A-Infos (en) UK, AFEd: Organise - SONE MA A'POI: THE WITCH TEAM II. (2/2) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Chinram: indigenous modernity and the experience of not being governed 
---- We wake half an hour before dawn and boil water on a fire next to 
the cauldron that has cooled with yesterday's rice. After coffee, a 
banana and some cold rice we load into the back of the pickup, backpacks 
weighed down with batteries, wires and steel. The sun is just beginning 
to rim the hillsides, and my rifle bounces against my knees as we 
trundle down the pockmarked road. Between my armor, rifle and bag I must 
be carrying 30 pounds of gear, yet I feel lighter than I have ever felt. 
For the first time in my life, I am not under the boot of a state. Even 
squeezed between my plates I can feel my lungs expanding wider than they 
ever have before. I am not safe, not comfortable, not certain that I 
will be alive tomorrow, and yet I can feel something deep inside me 
breaking free from a cage I didn't know was there. As a Westerner born 
and raised in one of the most draconian surveillance states in the 
world, to be sitting in the dawnlight with my enmity to the structures 
of power strapped openly across my back, knowing I am protected not by 
clandestinity but by the physical power of our collective resistance, is 
a freedom I have never known, and will never recover from. The cage 
inside me is broken. The bird has taken flight.v

We approach a bend in the road and slow to a crawl, pulling our truck 
off into a thick banana grove. We will walk from here, moving in the 
shadows before the enemy wakes. To assert that we are not under the boot 
of the state is not to claim that we are no longer in relation to it. 
Instead of under its boot we are now facing the muzzle of its gun, with 
the muzzles of our own pointing straight back. So long as states exist, 
to be stateless is to be at war. The freedom I feel is not freedom from 
fear or want, nor is it freedom from structures of power. Chin society, 
the rebel militias, the EAOs, the clans and the churches all have their 
own power structures, as do the supra-state forces of capitalist 
culture, the global economy, and neocolonial ideology. To be stateless 
is not to be outside relations of power, but rather to choose a 
particular position within them. It is to navigate the complex web of 
relationships beyond, above and below the state, and to confront state 
power with our unrelenting refusal to be governed.

There are forces in Chinram that would like to become a state to be 
certain, but by and large they are deeply unpopular, especially among 
the youth and those who have joined the revolution since the coup in 
2021. "Politician" is an insult here, and the political ambitions of 
some traditional elites have not allowed them to secure a monopoly on 
popular representation or the legitimate use of violence within Chin 
society. Governance is an amalgamation of old and new, formal and 
informal, with kinship networks and village councils continuing to be 
the central governing structures. Larger organizations interface with 
the diaspora and external funders, but the daily social care, 
maintenance and decision making remain overwhelmingly in the hands of 
small tribal and village systems. Incarceration and punitive justice 
exist in a gray zone between the formal and informal, the mid-scale and 
the micro. I recently accompanied one of my commanders on a medical 
visit to a POW camp that also houses civilian prisoners. The patient I 
was treating was a civilian incarcerated for domestic violence, and 
though the military structure wasn't really set up for him, they were 
housing him because his village was not ready to accept him back. There 
were ongoing conversations between his family, the village council, and 
the officers running the camp, trying to come up with a plan to 
eventually integrate him back into his village in a way that was 
acceptable to the people he had harmed. It was not an ideal system, 
especially as the POW camp was not equipped to meet his medical needs, 
but it was a flexible and organic system that engaged the specific needs 
of the prisoner, the people he harmed, and his broader community. Like 
so many things here, it is neither a template for a perfect free society 
nor "governance" as understood and inflicted by a state. These are the 
challenges, contradictions and compromises that shape the ceaseless 
creation and recreation of indigenous modernity.

Indigenous modernity is being shaped in every corner, crest and gully of 
the Chin hills. Old fuses with new, the micro, middle and macro bounce 
off each other, and tradition, coloniality and innovation wrestle and 
synthesize to create new indigenous cultures. Water flows through bamboo 
pipes into PVC faucets, and houses dangle off cliffsides on wooden 
stilts with satellite internet mounted to their roofs. Rice has replaced 
corn, cassava and sweet potato as the staple, but small-scale 
subsistence agriculture, hunting and foraging remain the primary food 
sources, with only rice, oil, and various processed snacks and sodas 
imported from the lowlands. Young men ride motorcycles into the hills 
and then disappear onto ancient hunting paths, armed with rifles, arrows 
and blow darts. A common symbol in local resistance iconography is a 
rifle crossed with an arrow, the epitome of tradition and modernity 
uniting in indigenous resistance. I wear the symbol on patch on my right 
arm, the flag of one of our local allied armies. Crocs and plastic 
flipflops peak out from under traditionally embroidered skirts, woven on 
looms that clack in the shade of wooden porches. TikTok dances slide 
seamlessly into traditional Chin dances and back again. While most Chin 
people know at least some Burmese, the daily language is a dozen 
different local languages, often unintelligible within a day's drive of 
each other. Just last week we had a bit of a debacle when our comrades, 
who are from less than a day's drive away, struggled to communicate to a 
local shepherd that she couldn't walk her goats down the road we were on 
because we hadn't launched our drone yet and the bomb was armed. Sign 
language and a few shared words got the message across in the end, and 
the goats rerouted. "Pwak ding" sometimes says it all.

Perhaps the strangest fusion to my Western leftist mind is the role of 
Christianity here in Chinram. The vast majority of Chin people are 
Christian, converted by American missionaries in the early 20th century. 
As James C. Scott discusses, these hills are one of the few places in 
the world where Christianity was embraced with open arms rather than at 
the barrel of a gun. The embrace of Christianity in Chinram and 
throughout highland Southeast Asia is the continuation of a long line of 
prophetic and millenarian traditions among state-evading hill peoples in 
the highlands. These magical and millenarian traditions, of which 
Christianity is in many ways a platonic example, act as both a 
revolutionary promise in defiance of lowland slavery and colonial state 
encroachment, and as a marker of differentiation from the ethnoreligious 
majority of the lowlands.29 As a minority religion facing colonization 
by a Buddhist majority, Christianity has come to be seen as a resistance 
symbol and a marker of Chin/Mizo identity.vi Among the comrades I met, 
Christianity was universally and enthusiastically celebrated, even among 
grumpy teenagers, punks and goths. Rebellion does not mean rejection of 
Christianity here, because Christianity is itself a rebellious force. 
While many of the visual symbols of Christianity in Chinram imitate 
American protestant aesthetics brought by the missionaries, the 
practices are often fused with folk traditions and even some remnants of 
traditional animist religion.

One of the most uncomfortable consequences of the omnipresence of 
Christianity in Chinram is an aesthetic conservatism with no bearing on 
or relationship to real politics. Theoretical support for America, 
Israel and Donald Trump are all commonplace here, yet my extensive 
conversations on the topic with everyone from teenagers to the highest 
echelons of political leadership revealed not a single actually 
conservative position, nor even the faintest understanding of the 
meaning of political conservatism in the West. People here support Trump 
because he is Christian and claims to support Christians. The comrades 
here were universally shocked to learn that since taking office he has 
rounded up, sent to concentration camps and deported hundreds of 
thousands of immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Christian. I 
spent hours and days debating the higher ups in Chin political 
leadership, and can honestly conclude that the disconnect does not stem 
from anything like Western conservatism, but rather from the 
incomprehensible chasm in political contexts that separates Western 
colonial and Chin indigenous politics.

This chasm between First and Fourth World political imaginations 
explains both the failure of the Western media and political 
establishment to comprehend the conflict in Myanmar, and the failure of 
the Western Left to grasp its significance. Many leftists fall into the 
trap of a simplistic and ahistorical campism, imagining that the brutal 
military dictatorship in Myanmar is somehow opposed to Western 
imperialism because it is backed by Russia and China, despite the fact 
that it does absolutely nothing to resist US imperialism in the region, 
collaborates closely with Israel, and, most importantly, has been 
terrorizing its subjects for over 70 years. Even leftists who do not 
fall into this tired old campism often fail to comprehend the 
significance of the revolution here, because it does not articulate 
itself in a language that Western leftist political discourse can 
understand.

This is not a communist revolution, not an anarchist revolution, not a 
socialist, feminist, or even liberal democratic revolution, in any 
coherent or unified sense. It is an indigenous revolution, and the terms 
of discourse, shared understandings, and modes of engagement exist 
beyond and outside colonial paradigms.

As Manuel explains, "the imposition of models on those who did not have 
a hand in the design has been the problem throughout our history. 
Clearly, the right to design our own model is the first step toward the 
Fourth World."30 The models of indigenous resistance being designed in 
Myanmar are a mixture of new and old, crafted from a thousand different 
histories and built with "all the ingredients that the tides of history 
have washed up on our shores."31

If the Left does not want to be discarded with the rubbish of our 20th 
century failures, we must reckon honestly with them. Our old ideologies 
have failed to create the world we've been dreaming of, and yet we 
continue to cling to them, and then wonder why the world has passed us 
by. The Left has long since ceased to be a meaningful force in global 
politics. New forces of resistance to imperial domination have arisen. 
The most obvious of these is political Islam, a global force as complex, 
diverse, and at odds with itself as the Left has ever been. The Left's 
inability to understand and engage with political Islam has reinforced 
our global marginality, and undermines our ability to map and confront 
the shifting forces of global power. It has also crippled our ability to 
engage meaningfully with the current war in Iran, and with the 
multifront resistances being waged across borders, communities, and 
political positions throughout the Middle East. Boring, oversimplified 
campism, orientalism, and liberal hand ringing all supplant a meaningful 
analysis of the conflict rapidly unfolding in the region.

The other global anti- imperialist force reshaping the world is 
something even less defined, more amorphous and fluid but no less 
powerful. It is the ceaseless wave of decentralized, grassroots youth 
uprisings, mostly led by indigenous peoples across the so-called Third 
World. The countless Spring revolutions, Gen Z uprisings, "ethnic 
conflicts" and "civil wars" that have already shaped the 21st century 
may not share a coherently articulated political analysis, but they 
share a shape, spirit, position and promise. The war here in Myanmar is 
perhaps the clearest example of this pattern unfolding across the globe, 
and its meaning and consequence are still being written.


Pipe bombs and broomsticks: the future of indigenous resistance and 
intercommunal solidarity
As Glen Sean Coulthard notes in his introduction to The Fourth World, 
"the shoulders of giants we stand on are not the shoulders of 
soothsayers."32 No matter how much we study and consider, how much we 
engage each other in debate and engage the enemy on the front line, we 
cannot know what will come of this dynamic, multidimensional revolution. 
But we do know that whatever happens, the consequences will reverberate 
beyond the mountains of Zomia, and beyond the barracks of Naypyidaw. 
This fight is not only for the land and peoples of the corner of the 
world currently known as Myanmar. It is for indigenous peoples 
everywhere, and for the future of indigenous modernity. What happens 
here will have consequences for the entire 21st century world order, and 
for the tumultuous system of national states grasping at the flotsam and 
jetsam of the shipwreck of post-colonial capitalist reconsolidation. The 
power of states, of networks, of coalitions, of tribes and ethnicities, 
of democratic (con)federalism, and of indigeneity are all vying to shape 
the future of human society, and by extension the future of all life on 
earth. There is no predetermined victor. How this war will unfold, not 
just in Myanmar but around the globe, depends entirely on the choices we 
make, on the courage we uncover in ourselves, on the intelligence of our 
strategic vision and the urgent actions we take.

Many theorists and commentators like to speculate about the role of 
technology in social transformation. There was a lot of clamor about the 
role of social media in the Arab Spring in 2011, and even more in 2021 
when Facebook played a central role in Myanmar's Spring Revolution. 
Facebook continues to play a pivotal role in the revolution's 
communications systems, a fact the dictatorship knows all too well, as 
its internet and telecommunications blackouts have demonstrated. New 
technologies continue to develop, and revolutionaries around the world 
continue to find ways to utilize them in the struggle for liberation. 
But early speculation that social media would usher in a new era of 
grassroots democratic politics has not played out the way many hopeful 
technophiles predicted. On the contrary, the tech industry, and 
especially the social media industry, has created new forms of power 
which allow a small number of tech elites bone chilling levels of 
control over what information the entire world receives. Technologies 
are tools of power that exist in a social context. Because technologies 
amplify power, they tend to reinforce power relations, meaning that on 
the whole technological development tends toward strengthening state and 
other repressive forces. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't use 
them. It's like guns; the world would be better off without them, but 
given that they exist, we can't afford not to have them. Social media's 
ability to decentralize and democratize internet communications 
continues to have revolutionary consequences, even as its devastating 
consequences unfold in parallel.

Lately I've been thinking that, in many ways, social media is to the 
internet what the FPV drone is to the nuclear bomb. Both the nuclear 
bomb and the internet have changed the shape and meaning of life on 
earth in ways that can never be undone. Together they have created what 
some call the nuclear anthropocene, a new age in planetary history in 
which human technology has fundamentally transformed, and has the 
capacity to annihilate, life on earth as we know it. Knowledge, truth, 
information, communication, conflict and war in the nuclear anthropocene 
are fundamentally different phenomena, and these changes cannot be 
unmade any more than an asteroid can unhit the earth. We are simply in a 
new terrain, and must learn to operate in it. As freedom fighters, our 
job is to search our new landscape for tools that can help us build 
freer futures within and beyond this new reality. From the technologies 
of power and death, new manifestations have arisen that, complicatedly 
and with severe drawbacks, have nonetheless empowered everyday people to 
challenge existing power structures. Social media and the FPV drone are 
both, at least in some ways, democratizing technologies, making forms of 
power that had previously been monopolized by the state and capital 
available to a much wider range of political actors. And they are both 
becoming tools of indigenous modernity. I look down at the patch on my 
arm, the rifle crossed with the arrow, and imagine that perhaps in the 
future it will be a broomstick crossed with an FPV drone.

The Fourth World War
The more pressing question for those of us in the so-called First World 
is where the battle lines will be drawn, and which side of them we will 
fight on. I was born, raised, and have lived most of my life in the 
so-called United States of America. America was built on indigenous 
genocide and chattel slavery, and these legacies shape every aspect of 
our modern life. We can trace a direct historical line from Manifest 
Destiny and bounties on Indian scalps to the contemporary prevalence of 
gun violence and mass shootings, from the plantation to the Prison 
Industrial Complex, from lynchings to police murders of Black youth, 
from smallpox blankets to the absence of basic health care services for 
the majority of Americans, and from the Trail of Tears to the sprawling 
homeless encampments that characterize our modern cities. The 
normalization of this daily violence over the past 500+ years has laid 
the foundation for a suffocating apartheid society governed by a racial 
caste system and maintained through repression and surveillance.

Some theorists speak of the imperial boomerang and the Third World- 
ization of the First World. To this our Fourth World comrades shout from 
the ghettos and reservations, it has always been this way. This is not 
to argue that there is nothing useful in the theory of the imperial 
boomerang, but rather to emphasize that it has the same shortcomings as 
other Third World theories; specifically, a failure to engage with the 
reality that colonial violence was always originally a domestic project. 
Whether we are looking at the enclosure of the commons in Europe, the 
entrenchment of structural patriarchy, and the internal colonization of 
"ethnic" communities across the European continent, or whether we are 
looking across the Atlantic at the genocidal violence that created the 
so-called United States of America, the story begins and ends in blood. 
Colonial violence is not something originally projected abroad that is 
now "coming home to roost." Rather, colonial violence was always the 
founding condition of any society capable of committing colonial 
violence. It is not a boomerang, it is a tautology.

This distinction matters because, as we discussed earlier, where we 
locate the origins of colonial violence shapes how we imagine opposing 
it. If, as much of Third World theory imagines, the First World is a 
monolithic colonial power, then decolonization is simply the process of 
breaking free from that power, and creating state structures modeled 
after colonial governments holds no contradiction. If, on the other 
hand, we understand that state-making was always a brutal process of 
colonizing everything in sight, we are forced to reexamine the nature of 
state structures themselves, and to look beyond them to other visions 
and futures. White supremacy and settler colonialism are Europe and 
America's number one export, and they have shaped the creation of 
post-colonial states across the world. This is as apparent in Myanmar as 
it is anywhere. The specific history of British colonial administration 
combined with the broader global cultural imperialism of American 
hegemony has shaped Burmese state- making, both by the junta and the 
NLD. The junta's brutal expansionist violence and its close alliance 
with the Israeli weapons industry demonstrates the classic authoritarian 
model, while the NLD's liberal capitalist version of federal democracy 
was developed in direct imitation of neoliberal American "democracy," in 
hopes of wooing sympathetic American statespeople like Hilary Clinton 
and gaining the backing of the European Union. Of course the empathy of 
American and European statespeople did very little good at the end of 
the day, because neither America nor the E.U. were going to stick their 
necks out unless they had something concrete to gain. The NLD's fusion 
of liberal democracy and Bamar supremacy is in fact an incredibly clear 
imitation of the American model, and it is no surprise that Aung San Suu 
Kyi became an American sweetheart in mainstream political discourse.vii

Now the face of American imperialism is changing. Neoliberalism is 
sunsetting, and a more blatant and unadorned version of American fascism 
is stepping into the light. It is no surprise that the junta's top 
military leader Min Aung Hlaing has expressed admiration for Donald 
Trump, or that the Trump administration has eased sanctions against key 
allies of the junta. Trump's policy towards Myanmar has been somewhat 
erratic, as he contends with his simultaneous desires to oppose Chinese 
influence in the region, fan the flames of old Cold War mythology to 
advance new imperialist agendas, support regional strongmen who can 
advance U.S. power in Southeast Asia, and navigate a bipartisan 
Washington consensus that has until now at least rhetorically supported 
the NLD and opposed the military dictatorship. How the relationship 
between the junta and the Trump administration will unfold remains to be 
seen, and, like everything about this conflict, will have global echos 
as the U.S. works to build regional alliances against China's Belt and 
Road Initiative. Once again we see how the struggle in Myanmar is in 
fact a global struggle for a new world order. The people's revolution in 
Myanmar is demanding a new future, beyond the NLD and the junta. In 
doing so they are rejecting the false binary between the old neoliberal 
world order and its unmasked fascist counterpart. Can those of us 
resisting fascism in the heart of empire learn to do the same?

And so we come to the question of where Americans will stand in the 
evolving global struggle against the colonial world order. Will white 
America continue to cling to the wages of whiteness, which for centuries 
we have accepted in place of our own dignity, and often at the expense 
of our own material interests? White Americans have demonstrated time 
and again that we will support policies directly detrimental to our 
physical and social well- being if they are sold to us in terms that 
reinforced our feeling of supremacy in a stable racial hierarchy. White 
welfare recipients regularly support cuts to welfare programs that we 
are told subsidize Black "welfare queens." White working class 
communities support the pollution of our air and water by deregulated 
industrial production if the industry promises jobs that won't be 
"stolen by immigrants." White parents support tax cuts that defund our 
children's schools if the politicians selling them also promise "tough 
on crime" policies that incarcerate Black and Native youth, and white 
communities send tens of thousands of our children to die in foreign oil 
wars in order to "protect us" from the barbarian Muslim hordes we are 
told are amassing at our gates. The legacy of siding with the colony is 
strong, and many current trends show it getting stronger.

At the same time, wherever there has been racial oppression, there has 
been intercommunal resistance. We have seen moments of magnificent 
rupture in which Black revolution, Indigenous insurgency, immigrant 
solidarity and settler sanity have joined forces to reweave the fabric 
of American social life, and these moments and movements have changed 
the course of history. From Croatan to John Brown, from the maroon 
communities of the Great Dismal Swamp to the legacy of the Black 
Seminoles, and from the Black Liberation Army to the burning of the 3rd 
precinct in Minneapolis, intercommunal solidarity has repeatedly 
prevailed against the forces of apartheid in ways that have shaken the 
foundations of the colonial world order. But the forces of recuperation 
are always close behind, and every historical moment of interracial 
solidarity is chased by reactionary forces fighting to reentrench 
American apartheid. The abolition of formal slavery was quickly followed 
by the advent of Jim Crow, the insurgencies of the 1960s and '70s were 
crushed by the War on Drugs and the rise of the Prison Industrial 
Complex, and the tides of recurrent Black uprising from Rodney King to 
George Floyd have been countered by a creeping and increasingly militant 
white supremacist counter-revolution culminating in the election of 
Donald Trump. The war between resistance and reaction, between 
colonization and intercommunalism, rages on.

This is, in many ways, why I came to Myanmar. The revolution here has so 
much to teach us, about intercommunalism, about decolonization, about 
coalitional resistance, about alliance across difference, about 
autonomy, indigeneity and Fourth World revolution. The diversity and 
complexity of the society here, and the multidimensionality of war and 
resistance, echo both the challenges and possibilities our resistance 
faces at home.

What could it look like for us to build decentralized intercommunal 
resistance coalitions connecting diverse communities in federated 
networks that center communal autonomy and indigenous self- 
determination? The possibilities for democratic (con)federalism, 
indigenous modernity, and autonomy without state power blossoming in 
these ungovernable hills hold lessons our Western colonial politics 
could not begin to articulate.

The Fourth World War is underway. The world of many worlds is alive and 
fighting, holding out its promise for a freer future.

Choosing violence
Of all the things I've learned since coming here, perhaps the clearest 
is that there is no such thing as neutral in the colonial world. The 
civilian life I left was not non-violent. It was shaped by the 
structural violence of American apartheid, and my complacency in this 
invisibilized violence reproduced and reinforced the violent structures 
of the colonial world. Imagining that I could somehow "opt out" of 
colonial violence by not being the one to pull the trigger reinforces an 
individualistic mythology that props up empire by allowing "civilians" 
to claim neutrality, while ignoring the omnipresent violence that 
structures and enables our lives. I think about the martyrs in my life 
taken by femicide, the war on drugs, the plantation industrial complex, 
transphobia, and every confluence of cruelty this world can meet out. 
Were they civilians? Can Black and Indigenous people be civilians in the 
colonial world? The very idea of being a civilian is a white 
positionality, a luxury of "innocence" afforded only to those deemed 
human by the white supremacist death machine. To cling to my status as a 
civilian is to choose whiteness, to choose the privileged fantasy of 
innocence that protects me at the expense of colonized people 
everywhere. And so I choose violence. I choose taking up arms and 
defending the people I love, choose the freedom of the colonized world 
over the illusions of comfort and safety I have been sold my whole life. 
Whatever happens, I have no regrets.

My plates stick to my shirt as I sweat up the mountain. The air is thin 
up here, and my lungs sip thirstily through the straw of my windpipe as 
I climb. Shoulders weighed down and back aching, I clutch for breath as 
I reach the hillcrest. Enemy camps sprout like daisies in my line of 
sight, waiting to be picked. I feel the magic stirring in the ground 
beneath me, flowing up through the coven as we assemble. We laugh and 
whisper an incantation. I begin to unzip my bag.

Closer
You are closer now.
The mountainsides on which we faced each other
are pulled together
as the valley between them sinks
with the weight of your body.

A chasm that only missiles could cross
now barely a stone's throw apart

We could not speak in life
there were too many centuries
of colonization between us.

But in death you are no longer my enemy,

and we can sit
and talk together

of how you got here
to the mouth of my muzzle,

and of the other paths
you never got to walk.

Leah Kaplan (2026)
WITCH (Women Internationalists of the Chin Hills)
AIF (Anti-Fascist Internationalist Front)

You will find both across social medias @witchteamfpv @aifmyanmar
This text is available in zine format here: 
https://aifmyanmar.noblogs.org/post/2026/07/22/sone-ma-apoi-the-witch-tea

Footnotes
i Throughout this essay I use the names Burma and Myanmar more or less 
interchangeably, with a tendency to favor the name used during the time 
period being discussed. Some anti-junta activists prefer the term Burma, 
as the name Myanmar was formally adopted by the dictatorship in 1989, 
and is generally associated with junta rule. Both terms refer to the 
ethnic majority group, with Bamar being the colloquial term and Myanma 
the formal name for the territory's ethnic majority people. For ethnic 
minorities both names represent the state's commitment to Bamar 
supremacy, and hence there is not a strong preference for one over the 
other. Young people tend to use Myanmar, while the older generation is 
more likely to use Burma.

ii On April 30, 2026, Aung San Suu Kyi was moved from military detention 
to house arrest.

iii The term "EAO" was codified during the National Ceasefire Agreements 
from 2013- 2015. Before that, terms like "ethnic organizations" and 
"ethnic resistance forces" were generally used interchangeably, and the 
criteria for being an EAO remains contested. I use the term broadly here 
to refer to organizations representing specific ethnic groups that 
engage in armed resistance.

iv During the uprisings in 2021, a modified version of Bob Marley's 
"Buffalo Soldier" became a popular anthem for the resistance. The 
Buffalo Soldiers as historical figures and the legacy of the American 
military pitting Black and Indigenous peoples against each other to 
further colonial expansionism is almost entirely unknown throughout 
Myanmar. The reference here is entirely to the song.

v I expect some readers will accuse me of romanticizing, and perhaps in 
some ways they are right. The life-altering freedom I am experiencing as 
a foreigner in Chinram is not the same as the experience of my Chin 
comrades. They have never lived under the suffocating hypocrisy or been 
contained by the imaginative straitjacket that binds life in the 
capitalist core. My experience here is that of a state subject breaking 
free for the first time. The physical and spiritual reality of that 
rupture is qualitatively different from the experiences of those who 
have lived here all their lives. The dialectical tension between these 
two experiences is precisely what constitutes a shatter zone. It is a 
place of refuge, a cultural crossroads where resistance 
cross-pollinates, evolving as it absorbs refugees, rebels and 
revolutionaries. We bring our histories and experiences, and change the 
place as we are changed by it. I am not an anthropologist with colonial 
fantasies of objectivity, here to observe and report on Chin society. I 
am a guerrilla, here to fight alongside my comrades in the global 
struggle against global forces of colonization. I bring what I have to 
offer, and take what I need to expand the struggle beyond Chinram, to 
bring the fight back to the heart of empire. In this sense my experience 
here is much closer to that of my Burmese comrades. We have taken to the 
hills, and are preparing to bring the war home.

vi When my commander read this piece she added the following: "I think 
this is largely true, but one thing Scott misses is that the ones 
'welcoming' Christianity so openly were at least in significant part the 
already extant patriarchal figures in the local prophetic traditions. 
They sought to consolidate power in their communities by accepting 
Christianity and, through their extant positions of authority, imposing 
it upon their people, especially women. This gendered blind spot is one 
of my main critiques of Scott's work. I think the 'welcoming' of 
Christianity here was at least in part an alliance between missionaries 
and patriarchs, welcoming both a new tool of resistance to Bamar 
hegemony and a new tool to consolidate power over their own communities."

vii It is worth noting that the genocide of the Rohingya people, a 
Muslim minority in Rakhine state, took place while the NLD was in power, 
under the authority and leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi. While this is 
sometimes portrayed as a contradiction or evidence of hypocrisy, it is 
in fact entirely in keeping with the NLD's policy of imitating American 
imperial ideology and practice, aligning Myanmar with the West against 
the phantom of Islamic "terror."

End Notes:
1 Grace Tsoi and BBC Burmese, "Myanmar coup: The people shot dead since 
the protests began," BBC, April 12, 2021, 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56636345.

2 "What's happening in Myanmar," Assistant Association for Political 
Prisoners (Burma), accessed February 26, 2026, 
https://coup.aappb.org/data-dashboard. 3 Andy, "How to Build a 
Revolution: Myanmar, Part One," interview by James Stout and Robert 
Evans, It Could Happen Here, Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, 
November 7, 2022, audio, 11:29, 
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-myanmar-printing-the-revo-289559181/ 
episode/how-to-build-a-revolution-myanmar-part-one-289559216.

4 Andy, It Could Happen Here, 27:40.

5 Alex, "How to Build a Revolution: Myanmar, Part Three," interview by 
James Stout and Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here, Cool Zone Media and 
iHeartPodcasts, November 9, 2022, audio, 20:49, 
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-myanmar-printing-the- 
revo-289559181/episode/how-to-build-a-revolution-myanmar-part-three-289559214.

6 Alex, It Could Happen Here, 22:24.

7 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of 
Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

8 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 208-211.

9 Antonio Graceffo, "Backgrounder: Ethnic Armies in Myanmar Civil War," 
Geopolitical Monitor, February 27, 2024, 
https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/backgrounder-ethnic- 
armies-in-the-myanmar-civil-war/.

10 Michael Martin, "The Dilemma of Shan State for Myanmar's Revolution," 
Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 7, 2025 
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dilemma- shan-state-myanmars-revolution.

11 "Chinland Council (CC) & Chin Brotherhood (CB): Members," Khalvontawi 
News, July 7, 2025, 
https://www.khalvontawi.in/2025/07/chinland-council-cc-chin-brotherhood-cb.html.

12 "Kachin Independence Organization (KIO)," ISP-Myanmar, August 20, 
2025, https://ispmyanmar.com/kachin-independence-organization-kio/.

13 "Our History," KNU - Karen National Union, accessed February 26, 
2026, https://www.knuhq.org/about-us/history?lang=en.

14 Maung Saungkha, "Ready for war: my journey from peaceful poet to 
revolutionary soldier," trans. Nu Nu Lusan, ed. Emily Fishbein, The 
Guardian, February 9, 2022, 
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/09/hungry-for-war-my-journey- 
from-peaceful-poet-to-revolutionary-soldier-myanmar.

15 Maung Saungkha, "Bamar Armed Group Aims to Break Junta Rule in 
Central Myanmar" The Irrawaddy, November 12, 2024, 
https://www.irrawaddy.com/in-person/interview/bamar- 
armed-group-aims-to-break-junta-rule-in-central-myanmar.html.

16 Walter Niehoff, "Student Armed Force (SAF)," Modern Insurgent, April 
10, 2024, https://www.moderninsurgent.org/post/student-armed-force-saf.

17 Yangon Anarchist Association, "Buffalo Soldiers Freedom Force," 
libcom.org, March 6, 2025, 
https://libcom.org/article/buffalo-soldiers-freedom-force.

18 Hein Thar, "Red dawn: Myanmar's reborn communist army," Frontier 
Myanmar, December 11, 2023, 
https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/red-dawn-myanmars-reborn-communist-army/.

19 Esther Wah, "Ethnics March Together General Strike - Nationalities 
Committee Against Coup," Burma News International, March 17, 2021, 
https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/ethnics-march-together-general-strike-nationalities- 
committee-against-coup.

20 Khun Bedu, "Interview: What Is the New Spring Revolution Alliance?" 
The Irrawaddy, December 19, 2025, 
https://www.irrawaddy.com/in-person/interview/interview-what-is-the- 
new-spring-revolution-alliance.html.

21 George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian 
Reality (University of Minnesota Press: 2019), 217.

22 Vine Deloria Jr., foreword to The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, by 
George Manuel and Michael Posluns (University of Minnesota Press: 2019), 
xxxix.

23 Deloria Jr., foreword to The Fourth World, xl.

24 Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 6.

25 Wah, "Ethnics March Together."

26 Deloria Jr., foreword to The Fourth World, xii-xiii.

27 Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 12.

28 Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 211.

29 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 319-323.

30 Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 220.

31 Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 220.

32 Glen Sean Coulthard, introduction to The Fourth World: An Indian 
Reality, by George Manuel and Michael Posluns (University of Minnesota 
Press: 2019), xxxi.

https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2026/08/19/sone-ma-apoi-the-witch-team/
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