Read the following articles and in groups: 1. Think about their comparison 2. Can you detect the authors' dominant IR theories? 3. What is missing from each viewpoint? 4. What is your opinion on the Rohingya crisis? The Left has turned on the Lady of Burma Jake Wallis Simons 12 September 2017 With all the wrath of a lover slighted, the Left has turned on Aung San Suu Kyi. On Friday, Jeremy Hardy, Marxism's comedy mouthpiece, lambasted her as a 'racist, vain narcissist', while a petulant George Monbiot demanded that the woman be stripped of her Nobel peace prize. 'To Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes,' he complained in a column last week, lamenting that he and his activist friends now feel 'cruelly betrayed'. The heart bleeds. How things have changed. Until recently, Suu was an icon of human rights, enthroned in the pantheon with Mandela, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. Now, if the bien pensant are to be believed, she's a racist. My great-grandmother was Burmese. Although I have never met Suu personally, I know a number of her close friends and extended family. They have always described Suu as a dizzyingly beautiful, charming, headstrong and fiercely independent woman, who was known to have climbed over the wall of her Oxford college when staying out past bedtime, and took that same attitude with her into the monumental challenges of her later life. They also recall her fondness for the military. After all, her father, Aung San, was a warrior cut down in his prime, and for a good part of Suu's childhood, soldiers were a big part of her life. Throughout her incarceration, the fetishisation of the Lady of Burma sat slightly uncomfortably with people who knew her. Not that they didn't greatly love, admire and support her, you understand; but it was odd for them to see a friend, however gifted and principled, being used to fulfil an Occidental need for an Oriental saint. Suu has always been an exceptional person, but she has never been without her faults. The way she placed her children very much in second place to her country created deep resentments in her personal life, and her single-minded brashness could sometimes be controversial. These traits in general, and her love for the military in particular, were incompatible with the Left's idealised view of her. So they simply airbrushed them out. And because she was under house arrest, their idolatrous vision of saintly womanhood was never forced to square with the flesh-and-blood person on whom it had been pinned. It is a familiar dynamic. The fact that the Dalai Lama, for instance, demands the oppression of a Tibetan minority and has admitted to shooting birds with an airgun does not stop right-on Westerners from going weak at the knees when he giggles. Likewise Desmond Tutu, that committed supporter of Hamas.
Only in the latter two cases, the Left has been willing to overlook their indiscretions (a bit of support for Hamas never