345 - Spreading Evil: Turning Against the World

For shame. Total shame. A 7.7 scale earthquake devastates Myanmar, killing more than 3,000 Burmese, destroying hundreds of pagodas, monasteries, and flattening tall buildings. In the good old days, U. S. personnel from USAID's Disaster Assistance Response teams would have gathered pre-positioned supplies in nearby Malaysia and flown in expert personnel from Dubai and Virginia to help Myanmar search for victims and assist in the enormous recovery effort.

But no, under a president and a team that has turned their collective back on human suffering and needs worldwide, a team that has abandoned the U.S.' global responsibilities and any pretensions of caring for humanity, China has quickly moved in and taken charge of search, rescue, and relief efforts. At least 2,000 Chinese specialists were digging in the rubble of Mandalay, Myanmar's famed second city, within 24 hours of the huge quake. China has pledged nearly $14 million in relief funds. India, Russia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all dispatched emergency teams and supplies. But not yet the U.S. Trump wants to bash universities at home rather than help deprived persons around the globe.

With the shutting of USAID, there are no Americans to help. Trump has promised a measly $2 million, which will eventually arrive in some form or other. But, for now, the best Washington can do is Secretary of State Marco Rubio's lame promise to provide aid everywhere, providing it is "strategically aligned with our foreign policy priorities...." And those priorities are dictated by Trump, who cares not a fig for the underdeveloped world and the planet's poor.

By contrast, hours after Friday’s quake in Myanmar, U. S. personnel who were preparing a response received termination notices as part of budget cuts. Relationships with groups that would usually distribute relief supplies on the ground have also been severed. Once the world's fastest, most thorough, and most generous responder to massive human emergencies, the U.S. has been reduced by Trump to a distant also ran, a chintzy, callous, seemingly disinterested and detached contributor to humanity's resilience. What a come down! And where are the Jack Kennedys and Edward R. Murrows to denounce depravity in the White House?

The irony is that, before the decimation of USAID and before the quake, USAID was spending $320 million to help the peoples of Myanmar. Most of that sum was assisting rural dwellers to improve children's health outcomes, strengthening democracy building, and training Burmese in the arts of humanitarian assistance. A good proportion of the aid was directed to the areas of Myanmar where ethnic armies and student militants have been battling the military junta that seized power in 2021 from an elected government. Even since the quake, it has bombed ethnic strongholds around Sagaing, to the horror of a populace still searching in and around Mandalay for survivors or corpses.

Before the quake, the junta was losing the civil war in Myanmar. Much of the Rakhine region in Myanmar's southwest, below Bangladesh, has been lost to the Arakan Freedom Movement. Large parts of Kachin, Shan, Wa, Karen, and Karenni states are now controlled by ethnic militias, often but not always cooperating with student and professional protesters organized under the National Unity (shadow) Government. It declared s three-week truce yesterday, and so did the junta, but what that will mean and if the junta will keep to the cease fire is unknown.

Chinese quake assistance may help the junta regain control over parts of Myanmar that were lost to rebels and protesters. Before the quake, the junta still controlled most major cities but had lost control over the countryside. (Myanmar, a country of 55 million, is 68 percent Burman or Bamar and 32 percent ethnic, divided into a dozen or more linguistic and ethnic groupings. The Bamar of the heartland are Buddhists, with a central headquarters in now destroyed Mandalay; a number of the ethnic groups such as the Karen are devotedly Christian. Perhaps 5 percent of the nation, in the southwest is Muslim (but most of those Rohingya were ethnically cleansed out of Myanmar into Bangladesh at the onset of this decade). The ethnic armies have mostly been fighting central military authority since 1962, when Myanmar (then Burma) forsook democratic rule for total authoritarianism. Major student-led anti-authoritarian uprisings occurred in 1988-1990, and then again beginning after the 2021 military coup ousted Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's majority elected government.

Before 1962, and a plunge by dictator Ne Win into autarchic despotism, Burma was the rice bowl of Asia. Much of that prosperity, together with a significant system of higher education, was destroyed by General Ne Win and the military rulers who followed him until the signal election of 2020. Now Myanmar exports oil, but for too long it persisted in growing and harvesting opium. It is now back to supplying much of the world with opium, thanks to the shutting of Afghanistan's opium growing areas by the Taliban. Myanmar also mines and exports jade and other precious stones and hosts a number of illicit Chinese gambling centers.

Just as Trump and Musk's rape of USAID has demonstrated in the case of their post-quake abysmal failure to come to the help of Myanmar and its people, so reducing USAID to a tiny shell somewhere in the U.S. State Department has meant the end of health assistance to the planet's neediest persons. No more do we help cure tuberculosis in South Africa, Kenya, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. No longer are we in the forefront of the (recently) winning battle against HIV/AIDS. No longer can USAID help track down and investigate outbreaks of deadly Ebola or Marburg disease in Africa, or even track and then vaccinate against measles in Africa and Asia. The struggle against infantile paralysis is forfeited.

The U.S. is also cutting nearly 50 million women worldwide from access to contraception. Doing so means many more deaths and an uptake in poverty. Until last month, USAID and other U.S. initiatives were providing 40 percent of all family planning globally across thirty-one developing countries. More than 17 million unwanted pregnancies were averted and 34,000 women or more prevented from dying in childbirth. To top all of this misguided withholding of humanitarian health and healing assistance, the U.S., its largest donor, has now backed out of funding the UN's reproductive health arm, the world's largest procurer and distributor of contraceptives.

Somehow, Musk and Trump think that these abandonments of long-term U.S. health commitments make important statements in the on-going culture war. But helping dig survivors out from under collapsed buildings or preventing population surges in places like Uganda and Northern Nigeria, where poor women give birth to seven or eight babies, hardly reduces wokeness or demonstrates American benevolence.

These misguided initiatives need to be wrestled and reversed, along with the illegal kidnappings of international students, and the total overturning of humanitarian values. It took too long to denounce and discredit Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn (who taught Trump) in the 1950s. Let it not take so long this even more dangerous time in our nation's cataclysmic tug-of-war between evil and good.