we discussed about that and we plan
to start with our one of our prior movement before
see the disagreement. We have got a red ribon movement

(19:23):
because because we want to try peacefully on the media. Okay,
we started like that and then uh, some of our
seniors from our society, they were from mentally hospitted. Okay,
they accept our propos yes, because our generation has already

(19:47):
passed that difficulties before, but not your generation shouldn't accept that.
Three days before the cue, t K got off a
plane in San Francisco. He's from in Ma, but he
lives in the Bay Area. Now, before you ask, he
says that the Burmese restaurant there is not as good
as stuff back home. It's only three days three days before,

(20:12):
three days before I went back to the to the
United States, and I wish i'mould staying a younger and
a doing the revolution, and I participate in a everywhere
that I can, but that I couldn't do from the
from the loung distance, you know. So, so that's all
I can do for now. T K had just been

(20:34):
in Myanmar. He had connections to many people on the
ground there. His friends were there, his family were there.
When the government cut off internet access, he remained able
to get good international reporting on the situation in his
home country. Slowly he found ways to communicate with his
friends and the growing core of the protesters taking to

(20:55):
the streets. I was a keyboard fighter. I have no
idea about the politics. I have no idea about the
military stuff. This is a single most common sentiment we've
heard across all the revolution we've met. None of them
considered themselves to be very political prior to the coupe.

(21:15):
They started marching in the street because the military coup
was obviously bad, but they stayed there because the violence
dished out by the state was so horrific. Safe at
the house in Maso, we talked to the boys and
his brothers and cousins, all of whom were living in
napid Or. When the coup kicked off. It didn't take
him long to try and join them. Then I went in.
I went to Mality, which just across the border in

(21:37):
your marside Um, and I was there for a week,
and it was it was something else, like I've never
been to protest now, I've never been involved in any
of this thing, and I never thought I would be,
you know, like I I don't know. I always thought
like I wasn't going to be a part of it.
But when I went there the first day, I write

(21:57):
there were two d thousand people on the street protest stay.
And then it's like and this big group of people
walk in streets after street and everyone coming out of
their house and we have this symbol like three fingers
from Hangar game. I think, um, yeah, so that's like
our symbol for democracy now, our our our movement now.

(22:18):
And everyone come out of their house doing that and
you know, like giving us water, food, everything. It was beautiful,
like it was. It was something else. It was something else.
And then from that day I was like hook. I
was like, Okay, this is what I'm gonna do. Now.
I'm gonna be a photographer and I'm gonna in this,
you know, and I'm gonna I'm gonna take photo of
these people and their stories and I'm going to share it.

(22:41):
And that's that's my part. That's my rule. Soon he
found friends among the protesters. Within a few days, he
was feeling a feeling that so many people felt in
It's a feeling you felt if you've ever been in
the thick of a crowd of people filled with right
to so anger and facing down overwhelmed police or soldiers.
It's a sensation I can't really described you if you

(23:02):
haven't experienced it, but I can say that there's no
time that I've ever felt more empowered than the times
I've been crush shoulders shoulder with strangers, toe to toe
with state violence, and watch cops break and retreat. It's incredible.
It's addictive, and if I'm honest, it's probably why Robert
and I booked a flight to visit a stranger. I've
been dem ng on the grand Um. I think after

(23:23):
three days, I met this group of people, young people,
like students trying to be lawyers and stuff, and I
figured out that they were the ones trying to organize
these big protests like two want people, a hundred thousand people.
They were the ones that's making that happen. So I
started kind of following them, trying to get close because
I wanted to get stories from them. Um. And then

(23:46):
they became they and they realized what I've been doing,
They've been watching like and so they were like very welcome,
and they took me to this hide out that they
go to and then we will have discussions and meetings
about what we should do the next day. Da da
da da um. But then it's because it's a small town. Right. Slowly,
I think police and military started realizing that we are

(24:07):
that group too. Oh yeah, dem grazy died word erma.

(24:32):
So by now you're probably wondering what that cover of
dust in the window. It's a song the boys learned
when we first took to the streets, but it tells
the story of a previous revelation, one that didn't succeed. Yeah,
can you tell us what that songs about, like you

(24:54):
know what the lyrics are and stuff and anything. Yeah,
we can try. I heard the word democracy in there.
I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's like all the lives that
were lost in fighting for Yeah, the people use it
for the Spring Revolution as well as Yeah, because tell

(25:16):
the world and that's the name of the song, Tell
the World is cooled, Yeah, till the world. So basically
the song is like, yeah, they sang it in the
back in the eight eight and then it's like we
used it quite a lot when when we were in
the protest too. Um yeah, and the laris are we'll

(25:38):
keep fighting until the end of the world for the
sake of history and revolution in our blood and of
the fallen heroes who fought for the democracy. Um oh,
our DearS heroes. This is the lend of like heroes,
like yeah and yeah it goes on and then yeah,

(26:01):
basically saying like something like the history went wrong along
the way, but we have to fix it. Yeah, like
the country has shut his blood and how could they
commit such violence to its own people, you know? Um? Yeah,
and yeah, like they say, like the blood on the

(26:21):
rose and the streets are not dried yet. Um. And
for the sake of these people will die for the democracy,
for fighting for democracy, for the sake of them, we
have to keep part it basically. Yeah. Now in their exile,
they keep singing it to remember the first day of

(26:42):
the revolution, when the fights are in the street, not
the jungle, before they lost so many of their comrades.
And then that was the night protest in front of
the police station. Candles. Oh this is they're singing the song. Yeah,

(27:07):
I got very very heated. The protests our friends were
just talking about occurred in reality, but the song popped
up all across the country. When you played it and
you you will sing it? Yeah, there they and yeah
it was in one guitar. It was a whole band,
Like will you have like protesters sitting down and then

(27:28):
there's a group of people who are playing this and
repeatedly there are a bunch of songs that will play
and then there's like words that we would say, and yeah,
thanks so giving myself. Yeah, I beam down and you'll
see from the footage, Yeah, it's yeah. How does it

(27:50):
make you feel seeing game now? It's scary? You know.
It's like this song is very real. So like at first,
um um, we didn't want to play the song. It's
too dark. It's too um it's too intense, right yeah,
like yeah, but it's not like the lives are they're

(28:14):
like you can see it, you know. It's like because
we're don't. We've been through it too, so it's very intense.
And yeah, I think the first time I heard it,
like I heard the song, I remember that we are
few and of yeah, I still have it, like every
time we're saying it now, this is not one of
the songs that we usually say. It's not a fun song. Yeah,

(28:47):
oh no, video must the more crazy Died word. On

(29:11):
the next episode, which you'll be able to download tomorrow,
we'll talk about how the Hunter began to clamp down
on the protests. Now the protesters decided this struggle was
too important to abandon and decided to fight back. Hi everyone,

(29:32):
it's James here. I just wanted to note that lots
of the words in the script are Burmese or Karen
or tie, and we've made every effort to make sure
that we pronounce them correctly. But we're sure we've obviously
made some mistakes along the way. That's not out of
a lack of respect or out of a lack of
rerecording on my part. That we did want to note
that where we've made a mistake, we're very sorry for

(29:53):
doing so. It could happen here as a production of
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Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening