How To Build A Revolution: Myanmar, Part 5

We conclude our series on Myanmar, and look at how the revolution is sustaining itself after more than a year and a half of fighting without international aid.

Music for this series was provided by Rebel Riot, check out their Bandcamp here https://therebelriot.bandcamp.com/album/one-day

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's not easy to leave your home, even when people
there are trying to kill you. Doctor Wonder, like everyone else,
struggled with the choice. His hospital had next to no supplies.
COVID's third wave was ravaging the population, and he couldn't
even get oxygen to treat sick patients. All around him
was death and fear, but he still wanted to stay. Actually,

(00:26):
I don't want to live my country because if we
just live like that, our country will be We'll go
back to yes before century. You know, you know, they
control everything. We have to just cue. We have to
just make it cue to get a patrol and petrolian.
We have faith in our young age. I don't. I

(00:50):
don't want to feel that feeling again, not for me,
not just for me, enough of for our people, for
our new generation are too young accents. Yes, one is
a five year one is an idea, So I just
want to five Yeah, until my last friend back. I

(01:12):
can't tolerate because they are trying, you know, aground movement.
I'm trying my best. From the decision to go was
made for him by the top of we are making
the meeting with him. He is an ac countrol. At

(01:32):
those times contro yes. At those times, we're making a
meeting then asking him did he saved or not? You
know that at the end of the meeting, he he
told me that him he was going to the insaying,
oh oh shit, holy ship, he was arrested. So that

(01:55):
I was living the younger and you know, the government
of the mility also announced that the that the remain
do arrest romain to arrested. I think all of my
thames that you have to go because you have all
of the data, so you have to go. So I
decided to call okay Andy and the boys made the

(02:16):
decision to abandon their apartment and head for Karin Territory
and eventually Thailand. Once one of their protest friends was
arrested by the government, his phone was on him when
he got caught, potentially exposing all of them. After a
harrowing drive into the jungle and several days among the Karin,
they succeeded in finding a people smuggler to get them
across the border without getting stuck in one of the

(02:37):
refugee camps operated by the Thai government. Three days later,
we're trying to cross at night time and these guys said, Okay,
you know you're going you cross, you get to Thailand
the same night. And we thought, okay, you know, and
we we stream across the river. It was very scary,
but for me, I've done it like three times, so

(02:59):
it was a little bit. I thought it was going
to be better, but it was more stressful because I
had them right. So I was like, if it was
me alone, maybe I could, you know, whatever happened, I
would find a way out. I'm not sure if I
could do that with three other people, you know, so
I was quite nervous. We paid what five thout a bodies. Yeah,

(03:20):
it's not cheap, It is not cheaping, no, no, But
because that's the thing, it's not just one person. Yeah,
it's not just one person. He the person that crossed
us from the river from Noality to this side is
one and then from there to the Norman's line is
another one. Right, So yeah, we saw the soldier were

(03:42):
like Alex Jayton fought or attempted to fight with the
correct but most of the time only did with stamped sentry.
W're about getting enough to eat. I wonder when he
gets his hands on something better than a squirrel rifle.
I kind of you sailed because we don't have like
enough guns. Uh you know. Like so by the time

(04:02):
like there was a like extra happing is uh lik ago,
I thought like, oh, we're gonna have to like go
and you know like fight them now. But uh instay,
like we have to pack our staff and move to
a diva Jenko. So we were like kind of like
refutees with uniforms. So yeah, you know, if I just

(04:28):
keep staying there like we if we are just going
to keep running away like this, like I don't want
to stay there. I want to do something about the NIED,
like you know, like the main needs in our candles,
the weapons against So I want to like come here
and like you know, like walk work for that. He
called his unit refugees with uniforms, and that's about what

(04:51):
they were. This is why rebels like me ofk and
Daddy you m c D are so motivated to find
a way to reliably print functional semi automatic weapons. The
Koran are desperately under armed, and yet they've been able
to hold off the military for decades. If the Koran
and other ethnic organizations were able to build functional arms
production infrastructure alongside the new rebels with the PDF, they

(05:14):
have a real chance at victory. If they succeed in
building this, the repercussions around the world could be massive.
That is, however, a story for another day. Seeing this

(05:37):
kind of conflict doesn't give for you. Nobody's supposed to
live through this kind of stuff, and certainly not when
they're just kids, even in a rich country replete with
therapists and VA clinics. Thousands of US veterans live every
day with PTFT. The difference for them is that they
went to war. In myanma what comes to you? And
then there's another one which says saida this one and

(06:03):
I did the first part and I'm too scared to
do the second part. Yeah, I mean this is fucked up.
Like every time I have to do it, I get
my head got sucked. Like that's one of the guy.
And so that's in Yanga in the protest, that's one
of the nightweight. That's one of the date. But the
Aduana about a hundred people would kill over a hundred people.

(06:26):
You can see in the video they come in um
and you will see that the military, how the military
came in and how they were trying to I'm not
sure if I have it anymore. Maybe here, oh you know,

(06:48):
developing here, they surrounded and they killed everyone. What they've
seen is bonded the boys. They do anything for each other,
and I've already done things that most of us can't imagine.
When one of their mothers wanted to take him home,
he felt helpless without them. When the rest of them crossed,

(07:10):
one of their moms came back to get him without
them and stuck in the country following apart, he didn't
want to keep going. Every day he worked soldiers outside
himself popping Yabba pills yabs, a meth based drug that
soldiers are often given by the military. He worried they'd
kill him. His brother in law was arrested and tortured
just for having a lighter. Can you remember what it

(07:32):
felt like when your mom came taking home. He kept saying,
he's going to kill himself for a long time, for
a line time, I will come through Dengle. Okay, Yeah,
he wasn't in a good space. Yeah that's really dangerous space.

(07:56):
Yeah I didn't. So he was saying, at if he
has to go back, he was telling us like, um,
you know now he's alone, Like he doesn't even have
us anymore, and so he was saying, like he's going
to go out to the protests and he's going to
try to kill the cops, right, the soldiers, the police.
And it was very difficult like for us to like

(08:18):
because we know his mom can't really like help him
with that stuff. You know we can, but she really
wanted to take him. So over time they chatted on
the phone and he felt better. But now he's here
with the boys. It's him playing his guitar and the
music you heard. Um, he got a lot better. Um

(08:38):
coping with this in a good life, you know what
I mean. I mean, if you're young and you see
people killing people like this terribly, you have some jog
fucked up thoughts yourself to write like well I can
do this to someone too, and stuff like that. So
he's struggled a lot with that for a long time.
And I think the worst thing was being alone. He

(09:01):
was alone, He couldn't talk to his mom about all
these things, right, he was PARANOI, he was scary, he
was traumatized. So I mean you should see like the
first time he actually canalizing. It's been five months since
he was he's here, but the first few months it
was very difficult. Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of like I

(09:22):
talked to them all the time about this, because I
know talking helps with these stuffs, like especially when you
all feeling the same thing. It's like, you know, And
I think our ways of coping with this is like
we talked about it about like kind of like a
joking way, like people hearing it. That's the best way
to deal with it. Like to get through his hard
days on his own, looking down at men who wanted

(09:43):
him dead. He picked up a cheap acoustic guitar. When
he got back, he began teaching the others he hadn't
picked it up. That's pretty good. When we went out
to the pool bar at night, in between kicking morasses,
the boys would look up at the stage. It was
occupied by a pretty second rape cover band for whatever reason,
probably not helped by the incredibly rough ti gien we've

(10:05):
been smashing back. I looked at them looking at the
stage on last night, and I wanted to cry. Teenage
kids shouldn't be caught picking up guns to fight or
picking up cameras to film their friends die. They should
be doing what I was doing when I was a teenager,
which is making a complete prick of myself on a
stage with a guitar. One day, Hopefully soon they'll be

(10:25):
able to sing happy songs again and the war will
just be a memory. I start then when you write it,
I know before Yeah, I don't have from for Paul.
I don't talk like their bond is so close now

(10:50):
they're barely ever apart. It's a lot of responsibility for Andy,
who's just twenty two himself, but he wouldn't want it
any other way, and neither would they. One and you
and Sarah have appointments, and so Robert and I take
the boys for dinner. It's a lot of fun and
actually a lot of food. But when we talked to
him about their options, it's refugees who might be able

(11:12):
to come to the US. One thing is clear. They
don't want to be a part. For me, it's like
I'd rather fucking take bullet than any of them, because
if they die, if something happened to them, I am
in so much trouble, you know what I mean. But
I know that's that's what they want to do. Like
if the mom truped him and Yang and he doesn't

(11:32):
do anything and the revolution is over, he's going to
feel so much regret, you know, like for not being
involved in this, and that's for me. It's like people
if if people want to fight, like, you know, like
we shouldn't keep them. We shouldn't just say yeah. It's

(11:59):
been a few months since we got back from Masot.
It's the rainy season there now, and that makes fighting
reporting harder. Amira is still stuck in Masot. It's not
safe for her to go back to a country where
her family wants her dead, but it's not possible for
her to leave Maysought either without travel documents, something the
U n h c R would have to issue. She's
stuck in a little room in a hotel. It's not

(12:21):
a great place for a young woman, and it's even
worse when she has to watch her friends continue to
struggle without her. We both wrote to the UN and
the various embassies on her behalf, but months later we've
heard nothing. This is typical of a lot of refugees.
They're often presented as a faceless mass of humanity, bereft
of hope, but each of them has a story, and
those refugee camps along the border between Thailand and Myanmar

(12:44):
are full of stories. Some of those are stories of fear,
some of heroism, and some of tragedy. But until things
change at the un all of those stories aren't being told.
The three D printed firearms Mawk and his Caude Eggs
are working on. I've made massive progress over the last
few months. But even though three D printed guns cost
a small fraction of the price of an M sixteen

(13:05):
or an a K forty seven, the pro democracy forces
are still desperately underfunded. They're at war with the state,
but they don't have any of the apparatus of the
state with which to fight back. Instead, the gen Z
rebels have turned once again to the Internet. Alongside crowdfunding
campaigns that liberate MIM, they have developed a more innovative
fundraising method that allows for donations even from people who

(13:28):
don't have any money. Instead of so listing cash donations
risking exposing their donors, they began using a method that
they call click to Donate, where supporters could help the
rebels by clicking on adverts on certain videos and websites
in order to generate advertising revenue. It's used to find
everything from weapons purchases to shelter for the ten thousand

(13:48):
eternally displaced people in Myanmar. I spoke to several people
in Myanmar who asked not to be named for their
own safety, but are very familiar with the funding of
the PDF. One of them told me to donate started
to support government staff who had decided to join the
Civil Disobedience movement. Government staff are always low paid, and
so they were not very financially stable in the beginning.

(14:11):
The funds from click to tommy allow these workers to
strike without pay. After a few weeks of being on strike,
financial concerns were weakening the movement and people were being
forced to work or stave. Younger pro democracy activists responded
by setting up YouTube channels and then using the anti
coup telegram channels to direct millions of views and a

(14:31):
cliques to them from across the country and from supporters abroad.
The resulting advertising revenue allowed them to fund the Civil
Disobedience movement and later to equip the PDF. By December,
these clicks were yielding an income of about five hundred
million kiats about twenty eight thousand dollars every day. The

(14:51):
military Hunter responded to this and international indignation at videos
of protesters being massacred in the street by tripling data
prizes and th rattling internet connection speeds. Pro democracy keyboard
warriors responded with viral content that required less bandwidth, including
writing personal finance blogs, to attract the u S audience
that was unknowingly supporting a revolution with its clicks. People

(15:14):
in Myanmar also began to use VPNs to access the Internet.
This helped them get around some of the junta's restrictions
and also yielded a higher advertising payment per click on
a given advert. Websites like Digital Revolution allow users to
find content that supports pro democracy rebels and click on it,
lending their support with nothing more than a broadband connection
and a few seconds of their time. Alongside their videos

(15:36):
and websites, the gen Z rebels also launched games. At first,
they were just simple, little online phone app games that
would let you throw darts at the coop leader or something.
One source told us that these games didn't just support
the rebels through funding, but also provided a little bit
of mental health care. You know, at least people could
virtually kill the folks in their city and their home

(15:57):
who were ruining their lives. And at the same time,
the games earned the money, and that money went to
fund the PDF. The most impressive of these games is
a recently launched War of Heroes, which you can buy
for just a dollar on the Apple and Google app
stores if you want to check it out. In the game,
which is available in Burmese or English, a player can
fight as a man or a woman and take on
government troops and even zombies. The money donated by these

(16:21):
games and adverts doesn't just go into a black hole,
According to the sources I spoke to, we have a
click to donate Facebook page, they said, and regularly we
release financial statements on a Facebook page saying like this
month we gave ten million caiaps to that group. I
spoke to Billy Ford, a program officer for the Burma
team at US Institute of Peace. He says this kind

(16:43):
of innovation is what's allowed the Programocracy movement to survive
in Miama since it was last violently suppressed in ATPs,
and resistance movements in Miamma have historically been an example
to the world of creative, strategic and resilient models of activism,
he said. This post when in one movement, has taken
that to a new level, enabling it to defy all

(17:04):
historical precedent and sustain an anti coup movement for more
than eighteen months, now actually gaining ground against a regime
with an enormous structural advantage. Rather than seeing their lack
of weapons and funds of the fatal floor. Ford says
that the highly unlined rebels have looked for areas where
they can outflank the aging generals who stole their futures
from them. The movement has leveraged comparative advantages large numbers

(17:28):
of people with time and tech savvy to raise money.
He says. This tactic, although unusual, has been a great success.
According to Ford, the approach has grown enormously, with one
of the video games, for example, Rising, have become the
number two paid app on the App Store at one point. However,
all the clicks in the world might not be enough
to sweep the rebels into Mandalay and return the country

(17:50):
on its path towards democracy. Sources inside Me and MARS
say that less and less revenue was generated by a
Me and mar I p address, and that they have
had to encourage members of the People's Click Force to
install VPNs to make their clicks appear to come from
the U S or Europe. Sometimes the traffic is so
massive that YouTube's algorithm mistakes it for an artificial intelligence
bot net. They're looking, they tell me, it pivoting towards

(18:13):
affiliate links and the sort of content driven commerce that
has swept the US media thanks to the success of
sites like The wire Cutter. Meanwhile, on the ground, PDF
forces are regularly getting the better of the toutmadaw and
small arms conflict, but coming off worse when they can't
defend themselves against the Russian jets, which the Hunter uses
to bomb civilian and military targets. Without man portable anti

(18:35):
aircraft systems, the rebels are sitting ducks. The world has
sent thousands of these to Ukraine and none to people
in Myanmar fighting the same battle for democracy against the
same Russian jets. Despite this, they're not discouraged. PDF rebels
tell me they have been scouring the Internet and they're
working on a solution that doesn't need the apparatus of
support of a state and instead relies on stable broadband

(18:58):
and the increasing ingenuity they've shown in an eighteen months
of revolution crazy dive wordering. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, meda,

(19:23):
oh my, I was going really a young age Dobby Boy.
Oh no, I know that three song Abby buying. Oh

(19:46):
hi everyone, it's me again, James. Don't worry. I'm not
coming to you at the end of the series to
report something tragic like I did. And I'll last me
on my series. And I'm just recording this little message
at the end to say that we're very grateful to
Daniel Honey and for all their hard work on this.
And we've gone through countless edits, but this particular project,
and they've done a lot of hard work to get

(20:09):
it to you in the form that you listen to
it today and for the last week. We also want
to say that although this appears to be a podcast
written and recorded by Robert and I, that Andy is
very much a co author and that none of this
would have been possible without him. As we said, and
he's not his real name, and we can't put his
real name in the credits because we're worried for his safety,

(20:30):
but his work has been invaluable and without him, none
of what you've heard would be possible. It could happen
here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zone
Media Dot com or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could Happen here, Updated

(20:51):
monthly at cool Zone, meda dot com slash sources. Thanks
for listening.