The editors and translators of this volume, John H. Badgley and Aye Kyaw, have been writing about Burma for decades. In fact, the earliest Badgley publication I can find is from 1958, four years before the coup led by General Ne Win ended the country's nascent democratic culture and replaced it with a socialist alternative. In their final analysis, Badgley and Aye Kyaw argue that ‘one cannot study the Burmese revolution without realising how much [Ne Win's] governance cost the country’ (p. 319). From 1962 to the late 1980s, his so-called ‘Burmese way to socialism’ was the guiding ideology of a system that remained largely inscrutable to outsiders. Socialism, in this variant, was a Burmanised and indigenised ideology designed to navigate between communist and capitalist while emphasising the intrinsic virtue of Burmese (and particularly Burman) culture and perspectives. Since the early 1990s, the trappings of this socialism have been gradually stripped from national politics. Nowadays, with the enduring standoff between Aung San Suu Kyi and the country's authoritarian military leadership, the socialist foundations of much Burmese political thought are consistently overlooked.
This is one reason that Red peacocks is unique and important; it proposes to revive interest in the untrendy topic of Burma's socialist heritage. For this purpose, it offers translations and interpretations (which are quite distinct activities in this book) that plough new ground. Badgley and Aye Kyaw's collective insights and obvious passion for the topic showcase the tropes that matter(ed) most in Burmese socialist thought: ‘Preservation! Revolution!’ (p. v). Their book is ‘primarily designed to assist the student of Myanmar politics in unravelling the knot of Pali jargon, Burmese beliefs, existential truths, and political rhetoric’ (p. xii). Intriguingly, for those of us familiar with the current political era and its new capital, Naypyidaw (‘abode of kings’), they also insist that ‘within Burmese socialism are threads of reality that tie contemporary politics to its dynastic heritage’ (p. xii).
The ‘particular niche’ of this book is ‘blending traditional Burmese political thought and socialist ideology’ (p. xii) in a context where the translation of Burmese language materials has received relatively little concerted attention. Badgley and Aye Kyaw's translations, and the interpretative essays that follow, pick up eternal themes such as poverty, warfare, rebellion, India, China, philosophy, nationalism, culture, progress and history. For a start, the book translates Maung Chit Hlaing's foundational ‘Man's World View’. This is followed by a number of essays and fragments from other socialist thinkers including texts on ‘Burmese revolution’ from Thein Pe Myint, U Nu and U Ba Swe. Some of the thematic preoccupations are anachronistic but, in other cases, the contemporary salience of the arguments is very strong. One portion notes, for instance, that ‘some of the Frontier Areas are 200 years behind, some areas may be a thousand years behind, and we must hasten to bring them up to modern standards’ (p. 121). Other thinkers who are translated include Thakin Tin Mya, Bo Let Ya, Brigadier Maung Maung, Dr Maung Maung and Yebaw Mya. In so many cases, the political and social context is historically grounded but also eerily familiar to those of us who observe today's Burma at close range.
The eclectic ambitions of this book would have been made more accessible by a smoother effort to attribute the authorship of the various sections, particularly when a single chapter includes portions from different Burmese writers. It is also sometimes unclear when we are reading a translation and when we have been offered an interpretative flourish. Better sign-posting, perhaps in the header for each page, would have made some of the abrupt changes of authorship easier to follow. Thankfully, such ambiguity only sometimes obscures the value of the translation. In other sections, small infelicities and inconsistencies, particularly in the bibliography, mar the reading experience (i.e. only some of the many Burmese titles in the bibliography are translated).
Such mildly critical comments should not, however, detract from the significant contribution of Red peacocks. It could have been produced more elegantly, or checked more rigorously, but it will remain a unique intervention which should provoke further efforts to understand how various forms of modernist and traditionalist political ideology have flowed through Burmese society. In one section, the point is made that ‘tragically, Burmese socialism lacked an appropriate means for eliminating human greed, suspicion and delusion; so throughout the Socialist period, even at the highest echelon, most leaders felt loka nibban (worldly bliss) meant material wealth’ (p. 279). With the end of the socialist period in Burma, some things have not changed. Burmese authoritarianism, in its current variant, has sadly failed to change the impression that bliss comes from material wealth alone.
