Surprised Michael Flynn’s calling for an army coup on Memorial Day? Not as surprising, perhaps, as Greene likening mask mandates to the Holocaust — I always suspected she liked the Holocaust.
Even so, plenty of pundits are perplexed Flynn would want the beloved US Army of his imagination to follow in the goose steps of Myanmar’s tin-pot, tin-eared generals. Especially on Memorial Day.
That would be to underestimate the depth of the Myanmar army’s depravity.
But first, what did Flynn say?
Appearing in Dallas at a QAnon conference, Flynn was asked during a Q&A session that was shared in a Twitter video: “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?”
After cheers from the crowd died down, Flynn responded: “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.”
Okay, so he was pandering to the QAnon base. Even I’m not surprised this crowd cheers the Tatmadaw that has seized power in Myanmar — surely no one owns the libs like Myanmar’s army.
But Flynn knows its general staff are a barracks-full of creepy pot-bellied septuagenarian and octogenarian lizards. Why is Flynn an admirer?
An incident on a bus ride 23 years ago from then-capital Yangon to the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda gave me a measure of the Tatmadaw. The pagoda is an exotic, if malaria-ridden, Buddhist site on the border of Mon and Bago States in the mountains past some of the country’s richest teak forests. On a heavily forested road just before the mountains we saw a motorized rickshaw overtake an enormous army tractor-trailer filled with unbelievably long virgin teak timber only to make a suicide turn a short distance in front of the oncoming truck — and stop.
The truck driver managed to swerve just enough to avoid the trishaw, nearly toppling its overloaded trailer. And then the passengers in the bus began to cheer and applaud. It wasn’t until we reached the tourist site that I found an English-speaking passenger who could explain what happened.
“He wanted to give his life in protest,” said my interpreter. At the army trafficking teak? I asked, to be clear. “Yes,” said the passenger. “The Tatmadaw will keep control until they run out of teak trees that are easy to cut. Then maybe they’ll hand power back to us, a little — until the trees grow back.”
Well, the teak forests have grown back, just enough, and the Tatmadaw has seized power again. To rape the country’s forests.
Flynn gets this. This is what he admires.