KEY POINTS:
Nothing galvanises world opinion like a martyred Buddhist monk.
Make that Western world opinion. The rest of the world doesn't seem to share our soft spot for Buddhism, perhaps because they take their own religions too seriously to be in the market for exotic or boutique alternatives. For liberal-minded agnostics, however, Buddhism is often the mumbo-jumbo of choice, the religion you have when you don't have religion.
With the Church of Rome still adopting the ostrich position on sexual issues and Anglicanism obsessing over gay bishops - a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted if there ever was one - and all those crazed American born-agains giving Christianity a bad name, it's not surprising that questing souls should look to Buddha for spiritual sustenance. While the enlightened view is that only simpletons or inbred, gun-toting bigots could take the Bible literally, it's apparently perfectly intellectually respectable to believe that you're going to be reincarnated as a mongoose.
This week we had our burning monk moment. Footage from Myanmar of a murdered monk face down in the shallows recalled the famous photo of Thich Quang Duc incinerating himself at a busy Saigon intersection in 1963 in protest at the brutality and corruption of Ngo Dinh Diem's administration. A few months later Diem was history and the Vietnam War was hotting up.
It seems unlikely that the TV footage will set off reverberations on that scale. Denunciation of the Burmese generals was near-universal but the fact that Myanmar is under the jackboot isn't exactly breaking news. Au contraire: for decades the situation in Myanmar and the nature of the regime have been constants in a volatile world. The generals took over when Jack Kennedy was in the White House and Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin and the greatest middle-distance runner in the world was a New Zealander.
The current cruelties are replays of the crackdowns of 1974 and 1988, the latter causing hundreds of thousands of Burmese to flee across the border into Thailand where they remain in refugee camps to this day. There was an election in 1990 but the regime ignored the result and consigned the winner - Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi - to house arrest, where she remains to this day.
Along with the despotism they've inflicted on their long-suffering people, the military regime's incompetence and corruption has impoverished what was, under British administration, one of the wealthiest countries in South-East Asia. The star of the moribund economy is the heroin sector: like Afghanistan and various countries in Central and South America, Myanmar is effectively a narco-state. No prizes for guessing who pockets the profits.
So don't expect the generals to respond to the world's condemnation with anything more than contemptuous indifference, perhaps with the sop of a few transparently cynical PR gestures. Those old thugs know the score. They know that the Western democracies will huff and puff but take no active measures to prevent a recurrence. They know Russia and China will look after them at the United Nations Security Council. They know that despite the threats of economic sanctions, plenty of countries and companies will be only too happy to keep doing business with them. And they know the Western media and its audience have limited attention spans.
They also know that these days the term "regime change" is only used in diplomatic circles when the subject under discussion is the precise, galactic dimensions of George W. Bush's brainless malevolence. Yet the fact remains that whatever you think was the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq - oil, imperialism, or Bush's desire to finish what his father started - it did bring about the downfall of a tyrant and give the Iraqis a shot at freedom. Which is what the monk in the shallows died for.
The argument that it's up to the victims of oppression to rise up rather than rely on outside help is fatuous and dishonest. How do unarmed, heavily monitored citizens bring down a military dictatorship prepared go to any lengths, including massacring its own people, to preserve its grip on power?
As Mao Zedong, who knew a thing or two about tyranny and was for a time a much admired figure in Western leftist circles, famously observed: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." It wasn't people power that toppled the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia, it was the invading Vietnamese Army.
Like his reputation, Tony Blair's doctrine of humanitarian intervention is a casualty of the ongoing chaos in Iraq. Without it we have nothing to offer the monks of Myanmar apart from strongly worded resolutions, indignant editorials, ineffectual sanctions and the odd tear. Without it we're just a bunch of bleeding hearts.
