From Reconciliation to Resistance

Episode #185: Alan Clements returns to the podcast, this time to talk about his recent book, Burma’s Voices of Freedom in Conversation with Alan Clements: An Ongoing Struggle for Democracy, a four-volume opus consisting of his interviews with “dozens of the country’s most respected and well-known politicians, pro-democracy activists, artists and religious leaders from Burma’s democracy movements” since the 1988 uprising.

Clements first addresses concerns about Aung Sang Suu Kyi, devoting the book’s first volume to her. He sets it up as one long interview, writing simple questions that she “answers” with selected verbatim quotes. Clements claims that her actual words disprove many of the narratives that have arisen about her since the Rohingya crisis. He insists that her actual words demonstrate that she in fact was not an apologist for the military’s genocidal actions against the Rohingya.

The next part of the book is an interview Clements conducted with Fergus Harlow, who he believes to be one of the leading experts in fascism, totalitarianism indoctrination and related subjects. The third part of the book is a letter Clements wrote to General Min Aung Hlaing, requesting permission to come to Nay Pyi Daw to interview him. His outreach is based on the themes of shame and redemption in the Angulimala Sutta and the life of King Ashoka. The fourth section of the book is what Clements calls a “brilliant” letter written by a very prominent (as yet unnamed) Tibetan Buddhist teacher, addressed to Aung Sang Suu Kyi, that explains how the world got the Rohingya crisis wrong. The final part of the book summarizes important events of the past few years in Myanmar.

Finally, the conversation turns to Clements’ defense of the use of violence in self-defense in the appropriate circumstances, which applies to those now in the resistance movement in Burma. While he still believes in an emphasis on reconciliation, he also thinks that pragmatically, people should have the right to choose how to defend themselves.