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Freedom & Chaos. Burma is a land that has not known peace for twelve years. The Japanese and the British twice fought over it during World War II. Burma won its independence and plunged into chaos, headlong and unready. Since then, the Burmese have been fighting disciplined Communist armies and a motley crew of guerrillas and bandits. But recently there have been hopeful changes. In the cold war's continental context, they are small changes; yet relative to the crumble and despair of Southeast Asia, they are significant, even sweeping:
¶ Burma has just about defeated its Communist insurrection—with no sizable help from the West.
¶ Burma is launching an ambitious program of land reform, infant industrialization and social welfare—once more, with no sizable help from the West.
¶ Burma is inspiring perhaps the most remarkable Buddhist revival in centuries, that is becoming in itself the focus of a new and powerful antiCommunism.
Burma, in short, is pulling itself out of its chaos. In its small-power context, it is working its own counterrevolution, employing a trinity of arms, ideology and religion that might prove to be a workable Asian alternative to Communism.
The man responsible for this show of hope in the land of spirits and stars is Burma's Prime Minister. U Nu.
Talent & Inspiration. U Nu, a little-known yet extraordinary man of 47, is coming into the headlines with his country. He is coming with reluctance and grave misgivings. "I am a dreamer, a writer," he says. "Framing rules and so on makes my head ache." U Nu once confessed to himself that he might some day become the Bernard Shaw of Burma, for he had "the talent and the inspiration." Instead, U Nu became Free Burma's first Prime Minister, and has remained so—despite four attempts to resign—for the past 6^ years. U Nu is a devout Buddhist who once hesitated to kill a cobra for fear of transgressing the Buddhist precept: "Thou shalt not kill ... All living creatures are subject to their destiny." U Nu, man of peace, has had to direct a pentagonal civil war. U Nu is a man of infinite modesty and quietness; he likes to drive out, on afternoons when he can get free, to a "meditation house" built on stilts, a tall man's height from the ground. U Nu must now meditate upon the fate of Indo-China, and he does not shrink from its implication: "Most of the countries of Southeast Asia are like this house," U Nu tells his visitors. "As the wind blows, they go to and fro like this."UNu flaps his hands.
"The Wolf of Man." U Nu is a man of rough and unfamiliar plainness. His head is round, his mouth seems rather large for his face, and his brown eyes fix visitors with peculiar intentness. His manner is sedate; his piety is apparent, and sincere. He betrays no concern that a Rangoon magazine is currently serializing a novel called Man the Wolf of Man (written in 1943) with a remarkable autobiographical preface by its author, U Nu.