Burma's Hidden History
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this extra episode David talks to Thant Myint-U about the fraught recent history of Burma (Myanmar) and asks what it can teach us about twenty-first century politics. Why did the West have so many illusions about Aung San Suu Kyi? Can democracy really rescue the country? What model of development might work in the age of Covid and climate change? A wide-ranging conversation about the forces shaping our world.
Thant's website: https://www.thantmyintu.com/
Thant's book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781786497871
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is David Ransman and this is Talking Politics. Our extra episode this week |
| 0:08.8 | is with Thant Meant Ouh, who's written a remarkable book about the hidden history of Burma, |
| 0:15.1 | and we're going to be talking about what that history teaches us about democracy and the |
| 0:19.9 | state of the world. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review |
| 0:26.6 | of Books, Europe's leading magazine of culture and ideas. Improve the quality of your solitude |
| 0:33.3 | with a subscription to the LRB. They'll send you exceptional analysis of the politics, |
| 0:39.3 | economics, sociology and science behind the crisis and reportage from around the world. |
| 0:46.2 | But also, gloriously unrelated, richly immersive distraction from the world's best authors and |
| 0:52.1 | critics, writing about history and philosophy, art and technology, fiction and poetry. |
| 0:58.4 | Just go to lrb.me-slash-talk and get your first 12 issues for just 12 pounds. That's lrb.me-slash-talk. |
| 1:13.5 | We recorded this conversation a few days ago on Thursday. Thant is speaking to us from Rangoon. He's |
| 1:19.6 | also spent some time in Cambridge. He studied here and I met him here first. He is extremely |
| 1:26.1 | intimately connected with the story of Burma and its recent history. But I started by asking him |
| 1:33.8 | a basic question about names. Why does he want to still speak about Burma and not Myanmar? |
| 1:42.2 | I prefer the name Burma. It's the name that has been used since actually before colonial times. |
| 1:47.9 | Myanmar is the word that has always been there in Burmese to describe the Burmese-speaking |
| 1:53.8 | Buddhist majority of the country. It was a change that was made by the military, |
| 1:57.9 | junta in the late 80s, kind of as part of a nativist or ethno-nationalist shift in politics. |
| 2:05.4 | So my preference is personal. But I do think that the change in the name also reflects |
| 2:13.0 | a certain type of shift in politics that happened in the late 1980s and 1990s as well. |
| 2:18.5 | So that leads into one of the many big questions we're going to talk about, which is what do we |
| 2:22.6 | mean when we talk about the Burmese nation? And it does connect to something that we were talking |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Catherine Carr, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Catherine Carr and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.