Burmese Way to Socialism
""Burma appears in Infrared debate via the anti-colonial independence question — Aung San, the Japanese interregnum, and British rule.
From the streams
From the INFRARED RUMBLE: MASSIVE SERVER-WIDE DEBATE:
> "What were the whites in Burma doing? All they did was side with the moderates — European elite opportunists, although they were pragmatically supporting the Japanese at first. Then when they realized Britain would finally have to be forced to give them independence — because the Japanese finally gave the Burmese a taste of freedom, although not pure freedom, but political freedom, unlike the British who were intent on keeping political AND economic control..."
> "Burma's independence was very quickly disposed of, and that's why it was a failure. But the person the Burmese look up to is still Aung San... You're basically looking up to a corpse, looking up to a failure. You want to be successful, look up to someone who's a winner."
The exchange
An opponent answered by symmetry: "I could say the same thing for Stalin — he failed by allowing Khrushchev to take power after him... does this just apply—" — exposing the debate's real question: whether revolutionary projects are judged by their defeats or their achievements, and who gets to define "failure" (Yezhovshchina, Socialism With a Human Face).