Ouch.
That’s how we felt after reading journalist Bertil Lintner’s grenade-like review of Robert H. Taylor’s Ne Win biography, published in the Irrawaddy this week.
Lintner accuses Taylor of watering down Ne Win’s brutal rule, which lasted from his 1962 to his resignation in 1988 amid the pro-democracy student uprising.
In that time, Ne Win launched the disastrous Burmese Way to Socialism, destroyed the economy and crushed dissent by jailing political opponents or forcing them to flee and remain in exile.
But as any reader of the book notices, Taylor’s view of Ne Win is more forgiving than you might expect for a book about a dictator.
Lintner isn’t the first to notice the apologetic vibe to the biography, but he is the first to shout it from the hilltops of a widely-read magazine.
“Taylor’s voluminous, 620-page biography of the general who turned Burma into a political and economic wreck, and who ruled with an iron fist for more than two decades, must go down in the history of literature as one of the most sycophantic portraits of a ruthless dictator ever written by a Western academic,” Lintner writes, adding later that the book is “an insult to the people of Burma and all those who lost loved ones in massacres carried out by the military in urban as well as frontier areas where the non-Burman nationalities live.”
Lintner takes issue with several “inaccuracies” and “distortions of history” (the review contains only a few specifics) while also taking the time to throw a punch at the Nikkei Asian Review, where Taylor’s writing sometimes appears, calling it “a not particularly successful attempt to emulate the old and well-respected Hong Kong weekly Far Eastern Economic Review,” which folded more than 20 years ago.
As for the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, with which Taylor is affiliated, Lintner deems it a “supposedly serious academic institution.”
We can only conclude that Lintner doesn’t think much of Taylor, and we can only further conclude that after this review the feeling may be mutual.
But why did Lintner wait this long to launch his attack? The book is 620 pages of detailed history, so maybe it took him a while to finish the tome.
The bigger mystery may be why Taylor’s book has escaped such criticism so far. Most reviews have been generally positive and Lintner’s voice is actually a lonely one among critics.
The only way to find out which side you are on is to read the damn thing.
