FOR FUTURE HISTORY
Barbet Schroeder’s . profiles Ashin Wirathu, a nationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has built his career targeting the county’s Rohingya minority. Schroeder charts Wirathu’s life from fringe extremist to superstar demagogue, trailing behind as he visits congregations and collects alms, detailing a series of campaigns which have been widely held responsible for the uptick in anti-Muslim furor compromising Myanmar’s democratic process. Well over a million refugees have entered neighbouring Bangladesh from the country’s western Rakhine State, 600,000 of them alone since August 2017; this past November, a shaky deal emerged whereby Myanmar agreed to “repatriate” the refugees, which, to human-rights activists, seems code for further internal encampment and/or being thrown back to hateful local governments. The ideology by which Theravada Buddhism—whose “good monks” were made icons of peaceful disobedience in Burma’s Saffron Revolution in 2007—can accommodate populist hatred is the chasm explored, at times clumsily, by Schroeder’s film. Even though the Rohingya dispute has existed for centuries, Wirathu specializes in a kind of demonization drawing on the rubric of the American “War on Terror,” whereby Burmese Muslims are in fact jihadist invaders without the same rights accorded Buddhists; he has proudly claimed that Aung San Suu Kyi “would like to help the Bengali, but I block her.” What’s depressing is that he’s probably right: Wirathu’s Ma Ba Tha movement was instrumental in passing legislation in 2015 that prevented ethnically Muslim Burmese from holding office or marrying Buddhist women
