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There is a common misconception, even held by media editors, that Myanmar is just a military country now and thats the end of its story. And yet this couldnt be further from the truth, says Oliver Slow. The journalist, who lived in Myanmar between 2012 and 2020, tells Index that people in Myanmar have got a taste of democracy.

They want to at least have a free choice in their matters, they dont want to be controlled by this very violent military, they want to have leaders who they have chosen for themselves, he says.

Slow is talking to Index in light of his newly released book Return of the Junta: Why Myanmars military must go back to the barracks, an excerpt of which is featured below. For Slow, getting across this message is one of his hopes for the book.As he says, he wants everyone to not give up on Myanmar, to understand that there is a vibrant future there.

Return of the Junta blends first-hand accounts with wider research into the background of the military. The result is an accessible, informed read on the 2021 coup dtat, and ultimately on this very complex country. While there are lighter moments in the book, it is not a sugar-coated retelling. Struggle for basic rights nay survival is a constant and unifying thread.

Early on Slow writes about how doctors have been a primary target of repression, persecuted in large part because they were central to the civil disobedience movement that formed in the immediate aftermath of the coup.

That angered the regime and they decided essentially that they would punish doctors in many ways, Slow tells Index. I remember from the time some pretty horrendous videos of soldiers just beating doctors in the streets. He says that when a third wave of Covid hit a few months after the coup the authorities would call doctors out to what they described as bad cases of Covid only to then arrest them.

Slow saysit speaks to the violence of the Myanmar military that doctors were specifically targeted and showstheir lack of respect for international norms.

Such violence against doctors not only punishes them, it punishes the population more broadly. Two years on hospitals are in a parlous state in Myanmar. Doctors have fled.

There is this feeling that they dont want to work for any institution which aligns with the military, says Slow. A friend of Slows who recently visited a hospital in central Yangon described the conditions as horrendous.

Slow who wouldnt return to Myanmar right now because it would be too risky finds it tougher and tougher to communicate with people there. Most of my contacts have left because theyre journalists. Instead Slow relies on secure messaging apps to reach people on the ground.

According to Slow the main resistance is in the form of armed militia in the border areas. Many of the people in these militia were university students in 2021 and were enraged over the disappearance of their promising future. He says these militia are making some advances.

Of course its not just in the border regions that protest exists. On the anniversary of the coup this year Twitter was filled with images of a silent protest streets of towns and cities across Myanmar were empty as people stayed at home to make a statement.There are also flash protests, very short protests where peoplewalk through the streets, do a photo, it goes on social media, theyre usually wearing a mask (for obvious reasons) and then they disband.

These anecdotes, combined with rising discontent over the military, give Slow hope.

Can the military ever rule again in that country with any legitimacy? Its a resounding no. Whether that means the resistance will win is a different matter as the military has made itself powerful over 50-60 years.The resistance is up against a pretty monumental machine, he says before adding:

But I do see a time at some point in the futurewhere the military will be defeated or removed from power.

Despite the increased investment, even in pre-coup Myanmar life was still incredibly difficult for most teachers, especially those living in rural areas.

Myat Kyaw Thein is a secondary school teacher close to the town of Monywa, in central Myanmar.

We have so many things to worry about as teachers, especially our safety and salary, said Myat Kyaw Thein, who told me in an interview conducted before the coup that he earned the equivalent of about US$150 per month. Its not enough, especially when you compare it with other countries in Southeast Asia. No wonder so many people leave teaching to go to better paying jobs.

Its a rotten salary, but whenever we raise it with authorities, they tell us its because of the low budget for education. Well, if you want to improve the education in this country, then increase the budget, he said.

A similar story was told by a teacher in a remote village of Myanmars Nagaland. The teacher had worked at a school in her local village for more than ten years, and although the resources had improved in recent years, life was still difficult for her and her colleagues. She told me they often used their own money to provide things such as pens and books for their students.

Its difficult for us because we dont have much salary, and sometimes have to use our familys [money], she said. But then we want [the students] to be happy and to come to school. Thats why we provide these things for them.

Even before the coup, it was clear that those tasked with overhauling Myanmars education system had an unenviable task ahead of them, including bringing together the dozens of different stakeholders national and foreign involved in such a monumental task and forming a cohesive strategy that pleases everyone.

Even what some may regard as the successes of the past decade in terms of reforms to education did not please everyone. For example, a recognition by the government about the need to switch from a teacher to a child-centred approach was a welcome step for those hoping to encourage more critical thinking, but parents who have only ever been exposed to the former their entire lives were understandably sceptical.

When a parent passes a school and doesnt hear students chanting in unison what the teacher has written on the board, they think, Whats going on in there? They arent learning, said an educator involved in the reforms.

Since the coup, however, much of the progress made over the last decade or so in Myanmars education sector has gone swiftly into reverse. With many teachers refusing to work under this junta, and parents not wanting to send their children to schools either due to legitimate security concerns or because they dont want them taught under this regime the SAC has resorted to many of the tactics of past military juntas to try and portray an image of normalcy in schools and universities.

Like in 1962 and 1988 it has closed universities and fired teachers not supportive of the coup. Thousands of teachers have been sacked, and hundreds jailed, for participating in the civil disobedience movement against the junta. To fill these teaching ranks, the military-controlled education ministry has encouraged applicants with lower qualifications to apply for jobs, and even been accused of dressing up army wives and female members of pro-military organizations in teachers uniforms and transporting them to schools. Like under the SLORC government [the military State Law and Order Restoration Council that ruled the country between 1988 and 1997], teachers have been sent on month-long refresher courses where they are urged to pay attention to the preservation of Myanmar culture and traditions as well as speak and behave respectfully and to be disciplined, almost certainly euphemisms to discourage teachers from imbibing any form of revolutionary thinking into their students.

Before the coup, despite some bumps, the general trajectory of the education system in Myanmar was on a positive path. The changes were also made largely free of the militarys sphere of influence, an indication of the potential Myanmar has as a whole if the Tatmadaws own interests are not directly threatened.

Like almost everything in Myanmar, however, the 2021 coup has created considerable concerns about what happens next. If the current situation continues, and the military manages to maintain an albeit loose grip on power, it is the next generation of young people in Myanmar, and others beyond that, who will be the ones to suffer the most, through a lack of investment, or care, in their education, a lack of capabilities to think critically and problem solve, and a lack of skills to prepare them for the working world. This could well manifest, as it has in the past, of creating a general feeling among the population that Myanmars remarkable diversity is something to be feared, not celebrated.

Return of the Junta was published by Bloomsbury in January 2023. Click here for more information on the book.

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Don't give up on Myanmar - Index on Censorship

In the world of on-campus activities, there arent many things that cause a news firestorm. For an organization like the Buckley Institute that focuses on intellectual diversity at Yale, news trucks only arrive when a speaker has been protested or shouted down. What brought journalists to Yale in November 2022 was the decision by federal appellate Judges James Ho of the 5th Circuit Court and Elizabeth Branch of the 11th Circuit Court to boycott future Yale Law students for prestigious clerk positions until Yale did something to address the intolerance on campus.

Earlier that March, over 100 students had protested and shouted down a panel on free speech that featured both a noted conservative and a prominent liberal. Police were called. But even after some of the disrupters left the room, they continued to shout and bang on the classroom walls, making it difficult for the event to proceed.

The previous fall, Yale Law administrators had pressured a Native American student to apologize for a party invitation, even warning it could hurt his career prospects. And who could forget how two Yale faculty ended up resigning as heads of a residential college after students demanded they lose their jobs simply for suggesting that college students could maturely handle a Halloween costume they found offensive?

At the invitation of the Buckley Institute, Ho and Branch gave an overflow crowd a chance to hear why a boycott was necessary and how they hoped Yale would improve quickly. But what really stood out was a comment from one Yale undergraduate who questioned whether it was really fair for life-tenured judges with total job security to ask students to put their futures on the line to stand up for free speech. Sometimes, she said, its better for me to just sit back, bite my tongue, and then in four years, Ill be able to say whatever I want.

That conservative students at one of the worlds preeminent universities self-censor during classroom discussion is, sadly, not a surprise. Seventy years ago, William F. Buckley Jr., for whom the Buckley Institute is named, wrote God and Man at Yale about his own experience with the campus orthodoxy. In 2011, I founded the Buckley Institute to address the still rampant monoculture at Yale.

As an undergraduate, I observed a lack of conservative or even heterodox viewpoints on campus. Yale celebrated diversity but not diversity of thought. In the basement of one of Yales residential colleges, a few friends and I launched what would become the Buckley Institute as a simple speaker series to bring intellectual diversity to campus.

One of our signature efforts, our annual college survey, shows that this problem is not unique to Yale. In 2022, 63% of college students surveyed nationwide said they often feel intimidated in sharing opinions different than those of their classmates; 58% because of their professors. Both records since we began asking this question in 2015, those two numbers represent a 13% and 8% increase from the previous years, respectively.

Tasha Dambacher, a sophomore majoring in history, feels this acutely. After all, she was the one who questioned Ho and Branch about the practicality of speaking up. She worries that sharing conservative views could negatively impact her grade in a class, graduate school applications or even future job prospects.

The pressure to self-censor can creep up in unexpected places. Aron Ravin, a junior, recalled a discussion seminar on The Iliad where the professor compared the violence in Homers epic poem to the killing of George Floyd and school shootings. Student groups had been calling for defunding the Yale Police Department, which Ravin called one of the few things that made students on campus feel safe in New Haven. Sick of the oppressive campus orthodoxy, he chose to speak up in defense of the police and pointed out that Homers work, published almost 3,000 years ago, had nothing to do with contemporary politics. Ravin hoped that doing so would embolden similarly-minded classmates who were afraid to share their perspectives.

Though conservatives are more worried about being canceled, progressive students are also concerned. Liberals (64%) were only 2% less likely than conservative students (66%) to report being intimidated from sharing an opinion in class because of their fellow students. Neither age, nor race, nor public or private university enrollment brought the share of those intimidated by classmates below 53%.

Yales religious students too feel the pressure. Though there isnt generally a feeling of hostility toward religious individuals, Ryan Gapski, the Buckley Institutes current student president, commented that theres a sense among students that religious perspectives shouldnt be lent as much credence as secular ones. Another religious Yale undergraduate, Marcos Barrios, expressed a similar sentiment and commented that, as a religious person, there is a certain level of caution you have before you speak on hot button issues.

Yale is welcoming to religious students, Barrios continued. Theyre just less welcoming when a persons religion means they have different views on the values the university professes.

Beyond expressing their views in the classroom, religious students at Yale also have trouble dealing with the administration regarding religious housing needs. The growing frustration even led to a recent rally. Gapski agreed that the administration was definitely a part of the problem here. Religious students had significant challenges in securing religious accommodations for housing as many dormitories have mixed-gender floors and communal bathrooms. The university did ultimately agree to offer a single-gender housing option after weeks of protest.

Some students sense that the Yale administration is more willing to accommodate the religious needs of its student body when those needs dont conflict with progressive orthodoxy. I believe its much harder, Barrios said, when the university doesnt agree with the students reasons.

If it seems like shout-downs are increasingly normal on college campuses these days, its probably because college students are more supportive of them than before.

Our 2022 survey found 44% of college students, the highest percentage on record, believe it is acceptable to shout down or disrupt speakers on campus. A record 41% believe it is justifiable to use violence to stop hate speech.

Alarmingly, students who are afraid to speak up support the very things that make them timid in the first place. With 63% of students afraid of their classmates and 44% supporting shout-downs, there is a cross section of students who fear social cancellation but still support censorship anyway. Among students, 43% believe political opinions they find offensive should be reported to administrators. And nearly two-thirds believe new university faculty and any new employees at any company should be compelled to sign a diversity, equity and inclusion statement.

Indeed, many current college students have turned away entirely from the principles that make America so uniquely welcoming to free speech in the first place. For the first time in the eight-year history of the survey, a plurality of students dont believe that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. A slim plurality of college students (33% to 31%) would prefer to live under a socialist system than a capitalist one. As Milton Friedman famously argued in Capitalism and Freedom, a free marketplace of ideas and a free marketplace of goods go hand in hand.

There can be social costs to speaking up, no doubt. Ravin decided early on to speak out and share his conservative perspectives: in the classroom, in the Yale Daily News and in various conservative outlets.

He related that one fellow student began harassing him over an op-ed he wrote and demanded Ravin issue an apology. The student then said Ravin would bear his grief unless Ravin donated to a fundraiser for black, transgender, homeless youth.

Dambacher told Judges Ho and Branch that shes seen conservative friends sniggered at as they walk across campus. Yale is a small community, she explained later. Once one person says something about you, everyone knows, so it can sometimes be safer to keep a low-profile.

The question that came to me over a decade ago was what to do about the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. During my time as an undergraduate, this was clearly an issue with regard to the faculty. Ten years later, Yale hasnt changed much. A 2017 survey by the Yale Daily News found that 75% of Yale faculty identified as liberal versus 8% who identified as conservative. In 2020, the Yale Daily News reported that less than 3% of faculty political donations went to Republicans.

The administration isnt much help either. Ostensibly, Yale supports free speech and expression on campus. Yale President Peter Salovey focused his second freshman address in August 2014 on free speech at Yale and stressed in his most recent freshman address that faculty and students must be open to engaging with diverse ideas, whether conventional or unconventional, of the left or of the right. The Woodward Report which calls for the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable and challenge the unchallengeable remains the universitys official free speech policy.

Yet, for all Saloveys words, Yale administrators seem unwilling to enforce the universitys own policies or take substantive steps to improve free speech on campus. No students were punished after the free speech panel was disrupted last March. And to add insult to injury, Yale gave graduation awards to two students who took leading roles in bullying a Yale professor during the Halloween costume controversy. Dambacher, the sophomore, commented that Yale administrators are a part of the problem. They are often willing to humor attempts from other students attempting to censor speech, and will not affirm the importance of intellectual diversity or free speech.

Indeed, an overweening bureaucracy is often the source of the free speech problems. The Halloween costume debacle began with an email from a paternalistic administrator. And it was a diversity director and an associate dean who warned the Native American law student of consequences over a party invite.

To be fair to Yale and the many university and college administrators around the country, they are in a tough position with regards to cancel culture in their own right. As Ravin put it, most of the administration wants to be supportive. The problem is that the administration also wants to support the DEI (diversity equality and inclusion)-driven progressives, the very people who shut down speech.

This is where organizations like the Buckley Institute can make a difference. By providing a counterweight in favor of free speech, the Buckley Institute gives supportive university administrators breathing space to do the right thing. If only the cancellers speak up, administrators who support free speech can do little to oppose them.

The most important work is directly with the students, though. The Buckley Institute brings diverse perspectives to campus on an almost weekly basis through our speaker series, Firing Line debates and seminars. Our annual Disinvitation Dinner introduces individuals who have been disinvited from other campuses to an audience that isnt too afraid to hear them. Last fall, we distributed 1,600 copies of Yales free speech principles to every incoming freshman, better equipping them to support free speech on campus.

But most important of all, what the Buckley Institute and similar organizations on other campuses provide is an environment where undergraduates can freely challenge ideas and be challenged. At Buckley, students learn that there are perspectives outside of the campus orthodoxy, even if they wont be exposed to them in the classroom.

There are many proposals about what to do to rescue the increasingly illiberal college campus. Some focus on tackling the DEI bureaucracies that have chilled speech for faculty and student alike. And Yales bureaucracy, which has at times included more than one administrator for every undergraduate, could definitely use reform.

But if Americas undergraduates want censorship, then these efforts will have little meaningful effect. If Americas undergraduates arent taught the value of free speech, all the legislation in the world will have little impact on the problems American universities are facing.

Educating the next generation about the importance of free speech is essential. Bringing speakers with diverse viewpoints, as the Buckley Institute does, is the only way to build a caucus in favor of a robust free speech culture on campus. Demonstrating that diverse viewpoints arent dangerous viewpoints will create a student body welcoming to ideas that challenge rather than conform.

As our polling shows, students at Yale and across the country are afraid to speak up in class. Unless we do something, the problem will only get worse.

Lauren Noble is founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute.

This story appears in the May issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

Originally posted here:
Is wokeism in colleges forcing conservatives to self-censor? - Deseret News

The activist group Fight for the Future wants Lizzo to stop supporting a bill thats been condemned by the ACLU, GLAAD, and the National Center for Transgender Equality

Earlier this month, Lizzo partnered with Dove to help promote the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) with an online petition. Her involvement with the project included a statement explaining her support of the bill. Social media is supposed to be a place where people can express themselves and be a source for beauty confidence, not anxiety, Lizzos statement in the campaigns press release reads. Seeing the negative impact social media is having on youth mental health today is devastating and has to stop. Join us and use your voice to help make change.

On Wednesday, April 26, the activist group Fight for the Future shared a petition calling on Lizzo to revoke her support for the bill. Opponents of the bill noted that its been condemned by organizations including the ACLU, GLAAD, and the National Center for Transgender Equality over concerns that the bills vague language could potentially lead to conservative-led censorship of LGBTQ+ content, reproductive health care resources, and more.

Fight for the Futures appeal to Lizzo notes her strong track record of support for the LGBTQ+ community. On Friday, April 21, Lizzo performed at an arena in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she brought out several drag performers in protest of the states anti-drag law.

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Young people need to hear Lizzos positive message, but the irony is that under KOSA, social media platforms would almost certainly be prevented from recommending her songs and videos to minors, said Evan Greer, musician and director of Fight for the Future. Lizzo has been a strong ally to the LGBTQ community. Im sure she wouldnt support this bill if she knew how many LGBTQ groups oppose it and how it would actually harm kids rather than helping them. Our hope is that this petition can get her attention and shell do the right thing and drop support for KOSA. Instead, she and Dove should focus their efforts on thoughtful efforts like strong privacy and antitrust legislation to hold Big Tech companies accountable and reduce their harm.

Pitchfork has reached out to Lizzos representatives for comment.

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Lizzo Called on to End Support of Kids Online Safety Act Amid Concerns Over Censorship - Pitchfork

Everyone self-censors. It might be a concerted decision to not spill the latest tea about Mike and Bailey making out at a Tigerland bar, or the whispering of something objectionable (not to be racist, but). Maybe its the lowering of the voice to avoid anyone hearing a cancellable opinion on gender, immigration, or any number of issues that might have Twitter trolls invading your replies.

On one hand, theres social utility to self-censorship. To be known as a gossip is to have a bad reputation. To have and advertise actual bigotry isnt conducive to making friends. To seek out controversy by commenting on every culture war issue, right or wrong, isnt good for ones employment status, not to mention the fact that its obnoxious.

On the other hand, too much self-censorship can be dangerous for oneself and for society. It can lead to a quiet killing of valuable parts of our public discourse, keeping allegedly unpopular opinions in minds of their thinkers, where they are doomed to live out their days squashed under the threat of ostracization.

The best example of this phenomenon is the case of conservative students and faculty in universities. Often, right-leaning students keep their opinions to themselves in the classroom. A 2019 College Fix poll reported that 73% of Republican college students withheld their political views in class for fear their grades would suffer.

Im a conservative, but my essays are very liberal, admitted one student from Mizzou in the poll

Why would I get myself killed to say Im a libertarian in a philosophy class, said another from North Carolina State.

I have had grades affected when I didnt withhold my views, confessed an Auburn student.

When writing papers for gen ed classes? Absolutely. I know a guy who chose to write a pro-border wall argumentative essay for our super liberal professor and the prof just wrote this whole paper is one big fallacy and bombed him. Me? I wrote about the evils of horse racing. Perfectly safe topic, a student at Clemson said.

Though these anecdotal outcries may not be justified (maybe that border wall paper was fallacious), there are still causes for concern that corroborates these students claims.

Journalist Conor Friedersdorf found in a 2020 study at the University of North Carolina that student populations are quite intolerant to a diversity of viewpoints, students of all political persuasions self-censor, students dont engage with differing opinions and disparaging comments about political conservatives are common.

These facts beg an important question. If it is the case that students, especially those with the conservative viewpoints, are having their social and academic currency taxed via an implicit threat of public or intellectual castigation, what happens to university culture and the world beyond?

The effect on universities is that conservative students will simply continue to self-censor for the sake of a good grade. They will tune out the opinions of their left-wing professors, never listening and thus never learning from what wisdom their educators do have to pass on.

It also means that liberal students will have their opinions unchecked by both conservative classmates, who are probably the only right-wingers on campus. In the least, such challenges almost certainly wont come from faculty, for there is a significant overrepresentation of left-wing over right-wing faculty and administrators in the university. A 2018 survey of Sarah Lawrence College, for instance, reported that liberal administrators outnumber conservative ones at a ratio 12 to 1. Across northeast schools, too, liberal faculty are more numerous than conservatives at a pace of 28 to 1.

Which means that former college students will in all likelihood carry their unchecked left-wing education and censorship with them from their campuses to their cubicles. Just as they learned about, say, finance and applied it to their jobs, they also learned about such fictions as microaggressions, toxic masculinity, or implicit bias and will subsequently rage around their workplaces making frequent demands of censorship against perceived ideological enemies. (Spotify employees demands of censoring Joe Rogan come to mind.)

The more conservative students keep their mouths shut on campus, then, the more society loses a valuable part of its public discourse. As more time passes, the more conservative values and voices will be washed out in an ecosystem of political and ideological one-sidedness.

Though this doesnt mean that conservatives are always right, or that they cant poorly communicate their ideas, it does mean that their persistence in self-censorship may ultimately lead to their extinction, which in turn extinguishes a robust part of our social heritage and culture.

Right-leaning, public-minded students can choose to continue the defensive game theyre playing shut up, listen and graduate or they can be proactive and go on the offensive by making the marked decision to stick their necks out and speak their minds, for the sake of broadening the interest of public opinion, and invest their social currency in diversifying the knowledge of the public, well outside their own private circles.

Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old history graduate student from Shreveport.

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Opinion: No one should be scared into self-censoring themselves in ... - The Reveille, LSU's student newspaper

Donald Trump Jr.the self-proclaimed general of the meme warstore into Fox News on a podcast Monday, partly over the right-wing cable behemoth not welcoming him on their airwaves in nine months. Ive been watching the censorship happening, even in conservative mainstream media, Trump Jr. said on a Monday edition of the right-wing Steak for Breakfast podcast. You saw what Fox did to Tucker Carlson last week, and the week before that, it was Dan Bongino, and, you know, the people who would actually question some of that narrative like: Is it a brilliant plan to send $130 billion to Ukraine, one of the most corrupt nations in the world? Then the son of the former president took issue with the network over not having him on in months. I used to be on Fox 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 times a week. I havent been on in nine months. Not a call, not an invite, not anything, he continued. So I understand what it appears like theyre trying to do to the America First movement. You know, Tucker was another one of those voices, he concluded, suggesting Carlsons Fox News ouster was over the host talking about forbidden topics. A Trump Jr. spokesman declined further comment, while Fox News representatives didnt return The Daily Beasts request for comment.

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Donald Trump Jr. Rips Into Fox News Over Not Inviting Him on in ... - The Daily Beast