It Could Happen Here Weekly 59

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. All dem crazy died word.

(00:43):
Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest police violence.
They were met with police violence on a massive scale. Shootings,
vehicle attacks, 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

(01:05):
to crack down violently on demonstrations. Milly claims that Trump
told him to have his soldiers cracked skulls, beat the
funk out of 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

(01:28):
in many cases their behavior was tame compared to the
militarized police who were reliably shot and beat protesters. For
millions of Americans, twenty 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

(01:49):
millions of Americans who'd take into the streets mostly went
back to their lives. Some were satisfied justice had been done,
others were furious to 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 twenty twenty one,
the military of Myanmar, known as the Totmadau, overthrew the

(02:11):
elected government in a coup. Hundreds of thousands of citizens,
most of them young, gin zy and millennial men and women,
took to the streets. Police responded with tear gas, water cannons,
and eventually bullets. The international community expressed its horror at
the brutality of the Totmadau, but that's all they did.
Over the course of several months, the military pushed protesters,

(02:33):
mostly out of the cities and a protest movement against
the military coup turned into a civil war. Now those
same protesters, mostly kids who wanted nothing more than a
normal life, have become revolutionaries. With home made guns, three
D printed rockets, and stolen rifles. They battled the Totmadau.
Some of them fight in the jungles, some of them

(02:53):
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 my Sought, Thailand, a small city
on the border of me An Mar. The boys singing
and playing music around us range an age from seventeen
to twenty two. Their existence in Thailand is a crime.

(03:15):
If they are caught here, they'll be forced to cross
the border into my an Mar, whose government executed their
friends and sold the organs for profit. But tonight they're
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, aged two and head of

(03:38):
the family. For his Instagram page, that's only real name,
but for obvious reasons, we can't identify him. We first
met when I sent him at 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

(03:59):
talking on the phone own 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 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.

(04:22):
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,
we sat behind a barn an 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,

(04:42):
and the next day I work up with a headache
and a blurry photo of me, Robert and Andy engaged
in a pose which was half hug and half mutual
support structure. We walked home and according to my phone,
at some point we took photos of a puppy and
and hopefully unrelated incident. At some point I started leading.
It was immediately obvious that Andy needed the chance to

(05:04):
blow off some steam over the last year and change,
he is chronicled every stage of the coup in its aftermath.
In early videos we see joyous protests, moments of resistance,
and splendor in the streets of cities like me Awiti.
Later we see violence, death, and guerrilla warfare. And he
didn't have what you would call an easy childhood, thanks

(05:26):
in part to me and mas long history of revolutions
being crushed by the army. People there, like people everywhere,
want to be free and determine their own futures, 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 thou so Um.
When I was seven seven, there was a revolution. It's

(05:49):
called Staffron revolution. It wasn't it wasn't like this you know,
it wasn't like what happened now, but like there were
a lot of people that were involved in it, a
lot of people that killed. A lot of people left
Myanmar and came to the refugee counts in here, and
we were one of the families that came to the
refugee counts. Um And Andy's mother is Buma, the dominant

(06:12):
ethnic group in Myanmar due to their decades long control
of the military and government. His 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.

(06:36):
Andy primarily identifies as and 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

(06:58):
you say, like economic refugees. You know, we go because
not because our village has been burned down and our
family has been 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, but
then for these current people, like this place is the
only place that they could exist at that moment, right

(07:18):
and probably still now too. So yeah, so they said that,
but that that education wasn't very good there. There's 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,

(07:39):
no one is coming there to fix that. So they
had a lot of anger, They had a 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 Nama, at least, you know, if you do
like the thing that people do, maybe you'll get somewhere. Yeah,
in the future. Here there's no future. So she said,

(08:00):
so we went back. Um, I was stay in your
mar for like four years, Andy had 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 mar attended to cartwheel between
attempts at democracy and military dictatorship. So when the world
media celebrated their first democratic elections in twenty five years,

(08:22):
Andy was not particularly excited. Yeah, so, 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 intensity take over took over,
there were some changes, like the phones got cheaper, the

(08:43):
internet got cheaper, and if you look back then you
can see big, big changes. But 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 Sensorgi took over. On Song Suchi came to
prominence during a nineteen eighty eight uprising against the military,

(09:05):
which ended in bloodshed in the streets of Yangon, and
she'd been a long time democratic activist. As Andy noted,
westerners celebrated her election as 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 general significant permanent control over the government. But I
think most of the people in the country knew it

(09:27):
wasn't real democracy because you know, the military always had
twenty five seats in the parliament, 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

(09:47):
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 did she act to
stop their ethnic cleansing of the Rohinga people. In act,
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

(10:10):
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 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

(10:33):
that she promised to do or like you know, we
we looked at her before, we looked at her as something,
you know, something hope for everyone for you know, for
all the ethnic groups and for everyone in the country.
But then when she became empowered, she mainly focus all
these changes for the Bama people. Well, you know, the

(10:57):
more the mainland people, like the military, Tree was still
fucking killing people and killing athnic 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

(11:19):
to leave. My dad was very abusive. 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,

(11:39):
and so I left my home I think in two six,
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 with his own
and set himself up in the sort of odd jobs
you can do without papers or legal residency, and that's

(12:00):
where things were for him. When the Topmadu carried out
their coup in early two thousand one, February one, I
was a mess. D 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 as the pretext to stay

(12:23):
in power. It's a situation that should be unsettlingly familiar
to most of our audience. For a while, Safe and
Masat Andy watched it in horror as he texted with
friends and family across the border. The arrest alsen Sugi
in 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

(12:47):
of this that I'm talking about right now, I didn't
have any knowledge of that. But yeah, So after I
think six day, the military 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 playing it, like, I started thinking, funk, I
should go back and like and I saw the protest

(13:07):
photos from yeng On. They looked amazing, right, and I'm like,
I'm a photographer. I should be there and you know,
document that. While Andy was staring at the protest photo
it's from the capital of Myanmar, napid Or, as well
as Meality and the largest city, Yang Gone wondering if
you should take his camera and document yet another rising
for democracy in his home country. A young woman named

(13:28):
a Mirror was in the thick of those protests and
yeng Gone when the coup started. A Mirror, aged seventeen,
had just finished high school. She was looking forward to
university and more oppressingly, looking forward to playing footsore with
their friends. She'd like to spend a day's crafting. She says,
making little things to gift or to keep, like every

(13:50):
other day. When she woke up, she spent ten minutes
in medication before facing the world on the first of February.
Long Sam Suki was her hero, she says. In our view,
her boyfriend translated for her. We'll get to their story later.
But when the Cube began, they lived a world apart.
They joined the whole generation in feeling in rage. But

(14:10):
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,
and then she became the leader, you know with the bullhorn. Yeah,
what kind of stuff would you say to the ball
through the bullhorn? Helloa, you don't want you do? Oh,

(14:41):
she's saying, uh, this is and fell and then uh
this is what? Oh that the erastian that ar Sansoti
is a and fell not fair? Okay okay, yeah. And
then and then she believed that, uh, she believed in

(15:01):
what the sense she said, like everything is possible, and
we haven't do anything, we haven't studied yet, and then
but when we study it, and then we can finish it.
So everything is possible. So so that's what she believed in.
So she she went on the road and then she

(15:24):
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, means monkey.

(15:46):
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 Phraset. Actually, I was just like I
was chilling with my scare friend, you know, our tailing
and we were you know, you know, Neflis and Chay

(16:09):
like one in January Neflist and I think it's a Sunday.
I think it's Sunday. Nele and Chay we sleep together.
If you didn't catch that they were Netflix and chilling,
you know, I was literally no wake up but any
louder show. I was so sleep but but at the
four a m. There's a phone rains and I suddenly

(16:31):
wake up. That's phone ring from my carel friend. How
Angie called ca call call hat and she said there's
a cool defeat. Oh and she wake up and she
told me there's a cool And then you know, I
don't believe it. I believe it. I didn't believe it.
So other time I chaed the social media. Oh ship,

(16:53):
may I'll actually do this. I'm so angry and I'm
so angry, you know. I was boord the doll down
there and told to my family, there's a good of
the everyone's angry at those things that the internet they
cut off. The next revolutionary were going to mean, it's
a fellow. Will call doctor Wonder because that's his revolution name.

(17:15):
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 oppotent symbol
of the pro democracy movement. But as doctor Wondered me clear,
many older medical professionals and not at all certain that

(17:37):
resistance was the right move here at the morning, I
saw the news that bad really really bad news for us.
How could I say that? Ah name bro you know, yeah,
Dad broke our future. Doctors were some of the earliest

(17:58):
most visible dissidents the pro democracy protests. Their rarity and
relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol
of the pro democracy 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

(18:18):
back to our h I also said our hospital we
are send that you know or professors or concerntors did
not much interest about that be whilst they told us, um,
you know whoever rules our campee, this is not our business.

(18:42):
This is one of our seniors doctors from our society
for our department pool us like that. But we reply him, no,
this 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,

(19:05):
so they got together a proposal, a sort of manifesto
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

(19:27):
say that disagreement. We have got a rep one movement
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 hospital. Okay,

(19:48):
they accept our propos yes, because our generation has already
passed that difficulties before, but not your generation shouldn't accept that.
Three days before the queue, t K got off a
plane in San Francisco. He's from Myanmar, but he lives
in the Bay Area. Now before you ask, he says

(20:12):
that the Burmese restaurant there is not as good as
stuff back home. It's only three days three days before,
three days before I went back to the to the
United States, and I wish I'm would stay in a
young ol and a doing the revolution and I participate
in a everywhere that I can, but that I couldn't

(20:33):
do from the from the loud distance, you know. So
so that's all I can do for now. T K
had just been in Mianma. 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

(20:54):
situation in his home country. Slowly he found ways to
communicate with his friends and a growing core of the
protesters taking to 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

(21:14):
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. 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

(21:36):
living in Napidor. When the cook kicked off, it didn't
take him long to try and join them. Then I
went in. I went to Maality, which is across the
border in ther 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

(21:57):
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 there were two thousand people on the street protesting.
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

(22:22):
our symbol for democracy now, our our our movement now.
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,

(22:43):
you know, and I'm gonna I'm gonna take photo of
these people and their stories and I'm going to share
it 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 eat you felt. If you've ever been
in the thick of a crowd of people filled with

(23:03):
righteous anger and facing down overwhelmed police or soldiers, it's
a sensation. I can't really described you you 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 crushed
shoulders shoulder with strangers, toe to toe with state violence,
and watch cops break and retreat. It's incredible. It's addictive,

(23:23):
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 three days,
I met this group of people, young people, like students
trying to be lawyers and so, and I figured out
that they were the ones trying to organize these big protests,
like two people, a hundred thousand people. They were the

(23:45):
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 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 um.

(24:07):
But then it's because it's a small town. Right. Slowly,
I think police and military started realizing that we are
that group too young. Oh, Demo crazy died word very much.

(24:35):
Oh 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.

(24:59):
Can you tell us with that? Songs about like you
know what the lyrics are and stuff and everything. Yeah,
we can try. I heard the word democracy in there.
I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's like all that were lost
in fighting for democracy. Yeah. The people use it for
the Spring Revolution as well as because tell the World,

(25:24):
and that's the name of the song. Tell the World
is cool, Yeah, I till the world. So basically the
song is like, yeah, they sang it in the back
in the AD eight and then it's like we used
it quite a lot when we were in the protest too. Um. Yeah,
the laris are We'll keep fighting until the end of

(25:47):
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. M hmm. Yeah, and yeah it
goes on and then m yeah, basically saying like something

(26:10):
like the history went wrong along the way, but we
have to fix it. Yeah, like the country has shuttis
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 rose and the streets are

(26:31):
not dried yet. Um. And for the sake of these
people who have die for the democracy, for fighting for democracy,
for the sake of them, we have to keep fighting basically. Yeah.
Now in their exile, they keep singing it to remember
the first day of the revolution, when the fights are

(26:52):
in the street, not the jungle, before they lost so
many of their comrades. And then that was a night
protest in front of the police. Issue candy. Oh, this
is they're singing the song that the sing Yeah, I

(27:14):
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 young
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 there's

(27:36):
a group of people who are playing this and repeatedly
there are a bunch of songs that will play. And
then there was like words that we would say and yeah,
so getting myself, yeah, being down and you'll see from
the footage, Oh yeah it's yeah. Yeah, how does it

(27:58):
make you feel seeing the 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,

(28:19):
but it's not like the levers are they're like you
can see it, you know. It's like because we've 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 were few and
of yeah, I still have it like every time we're
saying it now. This is not one of the songs

(28:40):
that we usually say. It's not a fun song. Yeah,
bo video must Room Wait the more crazy died word.

(29:18):
On 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. Oh

(29:54):
Like many people in my amber, the boys weren't usually
political before the protest, but what they saw in the
street to change them. This wasn't about the minor disagreement
between two parties. It was about fighting for the right
to live their lives without a boot. On their next election,
had delivered victory to Asan Suki's National League for Democracy

(30:14):
and delivered a resounding vote of no confidence in the
political arm of the top of the door, the nation's military.
It's worth noting here that yes, we are compressing some
complex things. The elections weren't perfect, and people in areas
that were largely non Berman tend not to support the NLD.
The NLD had failed to prevent a genocide, but in
the country that was well accustomed to harsh military rule,

(30:37):
there remained a better option than a military which saw
ruling is its right and it's sold just a separate
from the citizens. So when the military lost a record
number of seats. Everyone knew what would happen next, the
same thing that happened in the same thing that always
happened when the people came a little too close to
taking power from their military. So that happened on the

(30:58):
very first one and the first few days we didn't
know what to do. We I mean we we knew
the military was going to make it coop because one
the analogy won the election. That's why. That's how it started,
right and then and the military saying that they you know,
they cheated, they like, I don't know how to say,

(31:19):
they like funked up the votes, and you know, they
make themselves win. It wasn't true. I mean, the military,
what's not gonna win at all? Like it was because,
like I said, there were changes. You know, people saw
those changes, and and people were saying, yes, if she
had one more you know, like four more years, qight
more years, she could make a real difference. Those first

(31:40):
few days of protest, everyone says felt hopeful, just like
our protagonists and Zor who he met in the previous episode,
thousands of young people ran into the streets and found
solidarity in a simple politics to fuck that guy. There
were so many people man insane, so in reality there
was I think two hundred thousand people that day. The

(32:02):
marches got bigger every day and it seemed like nothing
could stop them. Briefly, Western news organizations public stories and
everyone hoped that the U N or the U S
or EU would show up and the Top Meadow will
be dealt with once and for all. Yeah, I was
trying to film, but then one of the guy pointed

(32:23):
a gun at me and I was like, but none
of that happened. The stories stopped. The West never sent
a single bullet or soldier, and the Top Meda deployed thousands.
Even after a year. All the boys remember the first
time they saw the force of the state turned against them.
Even before he got out of the border town of Milwadi,
and he saw the Top Medau begin to fight back

(32:44):
against the movement that had grown up to oppose them.
It's a story we heard from everyone we spoke to.
Once they began organizing, the cops started trying to infiltrate
their groups. I think police and military started realizing that
we are that group too, so then they started trying
to like tracked down. So there was one night where
two of the guys almost got arrested and then they

(33:04):
ran away and then we're like, okay, they were kind
of following us. Yeah yeah, And so after a week, Um,
the same thing happened. I was living because I wasn't
from yality. They didn't know I was just a new face,
so they didn't really know where I lived or you know,
and I always like take like two or three taxi
just to get to where I was there. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(33:27):
but the same place or you like switching. No, that
was the same place, but it was out of town.
Three of his friends got arrested. They're still in jail.
Actually in jail is the best case scenario because the
top medal make a habit of executing captured activists. The
stakes were life and death at every moment, and covering
the movement on a daily basis took its toll on
Andy and his brothers too. So my younger brother, Um,

(33:51):
they were in the capital city and that the first
time the military killed someone, they were there, they were
in the same protest, so they saw the whole thing,
and you know, they were traumatized. And so I thought
at the second time, I went back and I thought, well,
you know, like it's better to bring them all together
with me, like in the same place that we do

(34:12):
it together than all of us spread out everywhere, you know.
And like I said, my family's military on the military side,
so they didn't like that my brothers were going out
to protest. So that I was like, Okay, I'm gonna
bring you guys, um, and yeah, so we did all that.
We did the young protests together, six of us. They
came face to face with the potential cost of their

(34:34):
struggle and they were in neapedal when that happened. They
and it's it's military city, so it's very heavily controlled
by the military. And the first time they went out
to the protest um, the military shoot people. And he was, yeah,
there was like these trucks with the water penants. So

(34:56):
he got here by one and like he he wasn't
feeling well, so they took him to the angulands. But
then once he got in there, there was a guy
without his eyes because they shot like broad bullets into him. Um,
he was When Andy says Napierda is a military city,

(35:17):
he isn't just saying it's a city like Colleen, Texas
or San Diego Napioda is a city created out of
nothing starting in two thousand two to be a capital
for Myanmar. If you've seen it at all, it's probably
in a TV show that mocks the totalitarian excess of
building seven lane motorways in a city that was until
recently only populated by the people building it. Top Gear

(35:39):
played car football on the empty freeways, and the TV
show Dark Tourists also featured the city. Today, it is
a real city with a real population, but everything about
it was designed to reinforce authority. And yet the boys
and thousands of others took to the streets here, streets
built to reinforce the power of the people they were
fighting to demand that the military listened to them. Andy

(36:01):
shows us a picture of the man with his eyes
shot out. It looks how you think it would, and
it is worth noting that shooting people's eyes out is
a time honored international policing tactic. US cops shot more
than a hundred and fifteen people in the face with
less lethal munitions, thirty suffered permanent damage to their eyes.
But in Myanmar everything escalated several levels higher than that.

(36:23):
Shooting out eyes wasn't radical violence. For the Totmadal, they
treated it more like stretching before a run. In one protest,
the boys saw some drunk people tossing water bottles at
the police. The police responded with live gunfire from the
police can fall. The people's are turned to the side

(36:44):
and the retreat. Yeah, yeah, very intense situation. Peoples are running.
They also some guys during rocks back to the police.
That's when the police shooting. Andy translated the next part
for us. He so he was in the protest and

(37:09):
then they started shooting, and he ran away and got
a mail. But he was not in his neighborhood or
in his area of the city. He was somewhere else.
Um So when they started running, he didn't have anywhere
to go. And then someone um like accepted him at
the house. They say, coming, coming, and he hid and yeah,

(37:38):
so yeah, he hid in that house for like two
hours until the shooting stopped. It wasn't until they got
home that they realized the police had killed someone. In
the early days of what became the revolution, people formed
tight bonds and made radical commitments in the form of
legal activity. Well, the top of the door was still
scrambling to counter the counter coup. Everyone felt the clamp
down bite at a different time. It longer than average

(38:00):
for the cops to find the mirror and her carter
of revolutionaries, but eventually that day came. It came, and
she and her friends were gathered in a T shirt
preparing for an action. At that time on that day,
they are trying to protects in a sandal provenience. Uh

(38:22):
so before the protests that they catering the people at
the T shop. Uh. They sitting in the table with
with her teams about including her five people, but she
had to go and give the banner to the other groups.

(38:43):
So she's leaving just about like this match. And then
then the soldiers came into the tea shop and then
arrested her teammates. She's lucky to escape it, yeah, really narrowed,
you know. Yeah, so did she could leave immediately? Yeah? Yeah,

(39:06):
So that's how she came here because her teammates know
where she left, her house and everything. So she has
no choice to stay in the Younger, but that she
stay organizing her teams to the protests in the Younger

(39:26):
from here? From here? What her parents think when she
had to leave, So her parents told her the survival.
It's the first so she can do whatever she wants
and then but she have to be on her own. Okay,

(39:48):
well yeah, and then they don't they agree, you know,
like if she wants to leave, just leave. If she
stay want to do the you know, uh, protesting or
whatever she wants, and they're not saying no to her,
but they're not supporting. They just sort of thing she's

(40:10):
on her own. Yeah, she's on her own. That's that's
how last night I told you guys that she lost
her inheritance. Uh, like you know, she had to give
up on everything. Well, every in San Francisco. T K
could see what was happening through his scouts on the
ground and soldiers post on Facebook. He started to amass

(40:32):
a huge amount of intel. He also knew where the
underground groups and obedience movement centers were in the city's
and when he saw the cops of the military coming
for them, he was able to give them their heads up.
So whenever we we have like you know, information about
from the you know, some cd M soldiers, some CIDIUM police,

(40:55):
and then they gave him the informations had so we
got to inform mentions. So like okay, those guys are
going to the you know, let's say, okay, this place
and within one hour so from that place wherever living
the underground kings move out to get out. Yeah, get out. Yeah.

(41:17):
So so so that kind of things are with with that,
we save a lot of people. And then we got
arrested people too, But we also saved people. Everyone we

(41:37):
spoke to told us the same story. They went into
the street thinking that if they made enough noise, the
world would listen, and that the US or the EU
or the u N would defend democracy and invoked their
responsibility to protect innocent people being gunned down in the street.
To quote from the online publication The Diplomat, endorsed by
all Member States of the United Dations in two thousand five,

(41:59):
are two advances a potentially revolutionary idea that state sovereignty
entails a responsibility for government to protect its population from
massive trustee crimes and human rights violations. When a nation
fails to exercise this responsibility, our two P grant the
international community the legal warrant to intervene. The doctrine authorizes
the use for a range of coercive tools, with military

(42:20):
intervention as a last resort. People in Myanma thought that
if they were peaceful, civil and respectable, the government of
the world would do the right thing. The government of
the world, however, didn't give a fuck. But yeah, so
the protests are very very peaceful, you know. It's it's
when you go into the protest, it's very peaceful, very organized,
very um it's they try to make it look so clean,

(42:45):
so nice because I guess you know, no, it was
at the beginning they were trying to get attention from
the international community, and they were hoping that someone will
come in and say, you know, take down the military
and put our government back. Yeah, a lot of people die,
just like there was this saying like to you, and

(43:05):
you know, people were saying how many like how many
dead people do you need for you to take action? Right?
And there are people saying I will if you need
one more, I'll be that person. I'll just sucking die.
I'll just get killed by the military so that you
will come in and fix it and change the situation
in the country. Right. A Mirror felt the same. She
even organized the protest five people displaying the map of

(43:28):
the whole country on the river and you ain't going
She called it a suicide mission, but she thought it
would send a visible signal to the world and it
was worth risking her life to make the statement. At
the time, she she she didn't know anything about the politics,

(43:49):
so she believed in our TWOPI because people are protesting peacefully,
but the government take the action. So other countries are
gonna wait in and see and then they're gonna take
the actions about that. That's what she believed in. And
then she she decided to go protesting Peacefolly Theater And Okay,

(44:12):
did she think that other countries, United States, whatever, we're
gonna come in and intervene. Yeah, yeah, that that that's
what she thought, Like, you know, I want the wall seal,
the government take the actions and the convernment killing people
and if they if the war knows, and then we
can get a hab from the front. The other countries

(44:34):
where they did find support within other countries in Asia,
fighting games dictatorship, they formed the so called nulk Ti Alliance.
Drough on the example of Hong Kong to learn how
to stay in the streets when the government doesn't want
you there. But then when it happens in our country,
it's like, oh fuck, where does it happen before. And
then we went back straight with Hong Kong and there
was it's not just us, like, there were so much

(44:56):
infographics and like you know, how to be in the protests,
how to do certain things. It depending on the situation. Um,
so we had a lot of information. We were yeah,
we were looking through and I think that these are
the same thing that like people in Hong Kong used,
I think, but Hong Kong didn't have sniper shooting kids
in the head or cops faring rifles blindly into crowds.
But then later on, like by the time we got

(45:18):
too young and people were sitting down, they were little protests.
What the military does is they would come in and
they would just start shooting everyone. There was no there's
no negotiation, there was no hey, guys, can you move
and then you know any any of that stuff. They
were coming and they would treat this as a battlefield.

(45:38):
And it didn't take a while, and didn't well, it
did take a while. I think it's it took about
like a month and a half for us to finally say,
fuck the peaceful protests, the international community, they're not coming.
If they would have come, they would have come a
long time ago, you know, and we started fighting back.
But when we say we fight back, it's like molt
to cut tails slingshots. Dr Wondon exactly when and how

(46:01):
police were killing people. He would spend his days charging
people who would survive from those who might not make it. Soon,
the worst nightmares of his medical team are coming true
and the police began seizing his colleagues the alleged crime
of saving lives. I remember before the military Melify police,
a military man totally totally intruded our hospital one day.

(46:26):
I think at the middle of their may. Okay, they
totally intruded our hospital because the they have hearts our
city and doctors are doing operation at that hospital because
we have no more another police like that. Roum Trauma
said that we we could give good treat man for

(46:48):
that Trauma division because we have to take a risk.
That's what we're gonna take a rest soon. One of
our concenter was arrested at and Majesty Unity because he
took he took also his race. But if he wasn't here,

(47:08):
his junior can't handle that situation. You know. You know,
so many tense hand dress injury endure patient on that day,
mostly are can't you our pasion? You know, some are
open at domen open limbs. Okay, so we have so
many prices on that not things only got worse. Yeah. Yeah.

(47:31):
There was a pregnant woman who got shot and obviously
with the kids, and she died because she accepted like
twenty protesters in her house and when they came, they
shot and she wasn't like five weeks. Oh it's it's
you can see that she was pregnant. Molty used straight

(47:55):
up real bullets, like they don't give a ship, They
don't give a ship. That the way the military control
people is fear right, So then they want people to
see that if you go against me, you'll die horribly,
and they shoot hat. We saw so many faces with holes,

(48:15):
you know, so many people with holes in their face,
and it was fucked up, and it was scary because
every time you go out, you're saying, that could be me,
that could be my brothers, that could be you know.
Very quickly the revolution organized itself, not with hierarchies, officers
or vanguard parties. The people who existed in those roles
had already been arrested or fled, so instead the revolution

(48:37):
started with people giving whatever they could to the struggle
and taking whatever they needed to get by. The revolutionaries reinterviewed.
All initially thought that the struggle would be sure, that
the world would come to their aid, but even when
it became clear that this was not the case, they
continue to fight under the logic that's better to die
than live with a bluet on your neck. They took
all the leaders from the opposition side, so there was

(49:00):
no one to tell us what to do. There was
no instructions, right, so there was like two days of Okay,
what the funk do we do? You know? And then
people started protesting, but small, like very small, and then
I think after like five days, then there was like
two d people everywhere, Like now that I remember the

(49:20):
first day we arrived, I mean, we haven't seen each
other since COVID started, so it was like rather, you know,
back again and together. And then yeah, it was quite
fun for like one night and then we're all hanging
out and trying to plan what we're gonna do the
next day. So basically we kind of planned that, like

(49:40):
each of us had a rule, and our plan was
to go out and kind of be like a media crew. Right,
So we're filming, we're writing news, we're posting on the
internet so that everywhere else people can see it. Um.
So yeah, two of us are like the camera people,
and then this too. They look out for the roads

(50:03):
and streets, like because these places we've never been, right
Danuel in these areas, So whenever we go to a protest,
we'll sit down or we'll walk around and take photos
while these twos goes around and look for the fastest escapes.
You know, if the military come in, what would be
the best way to go? Would you know? Escape? And
then him another one. They kind of look after us.

(50:24):
They look at the news to see what's happening around us,
so that if there's an post on Facebook saying, oh
there's a military truck heading towards you, we kind of
be prepared, you know. But yeah, that was yeah, so
we had a lot of energy at that time. It
was like constant. We were going out out and you

(50:48):
can see like it's always following me, like that's me
and leaving him and he's always following me everywhere I go,
so that's something happening and just grab me around. Well,
the boys and Andy were reporting. Amira found her call
on the front lines. It's almost impossible to stress how
incredible she is. Before we recorded, she casually dropped into
conversation that she also trained in knife fighting sometimes. We

(51:10):
met her at a shooting range near my soft and
blasted a few paper targets together with a twelve gage
shotgun we've been using for a bit of target practice.
When it jammed, and it always jammed, she cleared the
chamber and got it back into action with a practiced
efficiency that any formally trained soldier would have recognized. In
the revolution, it didn't take long for her to find
her way to the front lines, and she's got the

(51:31):
scars to prove it, including some from hucking a tear
gas grenade bare handed back at the cops. Others adopted
roles to Some picked up shields and took on the
police toe to toe. Other supported protesters with medical aid
and food and water. So you can see the shield
two three, four or five two Yeah, to make it
and then you can see like they have these wet

(51:55):
plus did bad too, like watch people's faces when they
are two or like um two killed the smokes with
the have what towels too, and then there's someone always
watering it like you see here. Yeah, and this is
all from the neighborhood like they provided to us. They
built barricades and even developed a system of communications for

(52:18):
when things were getting violent. This allowed folks who were
not comfortable to get away, or at least that was
the goal. So the white flag means like we have
this place, like this is our But then the black
flag means will suck you up back, like if you've
done so much that we're gonna suck you up. You know, um,

(52:38):
I have a video of it. Wanted changed to from
white to black. Their tactics improved over time. When one
group got kettled, another group would pop up nearby and
draw soldiers away. Oh yeah, sure way. And then there
was one time when one of one part of the
city was enter attacked by the military. A lot of

(53:00):
protesters were trapped in there, and so we decided to
go out. So every other part of the city came
out at nighttime to protest, so that they soldiers have
to connect. Yeah, a mirror too, came face to face
with state violence. Oh yeah, che yeah, Ballodi and d
she read thrown in and she wants she wants to

(53:23):
take the action path because they are all protesting peace
folly and at that time she wants to have a superpower.
M m yeah, maybe she does. What what did she
what did she decided to do? What wouldn't they do
at that time? And she feels like she's going until

(53:45):
the act and then she would keep moving and then
she was participate in every role that she can and
then she would do as much as she can. That's
that's what she decided to We saw that picture of
her in front of the car. It was burnie. Yeah,
we're happened there with a throwing molotov cocktails. Yeah okay,

(54:07):
so like smoke bombs and then something like that, and
then she's trying to tow them back the picture. Yeah yeah, yeah,
so she picked it out and then she told them back,
hurt your hand, Yeah you have a scar fucking well
yeah yeah. Then uh she got hit by the smoke

(54:27):
bone like a twice. And then at the time she
lost everything. She lost her bags, she lost her phones,
and someone have her to hold and took her back.
That's how she escaped. They helped you. You know who
helped you with it? A friend or just a stranger.

(54:48):
Her friends is with her and I went to to
your guess hit down, and then the other strangers had them,
and then she got hit by that your guess, and
then and then she almost faint and a black out.
Our doctor who goes by wonder face a difficult choice.

(55:09):
Returning to the hospital meant risking arrest. The military could
come in any time to arrest injured protesters, and the
doctors helping them, but not going back then letting his
comrades die. State violence increased. He decided he needed to help.
They killed so many paceful protester on that day, I

(55:29):
think around about nearly round about hand or more might
be more than that, Yes, on that day, you know,
or because we have already we have already started see
that this Orvidian movement on that on that time, because
we didn't go the hospital there that was room by

(55:53):
that generate Okay, okay, so we dear outside the hospital,
you know, we we managed temporary camp like that because
for emergency in Joel patient. At that time, I was
involved one of the term side. Yeah, because but actually
we can't do uh, some of the injury of pelet

(56:16):
that may need for emergency operations like that bullet go through, Yeah,
go to break the bombs and open wound. So but
we have to take the risk because we have to
operate that patient. We go to hospital trauma emergency department.
We did our operation. I remember that night one of

(56:39):
the patients was shot down by police and they chased,
they followed that patient. We kept that patient in our
hospital in our war We emergency or we did emergency
operation on that at that night, on that night, and

(56:59):
we imagining move him out on their not because we
can't keep him on that hospital because ah soon he
just left our hospital. The police just came and sat
for him. But it is one of our ice creams. Uh.
They just quite there again. Yeah, what is that guy?

(57:22):
T K got on telegram? Lots of people couldn't be
underground fighting, but they still wanted to be part of
the struggle. He developed good connections with people on the ground,
but first that was just him desperately try and stay informed.
But soon he realized that he was well placed to
be doing the informing. With internet access cut off and
VPN is slowing down, only someone outside the country with

(57:44):
blazing fast Bay Area WiFi could collect all the info
coming in and turn it into useful, actionable advice for
protesters on the ground at that time, we know nothing
about it. No one's no one's teaching us what to do.
So we have to do it, do it, you know,
like we we we met. We like I said, we

(58:04):
have a seventy people. So we have a meeting every day,
every night. So we're trying to you know, brainstorm me
what we're gonna do. And then so we're making we're
making the plans and then we're making like, Okay, we're
gonna get the informations from you know, everything of details
that we can get, and that that's we're going to

(58:27):
share to the people. That's what we're gonna share to
the underground teams and other people. Within a few weeks,
it become clear that a diverse range of people, tactics,
and tools are going to be needed in the fight
for freedom and Mianda, next time, we'll talk about how
that fight took shape and tell you what it's like today.

(59:00):
Sitting at a pool bar and Mason listening to covers
of Cretan songs by the house band and losing a
pool against Andy and the boys. It's hard to think
of them hold up behind a barricade, clutching molotovs, but
not so long ago. The choices the boys face were
pretty stark. Every day every time they went out from
their little apartment, they knew they might not come back.

(59:20):
But I think the most fucked up thing that we
had to plan was what if someone get shot one
of us and the other person have to go carry
um who do you go? Who gets hits? You know?
And we had to kind of like what we did
this now, but like, okay, if I get hit, you know,
two of you this, this, and this person will come

(59:42):
out and you know, do this to me because it's
it's um, I don't know. I think we were planning
because it just it's just good to have that, you know,
because if someone gets shot and if all of five
of us go run in there, there's more targets, you
know what I mean. So then like if someone would
weight last weight get shots and you know this person go,

(01:00:03):
if someone heavier get shot, this two person go something
like that. When Andy says like we did earlier, he's
talking about a small stop the bleed type course that
we had given the boys. Most journalist operating in war
zones will take at minimum a week long hostile environment
and first aid training or heath at course many of
us will take extra courses. James and I both refreshed

(01:00:24):
our wilderness first Responder certificates once we had this trip planned.
Andy and his brothers didn't have access to any of this.
They learned what they could off the internet and tried
to protect themselves as best as they were able with
gear they purchased from an air soft store. The afternoon
we spent practicing skills. Wasn't nearly enough, but until they
can travel safely more than a few miles from the border,
it was better than nothing. Their little apartment had one

(01:00:46):
way in and one way out. If the cops came,
there was no escape. They had a plan for that too. Yeah,
so our plan was literally just to burn that fucking
door down so then it would be difficult for them
to come in. Then you know, we'll do I don't know,
whatever we can with the weapon we had um, but
we weren't going to make it out, you know, And
having to plan all that with these kids, like it's

(01:01:08):
like funked up. There were times that like they wake
up by night screaming like they you know they I
think now it's better, right, It's been a year and
a half and we are like we're better at coping
with it. But at that time it was very, very scary,
so that they'd be prepared to burn their door and
the rest of their apartment down around themselves. The boys
kept a stockpile of molotovs mixed and ready by the

(01:01:30):
front door at all times. They lived in a state
of permanent readiness to commit revolutionary suicide for weeks on end.
Eventually they decided they had to flee. We should probably

(01:01:52):
talk history here for just a little bit. Me and
Mar is a new name for a very old land.
Over the centuries, it's been ruled by a series of
empires and dynasties. The Mongols took over for a while
in the twelve hundreds and thirteen hundreds, and when they
left Lower Burma had a warring states period of its own.
The modern nation of Burma didn't start to come together
until the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, and things didn't

(01:02:15):
really congeal into a state until the reign of the
last two Burmese kings, who industrialized the country and reformed
its military enough to win a series of wars against
neighboring groups like the Irakan. This is what brought them
into conflict with the British Raj right at the turn
of the nineteenth century. Their wars were sending refugees into India,
and the Burmese King's designs on Thailand and British controlled

(01:02:37):
Bangladesh led to a policy wherein the Bridge supported insurgent
fighters who struck out at Burmese positions. A series of
near clashes between British and Burmese forces followed, and in
January of eighteen twenty four, the Burmese King Bagadah gave
his generals the order to attack. A pair of brutal
jungle wars followed, and despite winning several victories early on,

(01:02:59):
Burmese true were crushed comprehensively whenever they engaged British forces
in conventional battles. In January of eighteen eighty six, British
forces entered the capital, Mandalay and brought an end to
Burmese independence for almost sixty years. These are the broad
strokes of the story, as you'll find them summed up
in almost any history book. As with most colonial history,

(01:03:22):
the reality is somewhat messier than that. The Burmese Empire
the British destroyed was dominated heavily by the Bumah people,
who gave the colony its name, But there were other
peoples in the territory. They claimed the Shin, the karin Urakan,
the Rohinga, and dozens. More Like most empires dominated by
a single ethnicity, they were brutal. Father San Germano, who

(01:03:45):
lived in pre raj Burma, wrote of the king, he
is considered by himself and others absolute lord of the lives, properties,
and personal services of his subjects. He exalts into presses, confers,
and takes away honor and rank, and without any process
of law, can put to death not only criminals guilty
of capital offenses, but any individual who happens to incur
his displeasure. It is here a perilous thing for a

(01:04:07):
person to become distinguished for wealth and possessions, for the
day may easily come when he will be charged with
some supposed crime and so put to death in order
that his property may be confiscated. Every subject is the
Emperor's born slave, and when he calls anyone his slave,
he thinks thereby to do him honor. Hence, also he
considers himself entitled to employ his subjects in any work

(01:04:28):
of service without salary or pay, and if he makes
them any recompense, it is done not from a sense
of justice but as an act of bounty. And while
Bagudah was a fairly modern king, brutality like this went
back hundreds of years in the region. Most of the
kings and princes and other people who ruled the land
we now call me Anmar did so with brutal force

(01:04:48):
and an awful lot of conscription. This is broadly true
of much of Southeast Asia. Western histories of this region
tend to flatten life into kingdoms and empires and assume
life in their region coincidedtically with the lines drawn on maps.
This was never the case. Much of mainland Southeast Asia,
from the central highlands of Vietnam through Myanmar, northeast India

(01:05:09):
and several southern Chinese provinces, is filled with terrifying mountains
and brutal hills covered with the densest jungle imaginable. Standing
in Masot and staring across the border into Myanmar, all
you see is a vast expanse of jagged, deep green
peaks rolling endlessly on James and I are both experienced backpackers,
and neither of us would have wanted to take on

(01:05:31):
that terrain without quality gear and weeks of endurance training.
In an era before planes, helicopters, or satellite communications, this
area was practically ungovernable. People were aware of this at
the time, and for roughly the last two thousand years,
this chunk of highland Southeast Asia, known to political scientists
as Zonia, has been a refuge for people pushed out

(01:05:53):
and put down by the great state powers of the area.
Empires and kings would stick to the coasts and the
flat lines, perfect for cultivating rice. When they taxed their
subjects too hard or conscripted too many of them into
the military, some would flee to the hills to take
their freedom. As James C. Scott, a Yale policy professor, writes,

(01:06:14):
the frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device.
The more estate pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had.
The Frontier under wrote freedom. He calls the people who
chose to inhabit this stateless zone barbarians by choice. While
many of these ethnic groups were mocked for their lack
of so called civilized values like widespread literacy, Scott argues

(01:06:37):
that this lack was actually a conscious rejection. The refusal
to educate themselves in a manner acceptable to the powers
of the day was a rebellion against the legitimacy of
those powers and their standards. Human history and our modern
globe is filled with places like this, muddied areas at
the borders of great powers, where the detritus of war,
refugees and beaten soldiers can congregate without fear of the state.

(01:07:01):
The term for these places is shatter zones. Rojava, the
radical feminist enclave in northeast Syria, would be one example
of a shatter zone and the unique political potential such
places have. Myanmar is, by land mass, mostly shatter zones,
and since nineteen forty nine, different ethnic armed organizations have
existed in a more or less constant conflict with the state.

(01:07:24):
This includes the Karin people, whose territory borders Thailand. When
the young millennial and zoomer protesters in the cities realized
they were going to have to flee their homes to
continue the fight, Karin territory was a natural place to
retreat to. People had been making versions of the same
decision for two thousand years. The current situation between the
Kuran and Myanmar's military junta actually owes a lot to

(01:07:47):
the British Empire. When they took over in Myanmar, they
had to figure out how to govern it, and they
went with the tactic that had served them well all
across India and Africa. They picked a minority ethnic group
to act as their colonial shock troops. In Uganda, their
preferred warrior race were the Kaqwa people, from whom future
dictator Idi Amine descended. For their colonial troops. In India,

(01:08:08):
the Brits used Sikhs and Gurkhas, and in colonial Burma
they used the Karin. Ever since the British left, the
Karin have wanted as little as possible to do with
the central government and Napoda. Instead, they fought to maintain Cadule,
a land without darkness, as they were promised in Burma's
nineteen forty eight constitution. Today they might not be recognized

(01:08:29):
by the UN or the US, but the Karin have
their own schools, hospitals, and army. They have been at
war since nineteen forty nine. Andy, whose father is Karin,
only really found out about the struggle for Quadule, a
home for the Karin language peoples when he became a
refugee he moved into the camps along the border after
the Saffron Revolution. He was only eight years old. The

(01:08:51):
border is dotted with camps, some of them more like towns,
but they're always temporary, and while the Thai government tolerates
the Karin presence, people there are seen as temporarily displaced.
They can't build solid homes and don't have the identity
documents they need to travel even internally in Thailand, despite
not growing up there. Andy's identity cards, says Karin, it

(01:09:13):
doesn't take a pH d in history to know that
ethnic identity cards issued by imperial and formerly post colonial
governments are bad news. But if you need more information
about that, maybe google i D cards Comma Rwanda. Like
most people in most places, the young people from Mima
we talked to you had thought relatively little about the

(01:09:35):
injustices on the edge of their world. They tend to
think of the karen Is terrorists up in the hills
rather than freedom fighters. But once the top medor started
unloading machine guns into crowds, people were confronted with the
reality of a situation that they've been able to ignore before.
Suddenly they saw that the karen and other marginalized ethnic
groups were victims of the same government violence that they

(01:09:57):
now faced, and now that the scales had fallen from rise,
they were going to do something about it. The main
majority of groups people they are current people, which is
another ethnic groups from Nemore, and they they had a
different view, right because obviously the military. While we were

(01:10:18):
like because we were born in the city, we were
more like you know, like we didn't suffer that much,
even though it wasn't that great, you know. But then
for them, the military come to their states, the military
come to their villages, they burned the villages, they kill
the people, they read the people, you know, they do
all these atrocities. Um. So then they have a very
different view on the Miamar military and how the country

(01:10:41):
is you know, working doing and um so that's when
I started learning, oh, ship, like there is some other
stuff going on in the country. But you know, like
you kind of just you kind of just live with
your life. You know, you're your kid, You're trying to
get by day to date, like so you didn't really
think about it. Um And for me, that gold on

(01:11:02):
that go that went on for a long time until
the military will happen in the present revolution is not
the only flaer up of inter ethnic violence in the country.
The Tatmodor, under ming A Klan, began a concerted campaign
of genocidal ethnic cleansing against the Hina people, a largely
Muslim ethnic group who live in the country's or a

(01:11:23):
kind state. The Tatmodor, claiming the Rehinia were variously terrorists
or illegal immigrants native to modern day Bangladesh and hence
not native to myan Ma, spent months raping, killing, and
burning the villages of the Rehanga people. While the world,
perhaps distracted by a neoliberal consensus which demoniedes both migrants
and Muslims, did funk all to stop them. In Myanmar,

(01:11:47):
nobody spoke about the genocide, at least not in those terms.
Most people didn't even speak about the Hinda in those
terms because Tatmodor propaganda was so effective that citizens in
Yangon really believe that the Rahana were mike and terrorists
coming from Bangladesh. Government newspapers like The New Light of
Myanmar published daily stories linking them to groups like Isis

(01:12:08):
or Al Qaida, who, despite their best efforts, remain totally
irrelevant in this story. BOS popped up on Facebook, which
is basically synonymous with the Internet for many people living
in Myanmar, and seared a steady diet of anti raheinga
hate speech into political discourse, gradually shifting the Overton window
towards the endocide. And without better information, most people believe them,

(01:12:31):
and these Western friends, probably weirdos like me who had
crept into his d MS. At some point I started
to ask him questions. So the rein thing happened into
done seventeen. I was seventeen, and you know, we started
hearing it. I started getting phone calls from my friends
in the western countries, like Westerners. They would be like, Hey,
what's happening in your country? Why are you killing like

(01:12:53):
all the Muslims, And I mean like mess out thaily
and I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about.
I've never heard anything like that, right, um, and so yeah,
and then I like, I try to learn a little
bit more, but everyone has so intense opinions about it
that at some time like funk, I don't I don't
know anymore, you know, because the military was in control

(01:13:13):
at that time still kind of so they control the news,
they control the media, they control it's the same thing,
you know, like they control who was saying what, and
so we never hear about it that much. If you only,
if only you care so much and you're following everyone
that is saying you know the truth, then you know.
But otherwise you you didn't know. It was all very blurry,

(01:13:36):
very so that that's another time when I'm like funk,
like I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna
you know. And then one on in my life, um
and yeah, I never I never realized how much, like
how much they had to suffer, and they are still
suffering right number of international protests to stop the ethnic
cleansing of the Rainer. As they huddled hidden in their apartment,

(01:13:59):
Andy and his brother began to embrace the need for
deadly violence against Sarah Pressus. We never had any plans, actually,
we were just like, no, I think I remember, it's
like that was not really planned. It was like they
killed our people who were fucking hurt them back, you know.
It wasn't too get their guns or shoot them back.
Like we didn't even know how to use any of that,
you know. And honestly, we didn't even want to kill them.

(01:14:21):
We just want to be like, you can't do these
things and not feel, not feel any any anything, you know,
not not feel any consequences of that. Like we're not
fucking We're not animals, and you know, you can't just
come in and killed one of our friends and think
that we're not going to do anything back, you know,

(01:14:41):
like if we let that happen, then they're never going
to stop. You know. You they were trying to scare us,
and we were trying to scare them back, but they
actually kill people. We didn't. We never wanted to kill anyone,
you know. Indy's situation felt hopeless at this stage. Trapped
at the capitol and watching his friends disappear one by one.
It seemed like he was running out of options. Thousands

(01:15:03):
of young people and me and Mark felt the same,
and some of them decided to take an option they
hadn't even known existed. A few weeks earlier, when we
were in Massat, we conducted a phone interview with a
former rebel fighter named Alex. Like everyone else we talked to,
he woke up on the first of February to find
out that his phone didn't work and the internet was out. Yeah,

(01:15:24):
I thought like it was just you know, like something
wrong with my phone. And then like I started talking
to my friends and all my friends are having the
same problem. So we looked down and everybody is like
watching down to the market because we live close to
the market, and like they were like you know, like
doing like like buying lots of rise and like full
until I spoke, because no one knows what's gonna happen.

(01:15:47):
Like everyone else, he wasn't into politics, but he was
absolutely not into having the military funk with every aspect
of his life, so he got into the streets at first,
like we are not like that into the politics and stuff,
so we didn't know. But you know, like they can't
even like shut down the Internet is kind of like

(01:16:08):
controlling our life, right, so like if they can't even
do that, like you know, like we cannot imagine like
what other things they can do and which they did,
like killing the innosensibilians and stuff. So yeah, at first
we're just like, oh, yeah, we need to do something
about this, and then enjoy the protests. He and his
friends later found a shop to buy gas masks, tasers,

(01:16:29):
and goggles, but even with all their gear, they were
powerless against soldiers with guns and tear gas. He said
that the next few weeks were hard. Protests were less
and less safe, but nobody dared to talk about their
plans to take the fight to military. Everyone was worried
about informants and snitches. We didn't really like actually talk
about those stuff, Like we're only like discussing about you know,

(01:16:51):
like a protests and also like how to get attention
from the like embassies and stuff, but for like fight
fighting bag and you know, like going on the wars.
Like I think, like almost everyone they just decided on
their own unless they have super like trust their friends.

(01:17:11):
By April, he says he's seen people die in the streets.
He decided the protesting wasn't working and he needed to
pick up a gun. Then he probably was. He didn't
have one, nor did his friends. He knew some people
who had guns and hated the top of the door,
but he had been raised his whole life to think
of them as terrorists before this. We be you know,

(01:17:31):
like brainwashed by the military like pretty much our whole life,
so you know, we always think, oh, ethnic groups are
like like you know, they were okay, like wherever they
see or and he didn't like it. Just terrorist terrorists, right,
that's what like the military like make us believe our

(01:17:52):
whole life. And I was kind of scared to like
join them because like, yeah, I didn't know, like you know,
how to live off there or like if they're gonna
came in just because like I don't speak her, and
so yeah, it was bizarrely his boss who hooked him
up with the rebels in the hills, but he couldn't
tell anyone he was going, okay, say got captured or

(01:18:14):
turned out to be a snitch. Instead, he packed his
bag with some of his old clothes, didn't even say
goodbye to his family, and took a bus. He got
off that bus, waited until a man in the car
picked him up. By that night, he was in the jungle.
During the first night, they're like, you know, we have
to go God like one or the leader from the Junger,

(01:18:34):
like you know, like trainers by you like walking in
the dark in the forest, So we have to walk
to like somewhere we don't even know. We have to
sleep in there like deep gener He'd read about the
PDF on Facebook, but suddenly found himself among them. Technically,
they were distinct unit fighting for a return to democracy,

(01:18:54):
but in practice they're trained and equipped by the current
National Liberation Army who have been fighting for aeral democracy
for decades. Pretty soon his opinion of the Kurrent had changed.
But like during my time, I did some observation about them. Yeah,
it was like obviously, like the government is not the
current people fighting the cup the military. The military has

(01:19:17):
been like you know, like invading the Karrent villagers like
Karen Land. H Yeah, they were like banning down. They're
like villagers like waving the woomas You're like killing the
people for like many years. So they cannot do anything
but to fight back, you know, they have to fight
back to prove that their land. Just like the now

(01:19:39):
deceased rebel soldier who interviewed for our last series, I
like received rudimentary training. He never fired a gun before,
and supplies are very limited, but he's still got a
kick out of sending a few rounds down range. Like
not even in my dream, Like I never thought like
I will be like houlding it again or I shouldn't
should in it. So if be pretty good? Yeah, do

(01:20:02):
you what kind of gun was it? Was it a
point to too or was it? Yes, the first one
was a point to two. Was it hand homemade, handmade
or was it you know, no, it's not made, but
it's kind of really old. Even in the jungle, they
were worried about males. It took a while to make friends,
he says, but eventually he fell in with a cop

(01:20:24):
who had defected, a photographer, and a construction worker. Their plan,
he says, was a train up in the jungle and
then go home and find the cities. Like our idea
was like we went there and praying for a few
miles and then go back to the city. Like we thought,
like it's gonna be like a huge wars in the

(01:20:44):
city is like in Yango or mentally and also like
everywhere Yama. But yeah, it did. It turns out like that.
But instead he found himself pulling sentry duty in the jungle.
For a city kid, it was scary alone out there
in the night with a gun, surrounded by potential threats.
I feel like, you know, like okay, like it's gonna
happen tonight, Like they're gonna come to our base tonight,

(01:21:06):
so we I'm gonna have to shoot that, I have
to product my people find. But it didn't happen. Yeah,
I'll expend eight months in the field putting sentry duty
and learning the skills of a soldier. But without arms
and ammunition, there wasn't much you could do. And his
whole time training, he says, he only fired five shots
I've kind of used because we don't have like enough ghans,

(01:21:33):
you know. Like so by the time that there was
a like a straight happen if uh like a goo,
I thought like, oh, we're gonna have to like go
and you know, like fight them now. But instead, like
we have to pack our staff and move to a
deeper jenko. So we were like kind of like reputees
with uniforms. But yeah, you know, if I just keep

(01:21:58):
staying there like we if we're just going to keep
running away like this, Like I don't want to stay there.
I want to do something about the needs, like the
main needs in our candles, the weapons gainst. So I
want to like come here and like work for that.
The transition was hard for eight months in a light
bulb or flashing toilet. Now he crossed the river and

(01:22:20):
everything seemed normal, every kind of weird, like you know
from the jungle and metal. It's just a small river
across and they're like the life. Yeah, it's totally different.
Like peoples are living their normal life and now having
to like worry for like any things or like it
was like the whole time I wasn't younger, you know,

(01:22:43):
like we have to worry about our country and like
we don't want to live a normal life. And I'll
take them mad, like the military's gold so like, but
they're like here, everyone is living in normal life and
it's just only one river across. Now that he's across
the river, we won't say, well, he's still part of

(01:23:03):
the revolution. He's raising money and doing interviews like this,
trying to organize medical supplies and hoping that one day
he can return to his country not as a refugee
with a uniform, but practiced a soldier liberating his people,
or better yet, as a citizen in a free democracy.
Miyak wasn't ready to be a refugee quite yet. He

(01:23:24):
quickly found a role for himself on the militant side
of what had become a full fledged civil war. Before
the coup. He'd been studying engineering at university, and he
liked to understand how things worked. Although Alex and his
comrades had a critical shortage of weapons. Miyak didn't only
make guns at first, he made bombs too, using knowledge
that he had gained after traveling into the jungle and

(01:23:46):
getting training from Karin experts and explosives and as he
told us, they were very effective. Do you think the
explosives took out any soldiers? Of course is bosies are
for the biddings for the base. Some o the trouble.
So you know they came and pick the ball and
trying to cut off the bowl and just a slow

(01:24:07):
so they die. So my truf cut off the wire
bone wire, yes, but they die anyway. So it's like, oh,
my best memory is that we are using and the
very first E T N E T N in and

(01:24:28):
in thank angel. Now this revolutionary thing is the whole
things that arrest there or just arrest. It's very sad
when they made May made the idian bowl. Uh we
we had that the ambulas ambulus ambulus abus umblessed land.

(01:24:49):
It's like five fine ambular track is coming here. Okay,
this is I think this is my best memory. Yes, okay, wow,
So the bomb goes off, they have to send in
five ambulances, yes, yes, yes, was it soldiers or police soldiers. Yes,
that the soldier whole who checked the role. Yeah, it

(01:25:10):
was just bombs that the young rebels learned about. They
also shattered many of their misconceptions about the roles of
men and women. Yeah yeah. As a woman like a mirror,
stepped up to the front lines and fought alongside their

(01:25:32):
male comrades, it became hard to ignore the sexism which
underpinned much of traditional Burmese culture. The music you just
heard from a yang On punk band called Rebel Riot.
They gave a submission to use it here. They have
some great songs about the Spring Revolution, and this one
focuses on the role of women. In the video, you
see young women in the streets and then you see

(01:25:53):
them in the jungles carrying him sixt Me and Mama
might previously have had a woman leader, but gender equality
had been far from universal. And he told us a
story about this, and we recorded it. But it was
our last night in the country. We were on our
way to another spectacular hangover, one that would see me
vomiting with such ferocio of flight. But an elderly tie

(01:26:14):
lady took pity on me and gave me her shopping
bag once I filled up my sick bag in the
second month of the revolution, and he said when they
were in Yangon, the protesters would build giant barricades to
keep the police back. We've seen videos of these. They're
pretty impressive, huge amounts of palettes, boxes and burning tires.
We got some other audio of him describing them. No,

(01:26:38):
we could never get close to the military. Um, it
was never it was never attack, it was always defense.
So later on, when we started seeing how military cracked
down these protesters, we started building these gates and like
sandbags in our every base in the in the young On, Melody,

(01:26:58):
whatever across the country, we started building these barriers so
that the military trucks kind of just come in. And
it's actually crazy because sometimes to build these things, you
have to take over the road first, so like like
a main road or a highway. So then what we
do is all these little groups will gather, so one street,
two street, through street, you know, and then we will

(01:27:20):
go to the street, or we will walk down the
street saying we're gonna try to take over the street,
please come join. People will come down, people will come
down from the streets, from the buildings, and then we
go to the next street, we say the same thing,
and then people would join. Nothing they did could stand
up to a tank, though, just as that shopping bag
couldn't stand up to James's vomit. The military started using

(01:27:40):
human shields to get through the barricades and the groups
of people throwing molotovs. Usually we would defend our places, right,
we will use molotov sling shots, uh, and we will
resist like we will attacked, like we will be in
the behind the gate, but we will kind of make
them cannot come too too far, you know. But when
the military have someone that they're gun pointing, just a

(01:28:02):
normal civilian and making him move, we can't do anything
man like, we can't go through a moltav like, you know.
So that's when the military clean out all of that.
In Yangon, I think there was a time when it
was packed. It was every road had it, every street
had it, and everyone was guarding that right. But then

(01:28:23):
when the military started and then they said it in
the statements, they were saying, if that's near your house,
you're responsible. Then they came up with a better idea.
In Burmese culture, men fear passing under women's clothing if
it's hanging on a washing line, they'll go around rather
than under it. It is as Andy told us, bullshit.
So they decided to turn that bullshit back on the

(01:28:43):
troops and they grabbed as many women's launcheese a traditional
garment went around the waist like a sarong as they
could and hung them up above their barricade. It worked,
he said, and just like that, a generation of Burmese
kids realized that sexism hurts everyone who perpetuates it. Miak
told us an interesting story about this. He said, the
first time he met his fiance, he thought that she

(01:29:04):
was pretty sharp for a girl that he says now
was his bad me and mar he says, has some
gender hang ups, but he soon realized that she was
the bravest person he knew. They went to protest together,
and when something needed moving from one town to another,
they took advantage of those gender hang ups and her bravery,
and she risked her life carrying weapons in her bags

(01:29:25):
on inner city buses. We'll let him tell you how
they met. It's like we we met on a meiden,
like you know, we we started making maybe it's a
very first. We first we all match making, very very
very very respect their memories. The name of the media

(01:29:45):
is braced to me. Okay, prased all me. The name
of the media is she She is very you know, respected.
She said the very thoughtful things. You know. Oh she
is you know, it's so so thoughtful. I don't even think,
you know. In the memo, Carter is lays a Joanna.
You know, so buy is always good like people, you know,

(01:30:08):
something like this. So I thought she's really good, or
that she is a kid. This is my bad some
Janna I do die. But but later I met with
her on the protest, so I saw she is so beautiful.
I thought she has just twenty years agays. But we
know that later. So we keep doing together other things

(01:30:32):
and she she is my bad dad. I was grow
like this and well, whatever I have I have in danger.
All the contact her. We asked him if you worried
she got arrested while she was making trips into the
mountains with guns and bombs, But he said no. Was
it hard to leave her to go to the jungle
because she could get arrested, you could get no. No,

(01:30:53):
she is very clever, So I I never worry about her.
I just boy about mindset because she is more, you know, secret,
I see more play by than me. So she only
teached me how to be clear about much. LETTONK and
Mirror was falling in love as well. Her relationship was
a bit different though. At first we were in the

(01:31:14):
group chat Yeah, but then did you make the private? Yeah? Private?
He started the private chat? Did I did? I did,
because at that time I feel like, oh, she is
so young. At the time, she she's not even a team.
She's seventeen years old and she's leading the one of

(01:31:36):
the food tast team. So I'm like, wow, this girl
is like amazing, right, So that that's how I met her,
and then that's how I, you know, try to hit
her now. Admittedly t K, a security guy is translating here.

(01:31:58):
He's also her boyfriend for now. He's here with her
to make sure she's okay. When we met them both,
it was just weeks after he'd arrived in Thailand and
the two had met in person for the very first time.
It's a kind of story you can't help but find touching.
Two people in opposite sides of the world, united by
a fight for justice, the bonds of revolutionary care. At least,

(01:32:20):
it's a nice counterweight to all the stories of death
and violence, which will have more of you tomorrow on
part four of this series. Through the time we're reporting

(01:32:48):
this story, Robert and I walked miles and miles around
the streets Mason baby, only two journalous in town and
also both giant white guys. We kind of stood out,
and taking a turn due to a sensitive interview isn't
always a smart choice. Even when it was, they frequently
dropped us off in a wrong place and we end
up walking anyway. Everyone in Mason rides scooters, but riding

(01:33:12):
without a helmet can get you a fine. We figured
that his relative noviceist to the world of scooting, we
probably funded something up and we probably better off walking.
When the time came to meet me out, though he
offered us a ride That was very nice, but it
put us in an interesting position. What exactly do you

(01:33:32):
say when a guy you've never met, who's a friend
of a guy you dem on Reddit who you know
he's engaged in the illegal production and smuggling of guns
into a war zone, offers to pick you up at
the cafe so you can go out for dinner. We
decided to call our friend a long suffering guy we
go to or we have a security question. Paul his request,
we're keeping him anonymous, but he works in security and

(01:33:53):
has an extensive professional background dealing with situations just like
this or maybe mostly like this. Yes, So basically, Paul
were meeting with these people. Uh, we don't have an
established human chain with them of trust. They're they're just
averted account that James has been talking with but for
like six or seven months. Um, it doesn't really seem

(01:34:14):
like there's much else we can do besides, uh, keep
our eyes open and try to meet in a digital place. Yeah.
I mean the big concern is that it would be
the government, which is not um from what you guys
have said. The government simply doesn't have the wherewithal to

(01:34:39):
do operations like this, and I mean rebel groups like this,
they're they're trying, they want to get everything out there
they can. UM. So, Yeah, it is there a concern
about the fact that you don't have a chain of
people that can vouch for each other. Yeah, but the
situation there and everything's in their favor, they are, everything's

(01:35:05):
in your favor. Even minor cultural faux pause shouldn't be
an issue. With Paul's help, we came up with a
watertight plan. I should note here that he was at
least as concerned with our fate as he was with
the fate of the pair of pants he'd loaned James
for the trip. And I mean, yeah, it's a story
that needs to get out, so uh, being slightly lax

(01:35:27):
on the rules while knowing that it's in everybody's favor
that it goes well. I guess you gotta been the
rules sometimes. Yeah, I guess we'll check in trying to
approve of life. Yeah, we'll do a proof of life.
I will. I will send you a picture of James
holding a piece of paper that says big wife guy.

(01:35:51):
And if if we are kidnapped, I'll send you a
picture of me that says Elon Musk will be a
good custodian of Twitter. Ok, I'll know that that's the
that's the sign, and you know I'll get a black Yeah,
I'll figure out something. Yeah, me and me and a

(01:36:11):
few friends will be on our way. That sounds awful.
James has my favorite pants. Yeah, yeah, you gotta get
those pants bag. Oh yeah, this is all about the pants.
If I find hs dead body, I'm killing those pants off. Luckily,
both I and Paul's trousers made it back that night.
The only damage was to several delicious plates of food,

(01:36:35):
his fiancee and their godfather. We're the most gracious host,
and we decided not to record that first night. Instead,
we met up the next day. But there is one
thing from that night but I want to share with you.
Rather than explaining it, I let the song me out
played for us, talk to you to the beautiful medium
of punk music, bell A Chow. Of course it's an

(01:37:12):
anti fascist anthem. Then. It's original version tells the story
of a young partisan who says goodbye to his girlfriend
before he goes off to fight Italian fascists. If he dies,
he says he wants to be buried under a flower
in the mountains so people will see it and remember him. Yeah. Yeah.

(01:38:36):
After a few months of revolution, all our characters found
themselves mourning their friends, and many of them were in
the mountains. Their struggle is one they see in the
same vein as the Italian partisans who fought facists in
their mountains and the anti fascists who came from around
the world to fight the Spanish Civil War. I first
heard that song Belacho from a Spanish civil war vector.

(01:38:58):
And it's a strange closing of the loop to be
here sitting hearing it with young people who, just like
the Spanish Republicans, are fighting a coup with next to
no international support and a critical shortage of weapons. But
me Out was trying his best to fix their shortage.
A month into what would become the Spring Revolution, and

(01:39:20):
the stakes have become clear when the first protester would
shot and they kept marching. When people decided to go
back into the streets, they showed that the future of
their country was worth dying for. A few weeks later,
some of them decided it was also worth killing for.
It was about then that me Out's buddy and Keen
read it. User Daddy u m c D said he'd

(01:39:41):
been online we reckon they could use their three D printers,
a steel pipe and the expertise are some strains on
the internet to arm themselves. The promise of revolutionary technology
would take quite some time to have any kind of
battlefield impact in Myanmar, but the effects of a different
kind of revolution would be felt immediately. But then they
young activists took up our arms against the government. I

(01:40:04):
was like I'm entrusted us in how West and three
D printing especially my profession is a grand us and
virtual reality and one to tell us three D printing
is my hobby. So I just do I just download
some time from a thinking bust or other three D
three D printing criminal D and just do it for
my task, not specially especially like desk toys and stuff. Yeah, yeah,

(01:40:29):
just or twice yes, what do you think of guns?
Then I have never emerging a care because you know,
we have been living and a military booth for a
long time, so we're afraid or soldier especially not the
su especially the care that they hope. So we are
so afraid of that, so we never imagine, like like
we are the same as in North Korea. We're so

(01:40:49):
afraid of that, so we never imagine of making game.
But after that the story began at first Meal and
his team felt safe despite the dangerous nature of their work.
He felt the top medor was so behind the times
they wouldn't even know what a three D print. It
was like adult side the military didn't didn't know or

(01:41:10):
didn't give our funk about defriend So it is okay
a dose that it's really okay, one one one, one day,
can we need to hide the campus. If the three
print that, that's okay, Because we were saying this is
for our job or for some hobby that we can
see I do with that, but but not just that.
This time everyone the print that yes camp camp go

(01:41:34):
the like yeah yeah. Soon that head shop became a
lot closer to being a possibility. It's like a song.
As we we we finished the second second apt De nine,
we're trying to test that in young and we send
it to our warehouse. But unfortunately this way how it

(01:41:57):
exposed and ambushed by in the military and this gun
is taken by the military, and they announced this on
the new by picturer and this uh like like hammag
games and the don give funk about this just a
hammaga they just at the very first time, but later

(01:42:20):
and later later and later one they one the second
time they will arrest that. At this time they arrest
my revolutionary from my team. So I'm told him about
the efficiency and how do you use and the history
also the game at the time, maybe maybe he was
investigator and he told the truth. At this time he says,

(01:42:44):
like the FCC nine announced announced the name FCC nine
like like this before before at the very first time
team and now the game from the tagish Yeah if
you missed that, they thought the guns were turned. Is
the reason we giggled at this is that whenever we
see videos of combat in me and mar James and

(01:43:04):
I send them to a group chat and try to
work out what the weapons are and where they came from.
Nearly every time we're stumped. The guns turned out to
be some kind of niche Turkish shotgun made to look
like an a R fifteen. It seems the military we're
operating on the same assumption, only this time they were
very wrong. Like Alex Myak started this second more deadly

(01:43:24):
phase of the Spring Revolution by taking a trip out
to the jungle and he stayed for several months to
learn some of the skills he was going to need
to fight back against the top medal. I was going
the Monday as a cuminating data so I'm not like
the I'm not have a video training or something like that.

(01:43:44):
I just going as a cuminator guy. So I met
with them Sundgain specially or some Freya and I said,
I want to know how to shoot ga, how do
amber the gag so to teach me, I said, uh say,
I'm in acuminated. I can to the Traineer, but I
want to lamb the folks out of being so they

(01:44:05):
sent me some videos I did to lamb by myself.
Yet later he went back to carry prototype printed guns
to the E. A O S for testing. We asked
if it was scary being an undercover gun runner in
a dictatorship. He says it was, but he found that
he had a powerful ally in his fight homophobia. Yeah,
oscar Of. We need to discloses, so you know, yeah,

(01:44:29):
disguises though. I just that I have a long hair,
so I act like a day so you know that
the military has so Jianna and equality, so they hate game.
That's why I just just our brand. The military, assuming
me Of was gay and therefore incapable of fighting, let
him go. Miak kept his mouth shut and let their
homophobia help him smuggle the guns with which he hopes

(01:44:51):
to help topple the regime that places so much stock
and values like these. Miak said he had to go
to the jungle to prove that his guns worked because
at first the ear didn't believe him about the gain.
No one, no one believes I believed that. No one
believed that, so we have to made made it fast
and show them. So we made it first, uh we said,

(01:45:14):
we got again. It's it's a self fool. We lie,
we need to lie, and we send this to the
e O. Then they made it and it didn't walk
out and the adjust and walk out. Okay, yeah, how
do they feel made? Oh? Oh my my one of
my revolutionary and it was they said, oh, they're really

(01:45:35):
really happy. There's all that, all of the friend that
and most progession. Let's do it right now. Yes that
Almost everyone we met spend time in the jungle. Rooney,
that's a normed the gear not a given name, started
off as a protester, and just like everyone else, he
fled into the jungle to avoid being murdered by the
government and to learn from the ethnic armed organizations how

(01:45:57):
to fight back when when we try and make peace
protesting and it's really break down. Then he decided, like
he also we so we decided to choose to have
an ass and to make to make a revolution. So
at this time he goes to the EO or stays
and he lands the trainees, you know, even especially the

(01:46:17):
explosive trainees, and he got back to the town and
he's still making this explosive with the head of the teachings.
After learning from the e a O S, he came
back to Young Gone to put his knowledge to use.
Of course, just like MIAs gunmaking team and the street
protesters who learned from Hong Konger's he took to YouTube
and Google to try and find a better way to
build killing machines. So it's like the EO teaches the

(01:46:39):
very business explosives just came bound. You can produce and
you guysn't like this, But after they land a very
business then and they want to improve. So the landbine
theirselfs just like d I Y the lambine yourself with Google,
with YouTube, so later and later even they can make
TNT and et Y using YouTube. Of course, nearly everyone

(01:47:05):
we met at some point googled something like how to
make gun or how to make bomb. Now this is
not ideal, op SEC, but it speaks to the desperation
of the times. They used crowdfunding websites to raise money
for ingredients, and Rooney soon started putting his knowledge into practice.
What that meant was that people died he killed human

(01:47:25):
beings with the explosives that he made. Now, those people
would have killed Rooney or anyone else we've spoken to
in this series. He was defending himself and others by
making killing machines. But still, if you're a decent person,
it's not easy to watch your work result in a
stranger being blown into a pink mist. He is not
proud of that, but you know, you know, he is

(01:47:46):
never trying to kick even a cat on any man.
He is sad, but he had to do because of revolution.
Revolution was in Rooney's blood. The military had stolen his
house as a kid, and he'd grown up with his
uncle sharing men Marie's of the pro democracy uprising and
it's violent repression. He'd seen his family, his cousin brothers

(01:48:06):
and their parents harassed for his whole life. Now he
had a chance to fight back. He carried out hundreds
of missions before he eventually had to flee the city
when an accident led to serious injury. Like in June
Tones Saven, there's a nine mission, so he has to
made nine boom, Yeah, really big ball. So they did

(01:48:29):
trying to assembly this bowl adult one of his brands
smoking and this this family is called Campo. After the blast,
he had to run away from his house before the
police arrived. His friend was not so lucky, and he's
in jail now. Rooney is mostly recovered, but it's not
safe for him to go back, so he's hoping to

(01:48:50):
make a new start in Mason. The fight didn't stay
in Yangon, in Napod or even for villages living outside.
The coup was just as real, but so was a
desire to fight back. People outside of town found themselves
in the cross hairs at the Topmador as well. The

(01:49:10):
military employs a strategy which they call four cuts. It's
designed to alienate the rebels from local support. It doesn't work.
It's kind of scorched earth. Stuff has never worked. Didn't
work when the Nazis tried in Europe, didn't work when
the US tried in the Middle East of Vietnam, doesn't
work when it Rael keeps doing it, and it doesn't
work in Myanmar. What it does do is drive people

(01:49:31):
who lose their families to pick up a gun and
kill soldiers. And it's not hard to see why. I
just want to play you our conversation watching one of
Andy's videos about one of hundreds of mascarets that have
happened since last February and as a warning that stuff
we're going to talk about, it is about as horrible
as stuff can be. But yeah, basically about I think

(01:49:52):
twenty eight people were killed that day. They just came
into a village and show everyone. That's the handmade guns
that these villagers had. But it was just they weren't
shooting anyone though. It's that's all the everyone died. All
these guys died. Look at that his hands tied. Yeah, yeah,

(01:50:14):
looks like the love trying to tie their hands. Yeah,
that's electrical, it looks like. And they burned the whole village.
Now yeah they did, yeah twice, you guys are yeah yeah,

(01:50:37):
And that's why we say massacre because it's fucking look
at all the brains out, you know. Yeah, yeah, all
these kids, they weren't even eighteen. So all the villagers
that run away, they took a photo of the village
from afar and they burned the where the tith and
then left. Yeah Jesus fucking Christ, Yeah, it was all

(01:51:00):
he did. And he says. A nonprofit called Liberate Myanmar
supports the families every month, keeping them fair and sheltered,
because however hard the government tries to divide the people
from one another, it always seems to fail. Instead, it
just pushes them closer and closer together. While we were

(01:51:21):
in Thailand having a drink on a rooftop actually and
talking about some kind of meditation retreat that a guy
we met had gone on, we got to see some
of the action for ourselves. That night was a fun one.
We were hanging out with some nonprofit folks and we'd
acquired some pretty terrible whiskey. At various points in the
evening we would ambush one of the boys and tell
them they've been shot in the arm or the leg,

(01:51:42):
and have the others rush into practice the stop the
bleed skills well, and I demonstrated some improvised carrying techniques
and how to effectively turn and drop to the floor
when you're in the intimate presence of a grenade. Everyone
else at the party probably thought we were pretty strange,
but we were having fun. Then in the distance we
saw a huge yellow flash. It took a few seconds

(01:52:03):
of us all wondering if that whiskey had sent us
blind before the boom reached us. The first we thought
it was one of the air strikes that have been
happening in the border region. But it was close and
it was just one huge boom, not the rockets and
cluster bombs that tap the door like to drop on civilians.
Within minutes, minutes of nervously waiting on the rooftop to
see what was coming next, Andy's phone started buzzing. It

(01:52:25):
was a car bomb and it had gone off about
a hundred yards from the border where we stood earlier
that day. Camera or something, let me see, right, how
did they fucking get it in there? Immediately we had questions,
but very few answers. Car bombs hadn't been the thing

(01:52:47):
thus far in the revolution. This was new. Car bombs
are also extremely scary. It's hard not to be around
cars in the city, and when any one of those
cars might kill you, it's hard to do anything feeling
any semblance of safety. I want to know who did well?
I mean, yeah, probably no car bombs. I've never heard

(01:53:08):
of it. It hasn't yet. Is it somebody who driving it?
Or kind of like I don't think it's someone driving it?
Is it like you don't see anything there? Like h no,
I mean it could have is it by the because
if if there was a person in here, there wouldn't
be anything left. Yeah, you wouldn't se it. No, no, no.
But the thing is, look, there's the fence like that

(01:53:29):
that looks like it was there one at Yeah it was.
It looks like right by the breach. But then I
don't know why, what this, what happened. We still aren't
sure who set off the car bomb or if anyone died.
In a conflict like the one in Myanmar, it's sometimes
as confusing as it is scary. The military are more
than capable of a false flag style attack, killing civilians

(01:53:52):
and then blaming the PDF, and it has done this before.
That's what totalitarianism does. It aims to control every aspect
of every day life, even the truth. The jungle haunted
us the whole time we were there, unattainable. But right
next door, just a few miles away, and Locke Caw
the fight was raging. Lucky caused what's called a friendship town.

(01:54:12):
It was built with Japanese money as a place for
k and new fighters to live after they put down
their arms. It was supposed to be a symbol of
hope and a new, peaceful and democratic Mi'anmar. Now it's
a battlefield. But while we couldn't get there, we could
walk along the river bank and look at the jungle
and imagine what it must be like up in those mountains,
which we did almost every day. Myanmar itself looms like

(01:54:35):
a mountain over the town of Masot. It's a border
town without a border, but the city is surrounded by
refugee camps, nonprofit offices, and even museums for political prisoners
that can't exist on the other side of the river.
One day, we took a cab to see a monastery
on a bluff overlooking the river down into My'anmar. We
could see a casino still doing business with Chinese tourists,

(01:54:57):
despite the bombing nearby. On the walls of the mono
sterry were a colorful but horrific scenes of rape and
murder Buddhist stages of Hell, a reminder that, according to
the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, all life is suffering
and greed is the cause of suffering. The same thing
could be said for the refugees and fighters forced to
hide in the endless green of the jungle, driven away

(01:55:17):
from their homes by the greed of men who worship power,
all demo, crazy dye wordering my doing. It's not easy

(01:55:47):
to leave your home, even when people there are trying
to kill you. Doctor Wonder, like everyone else, struggled with
the choice. His hospital had next to no supplies. COVID's
third wave was ravaging the population, and he couldn't even
get oxygen to treat sick patients. All around him was
death and fear, but he still wanted to stay. Actually,

(01:56:07):
I don't want to live my country because if we
just live like that, our country will be We'll go
back to yes before century. You know, you know, they
control everything. We have to just cue to where we
have to just make it cue to get a patrolium petroleum.
We have faced in our young age. I don't I

(01:56:31):
don't want to feel that feeling again, not for me,
not just for me, enough of for our people, for
our new generation. I've got two young accents. Yes, one
is a five year one is an idea. So I
just want to fight until my last friend. But I

(01:56:53):
can't tolerate because they are trying, because you know, a
ground movement. I'm trying my best. The decision to go
was made for him by the topal. We are making
the meeting with him. He is anc control a control

(01:57:16):
yes at those times. So we're making a meeting then
asking him did he saved or not? You know adust
And at the end of the meeting, he he told
me that him he was going to the in saying oh,
I say, oh shit, holy ship. He was arrested. So

(01:57:36):
I was living the young ol and you know, the
government sorry that. The military also announced that the remain
to arrest remaining arrested. I think all of my things
that you have to go because you have all of
the data, so you have to go. So I decided
to go. Okay, Andy and the boys made the decision

(01:57:57):
to abandon their apartment and head for current territory and
eventually Thailand. Once one of their protest friends was arrested
by the government, his phone was on him when he
got caught, potentially exposing all of them. After a harrowing
drive into the jungle and several days among the Kuran,
they succeeded in finding a people smuggler to get them
across the border without getting stuck in one of the

(01:58:18):
refugee camps operated by the Thai government. Three days later,
we were trying to cross at night time, and these
guys said, okay, you know you're going you cross, you
get to Thailand the same night. And we thought, okay,
you know, and we we streamed across the river. It
was very scary, but for me, I've done it like
three times, so it was a little bit. I thought

(01:58:42):
it was going to be better, but it was more
stressful because I had them right, So I was like,
if it was me alone, maybe I could, you know,
whatever happened, I would find a way out. I'm not
sure if I could do that with three other people,
you know, so I was quite nervous. We paid what
five thouting bodies, right, it's not cheap, It is not cheaping.

(01:59:05):
But because that's the thing, it's not just one person. Yeah,
it's not just one person. He the person that crossed
us from the river from Noality to this side is
one and then from there to the Norman's line is
another one. Right, So yeah, we saw the soldier were
like Alex Dayton fought or attempted to fight with the

(01:59:26):
correct but most of the time only did with stamp century,
we're about getting enough to eat. I wonder when he
gets his hands or something better than a squirrel rifle
I kind of use because we don't have like enough guns,
you know. Like so by the time that there was
a like straight having uh lik ago, I thought like, oh,

(01:59:49):
we're gonna have to like go and you know, like
fight them now. But uh if they like we have
to pack our staff and move to a diepa Jenko
so were like kind of like reputees with uniforms. So yeah,
you know, if I'm just keep staying there like we

(02:00:10):
if we are just going to keep running away like this,
like I don't want to stay there. I want to
do something about the need, like you know, like the
main needs in our kidis the weapons against So I
want to like come here and like you know, like
Wok Wok for that, he called his unit refugees with uniforms,

(02:00:31):
and that's about what they were. This is why rebels
like me Ak and Daddy you m c d are
so motivated to find a way to reliably print functional
semi automatic weapons. The Korean are desperately under armed, and
yet they've been able to hold off the military for decades.
If the Koran and other ethnic organizations were able to
build functional arms production infrastructure alongside the new rebels with

(02:00:54):
the PDF, they have a real chance at victory. If
they succeed in building this, the repercussion around the world
could be massive. That is, however, a story for another day.
Seeing this kind of conflict isn't good for you. Nobody's
supposed to live through this kind of stuff, and certainly
not when they're just kids. Even in a rich country

(02:01:15):
replete with therapists and VA clinics. Thousands of US veterans
live every day with PTFT. The difference for them is
that they went to war in Myanma what comes to you?
And then there's another one which is Sada this one
and I did the first part and I'm too scared

(02:01:35):
to do the second part. Yeah, I mean this is
fucked up. Like every time I have to do it,
I get my head get funned. That's one of the
guy and so that's in Yangon in the protest. That's
one of the night, where that's one of the day.
But the Ajouana about a hundred people would kill over
a hundred people. You can see in the video they

(02:02:00):
come in um and you will see that the military,
how the military came in and how they were trying
to I'm not sure if I have it any more,
maybe here delop. They surrounded and they killed everybody. What

(02:02:27):
they've seen is bonded the boys. They do anything for
each other, and they've already done things that most of
us can't imagine. When one of their mothers wanted to
take him home, he felt helpless without them. When the
rest of them crossed. One of their moms came back
to get him without them, and stuck in the country
following apart, he didn't want to keep going. Every day

(02:02:47):
he watched soldiers outside himself popping Yabba pills yabas, a
meth based drug that soldiers are often given by the military.
He worried they kill him. His brother in law was
arrested and tortured just to having a lighter. Can you
remember what it felt like when your mom came taking him.
He kept saying, he's gonna kill himself for a long time,

(02:03:09):
for a long time. I will come through, okay, Yeah. Yeah.
He wasn't in a good space. Yeah, that's very space. Yeah,
and I didn't that. So he was saying that if

(02:03:31):
he has to go back, he was telling us like, um,
you know, now he's alone, Like he doesn't even have
us anymore. And so he was saying, like he's going
to go out to the protests and he's going to
try to kill the cops, right, the soldiers, the police.
And it was very difficult like for us to like
because we know his mom can't really like help him

(02:03:53):
with that stuff. You know we can, but she really
wanted to take him. So over time they chatted on
the phone and he felt it. But now he's here
with the boys. It's him playing his guitar and the
music you heard. Um, he got a little better. Um
coping with this in a good life, you know what
I mean. I mean, if you're young and you see

(02:04:15):
people killing people like this terribly, you have some drug
fucked up thoughts yourself too, write like well I could
do this to someone too, and stuff like that. So
he's struggled a lot with that for a long time.
And um, I think the worst thing was being alone.
He was alone. He couldn't talk to his mom about
all these things, right. He was paranoid, he was scary,

(02:04:36):
he was traumatized. So I mean you should see like
the first time he canalize. It's been five months since
he was he's here, but the first few months it
was very difficult. Yeah, I'm kind of like I talked
to them all the time about this, because I know
talking helps with these stuffs, like especially when you all

(02:04:59):
feel in the same It's like, you know, and I
think our ways of coping with this is like we
talked about it about like kind of like a joking way,
like people hearing it. That's the best way to deal
with it, Like to get through those hard days on
his own looking down at men who wanted him dead.
He picked up a cheap acoustic guitar. When he got back,
he began teaching the others he hadn't picked it up.

(02:05:21):
That's pretty good. When we went out to the pool
bar at night, in between kicking herrasses, the boys would
look up at the stage. It was occupied by a
pretty second rate cover band for whatever reason, probably not
helped by the incredibly rough Tige, and we've been smashing back.
I looked at them looking at the stage on our
last night, and I wanted to cry. Teenage kids shouldn't

(02:05:42):
be caught picking up guns to fight or picking up
cameras to film their friends dying. They should be doing
what I was doing when I was a teenager, which
is making a complete prick of myself on a stage
with a guitar. One day, hopefully soon they'll be able
to sing happy songs again and the war will just
be a memory, my stuff. Then when you write it before, Yeah,

(02:06:06):
I don't have from Paul. Yeah, I don't talk like stood.
Their bond is so close now, they're barely ever apart.
It's a lot of responsibility for Andy, who's just twenty
two himself, but he wouldn't want it any other way,

(02:06:28):
and neither would they. One night and you and Sarah
have appointments, and so Robert and I take the boys
for dinner. It's a lot of fun and actually a
lot of food. But when we talked to him about
their options as refugees who might be able to come
to the US, one thing is clear. They don't want
to be a part. For me, it's like I'd rather

(02:06:48):
fucking take bullet than any of them, because if they
die or if something happened to them, I am in
so much trouble, you know what I mean. But I
know that that's what they want to do. Like if
the mom trud him and yangon and he doesn't do
anything and the revolution is over, he's going to feel
so much regret, you know, like for not being involved
in this, and that's for me. It's like people if

(02:07:11):
if people want to fight, like, you know, like we
shouldn't keep them. We shouldn't just say yeah. It's been
a few months since we got back from Masont. It's
the rainy season there now, and that makes fighting and
reporting harder. Amira is still stuck in Mason. It it's
not safe for her to go back to a country
where her family wants her dead, but it's not possible

(02:07:33):
for her to leave Masat either without travel documents, something
the u N h c R would have to issue.
She's stuck in a little room in a hotel. It's
not a great place for a young woman, and it's
even worse when she has to watch her friends continue
to struggle without her. We both wrote to the U
N and the various embassies on her behalf, but months
later we've heard nothing. This is typical of a lot

(02:07:55):
of refugees. They're often presented as a faceless mass of humanity,
bereft of hope, but each of them has a story,
and those refugee camps along the border between Thailand and
Myanmar are full of stories. Some of those are stories
of fear, some of heroism, and some of tragedy, But
until things change at the u N, all of those
stories aren't being told. The three D printed firearms Mawk

(02:08:17):
and his colleagues are working on have made massive progress
over the last few months. But even though three D
printed guns cost a small fraction of the price of
an M sixteen or an a K forty seven, the
pro democracy forces are still desperately underfunded. They're at war
with the state, but they don't have any of the
apparatus of the state with which to fight back. Instead,

(02:08:37):
the gen Z rebels have turned once again to the Internet.
Alongside crowdfunding campaigns that liberate, they've developed a more innovative
fundraising method that allows for donations even from people who
don't have any money. Instead of soliciting cash donations risking
exposing their donors, they began using a method that they
call click to Donate, where supporters could help the rebels

(02:08:59):
by clicking on adverts on certain videos and websites in
order to generate advertising revenue. It's used to find everything
from weapons purchases to shelter for the ten four thousand
eternally displaced people in Myanmar. I spoke to several people
in Myanmar who asked not to be named for their
own safety, but are very familiar with the funding of
the PDF. One of them told me click to donate

(02:09:20):
started to support government staff who had decided to join
a civil disobedience movement. Government staff are always low paid,
and so they were not very financially stable. In the beginning,
the function click to tommy allow these workers to strike
without pay. After a few weeks of being on strike,
financial concerns were weakening the movement and people were being

(02:09:41):
forced to work or starve. Younger protomocracy activists responded by
setting up YouTube channels and then using the anti coup
telegram channels to direct millions of views and a cliques
to them from across the country and from supporters abroad.
The resulting advertising revenue allowed them to fund the civil
disobedience movement and later to equip the PDF. By December,

(02:10:04):
these clicks were yielding an income of about five hundred
million kiyats about twenty eight thousand dollars every day. The
military junta responded to this and international indignation at videos
of protesters being massacred in the street by tripling data
prizes and throttling internet connection speeds. Pro democracy keyboard warriors
responded with viral content that required less bandwidth, including writing

(02:10:27):
personal finance blogs to attract the u S audience that
was unknowingly supporting a revolution with its clicks. People in
Myanmar also began to use VPNs to access the Internet.
This helped them get around some of the junta's restrictions
and also yielded a higher advertising payment per click on
a given advert. Websites like Digital Revolution allow users to
find content that supports pro democracy rebels and click on it,

(02:10:50):
lending their support with nothing more than a broadband connection
and a few seconds of their time. Alongside their videos
and websites, the gen Z rebels also launched games. At first,
they were just simple, little online phone app games that
would let you throw darts at the cool leader or something.
One source told us that these games didn't just support
the rebels through funding, but also provided a little bit

(02:11:12):
of mental health care. You know, at least people could
virtually kill the folks in their city and their home
who were ruining their lives. And at the same time,
the games earned the money, and that money went to
fund the PDF. The most impressive of these games is
a recently launched War of Heroes, which you can buy
for just a dollar on the Apple and Google app
stores if you want to check it out. In the game,

(02:11:32):
which is available in Burmese or English, a player can
fight as a man or a woman and take on
government troops and even zombies. The money donated by these
games and adverts doesn't just go into a black hole,
according to the sources I spoke to. We have a
click to donate Facebook page, they said, and regularly we
release financial statements on a Facebook page saying like this

(02:11:54):
month we gave ten million caaps to that group. I
spoke to Billy Ford, a program officer for the Burma
team at US Institute of Peace. He says this kind
of innovation is what's allowed the protomocracy movement to survive
in Miama since it was last violently suppressed in ATPs,
and resistance movements in Myanmar have historically been an example
to the world of creative, strategic and resilient models of activism,

(02:12:17):
he said. This poste movement has taken that to a
new level, enabling it to defy all historical precedent and
sustain an anti coup movement for more than eighteen months,
now actually gaining ground against a regime with an enormous
structural advantage, rather than seeing their lack of weapons and
funds of the fatal flaw. Ford says that the highly

(02:12:39):
unlined rebels have looked for areas where they can outflank
the aging generals who stole their futures from them. The
movement has leveraged comparative advantages large numbers of people with
time and tech savvy to raise money. He says. This tactic,
although unusual, has been a great success. According to Ford,
the approach has grown enormously, with one of the video games,

(02:13:01):
for example, rising to become a number two paid app
on the App Store at one point. However, all the
cliques in the world might not be enough to sweep
the rebels into Mandalay and return the country on its
path towards democracy. Sources inside ME and MAR say that
less and less revenue is generated by a ME and
Mari ip address, and that they have had to encourage
members of the People's Clique force to install vp ns

(02:13:22):
to make their clicks appear to come from the U
S or Europe. Sometimes the traffic is so massive that
YouTube's algorithm mistakes it for an artificial intelligence bot net.
They're looking, they tell me, it pivoting towards affiliate links
and the sort of content driven commerce that has swept
the U S media thanks to the success of sites
like The wire Cutter. Meanwhile, on the ground, PDF forces

(02:13:43):
are regularly getting the better of the toutmadaw and small
arms conflict, but coming off worse when they can't defend
themselves against the Russian jets, which the Hunter uses to
bomb civilian and military targets. Without man portable anti aircraft systems,
the rebels are sitting ducks. The world is sent thou
of these to Ukraine and none to people in Myanmar
fighting the same battle for democracy against the same Russian jets.

(02:14:06):
Despite this, they're not discouraged. PDF rebels tell me they
have been scouring the Internet and they're working on a
solution that doesn't need the apparatus of support of a
state and instead relies on stable broadband and the increasing
ingenuity they've shown in eighteen months of revolution. De crazy,
I word oh do dying? YEA yeah? Oh my really

(02:14:49):
young age boy nine? I know it. Hi everyone, it's
me again, James. Don't worry. I'm not coming to you

(02:15:11):
at the end of the series to report something tragic
like I did. And I'll last me. I'm a series
and I'm just recording this little message at the end
to say that we're very grateful to Daniel, Andy and
for all their hard work on this, and we've gone
through countless edits for this particular project, and they've done
a lot of hard work to get it to you
in the form that you listen to it today and

(02:15:31):
for the last week. We also want to say that
although this appears to be a podcast written and recorded
by Robert and I, that Andy is very much a
co author and that none of this would have been
possible without him. As we said, and he's not his
real name, and we can't put his real name in
the credits because we're worried for his safety, but his
work has been invaluable and without him, none of what

(02:15:54):
you've heard would be possible. Hey, We'll be back Monday
with more episodes every week from now until the heat
death of the Universe. It could happen. Here is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can

(02:16:16):
find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at
cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.