Burma the Pillar of Fascism

I've noticed a lot of concerning patterns in regards to the direct parallels between the Fascist movements of Europe and that of Burma that are in conjunction with the Tatmadaw. The reason first and foremost being that of ideological similarity between the two movements, typically when you look at specifically European fascist they often center on race and a complete unassailable focus on the state sidelining things like religion, the true form of culture inherited from their respective nation but it has never had it as a central focus.

This is until the rise of the 969 movement which although fully formed as a cultural and political movement in the 2010s[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement ]. With said movement going back to the main leader joining the 969 movement in 2001 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirathu ]. Their main emphasis and messaging being on the protection of Burmese/Buddhist culture and the majority race of Myanmar from Muslims. Which sounds scathingly similar to the messaging utilized by the European far-right as of current which is a complete branching out compared to older and less contemporary far-right European movements which often, as I've stated have a total or near focus on race.

The 969 movement also happens to utilize the same methods of transmission utilized by the European far-right, being through social media in the form of Facebook, symbolism through flags or esoteric symbols or dog whistles such as "969" [ https://observers.france24.com/en/20130503-%E2%80%98969%E2%80%99-digits-terrifying-muslims-burma ]. The number "969" being remarkably similar to the use of the "Black Sun" symbol often used in European far-right contexts, the similarity being both are used as estoeric symbols to identity in and out groups, seperate those in the know from those who don't. But none of these tactics were seen in the 21st century European far-right until they were utilized by the Burmese far-right which shows greater support for the potentiality of collaboration or at least implicit admiration occurring from the European far-right towards the Burmese far-right as the 969 movement had been the ones who pioneered this much earlier. This is then also supported by how European far-right activity even in the 2010s were relatively limited with the only center of these exact methods/tactics being solely from Burma. These said propaganda tactics firstly started with the propagation of Wirathu's messaging the the 2000s form of propaganda in the form of CDs [ https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/govt-admits-not-doing-anything-to-stop-sales-of-anti-muslim-propaganda.html ].

Then in regards to the transmission of modern tactics this is firstly seen in the form of a direct webpage, the earliest archive being from 2013 [https://969movement.org/what-is-969-movement/ ]. But compared to other far-right European movements this wasn't just a webpage, it already due to past propagation of propaganda through CDs and the '969' dogwhistle has already helped the movement itself gain momentum. So when the ban of censorship was lifted in the 2010s, Wirathu used this to his advantage in the form of this site [ https://969movement.org/what-is-969-movement/ ]. But on top of this already pre-built ideology which again has a central focus on religion also with the earliest archive also being from 2013 being a forum page [ https://web.archive.org/web/20131030043058/https://969movement.org/forum/ ]. The forum itself contains direct categories like "General Dicussion", "Dhamma Talk" and most importantly "Organizing" which itself in the archive contains 2 posts by the admin one being "Open Positions" [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030044049/https://969movement.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6 ]. Which itself contains the positions of "Executive Director", "Chief Marketing Officer" and "IT Intern" but one constant remains between said positions, a requirement being that they all speak English which wouldn't have made sense unless they had direct intentions to export Buddhist Fascism across borders and eventually, globally, the job posting itself goes on to gain over 274 views [ https://web.archive.org/web/20131030043656/https://969movement.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=e7dbcf31476ed50ad1fa9925e4e4b87c ]. This was a position of media dominance never before seen for any far-right leader like Wirathu, none had an active website, an active means of coordination but most of all none of them were on the Times except of course, Wirathu. [ https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/sri-lanka/sri-lanka-bans-time-magazine-789qnnbkb85 ] It fact, there was so much fear at least by Sri Lankan governments that the Times magazine had the potentiality to incite radicalism and violence they'd banned it, but not the West, now a far-right leader's face was directly in front of and being viewed by the far-right of Europe. And for the final proof that it was indeed international, the site itself states "The creator of this blog is an American Buddhist of the Theravada school and supporter of the 969 message and its leader Ven. Wirathu. I decided to create this website after being disgusted at the despicable Time Magazine article.", this means that Wirathu didn't even have to reach the far-right, they came to them instead [ https://969movement.org/what-is-969-movement/ scroll to the bottom ].

Then finally from the 2010s to the 2020s they'd begin disseminating more and more through the use of disinformation through Facebook. [ https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/burmese-neo-nazi-movement-rising-against-muslims.html ] This is when their influence now combined with the website would begin permeating globally for everybody to see, thus allowing for the far-right in Europe to see a full display of tactics and coordination for the 21st century. And is now the exact same model used by the far-right in Europe and now across the globe. And it wasn't just the tactics of the 969 movement that were utilized, in fact the original American creator of the 969 movement's site here deliberately wanted the movement to spread, so much so they proposed "to use a modified version of the bylaws of the Wikimedia Foundation for the 969 Movement Inc." [ https://web.archive.org/web/20131030044052/https://969movement.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5 ]. This was deliberately done so in order to decentralize the movement itself and for "people in their own countries to start 969 Chapters for their own organizing efforts" which explains why the far-right despite being so decentralized are capable of coordination on a mass-scale through the internet because a modified version of Wikimedia had been co-opted, the only that was used for the 969 movement. But rather than simply using Buddhism, since they're in Europe they chose Christianity and "European Civilization" as that would've been more effective for a local context, but ultimately the template and central core of the far-right is the 969 movement. This is highlighted once again when the creator of the site states in the same post, "There needs to be discussion at how much (or little) ordained monks participate in this process and what the opinions of the 969 monks in Myanmar are about this proposal." [ https://web.archive.org/web/20131030044052/https://969movement.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5 ].

Now in regards to the very organization of the structure of the far-right I found these specific references in the Wikimedia Foundation's bylaws from this archived version from 2013, which was again directly referred to in the 969movement forum. [ https://web.archive.org/web/20131029204340/https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws#ARTICLE_I_-_NAME ] Looking at specifically the "ARTICLE II - STATEMENT OF PURPOSE", it states "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.", this sounds much similar to the way the mission of the far-right is but rather than disseminating educational content they disseminate ideologically-aligned propaganda as in the form of the "pepe" meme being a good example. The same article then also states "In coordination with a network of chapters and individual volunteers, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission.", this aligns perfectly well with the very fundamental structures utilized by the far-right today as again it involves a "network of chapters" which could be described as autonomous cells working under a decentralized but coordinated manner whilst still remaining multilingual. Then if you go down to "ARTICLE III - MEMBERSHIP" it deliberately states "The Foundation does not have members.", which happens to sound eerily similar to the way the far-right often doesn't have formal groups, or ranks or even a leader but operates by simply disseminating a framework instead, much like the manner in which the Wikimedia Foundation does so. Bylaw jargon aside, just for the purposes of simplifying it's a lot like how individual Mastodon instances may operate where each Mastodon instance operates completely independently in a network of Mastodon instances, and they connect to each other based on the needs/wants of the instance rather than being told explicitly what to do. So if in a network of 10+ Mastodon instances, if one were to go down, the network still persists and due to the open nature of the code itself a new instance can be created over and over again infinitum. But even despite decentralization they are still binded together by one purpose, being the very infrastructure of Mastodon itself, not necessarily through individual members so ranks aren't necessary, not through "creators" more can always be recruited, but the fundamental backend itself and the ability of an instance or "chapter" to continously propagate and spread. And now thus since the very first mention of this is in the 969 movement's forum this loops back to my core argument of the central, innovative core coming from the 969 movement, showing a direct method of international transmission and coordination.

The physical application is this is actually quite simple, I personally run a homeserver that currently runs forgejo an alternative to Github, a shimmie2 booru for tagging images as a gallery. The hardware itself was about £50 and I utilize Cloudflare tunnel so I don't have to expose any ports or use up any bandwidth reducing my monthly costs to about £5-10 which makes the barrier-to-entry of starting a potential "chapter" really quite easy to do. I could start a nginx instance [ https://nginx.org/en/ ], put some "extremist" content on there, connect Cloudflare to port 80 and it'd be up online for people to freely access and since I'm self-hosting it there's really no guidelines for me to follow if any. And that's just me, a singular person, if the far-right at the bare minimum for a "chapter" has at least 5 members all contributing money and technical skills in a similar financial apparatus to that of a trade union by contributing a small percentage of their finances that's an easy £100+ that could be used for an entire international operation scaling forums and matrix chat rooms. The exchange of currency can also be done easily and cheaply through means of XMR, [ https://www.getmonero.org/ ] an extremely private form of Bitcoin or litecoin [ https://litecoin.com/ ] that's often much more stable than Bitcoin and much cheaper to run, both being open-source and easy to have a private node [ https://www.getmonero.org/resources/user-guides/remote_node_gui.html ] set-up keeping currency exchange entirely private and anonymous. Now on top of all of this you were to route it all through something like tor [ https://www.torproject.org/?noredirect=1 ] or i2p [ https://i2p.net/ ] you'd be virtually invisible. Though just know I'm not implying a company like Cloudflare would allow this, just that it's essentially impossible to track everything especially since they handle the connections of possibly billions of individuals connections it's impossible for them to track this, even if they wanted to. Then for chatting online, most would expect Telegram to be the safest method, but it really isn't. Firstly, it's proprietary so you don't know what they're doing in the backend, so rather than that a more realistic chat protocol would be Matrix [ https://matrix.org/ ]. This would essentially allow for small individual instances of matrix servers, which can then be selectively connected to other Matrix instances, creating a web of Matrix instances that is completely inaccessible and invulnerable to subpoenas by the government whilst still remaining really cheap to run.

And Burma has not only been co-opted for the simple means of efficiency but has possibly also been done so due to a singular alignment with Fascism's idea of a 'proletariat nation'. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6bWO3XxLfY&t=105s ] In Fascist theory, proletariat nations are nations that have often been oppressed, much like how Myanmar has since the 1900s been fighting colonialism, Japanese fascism, sanctions but it has also does so whilst remaining completely and utterly Burmese. Of course, the formation of this ideology is in itself proof, somehow the poorest nation in ASEAN had the will and pride to articulate and coordinate to form an entirely new ideology that would now form a distinct branch of Fascism and of course in 2019 cause a genocide of the Rohingya population. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide ] Predating this there were already Muslim shops being systematically discriminated against meaning this had been building up for about a decade now, much much earlier than the development of Fascist movements in Europe. Which completes the pictures as to why Burma would completely fit the imagination of the European far-right as unlike Japan which is although apart of the far-right movement in some capacity they have ultimately, at least in the eyes of the European far-right, have been "corrupted" by the West and India too. But Burma completely shatters the category in itself, not imitating European Fascism but completely asserting it's own vision. But of course like all Fascist ideologies it still has a collective myth, the most obvious being of the colonial Burmese empire, the Toungoo Empire. It arose from a small city state, a single city state dubbed "Taungoo" from about 1510-39 that seperated from Ava. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Ava ] And in 1599 would grow to encompass an entire sub-continent, systematically move entire populations, enslave them, force Theravada Buddhism, Burmese legislature and even go as far as threaten the Chinese. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Toungoo_Empire] And of course in the 1800s during the Burmes-Anglo wars whilst entire subcontinents like India fell there weren't as many revolts. The Burmese persisted across 3 wars, across 60 years and even then 20 more years of guerilla warfare would persist. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Burmese_Wars ] It even got to the point that Burma had to be give an entirely seperate constitution from British India's allowing for more greater local independence . [ https://www.burmalibrary.org/mm/government-of-burma-act-1935-the-1937-constitution ] And of course Burma was also the earliest of the colonies due to General Aung San's efforts to become a fully independent nation. A combination of all these fuel fascist and far-right imagination, even after an entire century the Burmese have persisted and it seems they're still going.

There was also this meeting that took place between Daw Aung San Su Kyi and Viktor Orban of Hungary where in 2019 met specifically to address Muslims[ https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-in-cozying-up-to-orban-suu-kyi-falls-even-further-from-grace/a-49108276 ]. Coincidentally during a time when anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe was still relatively low due to the much lower population and no formal "movement" had occurred. Unlike in the 2020s where there's already growing concerns of far-right radicalism. Simply put, a noble laureate that was meant to championing Burmese democracy genuinely had no business ideologically aligning this similarly on such an issue. This supports my point that Burma specifically may be playing a central role in influencing fascism in Europe and the greater far-right movement occurring in Europe as it'd simply make no sense for a policy this seperated from global discourse to have seemingly occurred between Burma and Hungary of all countries. This had also happened during the year 2019 when the attacks on the local Rohingya weren't just being documented as a singular event but now a consistently maintained state-backed policy by the NLD and Daw Aung San Su Kyi as a result [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#2017%E2%80%93present:_Rohingya_genocide ]. This also highlights, directly the development of fascism to again be much earlier than that of European fascist movements which means the origins of Buddhist Fascism completely predates that of the European far-right's.

Just to emphasize my point, the rise of the Japanese far-right, in regards to being more public, only seemed to have occurred right after the rise of the European far-right. This is because Japan historically, has been quite differential to the West in regards to appearing more "Western", often trying to seperate itself culturally and technologically from East and greater Asia as a whole. This is mostly due to a cultural mark left by having to be one of the only industrialized Asian powers as per the Meiji restoration. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration ] Thus embedding this inherent component into Japanese society as whole, and even with the rise of Fascist Japan during WWII after being humiliated by the Americans and becoming the equivalent of a US-puppet state economically and culturally in order to counter the rise of Communism during the Cold War in the 1940s as per their policy of reverse course. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course ] The only real resistance to this loss of Japanese authenticity being by Yukio Mishima [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima ] and the Tatenokai or the "Shield Society", [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatenokai ] a private militia group that had the aims of restoring imperial power to the Japanese emperor due to a perceived loss of Japanese spirit from a now Americanized Japan, but this wouldn't amount to an entire cultural change of Japanese Society as a whole. But over decades on wards from the 50s, this had the effect of placing Japan in the periphery of the Western world for decades, which would naturally impact the Japanese far-right. Due to this, if one of the poorest nation in SEA which they viewed as "lesser", rose to become the ideological centres of Fascism they simply wouldn't be able to engage due to this inherent worldview embedded into their culture and due to their status of seeing themselves as "above" nations like Burma. Which is exactly why the Japanese far-right only rose, once the European far-right did so.

Now we're at present day, 2026 specifically where the junta due to Burmese resistance propaganda are often presented as idiots or incapable of running a country. Which is totally far from the truth, I was notified that the Burmese junta would begin imposing a rule that would allow for greater gas by making it so only odd numbered cars could drive on odd numbered days and thus so for even numbered cars. [ https://www.bssnews.net/international/365659 ] This may seem idiotic but this is far from the truth, this is a deliberate attempt to firstly, maximize their own supply of fuel but to also isolate individuals towns and cities like that of Yangon and Mandalay, preventing the flow of traffic and thus also the flow of information nation-wide. Please do not fall into the trap of believing they're incapable, that is a guise being utilized to make resistance inherently underestimate the Junta and in the long term could lead to higher causalities and losses for the resistance forces. They will and probably are utilizing this exact narrative to keep Burmese civilians unprepared and feel safe and that victory is inevitable, it isn't. Over the 2020s even amongst resistance forces they've already begun creating a number of key alliances with Fascist-aligned armies like that of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARA) in 2024. [ https://myanmar.iiss.org/analysis/rohingya ] The key similarity between the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Rohingya Army is that they are both explicitly following ethno-nationalist policies and are inherently reactionary in nature, they are fascists collaborating in order to gain their own interests. This could be the beginning of a nascent Fascist coalition in Burma.

Note: Sorry about any grammatical or spelling errors, I have learning difficulties so I often have to type in college, sorry. But please do engage with the essay on the thread if possible. ^_^

Also cleaned up the links' formatting so people wouldn't have to manually copy and paste anymore.