Epilogue: What to Make of Ne Win?

Summary

History not Theory.

Patriotism not Internationalism.

Evolution not Revolution.

Direction not Destruction.

Unity not Disruption.

Razumov's Credo in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

Despite what is known of his life, in many ways, Ne Win remains an enigma. There is too much unknown to form a rounded and satisfactory understanding of the man. He was a man of his time, and that time is now gone. The issues which inflamed nationalist politicians in Myanmar and other colonies in the 1920s and 1930s are all but forgotten, except by historians. The changing alliances and the violence of war and revolution in the 1940s throughout Europe and Asia are now the romance of movies and historical documentaries. The global Cold War and the anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist rhetoric of Third World leaders of the 1950s and 1960s are now marketed as Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh T-shirts. The collapse of socialism and Communism is now taught as inevitable by the sons and daughters of the neoclassical economists who developed monetarism and privatization in the 1970s and 1980s. Men and women born in this century will find it hard to understand how once white skin was a necessary badge for admission to the centres of global power and wealth, or that men brought the world to the cusp of nuclear war over ideological shibboleths of Communism and Democratic Capitalism. Even if we knew more about Ne Win, it is doubtful we would know how to understand the world as he and his generation of Myanmar nationalists did.

However, some aspects of his character, purposes and intent do show through his words and actions. Of course, over a lifetime of more than nine decades, his opinions changed as he learned new things, experienced new sensations, and observed the world around him alter, seemingly imperceptively, but cumulatively, significantly. However, like most people, Ne Win was probably not as adaptable to change as he thought he was or perhaps he should have been, particularly towards the end of his political career. He was born in a township in the middle of a province of British India and died in a nation whose government was considered a pariah by the Western governments which had seen him for twenty-six years as a champion of anti-Communism and the nation he governed, the quiet hub around which the international politics of South, Southeast and East Asia's conflicts were waged.