July 5, 2022 • 59 mins
Join your host James Brown for a 2 part episode with the best selling author, television host, public speaker, and former CIA undercover operative, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. Dive in with them as they explore how technology influences truth, what Amaryllis' go to news sources are, sacrifice, teaching our children about being citizens of the world and so much more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
When I hear someone say the words here's what really happened,
my ears automatically park up. I think it's because I'm
hungry for truth. I want to know what really happened.
I don't want to be ignorant, or captain the dark,
or protected from the reality of any situation. And more
than anything, I love knowing what we're really talking about.
(00:30):
Sometimes truth is in the subtext, and sometimes it's not
there at all. This two part episode features the best
selling author, television host, public speaker, and former CIA undercover
operative Amarillis Fox Kennedy. After Amarillis story, we chat about
(00:51):
high technology influences, truth, her go to news sources, sacrifice,
teaching our children about the greater good, and so much more.
This is the unimaginable. I'm your host, musician James Brawn.
The thing is, as a child, I never could have
(01:17):
imagined growing up to work as a spy. I couldn't
even imagine growing up to work for the establishment. They
grew up in this family devoted to art and outsiders, immigrants, refugees.
(01:37):
My dad was an economist, but he focused on the
electrification of camps where internally displaced people and refugees slept
with their children, fleeing wars that were started by the
governments and the military and the intelligence community that I
(01:58):
came to be a part of. Even as a teenager,
I never could have imagined that would have been the case.
How did it happen? Well, I guess you have to
go back to graduating high school. Graduating high school, I
took the money that my mom gave me to buy
(02:18):
a prom dress, and I went to st a travel
for people who are old enough to remember that, the
student Travel agency, and I paid cash for a ticket
to Thailand. And I did that because I wanted to
go and participate in this volunteer program to help teach kids,
(02:40):
refugee kids who had come across from the politically unstable
situation in Burma. And I arrived at the refugee camp
in on the Typeurmese border and realized that the two
weeks I had signed up for weren't long enough to
get acclimated myself fled alone help anybody, and so when
(03:03):
the other kids on my trip left, I stayed, which
I think made my team leader pretty uncomfortable, since he
was responsible for all of our well being and getting
us back to our parents. In one piece, but I
was pretty insistent, and he had other kids to take
care of, so he left and there I was making
(03:24):
my way back to the refugee camp with the calendar
unfolding in front of me, And I ended up staying
a whole year working in the camp school, but also
in the workshop that made prosthetic limbs for elephants, if
(03:45):
you could believe that, because elephants were often the most
important asset for two or three generations of a family
um in an area that relied so heavily on on
timber and logging, or an elephant could carry a fallen
tree all the way to market. But given the civil
(04:06):
war that was going on across the border in Burma
in Myanmar, the area that the elephants were walking across
every day was increasingly covered with land mines, and these
elephants were losing their limbs. And so I was there volunteering,
teaching kids in the mornings and building prosthetic limbs for
(04:27):
elephants in the afternoon, and and watching the little ones
swimming in the swimming hole. I'm not sure if they
would ever be able to go back to their home
country across the river, and one day a beautiful man
came to camp, and I was seventeen. He was probably
something like twenty two or three, really, no more a
(04:50):
man than I was a woman, but he seemed much
more experienced in the ways of the world than I was.
And I listened while he explained that he had been
in hiding for years across the border in Rangoon and
Yangon because of his opposition to the military regime, and
had finally escaped, but had a death penalty on his
(05:11):
head if he went back. His name was min's In,
and he was tall and slender, willowy, with these silver
round wire rim glasses and an encyclopedic knowledge of to
toak Fill and Vacliffe Hovel and all of the democracy
(05:33):
texts that I had absorbed traveling all over the world,
but most of my friends my age back in the
States had never read. I found him to be such
an interesting visitor to the camp. Became every few weeks
and dropped off a newsletter that he seemed to produce,
(05:54):
but I didn't really know where or how. It was
called the Arrowwaddy, named for the river in in Myanmar,
and it was the democratic newspaper and opposition to the
military regime and one day I I plucked up the
courage to approach him and ask if I could interview him.
I had been writing a few stories for BBC Radio
(06:16):
Bangkok service about what the refugee experience was on the
tay Burmese border, and I thought it would be a
good excuse to understand what he was doing and maybe
share some of his work with the world. And he
took me on the back of his moped through the
jungle with a blindfold on, which seemed a little melodramatic
(06:36):
at the time, but also I was seventeen and he
was beautiful and I was game. And so through the
rain we went through the trees blindfold, tight rain, prickling
my skin, making s turns between trees so that we
didn't die, until we finally stopped and he pulled off
my blindfold, and there we were underneath a platform that
(07:00):
was elevated in the trees above our heads, and a
ladder that we took climbing wrong over wrong until we
peeked our heads through the platform. And I felt like
something of a newly born infant traveling through that trap door.
I have to say, from the jungle floor into this
(07:21):
world of floor mattresses and mimiograph machines, ashtrays and bookshelves
covered in leather bound books that had been smuggled from
this or that used bookshop. And that's all there was
there except for four or five people leaning over their typewriters,
(07:43):
banging out articles for the next edition of this newsletter.
And I came to realize that this was the home
of the Aarrawaddy, the democratic newspaper and opposition to the
Burmese reshime, deep in the jungle on the Tai Burmese
border outside of Mesa At to the west of cheng Mai,
(08:04):
and it became something of a second home to me.
Minsen and I became very close friends, and as the
summer wore on, he let me know that there was
an uprising coming being planned by others who rejected the
military regime in Yeng Gone, that it was going to
(08:28):
be on September nine. And this was important from a
numerological point of view, because August eight had been the
initial uprising that had led to some fifteen or twenty
thousand students being killed, and no international outcry, no iconic
(08:52):
photo like the Tienamen Square photo we all know so well,
no real record of this in nor miss Lee heinous
crime against humanity, and Minsen was very preoccupied with trying
to figure out how we could make sure that somebody
was there in case this new protest was crushed the
(09:12):
way the last one was, and what record would there
be when everybody who was there on that platform in
the jungle already had a just sentence on their head
and could not possibly cross the border to go back
and be sure to take the photos or the video
that would be needed to tell the world what was
(09:32):
happening if a crackdown did in fact occur. With a
sense of immortality that only a seventeen year old could have,
and obviously I don't have anymore, I raised my hand
and said I'd go in, and they kind of looked
at me skeptically for a minute, and then realized it
(09:54):
was a terrible plan, but the only plan that any
of us had, And so they set about trying to
teach me how to record truth for the sake of
goodness in the face of real danger. They cut up
my satchel so that I could hide a camera inside
of it while I was cycling in the capital during
(10:16):
the protests. They gave me a box of biros of
kind of big pens so that I could open them
up and wrap film around the ink cartridge in order
to smuggle it out of the country. They gave me
a jar of Nivea face cream. I remember because my
(10:36):
grandmother used it and I hadn't. I hadn't seen it
since then too, wrap film in cellophane in plastic wrap
and submerge it in the face cream to bring it
back undetected. I had never done any of these things
before I was seventeen, and had led a life of
protest because my parents were big believer is in in
(11:00):
that but open protest. The subterfuge was a new thing
for me, and they taught me pretty well given the constraints,
and so I finally went on the first of September
and got my bearings. I had a a government assigned
(11:23):
tour guide quote unquote who met me on requested and
unpaid for when I arrived at the airport. These days,
this really only happens in the likes of North Korea,
but at the time it was pretty common in Menmir
the government minder who followed you everywhere you went morning
(11:45):
tonight under the auspices of providing some kind of entertainment
or tour guide it, but really to report back to
the government, to the regime on your activities. And so
they put me in a guesthouse that was different from
the one that I had booked, presumably because there were
cameras in the room. And I spent my days trying
(12:07):
to convince them that I wasn't there to do anything
other than to look at the pagodas and behave as
though I were just another idiot seventeen year old tourists.
And then on the nine I held my breath and
got up in the morning expecting, I don't know, expecting
to see the roads alight with fire and protest and
(12:34):
you know, maybe carnage even but something. And I guess
that was my first real introduction to the deadening power
of military dictatorships, because the scariness that I woke up
to that morning wasn't fighting in the streets. It wasn't
(12:57):
people being arrested, it wasn't gunfire. It was silence, total silence,
no protests, but also none of the normal street noise,
people sitting on low stools drinking milky tea the way
that they do every day on the streets of Burma.
(13:18):
None of the song cows or took tooks or street traffic. Nothing.
And at the end of my road, at each intersection,
I could see just low slung wooden barriers in the
shapes of prisms, with barbed wire running between each wooden staff.
(13:43):
That was it. The regime had known it was coming,
they had been warned. It turned out. We found out
later that a few key arrests had been made in
the middle of the night, and the fear and panic
that had resulted from that had prevented everybody else from
taking to the streets. And this pro test, this answer
to the horrors, that had been more than a decade
(14:07):
in the making, was shut down before it even began
by fear of torture and lifelong imprisonment and worse at
the hands of the regime that was in power. And
so suddenly there I was at a government run guesthouse
(14:27):
with the tour guide outside the door, feeling like all
I had done was bring revenue to this regime by
staying in their stupid hotel, and there wasn't even anything
there for me to record, and I wanted to get
the hell out of Dodge, but I was due to
go back on the so I went and had to
(14:50):
drink at my friend Min's inns favorite spot and doesn't
exist anymore, What a shame. But at the time it
was called Abc cat Faye a Mahmudula street, and it
was known to be a place where musicians gathered, artists, poets,
and of course as a result, so much of the resistance.
(15:11):
And I ordered some French fries and I remember they
came with chopsticks and chili sauce. And I sat there alone,
watching the silent streets outside, eating my French fries with chopsticks,
dipping them in chili sauce. And I went to the bathroom,
and in the bathroom I was handed a note. That
note was from someone who knew Mensen and and let
(15:33):
me know that there was a change of plan, that
I still had a purpose there, and that now my
purpose was to go and meet Aung San Suchi, the
nobel laureate who was under house arrest because she would
not give up her fight for democracy in the country
of her father, of her family. Her father had been
(15:55):
the first democratically elected leader of the country after the
end of colonialism after World War two, and he had
been assassinated, which had kicked off the military regime that
still was holding the country in a brutal vice lock
at that very moment, and she had come back to
(16:18):
take care of her mom, who was having a stroke.
But in that moment, there, at the time that this
uprising was happening, the first student uprising where so many
people were killed needlessly on the streets, she had felt
the calling of her father and had begun to speak
at these rallies and had become a national gathering figure
and leader. And every step of the way the government
(16:41):
had said to her, go home to your sons. She
had two young sons, Kim and Alexander, who were back
in Oxford and England, and go home to your sons.
You can get on any flight you want, and the
only caveat is that you will never be able to
return here. And she chose to stay, which in and
of itself was unimaginable to me, because my mother was
(17:02):
my best friend in the world, and the idea of
those two boys losing their mother because she was so
brave as to stay. But was it brave? It was
so confusing to me. But on entire nation seemed to
hang in the balance, and all of these people who
hadn't given up, who were still fighting for democracy, even
(17:22):
though all of their peers were in prison, being tortured
or being killed. We're doing it because they had found
some kind of a faith in her. And for all
of these months, for more than a year, in fact,
the government had made sure that she could not give
any public interviews, that the people who came and gathered
outside of her gates every week could hear her speak
(17:44):
from a window, but could not record it and could
not share it in any fashion with anybody beyond that block.
And so it seemed that Minsen's job for me was
to go and interview her myself, and to use the
training that he had given me. Not to bring out
photos or video of protests being crushed, because that had
(18:05):
happened silently in the night, without anybody there to witness
it at all, but to at least record her words
and bring them back to Thailand so that they could
be broadcast via a short wave which cannot be blocked
back across the border into Burma, so that those who
(18:26):
were in rural provinces could hear their leaders speak and
not lose faith that democracy was possible. So when the
day came I was ready at three thirty for the
ride that was supposed to come at four, early enough
that my quote unquote tour guide would not have arrived
at the guesthouse for the day. And when I saw
(18:49):
the car grind through the gravel, I tucked downstairs and
jumped into the backseat, and we made our way across
the city. Is the dawn kind of spilled sherbet pink
through the lanes and alleyways across the lake. And when
we turned up at the NLD headquarters, the National League
(19:11):
for Democracy on some succis party, it was just a
low slung building between tea shops. Didn't look like anything spectacular,
except that across the way there was a military outpost
and barracks where eighteen year old soldiers slept because they
(19:36):
were so threatened by democracy that they had to keep
watch outside of its door. They weren't keeping watch at
that particular moment because it was so early in the morning,
and so the driver stuffed me inside and sped away,
And I was in this big room with a staircase
going up the left hand side. At the top of
(19:57):
the staircase, suddenly a aired on sun SUCHI and she
looked every bit as regal and beautiful and petite and
impossible as her photographs, flowers tucked in her hair, perfectly folded,
lunji beautiful, inspiring. And I watched up the stairs and
(20:20):
sat down at the table with her, and we began
a conversation. I asked questions that I had prepared, tried
to calm my nerves while she answered them so that
I could properly respond ask follow up questions, do my
job as the ears of the Burmese people, that this
(20:41):
recording might, if I was able to do what I
was sent there to do, might end up in the
hands of And we talked about free elections. We talked
about sacrifice. We talked about the myth of benevolent autocracy,
and how men see democracy can be in comparison, and
(21:03):
how easy it is for strong men to rise in
the face of that messiness, how dangerous those who use
our divisions against us can be. So many ideas that now,
wherever you sit on the political spectrum, seem incredibly prescient
(21:23):
and remind me that history may not repeat itself, but
it sure as hell rhymes. But back then I was
hearing them for the first time, and I listened intently
until we got to the end of our time, and
I took the film out of the camera and got
ready to beautifully rapid inside of the big pens and
(21:48):
the Niva face cream as I was taught, and nonsense Succi.
She put her hand on mine, and it was small
enough that it could have fit in mind like a child,
but with this electric authority. And I looked up at her,
and she said, no, those are those are for the film.
You want them to find the film. You really want
(22:10):
to get out. You have a different hiding place, and
she pointed back towards the one toilet in the building,
a humble squat toilet affair in the back room. But
before I went, she wrapped the film with a cellophane
(22:33):
into the tiny bullet size shape of a tampon. And
I understood, I understood how I could help, why I
was there, what in that particular moment bravery might mean.
And she was right, because when I walked outside of
(22:54):
those doors, I didn't make it half a block before
I got picked up by the military. They took me
back to the guesthouse, but they had already tossed all
of my things there. They just gave me time to
pick up my passport, pick up my bag. They took
me right to the airport, not to the normal terminal
(23:14):
where you check in and travel like a free person,
but to a cargo bay around back. And I could
tell from other people being ushered in with their hands
bound behind their backs, that cargo was exactly what we
were considered, and that I had suddenly found myself in
(23:39):
a situation that was way beyond anything that I was
equipped to deal with. Seventeen year old kid, an idiot,
seventeen year old kid who was too privileged to even
imagine that by doing what I thought was right, I
might create more problems than I solved. And I started
running through my head and thinking, what now? What if
(24:03):
I'm a prisoner here and my country starts to make
concessions on human rights in order to get me back.
Prisoner swaps are the worst? How could I have done this?
And I was right to ask those questions. What I
had done was foolhardy, but luckily I had done it
under the guidance of those who knew a lot more
than I did, and in the end, they knew that
(24:25):
the political situation at the time meant that I would
be put on a plane back to Thailand with a
PNG statement in my passport. Now PNG stands for a
persona non grata. I knew that from Latin class, but
I didn't yet know that it is used in international
relations to mean this person cannot come back in this country,
(24:47):
no way, not ever know how nah. And that seemed
like a perfectly acceptable compromise to me at the time,
because I could hear screams down the hallway, and not
only did I not I want to find out what
it was that was causing those screams. Not only did
(25:08):
I not want to experience that, but I felt at
this point like the only way to make it worth it,
the only way to make up for having gone there
in the first place, was to go and tell this
story two sound the alarm about what was happening in
this country and what needed to change and what we
could do to help. And I was only gonna be
(25:29):
able to do that if I could get on that plane.
So I was PMNG. That passport became something of a
of a mark of honor for me because I got
on that plane with all of my big pens and
Niviia face creams pulled out of my luggage lost all
of that it was charged according to a receipt that
(25:53):
I was given an exit tax for the precise amount
of dollars and cents that happened to be in my
luggage at the time that it was searched. In fact,
other than my grubby teenage backpackers clothes, the only thing
that I had with me when I was put on
that plane was the passport with the PNG notification and
(26:18):
the film inside of the cellophane inside of me. When
I got back to Bangkok, Minsen picked me up at
the airport and he took me with the rest of
the crew from the jungle to this beautiful restaurant where
real trees grew through the ground and real birds flew
between the tables, even though it was all indoors in
(26:39):
this big warehouse beautiful district in Bangkok, and he asked
me questions about the country that he so obviously loved
and so obviously missed, and was broken hearted at the answers,
but elated that at least we got on Sanso cheese
words out. And we got the film to the BBC
in the morning and spliced it together and broadcast it
(27:02):
back and two weeks later, I had to leave, had
start college. I had to go back to being an
idiot American teenager. Starting my freshman year, I rocked up
at Oxford, my mom's English. So I was going to
university in England. An outsider because I was American, an outsider,
(27:25):
because I've grown up in all of these strange countries overseas,
an outsider because I had just taken a gap here
and been pnged by the military from a dictatorship in
Southeast Asia for meeting with a noble laureate under the
cover of darkness, despite the men with guns that slept
(27:47):
outside her door. But in all of that strangeness and awkwardness,
in those first few weeks and months at Oxford studying
international studying, theology, God's law and man's law, moral law,
and social law, it started to come together for me
(28:08):
how telling the truth can bring evil to its knees.
Letting this tiny, petite, brave woman speak her truth had
brought literally hundreds of armed men in convoy, and that
was electrifying for me. Power of smuggling truth from the
(28:31):
farthest corners of the world to make sure that the
rest of us show up. The rest of us know
what's going on, and can activate ourselves, can show up
and help. And suddenly the idea of the establishment began
to melt a little bit, because suddenly I had had
(28:54):
to grapple with having come face to face with what
dictatorship truly looks like, what it feels like and smells
like and tastes like. In a country where you can't
even walk down the street without being assigned to tour
guide who watches your every move and waits for you
outside of the bathroom, and having experienced that, having seen
(29:16):
the lengths that that country went to to prevent truth
from seeping outside of its borders, Suddenly the idea of
traveling around the world to let people explain what is happening,
ask for help, tell the truth, it didn't seem so
(29:37):
much like the Cia of the movies. I understood suddenly
that there was a battle between those who will smother
truth and those who will smuggle truth out for all
to see. And I think that was the beginning of
me and deciding to devote my life to being the latter,
(29:59):
to be a smuggler of truth, not a smotherer. And
at first I thought I would smuggle truth as a
journalist but then nine eleven happened, and in the heartache
that followed, I was thrown backwards in to the heartbreak
of being eight years old and losing my best friend.
(30:24):
The first person I knew who had died, Laura. She
had been one of my two best friends in London.
I was in third grade and she and her whole
family were flying home for Christmas when they're playing went
down over lock of the Scotland pan Am flight that
(30:47):
exploded midair. I have been right before Christmas, but my
mom waited until after Christmas to tell me. And the
only way I got through it, because to be honest,
I really at the time didn't think I would. The
only way I got through it was my dad explaining
that as you started reading the newspaper that it didn't
(31:08):
seem connected, but that maybe if I understood the forces
that took her, they wouldn't seem as scary. The boogeyman
in the closet goes away when you turn on the lights,
and so I set about trying to turn on the lights.
I read the newspaper every day, probably too carefully in retrospect,
(31:28):
looking back on it, probably not that healthy at all
actually to read about Kadafi and Gorbachev, and to wonder
when exactly they might next claim another one of my
friends from the sky. But that understanding helped, It helped
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me to heal, It helped me to grow, It helped
me to try to become some part of the solution
instead of some part of the problem. And at was why,
graduating high school, I had always been so opposed to government,
so opposed to the establishment, because it seemed to me
that everyone who was fighting for the solution was on
(32:11):
the outside. And so when nine eleven happened and suddenly
I was thrown back, so those conversations with my dad
as an eight year old, suddenly I needed that advice.
How do I cope? How do I deal with loss
and terrorism all over again? And his advice kept coming
back to me. You know, you you have to understand it.
(32:33):
You have to understand these forces or they will drown you.
And I realized that if I pursued the path of
being a smuggler of truth as a journalist, if I
went back to Southeast Asia started working again in the
human rights realm, writing stories just as I had wanted to,
(32:57):
I could have an impact, for sure. But I was
unlikely to ever come truly face to face with the
most terrifying, the most malicious of forces, the forces that
had already taken my friend, the forces that had taken
(33:21):
another three thousand some Americans on that Tuesday morning. I
could report on them, sure, but I would never sit
down and have a cup of tea with them. I
would never have the opportunity to say, how do you
think this is okay? What conceivable story do you tell
(33:42):
yourself to make it seem rational or even honorable to
fly a plane into a building full of innocent people.
The only way I was going to be able to
ask that question of somebody who could actually answer it
was to do this very different kind of work. And
so as I started my graduate degree at Georgetown. When
(34:03):
I was first asked would you be interested in that
kind of work? I said something that would have been
unimaginable to me in the years leading up to it.
I said, maybe I would. Maybe I would, because I
don't know how else I will find the ground truth.
(34:25):
How else do you not just believe what you see
on TV? How else do not just believe with the
people around you tell you even though you know that
they've never been there? They've never heard it, and they're
just telling you what someone else told them. I would
be interested, I think I remember saying, and they said, well,
(34:47):
so are we, So are we? And that's how I
ended up walking into an info session in a suburban
holiday in And I can tell you that, coming from
decades of progressive family values, I thought I was walking
(35:10):
into a very different thing. But it turned out to
be a weird and brilliant and wacky group of people
who disagreed violently about so many issues, but were united
by this powerful curiosity, this sense of belief in the
(35:34):
power of human nature for good and ill, that we
cannot know what is going to happen or change it
just by listening with satellites with phone taps, that human intelligence,
human relationships actually still tip the balance. And as a result,
(35:56):
I got to have those conversations, I got to share
those cups of tea with people who had done things
so abhorrent it was unimaginable in many senses to even
be in the room with them. And yet I never
would have understood until I was in that room that
the driving force behind those spasms of violence, those terrible,
(36:20):
abhorrent acts, were incredibly human the most human feelings, the
most familiar Dare I say it to all of us?
The most familiar feelings. Fear, insecurity, Am I here? Does
anyone hear me? Grievance, shame, anger, powerful emotions that we
(36:43):
see taking our own country by storm right now, by
the way, the same human emotions that drive graffiti. When
someone pulls out a spray can and mark's wall as
a way of saying, God, damn it, I exist, Pay
attention to me, Listen to me here my pain. And
(37:04):
when that metastasizes, and it metastasizes, and it metastasizes, and
that cancer grows and grows and grows, unchecked and unnoticed,
that's when the most awful, the most bloody moments of
the war on terrorism occurred on all sides. By the way,
(37:24):
maybe that's a story for another day. In the end,
it's funny to me that it was so unimaginable as
a child that I would have ended up doing that work,
because now, as a mom of three kids, three beautiful,
perfect children, perfectly imperfect, by the way, it's unimaginable to
(37:45):
me that I didn't Because I got to turn on
the lights in the shadowy bedroom and look the monsters
square in the eye and figure out that in the
end they weren't monsters at all, they were files of laundry,
they were human beings dealing with human feelings, and that
(38:09):
their acts were monstrous, their acts were abhorrent, that we
could try to figure out some sliver of common ground
to prevent those acts from happening again, but that they themselves, we, ourselves,
all of us, are just humans. That the Boogeyman is
(38:30):
not them and is not us, but is in fact
the concept of them and us that gave rise to
the violence in the first place. And out of all
of that, the only thing that I hope is not
unimaginable is a world where, slowly, slowly, that distinction between
(38:53):
us and them begins to fade and the violence along
with it. Not as a long project project that I
leave to my kids and they will leave to their kids,
but it's a project I believe in with all my heart,
and I hope that you do too. Are on song.
(39:24):
Succi stayed in me and mar for the greater good,
but she had a huge price, not being able to
see your sons. I'm curious to hear what she said
about sacrifice. Yeah, I mean sacrifice was a huge theme
across the whole whole discussion. Uh, not just the sacrifice
(39:47):
of um being away from her sons and the personal
sacrifices Succi herself had made distance from family, yes, but
also her own freedom and the opportunity to spend her
life um anywhere else or doing any other kind of work.
And when she talked about the choice to be away
(40:10):
from Kim and Alexander, her sons, I really related with them,
you know, because I had grown up with a dad
who I missed so much while he was away, and
I knew he was doing important work. He was figuring
out ways to bring electrical grids to really distant parts
of the planet, um, you know, refugee camps and isolated villages,
(40:32):
and I knew that was going to have a huge
impact for you know, kids being able to do their
homework after dark, and moms being able to cook meals
um on electric stoves, and it's just so so many
wonderful quality of life changes. But I missed him, and
I think that's something that's really hard to grapple with
(40:53):
when you're a kid. So I I felt for Kim
and Alexander when and since who she was talking ing
about the need to take over her father's work, And
I think that's very much how she saw it. That
her dad had put everything on the line to bring
democracy and self rule to me and mar after colonialism,
(41:19):
and that that had been a cause that he had
died for in the end, that he had been murdered for.
And the way she described it, when she was standing
in those crowds and watching university students be slaughtered, um,
watching university students not too much older than her own
(41:41):
sons put their own lives on the line for the
democratic dream that her dad had introduced and had fought
for himself. I think she felt that call in her
blood uh, and felt that she was the only person
(42:02):
because of of um, the loyalty that so many of
the students fell to her father, that she was the
only voice that could unite the democratic forces in the
country and and actually bring about the change that her
father had started. So in a funny way, it was
(42:23):
it was actually a family, family duty, I think UM
that had brought about the decision. Um. It was just
duty to her father and her father's democratic dream rather
than duty to her children. And I think that was
a choice that she continued to grapple with every day.
(42:45):
But it sounded like from what she said that she
always came down in the same place, UM, which was
that someday UM, as her boys got older, they would
come to understand that she wasn't just the mother, UM,
but she also had a role to play in the
(43:06):
wider world, UM, in making the world that they were
going to inherit, and that so many of UM there,
their fellow country men and women in Myanmar were going
to inherit a safer and better and more democratic, freer place.
(43:27):
And you know, that has really stuck with me because
I grappled with that exact same problem once I became AM,
you know, and I think, whether you're a freedom fighter,
nobel laureate like Gangsan Succi, or you're an undercover operative
as I was when I had my first daughter, or
(43:50):
you're just any parent on this planet who has to
choose every morning whether to leave the home and go
to work or whether to do the mission critical work
of being at home with your kids reading the bedtime stories.
You know, is your job, um, to to parent at
(44:13):
their side, or is your job to parent by improving
the world that they will ultimately have to live in
and how do you balance those two things? And I think,
you know, watching my own parents um make that balancing
act when I was a kid was my first introduction
to that. But Angsan Succi was a really important echo
(44:36):
um that has has stayed with me and I think
affected a lot of my my own thinking about those choices.
I think we have to be there for our kids,
but we also have to model for them what it
is to be a citizen of the world, what it
is to have a purpose here, and that purpose is family, yes,
(45:00):
but also the wider human family, and what small part
we can play and in making life more bearable, more beautiful,
more joyful even um for the rest of that human family.
And the more that our kids see us do that,
the more that they will do it in their own lives.
(45:21):
And I think that that's as much a part of
parenting as every hug and story and moment that we
spend together. You know, they're they're all, They're all critical,
and it's the great work of our lives to figure
out how to fit them all in. I'm still working
(45:42):
on that one. I hear you. What's mens up to
these days? Do you guys keep in contact at all
men's in is an extraordinary adult. And I guess I
would have known that knowing him as as a young adult,
as a just just gone twenty something year old, UM.
(46:04):
But he went on to to grow into such a
leader in the democratic movement and in Myanmar, and in
fact has moved his family back there and is is
now back in Myanmar, um, you know, doing everything he can,
um to support the forces of democracy and freedom, even
(46:26):
now in the face of of such an enormous UH
set back with the military coup and and the sliding
towards civil war that is happening in Myanmar as we speak.
It's been such an emotional process to watch, um, you know,
to to be there when there were only a dozen
(46:53):
or so internet connections available in the entire country and
everybody was living in fear of the military. And I
was rested for just visiting Gong Sen Succi and hearing
the words that she had to say, and then going
back the next time, which I did, um, some seven
years ago two thousand and fifteen, for the democratic elections
(47:20):
held freely and openly, and to stand in the street
outside the NLD headquarters in the very spot that I
had been arrested when I had been there in and
instead of there being a military outpost, I looked in
(47:40):
every direction, and as far as I could see, in
every direction was a sea of people waiving the fighting
peacock flag, which is the symbol for democracy in Myanmar,
and singing democracy songs. And I mean, my heart was
just bursting with proof that that kind of revolution could
(48:02):
happen peacefully over such a short period of time. I
felt so hopeful for the fall of autocracy and the
rise of democracy all over the world. It was just
an extraordinary moment. And I have my video actually that
I took on my cell phone. Um, standing in that spot,
the same spot I had been arrested. Um. You know
(48:26):
some what is that fifteen and seventeen years later and uh,
and watching democracy just in full flourishing all around me.
I'll send it to you. But then, of course, uh,
here we are five years later, and all of that
(48:48):
progress has been clawed back by the military, and the
muzzle has been shoved back across the whole country's mouth,
and the young people will just not stand for it
this time. And that's why we're seeing the incredible courage,
(49:09):
um that is spurring these continued protests and and this
movement towards what I can only imagine will be protracted
and unfortunately, probably very violent civil war, because young people
who went through that blossoming of democracy, who in living
(49:33):
memory remembered what it was to live under a military regime,
just refused to go back. Now that the military is
is trying to turn back time. And so we're again
in a moment that is more similar to when I
was there the first time in than in any of
these beautiful times since. And of course, in in that
(49:58):
moment of struggle means and being of the character that
he is, um has returned to the country to be
there for Uh, for his brothers and sisters in democracy.
You know, I think it's a much more complicated time
there now, and the democracy movement is a little bit
more fragmented. Um Angsan succi In in many senses did
(50:22):
not turn out to be the leader that the democracy
movement had hoped for and had fought for. When she
finally did achieve the power that you know, she had
been in opposition for so long, and when her party
was finally allowed to share power share governance with the military,
(50:45):
the military never completely seated control so it is important
to remember that UM. You know, they always had a
hand on the tiller. But but when Angsan Succhi's party
was given control after those elections that I witnessed in
two thousands fifteen, UH, she did not turn out to
(51:07):
be as as stalwart a champion for the freedom of
all people's as many had hoped. UM. In fact, she
let many people down in her failure to defend the
ro Hinja people who live on the western border of
Myanmar between Myanmar and Bangladesh, who suffered terrible, terrible injustice
(51:34):
and persecution at the hands of the Berman majority in Myanmar.
Umra Hina are Muslims and were in many cases run
off their land. The villages were raised, UM many of
them themselves were killed, children orphaned, UH, and the refugee
(51:54):
camps and internally displaced person camps along that border are
now overflowing. UM. And Aung San Succhi, of course, was
the natural leader that everybody looked to as the winner
of the Nobel Peace Prize and the defender of democracy
(52:15):
to speak out against these injustices and to lead lead her,
her people and her followers UM to a path of
um of reconciliation and UH and justice, and she has
not done that. And I think that's been a really
heart shattering failure UM and disappointment for many of her followers,
(52:40):
including me and UH, and including Men's in and Men's
And in fact, despite being a close close friend UM
from childhood onwards among Sun, Succi was one of the
first to speak out against that failure UM and has
(53:02):
written publicly about it in in periodicals all over the world.
And UM has really urged and called on Succi to
to step up and UH and to to live the
lesson that until all who live in Myanmar are free,
none are UM. And as part of that call, I
(53:26):
think he has gone back and UM and has continued
his work in the hopes that some of the other
democracy leaders there UM will be more inclusive and and
will bring all of the different ethnic minorities in Myanmar
under the democratic the same democratic fold. Do we stay
(53:46):
in touch? We do not as often as I would like. UM.
It's a bit tricky to communicate now with me and Maar.
The internet is not nearly as free as it once
was UM, so I haven't been able to contact him,
though I've tried in the last year Um before he
moved back. We had the last the last coffee we
(54:10):
had was actually in Berkeley, California. He was a visiting professor,
an honorary professor at Berkeley UM, working on issues of
resisting authoritarian rule around the world. And he had married
and had his own daughter, who's uh he had named
(54:32):
Sue in honor of Ansan succi Um before before the
disappointment that he later voiced in her. So, you know,
he has lived a life of of constant devotion to
the College of Democracy in Mianmir and has been incredibly
authentic to his own moral compass throughout that, and I
(54:56):
continued to admire him immensely. So what's your thoughts about
smuggling truth these days to humans still tip the scale?
I think that's actually a really important question, you know.
I hear so frequently this argument that you know, we're
now in a different era and human intelligence is anachronistic,
(55:20):
it's a thing of the past, and we should just
rely on on signals intelligence, which you know is the
kind of technical term for um the stuff. And I say,
does wire taps um intercepts all that kind of trickery
or satellite imagery? You know, these kinds of of technical
(55:44):
means for knowing what the adversary is doing, and I
just think that that's a dire, dire mistake. You know,
human relationships are able to offer insights into people motivations
and future plans in a way that no technology ever could.
(56:06):
You know, I sometimes I liken it too. If you
think in your own life, you have a small group
of friends that you communicate with on a on a
regular basis, you know that you meet up with on
Friday nights and have a pint of beer after work with,
and then you have a much much broader group of
(56:27):
relationships people that you follow online right on on social media,
and maybe there are people you went to high school with,
maybe their celebrities who you've never even met, but you
kind of keep tabs on the events of their life
that they that they post about or that somebody else
posts about them um online And to me, that's like
(56:49):
a pretty good approximation of the difference between human intelligence
and other technological means signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, UM when
you actually have a human relationship with somebody. If you
think of the friends that you meet every Friday and
have drinks with at the bar, you not only know
what is happening in their life. You know that they
(57:13):
got married this week, for example, UM, but you also
know what their future plans are, that they're they're getting
ready to have a baby, that they they want to
want their trying to have a baby right even though
they haven't yet and they haven't announced it UM. And
more than that, you know how they feel about those
(57:35):
plans and how likely they are to happen. You might
know that UM, they're worried because they're having trouble with fertility,
that they're nervous about seeing a fertility doctor because it
didn't work out for a friend of theirs, but their
spouse does want to see it, and what conflict that
might be arising, and what impact that conflict might have
on their marriage and on the baby. None of that
(57:57):
do you see for that broader group of friends, where
you're just seeing events be posted as they actually happen.
That kind of technological surveillance UM doesn't give you insight
into future plans, and it doesn't give you insight into
the emotions and the intentions behind those future plants. And
(58:22):
you know, all of that is critical to friendship, which
is why you're much closer to the people that you
see every Friday night than the people that you just
follow on social media. But it's also critical to the
kinds of relationships um that allow us to bring an
end to conflict or to prevent attacks. They are, they are.
(58:53):
Amarillas said that the boogeyman is not us or them,
but it is the concept of us and them they
give rise to the violence in the first place. Let
that sink in. The boogeyman is not us or them,
but it is the concept of us and them that
give rise to the violence in the first place. It's
(59:15):
easy to forget that we're all made of the same
stuff and to get lost in a feedback loop of
fear that in the end divides us. You've just listened
to part one of a two part episode of The Unimaginable.
I'm your host James Brown. Until next time.
When I hear someone say the words here's what really happened,
my ears automatically park up. I think it's because I'm
hungry for truth. I want to know what really happened.
I don't want to be ignorant, or captain the dark,
or protected from the reality of any situation. And more
than anything, I love knowing what we're really talking about.
(00:30):
Sometimes truth is in the subtext, and sometimes it's not
there at all. This two part episode features the best
selling author, television host, public speaker, and former CIA undercover
operative Amarillis Fox Kennedy. After Amarillis story, we chat about
(00:51):
high technology influences, truth, her go to news sources, sacrifice,
teaching our children about the greater good, and so much more.
This is the unimaginable. I'm your host, musician James Brawn.
The thing is, as a child, I never could have
(01:17):
imagined growing up to work as a spy. I couldn't
even imagine growing up to work for the establishment. They
grew up in this family devoted to art and outsiders, immigrants, refugees.
(01:37):
My dad was an economist, but he focused on the
electrification of camps where internally displaced people and refugees slept
with their children, fleeing wars that were started by the
governments and the military and the intelligence community that I
(01:58):
came to be a part of. Even as a teenager,
I never could have imagined that would have been the case.
How did it happen? Well, I guess you have to
go back to graduating high school. Graduating high school, I
took the money that my mom gave me to buy
(02:18):
a prom dress, and I went to st a travel
for people who are old enough to remember that, the
student Travel agency, and I paid cash for a ticket
to Thailand. And I did that because I wanted to
go and participate in this volunteer program to help teach kids,
(02:40):
refugee kids who had come across from the politically unstable
situation in Burma. And I arrived at the refugee camp
in on the Typeurmese border and realized that the two
weeks I had signed up for weren't long enough to
get acclimated myself fled alone help anybody, and so when
(03:03):
the other kids on my trip left, I stayed, which
I think made my team leader pretty uncomfortable, since he
was responsible for all of our well being and getting
us back to our parents. In one piece, but I
was pretty insistent, and he had other kids to take
care of, so he left and there I was making
(03:24):
my way back to the refugee camp with the calendar
unfolding in front of me, And I ended up staying
a whole year working in the camp school, but also
in the workshop that made prosthetic limbs for elephants, if
(03:45):
you could believe that, because elephants were often the most
important asset for two or three generations of a family
um in an area that relied so heavily on on
timber and logging, or an elephant could carry a fallen
tree all the way to market. But given the civil
(04:06):
war that was going on across the border in Burma
in Myanmar, the area that the elephants were walking across
every day was increasingly covered with land mines, and these
elephants were losing their limbs. And so I was there volunteering,
teaching kids in the mornings and building prosthetic limbs for
(04:27):
elephants in the afternoon, and and watching the little ones
swimming in the swimming hole. I'm not sure if they
would ever be able to go back to their home
country across the river, and one day a beautiful man
came to camp, and I was seventeen. He was probably
something like twenty two or three, really, no more a
(04:50):
man than I was a woman, but he seemed much
more experienced in the ways of the world than I was.
And I listened while he explained that he had been
in hiding for years across the border in Rangoon and
Yangon because of his opposition to the military regime, and
had finally escaped, but had a death penalty on his
(05:11):
head if he went back. His name was min's In,
and he was tall and slender, willowy, with these silver
round wire rim glasses and an encyclopedic knowledge of to
toak Fill and Vacliffe Hovel and all of the democracy
(05:33):
texts that I had absorbed traveling all over the world,
but most of my friends my age back in the
States had never read. I found him to be such
an interesting visitor to the camp. Became every few weeks
and dropped off a newsletter that he seemed to produce,
(05:54):
but I didn't really know where or how. It was
called the Arrowwaddy, named for the river in in Myanmar,
and it was the democratic newspaper and opposition to the
military regime and one day I I plucked up the
courage to approach him and ask if I could interview him.
I had been writing a few stories for BBC Radio
(06:16):
Bangkok service about what the refugee experience was on the
tay Burmese border, and I thought it would be a
good excuse to understand what he was doing and maybe
share some of his work with the world. And he
took me on the back of his moped through the
jungle with a blindfold on, which seemed a little melodramatic
(06:36):
at the time, but also I was seventeen and he
was beautiful and I was game. And so through the
rain we went through the trees blindfold, tight rain, prickling
my skin, making s turns between trees so that we
didn't die, until we finally stopped and he pulled off
my blindfold, and there we were underneath a platform that
(07:00):
was elevated in the trees above our heads, and a
ladder that we took climbing wrong over wrong until we
peeked our heads through the platform. And I felt like
something of a newly born infant traveling through that trap door.
I have to say, from the jungle floor into this
(07:21):
world of floor mattresses and mimiograph machines, ashtrays and bookshelves
covered in leather bound books that had been smuggled from
this or that used bookshop. And that's all there was
there except for four or five people leaning over their typewriters,
(07:43):
banging out articles for the next edition of this newsletter.
And I came to realize that this was the home
of the Aarrawaddy, the democratic newspaper and opposition to the
Burmese reshime, deep in the jungle on the Tai Burmese
border outside of Mesa At to the west of cheng Mai,
(08:04):
and it became something of a second home to me.
Minsen and I became very close friends, and as the
summer wore on, he let me know that there was
an uprising coming being planned by others who rejected the
military regime in Yeng Gone, that it was going to
(08:28):
be on September nine. And this was important from a
numerological point of view, because August eight had been the
initial uprising that had led to some fifteen or twenty
thousand students being killed, and no international outcry, no iconic
(08:52):
photo like the Tienamen Square photo we all know so well,
no real record of this in nor miss Lee heinous
crime against humanity, and Minsen was very preoccupied with trying
to figure out how we could make sure that somebody
was there in case this new protest was crushed the
(09:12):
way the last one was, and what record would there
be when everybody who was there on that platform in
the jungle already had a just sentence on their head
and could not possibly cross the border to go back
and be sure to take the photos or the video
that would be needed to tell the world what was
(09:32):
happening if a crackdown did in fact occur. With a
sense of immortality that only a seventeen year old could have,
and obviously I don't have anymore, I raised my hand
and said I'd go in, and they kind of looked
at me skeptically for a minute, and then realized it
(09:54):
was a terrible plan, but the only plan that any
of us had, And so they set about trying to
teach me how to record truth for the sake of
goodness in the face of real danger. They cut up
my satchel so that I could hide a camera inside
of it while I was cycling in the capital during
(10:16):
the protests. They gave me a box of biros of
kind of big pens so that I could open them
up and wrap film around the ink cartridge in order
to smuggle it out of the country. They gave me
a jar of Nivea face cream. I remember because my
(10:36):
grandmother used it and I hadn't. I hadn't seen it
since then too, wrap film in cellophane in plastic wrap
and submerge it in the face cream to bring it
back undetected. I had never done any of these things
before I was seventeen, and had led a life of
protest because my parents were big believer is in in
(11:00):
that but open protest. The subterfuge was a new thing
for me, and they taught me pretty well given the constraints,
and so I finally went on the first of September
and got my bearings. I had a a government assigned
(11:23):
tour guide quote unquote who met me on requested and
unpaid for when I arrived at the airport. These days,
this really only happens in the likes of North Korea,
but at the time it was pretty common in Menmir
the government minder who followed you everywhere you went morning
(11:45):
tonight under the auspices of providing some kind of entertainment
or tour guide it, but really to report back to
the government, to the regime on your activities. And so
they put me in a guesthouse that was different from
the one that I had booked, presumably because there were
cameras in the room. And I spent my days trying
(12:07):
to convince them that I wasn't there to do anything
other than to look at the pagodas and behave as
though I were just another idiot seventeen year old tourists.
And then on the nine I held my breath and
got up in the morning expecting, I don't know, expecting
to see the roads alight with fire and protest and
(12:34):
you know, maybe carnage even but something. And I guess
that was my first real introduction to the deadening power
of military dictatorships, because the scariness that I woke up
to that morning wasn't fighting in the streets. It wasn't
(12:57):
people being arrested, it wasn't gunfire. It was silence, total silence,
no protests, but also none of the normal street noise,
people sitting on low stools drinking milky tea the way
that they do every day on the streets of Burma.
(13:18):
None of the song cows or took tooks or street traffic. Nothing.
And at the end of my road, at each intersection,
I could see just low slung wooden barriers in the
shapes of prisms, with barbed wire running between each wooden staff.
(13:43):
That was it. The regime had known it was coming,
they had been warned. It turned out. We found out
later that a few key arrests had been made in
the middle of the night, and the fear and panic
that had resulted from that had prevented everybody else from
taking to the streets. And this pro test, this answer
to the horrors, that had been more than a decade
(14:07):
in the making, was shut down before it even began
by fear of torture and lifelong imprisonment and worse at
the hands of the regime that was in power. And
so suddenly there I was at a government run guesthouse
(14:27):
with the tour guide outside the door, feeling like all
I had done was bring revenue to this regime by
staying in their stupid hotel, and there wasn't even anything
there for me to record, and I wanted to get
the hell out of Dodge, but I was due to
go back on the so I went and had to
(14:50):
drink at my friend Min's inns favorite spot and doesn't
exist anymore, What a shame. But at the time it
was called Abc cat Faye a Mahmudula street, and it
was known to be a place where musicians gathered, artists, poets,
and of course as a result, so much of the resistance.
(15:11):
And I ordered some French fries and I remember they
came with chopsticks and chili sauce. And I sat there alone,
watching the silent streets outside, eating my French fries with chopsticks,
dipping them in chili sauce. And I went to the bathroom,
and in the bathroom I was handed a note. That
note was from someone who knew Mensen and and let
(15:33):
me know that there was a change of plan, that
I still had a purpose there, and that now my
purpose was to go and meet Aung San Suchi, the
nobel laureate who was under house arrest because she would
not give up her fight for democracy in the country
of her father, of her family. Her father had been
(15:55):
the first democratically elected leader of the country after the
end of colonialism after World War two, and he had
been assassinated, which had kicked off the military regime that
still was holding the country in a brutal vice lock
at that very moment, and she had come back to
(16:18):
take care of her mom, who was having a stroke.
But in that moment, there, at the time that this
uprising was happening, the first student uprising where so many
people were killed needlessly on the streets, she had felt
the calling of her father and had begun to speak
at these rallies and had become a national gathering figure
and leader. And every step of the way the government
(16:41):
had said to her, go home to your sons. She
had two young sons, Kim and Alexander, who were back
in Oxford and England, and go home to your sons.
You can get on any flight you want, and the
only caveat is that you will never be able to
return here. And she chose to stay, which in and
of itself was unimaginable to me, because my mother was
(17:02):
my best friend in the world, and the idea of
those two boys losing their mother because she was so
brave as to stay. But was it brave? It was
so confusing to me. But on entire nation seemed to
hang in the balance, and all of these people who
hadn't given up, who were still fighting for democracy, even
(17:22):
though all of their peers were in prison, being tortured
or being killed. We're doing it because they had found
some kind of a faith in her. And for all
of these months, for more than a year, in fact,
the government had made sure that she could not give
any public interviews, that the people who came and gathered
outside of her gates every week could hear her speak
(17:44):
from a window, but could not record it and could
not share it in any fashion with anybody beyond that block.
And so it seemed that Minsen's job for me was
to go and interview her myself, and to use the
training that he had given me. Not to bring out
photos or video of protests being crushed, because that had
(18:05):
happened silently in the night, without anybody there to witness
it at all, but to at least record her words
and bring them back to Thailand so that they could
be broadcast via a short wave which cannot be blocked
back across the border into Burma, so that those who
(18:26):
were in rural provinces could hear their leaders speak and
not lose faith that democracy was possible. So when the
day came I was ready at three thirty for the
ride that was supposed to come at four, early enough
that my quote unquote tour guide would not have arrived
at the guesthouse for the day. And when I saw
(18:49):
the car grind through the gravel, I tucked downstairs and
jumped into the backseat, and we made our way across
the city. Is the dawn kind of spilled sherbet pink
through the lanes and alleyways across the lake. And when
we turned up at the NLD headquarters, the National League
(19:11):
for Democracy on some succis party, it was just a
low slung building between tea shops. Didn't look like anything spectacular,
except that across the way there was a military outpost
and barracks where eighteen year old soldiers slept because they
(19:36):
were so threatened by democracy that they had to keep
watch outside of its door. They weren't keeping watch at
that particular moment because it was so early in the morning,
and so the driver stuffed me inside and sped away,
And I was in this big room with a staircase
going up the left hand side. At the top of
(19:57):
the staircase, suddenly a aired on sun SUCHI and she
looked every bit as regal and beautiful and petite and
impossible as her photographs, flowers tucked in her hair, perfectly folded,
lunji beautiful, inspiring. And I watched up the stairs and
(20:20):
sat down at the table with her, and we began
a conversation. I asked questions that I had prepared, tried
to calm my nerves while she answered them so that
I could properly respond ask follow up questions, do my
job as the ears of the Burmese people, that this
(20:41):
recording might, if I was able to do what I
was sent there to do, might end up in the
hands of And we talked about free elections. We talked
about sacrifice. We talked about the myth of benevolent autocracy,
and how men see democracy can be in comparison, and
(21:03):
how easy it is for strong men to rise in
the face of that messiness, how dangerous those who use
our divisions against us can be. So many ideas that now,
wherever you sit on the political spectrum, seem incredibly prescient
(21:23):
and remind me that history may not repeat itself, but
it sure as hell rhymes. But back then I was
hearing them for the first time, and I listened intently
until we got to the end of our time, and
I took the film out of the camera and got
ready to beautifully rapid inside of the big pens and
(21:48):
the Niva face cream as I was taught, and nonsense Succi.
She put her hand on mine, and it was small
enough that it could have fit in mind like a child,
but with this electric authority. And I looked up at her,
and she said, no, those are those are for the film.
You want them to find the film. You really want
(22:10):
to get out. You have a different hiding place, and
she pointed back towards the one toilet in the building,
a humble squat toilet affair in the back room. But
before I went, she wrapped the film with a cellophane
(22:33):
into the tiny bullet size shape of a tampon. And
I understood, I understood how I could help, why I
was there, what in that particular moment bravery might mean.
And she was right, because when I walked outside of
(22:54):
those doors, I didn't make it half a block before
I got picked up by the military. They took me
back to the guesthouse, but they had already tossed all
of my things there. They just gave me time to
pick up my passport, pick up my bag. They took
me right to the airport, not to the normal terminal
(23:14):
where you check in and travel like a free person,
but to a cargo bay around back. And I could
tell from other people being ushered in with their hands
bound behind their backs, that cargo was exactly what we
were considered, and that I had suddenly found myself in
(23:39):
a situation that was way beyond anything that I was
equipped to deal with. Seventeen year old kid, an idiot,
seventeen year old kid who was too privileged to even
imagine that by doing what I thought was right, I
might create more problems than I solved. And I started
running through my head and thinking, what now? What if
(24:03):
I'm a prisoner here and my country starts to make
concessions on human rights in order to get me back.
Prisoner swaps are the worst? How could I have done this?
And I was right to ask those questions. What I
had done was foolhardy, but luckily I had done it
under the guidance of those who knew a lot more
than I did, and in the end, they knew that
(24:25):
the political situation at the time meant that I would
be put on a plane back to Thailand with a
PNG statement in my passport. Now PNG stands for a
persona non grata. I knew that from Latin class, but
I didn't yet know that it is used in international
relations to mean this person cannot come back in this country,
(24:47):
no way, not ever know how nah. And that seemed
like a perfectly acceptable compromise to me at the time,
because I could hear screams down the hallway, and not
only did I not I want to find out what
it was that was causing those screams. Not only did
(25:08):
I not want to experience that, but I felt at
this point like the only way to make it worth it,
the only way to make up for having gone there
in the first place, was to go and tell this
story two sound the alarm about what was happening in
this country and what needed to change and what we
could do to help. And I was only gonna be
(25:29):
able to do that if I could get on that plane.
So I was PMNG. That passport became something of a
of a mark of honor for me because I got
on that plane with all of my big pens and
Niviia face creams pulled out of my luggage lost all
of that it was charged according to a receipt that
(25:53):
I was given an exit tax for the precise amount
of dollars and cents that happened to be in my
luggage at the time that it was searched. In fact,
other than my grubby teenage backpackers clothes, the only thing
that I had with me when I was put on
that plane was the passport with the PNG notification and
(26:18):
the film inside of the cellophane inside of me. When
I got back to Bangkok, Minsen picked me up at
the airport and he took me with the rest of
the crew from the jungle to this beautiful restaurant where
real trees grew through the ground and real birds flew
between the tables, even though it was all indoors in
(26:39):
this big warehouse beautiful district in Bangkok, and he asked
me questions about the country that he so obviously loved
and so obviously missed, and was broken hearted at the answers,
but elated that at least we got on Sanso cheese
words out. And we got the film to the BBC
in the morning and spliced it together and broadcast it
(27:02):
back and two weeks later, I had to leave, had
start college. I had to go back to being an
idiot American teenager. Starting my freshman year, I rocked up
at Oxford, my mom's English. So I was going to
university in England. An outsider because I was American, an outsider,
(27:25):
because I've grown up in all of these strange countries overseas,
an outsider because I had just taken a gap here
and been pnged by the military from a dictatorship in
Southeast Asia for meeting with a noble laureate under the
cover of darkness, despite the men with guns that slept
(27:47):
outside her door. But in all of that strangeness and awkwardness,
in those first few weeks and months at Oxford studying
international studying, theology, God's law and man's law, moral law,
and social law, it started to come together for me
(28:08):
how telling the truth can bring evil to its knees.
Letting this tiny, petite, brave woman speak her truth had
brought literally hundreds of armed men in convoy, and that
was electrifying for me. Power of smuggling truth from the
(28:31):
farthest corners of the world to make sure that the
rest of us show up. The rest of us know
what's going on, and can activate ourselves, can show up
and help. And suddenly the idea of the establishment began
to melt a little bit, because suddenly I had had
(28:54):
to grapple with having come face to face with what
dictatorship truly looks like, what it feels like and smells
like and tastes like. In a country where you can't
even walk down the street without being assigned to tour
guide who watches your every move and waits for you
outside of the bathroom, and having experienced that, having seen
(29:16):
the lengths that that country went to to prevent truth
from seeping outside of its borders, Suddenly the idea of
traveling around the world to let people explain what is happening,
ask for help, tell the truth, it didn't seem so
(29:37):
much like the Cia of the movies. I understood suddenly
that there was a battle between those who will smother
truth and those who will smuggle truth out for all
to see. And I think that was the beginning of
me and deciding to devote my life to being the latter,
(29:59):
to be a smuggler of truth, not a smotherer. And
at first I thought I would smuggle truth as a
journalist but then nine eleven happened, and in the heartache
that followed, I was thrown backwards in to the heartbreak
of being eight years old and losing my best friend.
(30:24):
The first person I knew who had died, Laura. She
had been one of my two best friends in London.
I was in third grade and she and her whole
family were flying home for Christmas when they're playing went
down over lock of the Scotland pan Am flight that
(30:47):
exploded midair. I have been right before Christmas, but my
mom waited until after Christmas to tell me. And the
only way I got through it, because to be honest,
I really at the time didn't think I would. The
only way I got through it was my dad explaining
that as you started reading the newspaper that it didn't
(31:08):
seem connected, but that maybe if I understood the forces
that took her, they wouldn't seem as scary. The boogeyman
in the closet goes away when you turn on the lights,
and so I set about trying to turn on the lights.
I read the newspaper every day, probably too carefully in retrospect,
(31:28):
looking back on it, probably not that healthy at all
actually to read about Kadafi and Gorbachev, and to wonder
when exactly they might next claim another one of my
friends from the sky. But that understanding helped, It helped
(31:49):
me to heal, It helped me to grow, It helped
me to try to become some part of the solution
instead of some part of the problem. And at was why,
graduating high school, I had always been so opposed to government,
so opposed to the establishment, because it seemed to me
that everyone who was fighting for the solution was on
(32:11):
the outside. And so when nine eleven happened and suddenly
I was thrown back, so those conversations with my dad
as an eight year old, suddenly I needed that advice.
How do I cope? How do I deal with loss
and terrorism all over again? And his advice kept coming
back to me. You know, you you have to understand it.
(32:33):
You have to understand these forces or they will drown you.
And I realized that if I pursued the path of
being a smuggler of truth as a journalist, if I
went back to Southeast Asia started working again in the
human rights realm, writing stories just as I had wanted to,
(32:57):
I could have an impact, for sure. But I was
unlikely to ever come truly face to face with the
most terrifying, the most malicious of forces, the forces that
had already taken my friend, the forces that had taken
(33:21):
another three thousand some Americans on that Tuesday morning. I
could report on them, sure, but I would never sit
down and have a cup of tea with them. I
would never have the opportunity to say, how do you
think this is okay? What conceivable story do you tell
(33:42):
yourself to make it seem rational or even honorable to
fly a plane into a building full of innocent people.
The only way I was going to be able to
ask that question of somebody who could actually answer it
was to do this very different kind of work. And
so as I started my graduate degree at Georgetown. When
(34:03):
I was first asked would you be interested in that
kind of work? I said something that would have been
unimaginable to me in the years leading up to it.
I said, maybe I would. Maybe I would, because I
don't know how else I will find the ground truth.
(34:25):
How else do you not just believe what you see
on TV? How else do not just believe with the
people around you tell you even though you know that
they've never been there? They've never heard it, and they're
just telling you what someone else told them. I would
be interested, I think I remember saying, and they said, well,
(34:47):
so are we, So are we? And that's how I
ended up walking into an info session in a suburban
holiday in And I can tell you that, coming from
decades of progressive family values, I thought I was walking
(35:10):
into a very different thing. But it turned out to
be a weird and brilliant and wacky group of people
who disagreed violently about so many issues, but were united
by this powerful curiosity, this sense of belief in the
(35:34):
power of human nature for good and ill, that we
cannot know what is going to happen or change it
just by listening with satellites with phone taps, that human intelligence,
human relationships actually still tip the balance. And as a result,
(35:56):
I got to have those conversations, I got to share
those cups of tea with people who had done things
so abhorrent it was unimaginable in many senses to even
be in the room with them. And yet I never
would have understood until I was in that room that
the driving force behind those spasms of violence, those terrible,
(36:20):
abhorrent acts, were incredibly human the most human feelings, the
most familiar Dare I say it to all of us?
The most familiar feelings. Fear, insecurity, Am I here? Does
anyone hear me? Grievance, shame, anger, powerful emotions that we
(36:43):
see taking our own country by storm right now, by
the way, the same human emotions that drive graffiti. When
someone pulls out a spray can and mark's wall as
a way of saying, God, damn it, I exist, Pay
attention to me, Listen to me here my pain. And
(37:04):
when that metastasizes, and it metastasizes, and it metastasizes, and
that cancer grows and grows and grows, unchecked and unnoticed,
that's when the most awful, the most bloody moments of
the war on terrorism occurred on all sides. By the way,
(37:24):
maybe that's a story for another day. In the end,
it's funny to me that it was so unimaginable as
a child that I would have ended up doing that work,
because now, as a mom of three kids, three beautiful,
perfect children, perfectly imperfect, by the way, it's unimaginable to
(37:45):
me that I didn't Because I got to turn on
the lights in the shadowy bedroom and look the monsters
square in the eye and figure out that in the
end they weren't monsters at all, they were files of laundry,
they were human beings dealing with human feelings, and that
(38:09):
their acts were monstrous, their acts were abhorrent, that we
could try to figure out some sliver of common ground
to prevent those acts from happening again, but that they themselves, we, ourselves,
all of us, are just humans. That the Boogeyman is
(38:30):
not them and is not us, but is in fact
the concept of them and us that gave rise to
the violence in the first place. And out of all
of that, the only thing that I hope is not
unimaginable is a world where, slowly, slowly, that distinction between
(38:53):
us and them begins to fade and the violence along
with it. Not as a long project project that I
leave to my kids and they will leave to their kids,
but it's a project I believe in with all my heart,
and I hope that you do too. Are on song.
(39:24):
Succi stayed in me and mar for the greater good,
but she had a huge price, not being able to
see your sons. I'm curious to hear what she said
about sacrifice. Yeah, I mean sacrifice was a huge theme
across the whole whole discussion. Uh, not just the sacrifice
(39:47):
of um being away from her sons and the personal
sacrifices Succi herself had made distance from family, yes, but
also her own freedom and the opportunity to spend her
life um anywhere else or doing any other kind of work.
And when she talked about the choice to be away
(40:10):
from Kim and Alexander, her sons, I really related with them,
you know, because I had grown up with a dad
who I missed so much while he was away, and
I knew he was doing important work. He was figuring
out ways to bring electrical grids to really distant parts
of the planet, um, you know, refugee camps and isolated villages,
(40:32):
and I knew that was going to have a huge
impact for you know, kids being able to do their
homework after dark, and moms being able to cook meals
um on electric stoves, and it's just so so many
wonderful quality of life changes. But I missed him, and
I think that's something that's really hard to grapple with
(40:53):
when you're a kid. So I I felt for Kim
and Alexander when and since who she was talking ing
about the need to take over her father's work, And
I think that's very much how she saw it. That
her dad had put everything on the line to bring
democracy and self rule to me and mar after colonialism,
(41:19):
and that that had been a cause that he had
died for in the end, that he had been murdered for.
And the way she described it, when she was standing
in those crowds and watching university students be slaughtered, um,
watching university students not too much older than her own
(41:41):
sons put their own lives on the line for the
democratic dream that her dad had introduced and had fought
for himself. I think she felt that call in her
blood uh, and felt that she was the only person
(42:02):
because of of um, the loyalty that so many of
the students fell to her father, that she was the
only voice that could unite the democratic forces in the
country and and actually bring about the change that her
father had started. So in a funny way, it was
(42:23):
it was actually a family, family duty, I think UM
that had brought about the decision. Um. It was just
duty to her father and her father's democratic dream rather
than duty to her children. And I think that was
a choice that she continued to grapple with every day.
(42:45):
But it sounded like from what she said that she
always came down in the same place, UM, which was
that someday UM, as her boys got older, they would
come to understand that she wasn't just the mother, UM,
but she also had a role to play in the
(43:06):
wider world, UM, in making the world that they were
going to inherit, and that so many of UM there,
their fellow country men and women in Myanmar were going
to inherit a safer and better and more democratic, freer place.
(43:27):
And you know, that has really stuck with me because
I grappled with that exact same problem once I became AM,
you know, and I think, whether you're a freedom fighter,
nobel laureate like Gangsan Succi, or you're an undercover operative
as I was when I had my first daughter, or
(43:50):
you're just any parent on this planet who has to
choose every morning whether to leave the home and go
to work or whether to do the mission critical work
of being at home with your kids reading the bedtime stories.
You know, is your job, um, to to parent at
(44:13):
their side, or is your job to parent by improving
the world that they will ultimately have to live in
and how do you balance those two things? And I think,
you know, watching my own parents um make that balancing
act when I was a kid was my first introduction
to that. But Angsan Succi was a really important echo
(44:36):
um that has has stayed with me and I think
affected a lot of my my own thinking about those choices.
I think we have to be there for our kids,
but we also have to model for them what it
is to be a citizen of the world, what it
is to have a purpose here, and that purpose is family, yes,
(45:00):
but also the wider human family, and what small part
we can play and in making life more bearable, more beautiful,
more joyful even um for the rest of that human family.
And the more that our kids see us do that,
the more that they will do it in their own lives.
(45:21):
And I think that that's as much a part of
parenting as every hug and story and moment that we
spend together. You know, they're they're all, They're all critical,
and it's the great work of our lives to figure
out how to fit them all in. I'm still working
(45:42):
on that one. I hear you. What's mens up to
these days? Do you guys keep in contact at all
men's in is an extraordinary adult. And I guess I
would have known that knowing him as as a young adult,
as a just just gone twenty something year old, UM.
(46:04):
But he went on to to grow into such a
leader in the democratic movement and in Myanmar, and in
fact has moved his family back there and is is
now back in Myanmar, um, you know, doing everything he can,
um to support the forces of democracy and freedom, even
(46:26):
now in the face of of such an enormous UH
set back with the military coup and and the sliding
towards civil war that is happening in Myanmar as we speak.
It's been such an emotional process to watch, um, you know,
to to be there when there were only a dozen
(46:53):
or so internet connections available in the entire country and
everybody was living in fear of the military. And I
was rested for just visiting Gong Sen Succi and hearing
the words that she had to say, and then going
back the next time, which I did, um, some seven
years ago two thousand and fifteen, for the democratic elections
(47:20):
held freely and openly, and to stand in the street
outside the NLD headquarters in the very spot that I
had been arrested when I had been there in and
instead of there being a military outpost, I looked in
(47:40):
every direction, and as far as I could see, in
every direction was a sea of people waiving the fighting
peacock flag, which is the symbol for democracy in Myanmar,
and singing democracy songs. And I mean, my heart was
just bursting with proof that that kind of revolution could
(48:02):
happen peacefully over such a short period of time. I
felt so hopeful for the fall of autocracy and the
rise of democracy all over the world. It was just
an extraordinary moment. And I have my video actually that
I took on my cell phone. Um, standing in that spot,
the same spot I had been arrested. Um. You know
(48:26):
some what is that fifteen and seventeen years later and uh,
and watching democracy just in full flourishing all around me.
I'll send it to you. But then, of course, uh,
here we are five years later, and all of that
(48:48):
progress has been clawed back by the military, and the
muzzle has been shoved back across the whole country's mouth,
and the young people will just not stand for it
this time. And that's why we're seeing the incredible courage,
(49:09):
um that is spurring these continued protests and and this
movement towards what I can only imagine will be protracted
and unfortunately, probably very violent civil war, because young people
who went through that blossoming of democracy, who in living
(49:33):
memory remembered what it was to live under a military regime,
just refused to go back. Now that the military is
is trying to turn back time. And so we're again
in a moment that is more similar to when I
was there the first time in than in any of
these beautiful times since. And of course, in in that
(49:58):
moment of struggle means and being of the character that
he is, um has returned to the country to be
there for Uh, for his brothers and sisters in democracy.
You know, I think it's a much more complicated time
there now, and the democracy movement is a little bit
more fragmented. Um Angsan succi In in many senses did
(50:22):
not turn out to be the leader that the democracy
movement had hoped for and had fought for. When she
finally did achieve the power that you know, she had
been in opposition for so long, and when her party
was finally allowed to share power share governance with the military,
(50:45):
the military never completely seated control so it is important
to remember that UM. You know, they always had a
hand on the tiller. But but when Angsan Succhi's party
was given control after those elections that I witnessed in
two thousands fifteen, UH, she did not turn out to
(51:07):
be as as stalwart a champion for the freedom of
all people's as many had hoped. UM. In fact, she
let many people down in her failure to defend the
ro Hinja people who live on the western border of
Myanmar between Myanmar and Bangladesh, who suffered terrible, terrible injustice
(51:34):
and persecution at the hands of the Berman majority in Myanmar.
Umra Hina are Muslims and were in many cases run
off their land. The villages were raised, UM many of
them themselves were killed, children orphaned, UH, and the refugee
(51:54):
camps and internally displaced person camps along that border are
now overflowing. UM. And Aung San Succhi, of course, was
the natural leader that everybody looked to as the winner
of the Nobel Peace Prize and the defender of democracy
(52:15):
to speak out against these injustices and to lead lead her,
her people and her followers UM to a path of
um of reconciliation and UH and justice, and she has
not done that. And I think that's been a really
heart shattering failure UM and disappointment for many of her followers,
(52:40):
including me and UH, and including Men's in and Men's
And in fact, despite being a close close friend UM
from childhood onwards among Sun, Succi was one of the
first to speak out against that failure UM and has
(53:02):
written publicly about it in in periodicals all over the world.
And UM has really urged and called on Succi to
to step up and UH and to to live the
lesson that until all who live in Myanmar are free,
none are UM. And as part of that call, I
(53:26):
think he has gone back and UM and has continued
his work in the hopes that some of the other
democracy leaders there UM will be more inclusive and and
will bring all of the different ethnic minorities in Myanmar
under the democratic the same democratic fold. Do we stay
(53:46):
in touch? We do not as often as I would like. UM.
It's a bit tricky to communicate now with me and Maar.
The internet is not nearly as free as it once
was UM, so I haven't been able to contact him,
though I've tried in the last year Um before he
moved back. We had the last the last coffee we
(54:10):
had was actually in Berkeley, California. He was a visiting professor,
an honorary professor at Berkeley UM, working on issues of
resisting authoritarian rule around the world. And he had married
and had his own daughter, who's uh he had named
(54:32):
Sue in honor of Ansan succi Um before before the
disappointment that he later voiced in her. So, you know,
he has lived a life of of constant devotion to
the College of Democracy in Mianmir and has been incredibly
authentic to his own moral compass throughout that, and I
(54:56):
continued to admire him immensely. So what's your thoughts about
smuggling truth these days to humans still tip the scale?
I think that's actually a really important question, you know.
I hear so frequently this argument that you know, we're
now in a different era and human intelligence is anachronistic,
(55:20):
it's a thing of the past, and we should just
rely on on signals intelligence, which you know is the
kind of technical term for um the stuff. And I say,
does wire taps um intercepts all that kind of trickery
or satellite imagery? You know, these kinds of of technical
(55:44):
means for knowing what the adversary is doing, and I
just think that that's a dire, dire mistake. You know,
human relationships are able to offer insights into people motivations
and future plans in a way that no technology ever could.
(56:06):
You know, I sometimes I liken it too. If you
think in your own life, you have a small group
of friends that you communicate with on a on a
regular basis, you know that you meet up with on
Friday nights and have a pint of beer after work with,
and then you have a much much broader group of
(56:27):
relationships people that you follow online right on on social media,
and maybe there are people you went to high school with,
maybe their celebrities who you've never even met, but you
kind of keep tabs on the events of their life
that they that they post about or that somebody else
posts about them um online And to me, that's like
(56:49):
a pretty good approximation of the difference between human intelligence
and other technological means signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, UM when
you actually have a human relationship with somebody. If you
think of the friends that you meet every Friday and
have drinks with at the bar, you not only know
what is happening in their life. You know that they
(57:13):
got married this week, for example, UM, but you also
know what their future plans are, that they're they're getting
ready to have a baby, that they they want to
want their trying to have a baby right even though
they haven't yet and they haven't announced it UM. And
more than that, you know how they feel about those
(57:35):
plans and how likely they are to happen. You might
know that UM, they're worried because they're having trouble with fertility,
that they're nervous about seeing a fertility doctor because it
didn't work out for a friend of theirs, but their
spouse does want to see it, and what conflict that
might be arising, and what impact that conflict might have
on their marriage and on the baby. None of that
(57:57):
do you see for that broader group of friends, where
you're just seeing events be posted as they actually happen.
That kind of technological surveillance UM doesn't give you insight
into future plans, and it doesn't give you insight into
the emotions and the intentions behind those future plants. And
(58:22):
you know, all of that is critical to friendship, which
is why you're much closer to the people that you
see every Friday night than the people that you just
follow on social media. But it's also critical to the
kinds of relationships um that allow us to bring an
end to conflict or to prevent attacks. They are, they are.
(58:53):
Amarillas said that the boogeyman is not us or them,
but it is the concept of us and them they
give rise to the violence in the first place. Let
that sink in. The boogeyman is not us or them,
but it is the concept of us and them that
give rise to the violence in the first place. It's
(59:15):
easy to forget that we're all made of the same
stuff and to get lost in a feedback loop of
fear that in the end divides us. You've just listened
to part one of a two part episode of The Unimaginable.
I'm your host James Brown. Until next time.
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