Dr. Maung Zarni says, Myanmar feudal racists & nationalists are to blame for the country's Hell

We Bama must stop blaming our former alien colonizer, the British. We are no better.

Miseries of Rakhine and Rohingyas can be traced back Bama Colonial Genocide of 1784.

Several years ago I was visiting the 14th century seat of Siamese kingdom, Ayutthaya, about 80 Kilometer north of Bangkok with my mother, a historian by training and a practising Buddhist till her

last breath.

I asked her how she felt about visiting the place, with burnt marks and beheaded Buddha images - all done by Kongbaung invading troops - made up of Dry Zone Bama and other peasants like the Shan, the Karens, etc.who lived en route from Shwe Bo to Siam, forced or incentivised to partake in the complete and total destruction of a neighbour's seat of the kingdom.

Her reply was, "sad".

As a student of history, she knew how genocidal the Bama feudal rulers were, burning down the Mon's center of power at Pegu only a decade earlier in 1750's, having resulted in the first known exodus of war-fleeing refugees into Siam. The total destruction of Pegu was carried out by the founder of the last Burmese feudal dynasty, the village chief Aung Zeya, who like any other ruthless military strong-man crowned himself "King".

After the destruction of this Siamese kingdom, the Konbaung conquistadors took aim at Mrauk-U, an Arakan kingdom of multiethnic peoples of Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, etc.

So, the total misery of the Rakhine, Rohingya and other inhabitants of today can in fact be traced to Konbaung a colonial genocide of 1784, as opposed to the British conquest of Arakan in 1824. troyed the Rakhine kingdom at Mrauk-U in 1784. Maung Wai was the same guy who brought thousands of Rakhine POWs to back to Mingun, a temporary palace site, across the Irrawaddy from Mandalay where they were made to bake red bricks and build this Un-finished Pagoda. He squandered royal treasures for his megalomaniacal temple building while the commoners starved, literally. The rice from royal granaries had to be distributed freely to stave off the kingdom-wise famine.

The Bama's ruthless military conquest of Mrauk-U too resulted in close to 200,000 residents fleeing into the Sultanate of East Bengal, a British protectorate, in 1784-85, and sowed the seed of an extremely potent Rakhine Ethno- Nationalism against the dominant Bama in the Dry Zone.

Though linguistically related, no Rakhine with a nationalist consciousness likes to even speak Burmese, let alone embrace a life of a subjugated people under the ruthless, blood-sucking Bama militarism.

So, the Burmese military came up with a classic Divide and Rule strategy: it pits Muslim residents, particularly demographically 1/3 Rohingyas against the nationalistic Rakhine who make up the rest of

the region's population.

No doubt that the total misery of the Rakhine, Rohingya and other inhabitants tof today can in fact be traced to Konbaung colonial genocide of 1784, as opposed to the British conquest of Arakan in 1824.

The Burmese kings were effective killers, grabbers of land, raiders of slaves and builders of temples with prisoners of wars, but they were no nation-builders in the good sense of the word.

Myanmar Tatmadaw models itself along those ancient, eventually self-destructive and suicidal political culture and mindset.

Aung San Suu Kyi wants her father to be recognized as the Founder of the 4th Bama Empire. The Marxist-inspired anti-imperialist father would be turning in his grave, in complete misery that the daughter and the army he gifted his beloved country have irreversibly turned imperial and Fascist respectively.

Neither Fascist entities or colonial political systems last. Not even those "world-class" empires, let alone a third or fourth rate tin-pot double-dictatorship of the generals and the Nobel.

Myanmar's end is in sight: the question is not if but when it will break up, emphatically in a violent way.