Rev. Danny Fisher

Via deathpower: Pseudonymous Burmese journalist “Awzar Thi” responds at his blog Rule of Lords to a recent opinion in the Washington Post by Oxford economics professor Paul Collier. In that piece, titled “Let Us Now Praise Coups”, Collier suggested that military coups might be the only solutions left to the brutal dictatorships of President Robert Mugabe and General Than Shwe in Zimbabwe and Burma, respectively. At deathpower, author Erik W. Davis dismissed Collier’s opinion as “half-baked” and “militarist.” I’m inclined to agree with these assessments, in part because Awzar Thi’s piece makes such a convincing case for coups as all-around heinous things. He closes with the powerful statement:

Let us not praise coups, and let us certainly not wish them upon people who are already acutely suffering their iniquities. They are not a way out of trouble but a way into more of it. No better advertisement of this exists than Burma today.