Word: rangoon
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Candor in a military dictator is a rare quality, and self-criticism rarer still. But Burmese Strongman General Ne Win offered both in abundance at a recent Rangoon seminar of his Socialist Program Party. The topic: potholes in Ne Win's "Burmese road to socialism," launched soon after he took power in 1962 and began nationalizing every thing in sight. The economy, confessed the general, "is in a mess." So much so, he added, that "if Burma were not a country with an abundance of food, we would all be starving...
...before his death. In a section buried deep in the article, Sevareid recalled that Stevenson had talked of behind-the-scenes arrangements made by U.N. Secretary-General U Thant in the early fall of 1964 to have a North Vietnamese emissary and a U.S. delegate open talks in neutral Rangoon...
...clipped accents, mustaches and swagger sticks. The enlisted men are also right out of Kipling's pages?sturdy Jats and turbaned Sikhs, rawboned Pathans and sinewy Sindhis, volunteers all, whose regimental flags are inscribed with battle names ranging from Ypres and Gallipoli to El Alamein and Monte Cassino and Rangoon...
Expanding Volume. Ads seduce the eye and ear everywhere in Asia. They blink in neon from signs that share the skyline with Bangkok's temple spires and from plump helium balloons in the skies over Taipei. Billboards in Rangoon hymn a product called "Monkey Brain Tonic." In Thailand, such popular TV shows as Alfred Hitchcock and The Deputy are often interrupted by commercials that run up to 15 minutes, and many of the country's 80 commercial radio stations carry eight-minute plugs-partly because time sells for as little as $1 a minute...
Diplomats in Rangoon concede that, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia -with the notable exception of sturdy and prosperous little Thailand-Burma is not too badly off. In other words, it has just managed to avoid disaster. But that still leaves it far from being a pilot plant for Western policy in Asia...