Many answers would be given by different advocates. Social conservatives may argue that abortion is the scourge of our times while social liberals could point to gay/bi-sexual/lesbian/transgender rights. The variance of opinion shows, I think, that there isn’t a necessarily clear answer to this question. If anything, prophecy is a difficult task to undertake and few are particularly good at it.

I would give a different answer, however, to those previously given – a problem which is at the same time obvious, ubiquitous, and ignored. Adam Smith articulated the problem succinctly, which Noam Chomsky relays in one of his latest books Failed States called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: . . . all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” Chomsky cynically adds “Much has changed since his day, but the vile maxim flourishes.”

We are witnessing today the transformation of a previously large world into a global village. “Globalization” as it is commonly called. Problems of extreme poverty are difficult if not impossible to ignore today. 24 hour news networks and the internet have caused the spread of information to exponentially increase. What happened moments ago in Thailand or some other region of unrest is made available in seconds.

It is not simply that we do nothing in the face of incredible suffering. It is the fact, rather, that we consume products that would never warrant the predicate of “necessity.” I-Pods, designer jeans, smart phones, plasma screen TVs, luxury cars, bed-bath-and-beyond, etc, are but a few examples that come to mind.

Peter Singer and the moral/analytic philosopher Peter Unger have seen this problem with unusual moral clarity. Two essays by Singer illustrate this excellently: “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” and “Poverty, Affluence, and Morality.” I will take it upon myself to summarize the key point articulated in these essays, which Unger expounds upon to great detail in a book called Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. (Catchy title)

Singer asks you to imagine that you are hurrying to an extremely important event – let’s say a much anticipated lecture in which you are the speaker. On the way, you witness a child drowning in a shallow pond (Not for the child, but for you). You are, however, wearing your best suit, and saving the child would require you to jump in the pond, procure the child, and emerge soaking wet and muddy. In so doing, you would inevitably have to, at best, be extremely late, or, at worst, cancel the lecture. Instead of saving the child, you decide to go onto give your lecture while the child drowns.

Most of us would regard the aforementioned decision as extremely regrettable to say the least. Singer goes a step further to argue that we are forgoing our basic human responsibility to our fellow man every time we spend our prized income on a hedonistic luxury instead of donating our money to a life saving charity. Basically, every dollar we do not spend on an absolute necessity has the blood of the third world upon it.

I have always felt that there are many nuances that Singer simply doesn’t raise. For instance, what if we have a family? Does the direction of our moral responsibility befall upon them? (As a side note, Warren Buffet doesn’t seem to think so. When asked why he was leaving very little money to his children, his response was “I do not want to reward them for winning the sperm lottery.”) What about the fact that money isn’t our only resource, but rather we are in possession of a multitude of resources, the most important of which is our time? Doesn’t it logically follow that time spent on even life enhancing activities, such as education, are mere distractions to the more important, life-or-death needs of humanity? We also must not forget that the reason many people have expendable income is precisely because Americans consume luxuries!

I do not bring up these objections to brush off Singer, but rather because I feel that making the initial, shallow pond argument opens up a Pandora’s Box of inquiry which must be answered by every thinking adult living in the First World. In conclusion, then, Singer is getting at something true. Where the logical outgrowth ends, however, I simply do not know.

Michael Wester is a guest contributor to Occam’s Aftershave. He is a recent graduate of Franciscan University and will be attending Notre Dame Law School in the fall.

One of the most arduous ecumenical challenges consists of finding unity between the intransigent nonbeliever and the uncompromising Christian on any question of deep philosophical import. This should not come as a surprise, however, as there are obvious irreconcilable differences between the two religious outlooks which ultimately lead proponents of each worldview to very different metaphysical conclusions. Thus it is somewhat surprising to notice that the world has experienced unthinkable progress in the past century despite the fact that so many people disagree on so many fundamental questions.

Apparently, people have made the decision to set aside their moral and religious differences and devote PhDs and MDs toward endeavors that we all seem to agree bestow practical advantages to humankind and contribute to our happiness.  Speaking as an American, I surmise that our democratic spirit is largely responsible for our nation’s success, especially in the realms of science, medicine, and technology.  For by affording religious liberty to its citizenry and safeguarding the right of a person to not be coerced into violating his or her conscience, sound democracy allows people to work peaceably toward the common good, provided that certain universally accepted principles are not violated.
In his commencement address at the University of Michigan on May 1, 2010, President Obama stated three goals for the United States if she is to continue her role as an agent of world progress in the twenty-first century.  Particularly, the President urged for smarter government, more civility in public discourse, and active participation in politics.

President Obama’s speech served as a timely exhortation that a democracy is only as successful as are the people who collectively form the democratic body.  He shrewdly pointed out that a vivacious democracy requires an open mind, constructive criticism, and a willingness to reach across the aisle when it becomes necessary for the common good.

This need to reach across the aisle in a democracy is applicable to believers and non-believers as much as it is to Democrats and Republicans.  For there are some issues essential to democratic progress that require a collaborative effort among even those with radically divergent theo-philosophical positions.  One such issue involves improving the social condition of humankind.

I believe that great unifying, democratic wisdom is to be found in the Social Gospel movement, famously articulated by the early twentieth-century American Protestant thinker, Walter Rauschenbusch.

In his most well-known work, A Theology for the Social Gospel, Rauschenbusch formulated a response to social injustices while using Christian terminology.  His thesis was that Christ’s central teaching consisted of achieving the Kingdom of God on Earth.  While he believed in an afterlife, Rauschenbusch nevertheless maintained that it is both cowardly and un-Christian to disavow worldly progress simply because one might believe that there are greater rewards awaiting the faithful in heaven.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon committed Christians to build solidarity with the whole of humanity in order to end capitalistic greed, unjust war, and needless human suffering.  Rauschenbusch saw little use for sacraments or nuanced theological argumentation, believing instead that helping the poor and ending other social ills on this planet was the crux of Christ’s message.

Interestingly, Rauschenbusch was explicit that it was not necessary for one to believe in life after death in order to bring about the Kingdom of God.  Indeed, it seems as if Rauschenbusch would have found it essential to call upon the services of atheists and agnostics to alleviate poverty and institute genuine social change.  For while Rauschenbusch himself was a committed Christian, the Social Gospel movement concerned itself largely with the condition of the world.  Hence, Rauschenbusch found a way to remove barriers that often prevent those with different opinions about what happens after one’s bodily death from working side-by-side.

As a Roman Catholic, I personally find many of Rauschenbusch’s theological points to be problematic and flawed.  Nevertheless, I see great ecumenical potential in the overriding ethos of the Social Gospel movement.  For one, Rauschenbusch makes it very clear that the Social Gospel movement can and should occur within a democratic setting like the United States. And two, it seems as if the only premise that the Social Gospel movement requires one to agree with is that a person’s earthly life is precious, so efforts should be made to remove institutionalized social evils, such as those that prevent poor people from rising above their indigence, in addition to those that extol unjust warfare and human greed.

The magic of the Social Gospel teaching is its philosophical appeal to both believers and non-believers. The Christian will find Rauschenbusch’s words immediately appealing because they are framed in Christological syntax.  At the same time, the politically liberal atheist will likely be attracted to Rauschenbusch’s openness to working with those who do not believe in life after death.

So when we reflect today on the achievements that have been brought about largely because our democratic principles afford us the liberty to believe or disbelieve, to speak freely about our convictions, and to choose the setting in which we may make use of our
talents and interests, let us also heed the President’s advice to remain open-minded for the sake of upholding our spirited democracy.

A successful democracy necessitates agreement between religious and non-religious in some vital areas so that genuine progress may be achieved.  Besides scientific achievements, one area in grave need of bilateral agreement is in the realm of promoting social welfare.  Let us disagree with Rauschenbusch where necessary, but let us coalesce behind his conclusion that it is in the interest of everyone living in a democracy to improve the social condition of the citizens on whom even the rich man ultimately relies to perpetuate his own earthly happiness.

When I read the Sunday edition of the Post, the atypical headline from the previous day became a bit clearer – the first incumbent fell to angry hoards of his constituents at the Utah GOP convention. The tea party seems to be getting the credit, which may seem odd, because Senator Bennett wasn’t exactly a RINO. In fact, his conservative credentials were relatively solid.

Relatively solid didn’t seem to cut it for the tea party movement. He voted for Bush’s bailout in 2008, and sought a compromise with Democrat Ron Wyden to overhaul the health care system. A revocation of a promise to seek only two terms back in 1992 also soured the palate of activists in his state.

Yesterday, May 12, 2010, the Washington Post said, “Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV) lost his bid for a 15^th term Tuesday in a primary defeat that further affirms the anti-incumbent sentiment coursing through the country.” The first congressional district of WV has been held by the same family since 1968. Consider this to be further evidence for my working hypothesis

A Rand Paul primary in Kentucky will be another test of strength for the tea party, and it looks like they will get another candidate on base to compete in the general elections on November 2. Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul, is up 44% to Secretary of State Grayson’s 32%. Unless a scandal emerges in which it is discovered that he uses campaign contributions to solicit prostitutes, he should walk into the nomination.

Some may make the argument that we are headed for a Republican landslide in 2010. I would caution such optimism on the right. Remember that the country still feels a bit of a hangover from the Bush presidency, an administration that had to virtually run out of town on January 21, 2009. Another Gingrich revolution simply doesn’t seem plausible in light of equal distribution of disdain between Republicans and Democrats.

Rather, my prediction is that while Republicans will certainly gain seats, it probably won’t be the 40 or so needed to retire Pelosi as the house majority leader. Recent polls seem to reflect this sentiment. Incumbents, realizing that this may be the case, are doing what they do best: disingenuously pandering for votes.

For the sake of moving forward, then, I will quote Ian’s chastisement of my position that my cause-effect analysis is flawed: “For this critique to hold water, we must take the position that Comedy Central’s self-censorship in the face of threats from Revolution Muslim is an “effect” of those “causal” threats. I refuse to accept this construction of the situation, because doing so completely absolves Comedy Central from any responsibility for its own decisions.”

It is not my intention to totally absolve Comedy Central – I even called their censorship pathetic. My position is simply that while it may strike at the heart of the Western ego to censor itself, it may have ethically been a perfectly legitimate position to act as they did, given past reactions from the Muslim Community. Ian’s quote also illustrates that he does not attempt to counter this objection with a logical reconstruction, but merely complains about it.

There are several other problems. First, to show that it is highly probable that I am not making a false inference, let’s examine a country, as Ian asks me to, which is NOT Islamic and carries similar economic burdens. Here, I think Haiti will do just fine. If poverty were a sufficient or vital cause of terrorism, you would think that the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, (also a forty-five minute flight from Miami) may cause a troublesome security threat. But they don’t.

Now, you could point out that Haiti does not have political grievances against the US. Very well then, if Haiti doesn’t satisfy you, let’s take another poor country with legitimate grievances against the US: Nicaragua. In the 1986 case of Nicaragua v. United States, the ICJ (International court of Justice) commanded the United States to cease carrying out “unlawful acts of force” and ordered that the US pay massive reparations for the suffering  inflicted, which we, in turn, refused to pay.

With these two antidotes in mind, I ask the question: how many Haitian or Nicaraguan terrorists have been in the headlines as of late? If the answer isn’t zero, it is much closer to zero than their Islamic counterparts.

The single most glaring problem with Ian’s analysis is that he seems to forget the entire country of Saudi Arabia. The state mandated religion of Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism – a puritanical, stringent version of Sunnism, which, probably not incidentally, produced seventeen of 9/11’s nineteen hijackers, many of whom had doctorates and came from well to do backgrounds. Also, let us not forget that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, the two highest ranking members of al-Qaeda, come from very wealthy backgrounds. Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, and Zawahiri was the son of a well to do doctor. In comparison to the Wahhabis, Revolution Muslim actually seems refreshingly enlightened. Either way, an entire country cannot be brushed off as “fringe.”

In conclusion, I am not attempting to argue that political grievances play no role in the way Islam reacts to the West. Obviously the creation of the state of Israel, the support for belligerent, repressive regimes at the expense of people in the Middle East, as well as the First Gulf War and what is now going on in Iraq play an extremely important (although difficult to quantify) role in causing terrorism. My thesis is simply this: that Islam, as it is commonly practiced, lends legitimacy to acts of terror. I think Ian could even agree with this.

Well, PC’s (and Harris’) list isn’t representative, either. The six selected countries are all poor, generally under-developed, and all relatively close to the equator. Never mind, though – the proximate cause for the popularity of suicide bombing in all these nations is apparently to be sought, and found, in Islam. This error is one of unjustified inference. In order to make such an inference, we would need similar statistics for more affluent Islamic nations, and for countries that are not Islamic but have similar economic conditions.

Certainly a good project for an enterprising graduate student. For now, though, PC’s claim that I made a “factual error” remains unconvincing. On to my supposed “logical” error, which PC says was my “assumption that an effect is more important than a cause.” For this critique to hold water, we must take the position that Comedy Central’s self-censorship in the face of threats from Revolution Muslim is an “effect” of those “causal” threats. I refuse to accept this construction of the situation, because doing so completely absolves Comedy Central from any responsibility for its own decisions. A threat is made, and the target of the threat can either acquiesce to the threateners’ demands or ignore them.

I believe my point stands – we will always have lunatics raving from the intellectual deserts of the world (be they in Iran or Kansas or websites run by attention-seeking tribalists in Manhattan), and our responsibility is to deny them what they seek. They cannot be allowed to have a chilling effect on free speech, or any other enlightened ideal. To allow them to accomplish this, without even putting up a fight, is cowardice in the first degree.

Now, from what I can tell, Ian does not accuse me of factual inaccuracy, but of an inaccuracy in emphasis. Hence the comments on “missed opportunities” to criticize the media for “preemptive eagerness [to capitulate]” as well as an overemphasis on my part of the stagnation within Islam, since after all, such reactionaries have always existed on the fringe in almost every society. I think that this is a fair assessment of Ian’s position, but I will let him be the judge of that.

Ian, however, makes two errors: one factual and the other logical. The factual error is that he labels groups like Revolution Muslim as “fringe” – a mere annoyance to the rest of us analogous to Fred Phelps and his seemingly inbred brood. The problem is actually larger than that. Consider as evidence for this claim the following table, obtained from pg. 126 of The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, which he obtained from a Pew Research Poll:

Suicide Bombing in Defense of Islam: Is it ever justifiable?

1)      Lebanon – Yes: 82 %, No: 12% DK: 6%

2)      Ivory Coast – Yes: 73% No: 27%  DK: 0%

3)      Nigeria – Yes: 66% No: 26% DK: 8%

4)      Jordan – Yes: 65% No: 26% DK: 9%

5)      Bangladesh – Yes: 58% No: 23% DK: 19%

6)      Mali – Yes: 54% No: 35% DK: 11%

The list continues rather dismally, but I think you all get the point – that the label of “fringe” doesn’t exactly apply. Fred Phelps, on the other hand, is the only “Christian” as far as I know, who protests the funerals of soldiers and therefore could be correctly labeled a “lune,” as the illustrious Bill O’Reilly would put it.

Ian’s logical error lies in his assumption that an effect is more important than a cause. The effect is, as Ian put it, the media’s preemptive eagerness to capitulate. But to simply complain about an effect explains absolutely nothing. The real explanatory work is undertaken when one asks: “Why the exhibition of fear by Comedy Central?” The answer readily becomes apparent with a brief analysis of the above statistics. Yes, I will wholeheartedly agree with Ian that Comedy Central’s willingness to fold is somewhat pathetic. Then again, which is worse: media capitulation or the senseless violence that will inevitably occur somewhere in the world if Comedy Central aired the episode of South Park in question? That is indeed a difficult question to answer.

The necessary particulars can be found in PC’s original post. Briefly, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, were warned in a blog post on the “Revolution Muslim” website (a link I refuse to furnish) that they might “end up like Theo Van Gogh,” the Danish filmmaker slaughtered in the street for having made a short movie deemed blasphemous by certain Islamic leaders.

Such a threat, implicit or otherwise, is of course deplorable. However, it is usually disingenuous to take the lunacy spouted by a handful of idiots and draw conclusions about the larger group to which they belong. “Revolution Muslim” can be said to speak for Islam in the way that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church can be said to speak for Christianity.

PC’s post (mostly) avoids this error, and is instead aimed at “certain Islamic societies” that live “as if the world exists today exactly as it did in 632 AD, the year Muhammad died and Abu Bakr began his conquest over the Arabian Peninsula.” Fair enough, I suppose, but let’s stipulate that there will always be tribalist, regressivist, nativist groups which seek to undo the progress and trappings of modernity. Such groups have always annoyed the rest of us with their ignorant shrieking, and will probably continue to do so. They live and remain at the margins of society, which is where they belong.

My colleague’s real error is in missing an opportunity to criticize the eagerness – indeed, the preemptive eagerness – of an American cable network to censor their own content so as to avoid any “trouble.” Were I inclined to mount such a case, Comedy Central’s willingness to capitulate to the threats made on an obscure website would rank very near Prosecution Exhibit A in “The People vs. Western Liberalism.” It would, however, have to wait in line behind similar demonstrations of spinelessness, including notably the American press’ refusal to reprint the Danish cartoons that caused such a violent furore around the world in 2005.

No other group is afforded the insulation from offense granted to Islam, and I would argue that this says more about the press and Western “sensibilities” than it does about Islam itself. However, it must be said that this insulation is granted at least partly due to Islamic radicals’ demonstrated willingness to make good on their threats. Nonetheless, for Comedy Central – and the rest of the Western media – to capitulate to the demands of the lunatic minority is to grant them a victory they do not deserve.

One need only point to German Idealism, in particular Hegel, who postulated that the “world spirit comes to self realization through our conscious experience,” or Marx’s materialistic inversion of Hegel, or the postmodernists of the Twentieth Century. John Searle, one of the most famous living, American philosophers said that Jacques Derrida, the philosopher most associated with postmodernism as a movement, “gives bullshit a bad name.” I could not agree more.

Intelligent design (ID) may actually be a step up from postmodernism, in that the arguments aren’t directly obfuscated, a strategy which would not play out well for advocacy groups like the Discovery Institute and the Thomas Moore Law Center, who are both trying to win battles at the court level. My contention with ID is that it presupposes an intelligent designer, and then seeks evidence to back the claim that the world, is, in fact, designed, rather than sufficiently explainable through less providential forces, such as natural selection.

There are then generally two arguments put forward in favor of ID: 1) that organisms are irreducibly complex and 2) too improbable to have arisen through blind forces. I will deal with them in this order.

Michael Behe, an American professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and, aside from Phillip E. Johnson, the main proponent of ID, argues that the flagellum motor is a perfect example of irreducible complexity. The flagellum motor is, indeed, highly complex – there are over fifty interrelated parts which enable it to function.

Kenneth Miller, a biologist from Brown University, has other ideas, however. He points out that within the flagellum motor is a bacterial syringe which is missing forty of its fifty parts, or 80 percent. How, then, could the flagellum motor be irreducibly complex if we can, in fact, find simpler parts that are perfectly functional?

Another one of Behe’s favorite examples of irreducible complexity is the immune system. He says in Darwin’s Black Box that “We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.” Eric Rothschild of the ACLU and attorney for the plaintiffs suing the Dover, PA school board in the Kitzmiller trial of 2005, asked for permission to approach Behe on the witness stand, which was granted. Carrying a stack of approximately thirty books, each of which presented lengthy evidence for the evolution of the immune system, he asked why Behe found all of the arguments within the presented work unsatisfactory evidence for the evolution of the immune system. Rather shamefully, Behe admitted that he hadn’t read any of them.  No wonder Judge Jones, a Bush appointee and noted social conservative concluded in his opinion that “The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.”

The argument of improbability is perhaps even more specious. Once again, Kenneth Miller was quick to see the fallacy, which takes a present day situation and calculates the improbability of say, the human body, backwards. Consider, declares Miller, a hand of five card draw dealt out to several people. You could certainly ponder the hand and exclaim with wonder the immense improbability of receiving the five cards that you did. The hand received would be so improbable that you could play cards for the rest of your life and never receive those five exact cards again. The improbability of a hand of poker or life on earth for that matter will always seem immensely improbable. But this obviously will not do.

There are also larger philosophical problems, such as “gap logic.” Although I do not always warm to Richard Dawkins as a philosopher, his section in The God Delusion entitled “The God of the Gaps” is superb. Simply put, the answer of “God did it” is a kind of laziness posturing as science which seeks to hide its un-probing spirit with theological answers.

This leads me to a concluding thought on ID. The natural sciences, by definition, deal with objective and measurable phenomena. I think theists and the non-religious can agree that god is certainly not a measurable phenomena, which is why I will take this opportunity to quote Father George Coyne, a Roman Catholic priest and former director of the Vatican observatory, a position from which he was removed by Pope Benedict for being an opponent of ID: “Intelligent design is a movement on behalf of religion and it is not going to destroy just science but religion.”

Yesterday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) introduced a bipartisan bill on the Senate floor that would renew U.S. trade sanctions against the Burmese junta. During his remarks, McConnell made some salient observations, including the fact that the junta’s recently-drafted constitution is among the worst that Indiana University’s constitutional law professor David Williams has ever seen.

This sham constitution was drafted after a visit to Burma by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who offered the junta an easing of trade sanctions in exchange for the release of political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi. This offer was ignored, and Suu Kyi’s sentence was extended by 18 months, preventing her and other pro-democracy factions in the country from having any part in drafting the new constitution, which McConnell said is an attempt by the junta to gain international credibility.

McConnell also noted the troubling rumors of weapons transfers between Pyongyang and Naypyidaw, which, if true, would violate United Nations sanctions on the North Korean arms trade.

If anything, this re-highlights the difficulty of launching any serious effort to help unseat the Burmese junta. Trade sanctions are already in place, and it can be argued that they have done more to hurt the population of Burma than the military dictatorship. The sanctions also incentivize illicit trade deals with North Korea and other illegal arms manufacturers.

But direct military response to the region – by any Western power or coalition – is basically out of the question. Burma lies well inside China’s sphere of influence, which precludes military intervention without the express consent of Beijing. The chances of that happening – or of Beijing responding directly to the problem – are not good.

When I said I didn’t have a ready answer to the Burma Problem, this is what I meant.

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

Thus George Orwell rather shame-facedly ended his essay, “A Hanging,” which recounted his experience witnessing the execution of a Hindu prisoner during his years as a member of the British-run Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

It was in Burma that Orwell – then still going by his given name, Eric Blair – began developing his distaste for empire and totalitarianism. This was the period from 1924-27, and Orwell was righteously angered at the treatment of the Burmese, noting (as Christopher Hitchens has tactfully put it) that the most-educated Burmese man would never rise to membership in the aristocratic British colonial clubs, but that even the least-educated Burmese woman could find her way in – via the back door, of course.

As loathsome as this arrangement was, things have hardly improved for the Burmese in the years since the end of World War II, which is when the British administration collapsed to a surge of Japanese troops. In 1948, Burma was declared independent, and opted not to join the British Commonwealth. A bi-cameral legislature was established, and for 14 years, the Burmese were happily independent.

This democratic arrangement was to be short-lived, however. In 1962, General Ne Win overthrew the government and established – under the often-misused label of socialism – the brutal junta that would control the country to the present day. In the early years of the “one-party” regime, the junta dealt with public displays of discontent by mass-murdering protesters and displacing hundreds of thousands of Burmese ethnic minorities, who often fled to neighboring China and Thailand in the wake of government takeover of the nation’s industries and economy.

Orwell died prematurely in 1950, and so was spared the horrific sight of what has happened in Burma, a country and people he had grown to love and with which he sympathized. The ruling junta has given itself the Orwellian title of “State Peace and Development Council,” and has done everything in its power to ensure that peace and development are completely absent in the nation. Instead, Burma’s ethnically-diverse population is used as a significant source of “raw materials” for international and domestic human trafficking. Burma’s children are forcefully recruited into the military and sex trades, and Burmese of all demographics are used for forced labor. The military routinely uses kidnapping, torture, rape and outright murder as weapons against the Burmese population.

Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma in May of 2008, with estimates of the dead or missing topping 200,000. The junta – still insisting on the name “Myanmar” rather than Burma – refused or resisted United Nations efforts to send aid to the affected areas. I recently spoke with a young Burmese man who is now a member of the U.S. military, who told me that after the cyclone, any aid that made it into the ravaged areas was hoarded by soldiers, who holed up in the country’s Buddhist temples that provided the only dry ground in the months following the storm.

“They told people, there’s no place for you here,” he said, adding that these statements were usually accompanied with the threat of being shot or beaten.

Despite the brutality of the dictatorship, though, Burma has maintained a substantial bloc of organized resistance – a brave cadre of protestors who are led, at least in spirit, by pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. Elected Burma’s prime minister in 1990 (the junta has occasionally indulged in the practice of sham “elections”), Suu Kyi was being held under strict house arrest well before she could be seated, and long before she could ever accept the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991. Still a hero to the Burmese resistance, Suu Kyi was sentenced in August 2009 to 18 additional months under house arrest for a “trespass incident” earlier that year when an American man named John Yettaw swam across a lake to her home. The sentence conveniently prevents Suu Kyi from participating in Burma’s “general elections,” which are to be held sometime later this year.

Unlike North Korea, where the populace has been systematically isolated, starved, and indoctrinated under an even more Orwellian regime, in Burma there is still the defiant spark of hope.

The European Union, United Nations, and the United States have all consistently decried the junta’s treatment of the Burmese population, but little has been done to combat its death-grip on the impoverished country, other than to levy harsh sanctions. Burma’s neighbors, including China, have argued against these, claiming – probably accurately – that sanctions do little to loosen the junta’s hold on the country and instead result in ever-worsening conditions for Burma’s citizens. However, few if any alternative solutions have been suggested.

Despite the almost universal diplomatic-level recognition of Burma as an ongoing human rights horror story, the woe begotten country receives little attention in the United States. When it is covered, Burma remains buried deep within “World News” sections of the papers, and barely merits even a mention on the “crawl” underneath news broadcasts. Moreover, as the United States continues its efforts to establish democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it can only manage to make benevolent noises toward a people positively crying out for emancipation from a totalitarian dictatorship.

I do not have a ready answer to the crisis in Burma, but it seems that the issue merits more attention than it is currently receiving.