With this episode, the second hundred episodes of the podcast will begin! Today we look at Burma from the 1950s to 1988, going up to the point just before the country was renamed Myanmar. During this period, the country had only two leaders, U Nu and Ne Win. U Nu tried unsuccessfully to turn Burma into a socialist state, while Ne Win was a dictator who did some wild things because he was also superstitious.
https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/70370482/episode-101-burma-a-ne-win-situation/
(Transcript)
This episode is dedicated to Benedict P., and William L. N. Both of them made donations to the podcast in early November 2020. Benedict, it is good to hear from you again, and William, welcome to this happy podcast! As I record this, today marks 35 years since my wife and I got married in the Philippines, so I hope both of you have something to celebrate as well. May your steps always be guided down the path to success.
Episode 101: Burma, A Ne Win Situation
Greetings, dear listeners, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky! Did you hear the episode number? #101! This is where the second hundred episodes of the podcast will begin. Today you are going to hear some of the craziest stories from Southeast Asia’s recent history. In the previous episode we looked at the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, one of the easternmost countries in the region. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were mainly interested in getting other people’s money, so sometimes we call their government a kleptocracy. Now we are going to visit the Southeast Asian country that is farthest to the west – Burma, or as it is usually called today, Myanmar. A dictatorship was set up here as well, but whereas the Philippine leaders were motivated by greed, the leader of the Burmese dictatorship had a very different motivation – superstition.
Our last episode that covered Burma’s history was Episode 63. There we covered the path Burma took to independence after World War II. The colonial power, Great Britain, tried for a while to hold onto its empire, the so called “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets,” but with its chief colony, India, getting ready for independence, London soon realized that keeping all the other colonies was unrealistic. However, the British had trouble accepting the leaders that the Burmese wanted, for the main nationalist group, now called the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, or AFPFL, had fought on the side of the Japanese for most of the recent war. Eventually they did accept the leader of the nationalists, Aung San, but then tragically, he was assassinated in July 1947, six months before independence was scheduled to take place. Aung San’s death went a long way towards explaining the troubles that have happened since then, because he was the only leader the Burmese people liked very much.
Independence would come at 4:20 AM on January 4, 1948; that time was chosen by the country’s astrologers as the most auspicious, or luckiest moment. Even so, revolts broke out all over the land, and for a while it looked like the new nation would disintegrate just as it was being proclaimed. At one point, one of the rebel groups, the Karen tribe, had soldiers only four miles from Rangoon, the nation’s capital. Other minority groups in revolt besides the Karens included the Mons, the Pa-O, and the Arakanese, both Moslem and Buddhist Arakanese factions. In addition, there were disgruntled communist factions, and thousands of Nationalist Chinese soldiers crossed the border as refugees, after the communist takeover of their homeland. Some of the Nationalist Chinese became drug lords in the opium-growing area where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet, the infamous “Golden Triangle.” Eventually the government was able to take most of the country back, but it could not stamp out the revolts completely. In fact, the Karen revolt is still going on as I record this, seventy-one years after it began.
The time frame covered by today’s episode runs from the 1950s to 1988, almost two full generations. However, it won’t take as long to cover this period as it would, if we were talking about another country. The main reason for this is Burma’s isolation; I told you in a previous episode that for most of my lifetime, Burma was ruled by a military junta that got along with almost nobody, and was damn proud of it. Consequently Burma saw few visitors, and the outside world rarely heard from it or the Burmese people. Many of the events that would have become news stories in other countries, went unreported when they happened in Burma. For instance, when I was a kid, about the only time I saw a news story from Burma was in 1975, when an earthquake severely damaged Bagan, the ancient city of pagodas that was featured in Episode 9. And speaking of the Burmese people, I grew up in Florida, an American state with a large, ethnically diverse population, but I was in my 40s before I met someone from Burma. Finally, there is the matter of geography. Away from this podcast, I don’t have to tell too many folks that Thailand used to be called Siam, but while it has been thirty-one years since Burma was officially renamed Myanmar, I still regularly have to let people know about the name change, even more often than I have to tell them that the Tuva district of Siberia used to be an independent state called Tannu-Tuva.
Another factor that makes today’s story easier to tell is that for the first forty years after independence, from 1948 to 1988, Burma was run by only two people, U Nu and Ne Win, so we won’t have to talk about many changes of government. We have met U Nu and Ne Win before in this podcast; like Aung San, both of them came from the Thakin Society, the group of college students in the 1930s who were Burma’s most successful nationalist movement. Indeed, I referred to U Nu as Thakin Nu, until he succeeded Aung San and became the first post-independence prime minister. Now in this episode we won’t get to the point where Burma’s name was changed to Myanmar, but we will stop right before that happens. Therefore I don’t plan on using the name “Myanmar” for most of this episode.
One more thing. Before beginning today’s narrative, I will apologize in advance for mispronouncing any Burmese names. That is probably unavoidable for a native English speaker like me. I have said before that I find Burmese names a challenge. Okay, if you’re ready, let’s go.
<Interlude>
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We saw in previous episodes that the time when the British Empire ruled Burma was not its finest hour. In fact, it was so bad that after Burma became independent, it did not join the British Commonwealth of Nations, Britain’s club for former colonies. The anti-Western feeling in independent Burma was so strong that it rejected capitalism and tried to build the country along socialist lines. Both U Nu and his successor, General Ne Win, developed a national policy that combined socialism, Buddhism, and isolationism, calling it "the Burmese Way to Socialism."
U Nu’s main accomplishment was a Buddhist revival. From 1954 to 1956 he hosted the Sixth World Buddhist Council, the first international convention of Buddhist monks and scholars that had been held in nearly a century. He traveled abroad often and became a respected spokesman for the Nonaligned Movement. Refusing to take sides in the Cold War, he attempted to serve as an intermediary between East and West, and was judiciously fair in his dealings with other countries; for example, Burma was one of the first nations to recognize both Israel and Communist China. In the countries that were divided by the Cold War – Germany, Korea and Vietnam — he refused to send diplomats to either side. U Nu’s greatest diplomatic triumph was good relations with China; in 1960 he signed a treaty of friendship with the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, and settled a border dispute that had bothered both countries for much of the 1950s. Another statesman who made Burma look good was one of U Nu’s advisors, U Thant; first he was the Burmese ambassador to the United Nations, and then he became the third UN secretary general, serving from 1961 to 1971.
On domestic issues, however, U Nu was only a mediocre leader. The economy never recovered to its pre-World War II levels, and just as the civil unrest was dying down, the economy began to fail. Thus, he had to postpone indefinitely his plans to make Burma the first welfare state in Asia. In 1954 he proposed a constitutional amendment making Buddhism the state religion, a move that offended the country’s Christian and Moslem minorities. Now he learned how hard it can be to please everybody. To placate the non-Buddhists, he offered equal time for the teaching of all three religions, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, in the schools. That caused so much trouble from the monks that he banned all religious instruction, a move that caused more demonstrations all over the country. He was forced to capitulate and allow only Buddhist instruction; one observer commented that he became a victim of the very sentiments that, as a patron of Buddhism, he had fostered.
1956 saw new elections, which the AFPFL won. However, the leftists formed a coalition called the National United Front, or NUF, which was led by Aung Than, the older brother of Aung San; they won 37% of the vote and 48 of the 250 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Remember what I said about Aung San being the only popular Burmese politician? Now that popularity rubbed off on his family. That is why Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, has gotten so much attention in recent years.
In 1958 the AFPFL split into two factions, known as the "Clean" AFPFL and "stable" AFPFL. U Nu led the “Clean” faction, while two other politicians, Kyaw Nyein and Ba Swe, led the “Stable” AFPFL. Because the “Stable” AFPFL was the larger faction, they tried to force U Nu out of office with a no-confidence vote. U Nu narrowly escaped defeat by a margin of eight votes, because the leftist NUF supported him. Meanwhile, one of the minority tribes, the Shans, was threatening to secede, now that the ten-year waiting period they had promised Aung San was over, and the states containing ethnic minorites had not received the autonomy promised to them.
Faced with losing control over the country, U Nu turned to General Ne Win for help, in October 1958. Ne Win was sworn in as prime minister, and for the next 15 months he led a caretaker government that put Burma’s house back in order. At the time, this was a popular decision, because Ne Win did not have the democratic responsibilities that he would have been saddled with, had he been a civilian, so he was able to make dramatic improvements to the country’s internal stability. Then in February 1960 another election was held, which U Nu’s faction won easily, and Ne Win returned the government to civilian rule. Remarking on his victory, U Nu said, quote, "I guess people like us." Unquote.
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Once U Nu was back, however, the old problems came back with a vengeance. Having had his taste for power satisfied once, Ne Win did not wait for permission to take over for a second time. On March 2, 1962 he staged a coup, arrested most of the civilian politicians, scrapped the constitution, dismissed Parliament, and began ruling by decree. U Nu was taken to an army camp outside of Rangoon, where he was kept for the next four years; the country’s new leaders euphemistically called this “protective custody.” A 17-member Revolutionary Council was established, and the disorderly AFPFL was replaced by the Burmese Socialist Program Party, the BSPP, which now became the only legal political party in the land. And that wasn’t all; the All Burma Student’s Union, an organization uniting all student groups in the country, was banned, the press was muzzled, and the country was closed off to the rest of the world. In this way Burma’s long rule under the military began. It’s not completely over, even today. Officially the country is no longer ruled by a junta, but the armed forces still play a part; according to the current constitution, 25% of the seats in the legislature are appointed by the military and the rest of the members are elected.
Podcast footnote: I believe I referred to Ne Win as Thakin Ne Win, when I introduced him as a Burmese student and nationalist in the 1930s. In doing the research for this episode, I found that was inaccurate. Ne Win was born under a different name, Shu Maung, so the name he really used in college was Thakin Shu Maung. Also, his date of birth is uncertain; my sources give it as July 10, 1910, May 14, 1911, or May 24, 1911. Wikipedia considers the 1910 date the most likely; it came from a biography written by Kyaw Nyein. For the biography, Kyaw Nyein interviewed surviving members of the Thirty Comrades, the thirty Burmese nationalists who got military training from the Japanese, so they could lead a pro-Japanese army, after Japan invaded Burma in 1942. Each of the Comrades took a nom de guerre, and the name Shu Maung chose for himself was Bo Ne Win, meaning “Commander Bright Sun.” After the war, like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, he stuck with the nom de guerre for the rest of his life, so I will keep calling him Ne Win for the rest of the time he is in the podcast. End footnote.
Under the Burma Socialist Program Party, Burma experienced one-man misrule. Ne Win imposed socialism more aggressively than U Nu did, by nationalizing all land, commerce and industry. In February 1963, the Enterprise Nationalization Law was passed, nationalizing all major industries and prohibiting the building of new factories. In addition foreigners, especially Chinese, were prohibited from owning land, sending money abroad, getting business licenses and practicing medicine. Rice marketing was made a government monopoly and peasants were paid less than a third of the market value for their crop. This mass nationalization caused vast numbers of people to lose their jobs, and many everyday commodities became available only on the black market. Nevertheless, Ne Win called what he was doing “healthy politics.” He and his generals had little, if any, knowledge of economics, and they didn’t seem interested in learning more; they preferred driving the country to ruin, over stepping down in favor of somebody who could do a better job. Later Ne Win would admit to journalists that his policies had been misguided but that, quote, “it was like having caught hold of a tiger’s tail… there was nothing else to do but hang on to it.” Unquote. To get the minds of the people off the economy, Ne Win staged rounds of persecution against ethnic Chinese in Burma, forcing at least 100,000 Chinese to leave the country. We saw in other episodes of this podcast that the Chinese have been a convenient scapegoat for Southeast Asian leaders to blame their problems on, much like how Jews have often been treated in Europe. Still, it’s a bit surprising that Ne Win persecuted the Chinese, because he had Chinese ancestry.
Ne Win also had a puritanical streak; he closed dance halls, prohibited beauty contests and horse races, and insisted on punctuality and industriousness. Such behavior did not go over well with the easygoing Burmese, and that caused the economy to go from bad to worse. Per capita income sank from $670 in 1960 to a low of $200 in 1989. The most recent figure I could find for the per capita income put it at $6,707 as of 2019, meaning it is still well below the worldwide average; among the 200 or so nations in today’s world, this figure ranks 128th. Most of the population have continued practicing subsistence farming to avoid starvation. Under British rule, Burma was the world’s largest exporter of rice, but it stopped exporting rice in 1973; now it is known as the world’s second largest grower of the opium poppy, after Afghanistan. The country is rich in farmland, teak, rubies, natural gas, even oil, but is usually classified as one of the poorest nations in the world. Most homes are bamboo huts, and under Ne Win, the government ignored public works, resulting in a country full of crumbling buildings. Outside of Rangoon, most of Burma did not have electricity.
Though Ne Win has been gone for many years, if you visit Burma today, you can still see the effects of him neglecting the infrastructure. According to the 2013 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, Burma was ranked 146th out of 148 places for the quality of its infrastructure. Today most of the roads remain unpaved, and even now, only 50% of the population has electricity, giving Burma one of the lowest electrification rates in Asia.
Podcast footnote: Years ago I read the science fiction stories of Keith Laumer. Before he became an author, Laumer was a US diplomat, so he wrote stories about diplomats in space. In the 1970s, twenty years after he was stationed in Rangoon, he described the former Burmese capital this way. Quote: "Once the garden city of the East, now the garbage city of the East." Unquote, and end footnote.
Before Ne Win took over, Burma had isolationist tendencies; under him they became downright xenophobia. Few countries were harder to get into. In the 1960s tourists were not allowed to stay in Burma for more than 24 hours, so I am guessing that the only attraction the tourists got to see was Rangoon’s great pagoda, the Shwedagon. In the 1970s the time allowed to tourists was increased to one week, so they could visit places outside of Rangoon, like Bagan. Burma even quit the Nonaligned Movement that it helped get started, after the 1979 meeting. That year’s session was hosted in Havana by the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, who can hardly be called a nonaligned head of state; understandably, the Burmese charged that the meeting was tainted by superpower politicking. Indeed, I remember the Yugoslavian leader, Josip Broz Tito, made the same accusation, claiming that he was a better representative of Third World interests than Castro. Ne Win locked out the modern world everywhere; under him Burma had no high-rises, nightclubs, or neon signs; even Coca-Cola was unknown. No new cars, trucks and busses were available while Ne Win was in charge, so the Burmese became mechanical geniuses to maintain the vehicles they had. Offices could not get computers or even typewriters, so they kept their records in dusty ledgers, like they were still in the early nineteenth century.
In March 1974, Ne Win decided it was time to reorganize the government, so he disbanded the Revolutionary Council and renamed the country the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. A new office, that of president, was created, Ne Win was elected to fill it, and he vacated his previous job of prime minister so it could be filled by someone else.
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If all Ne Win did was oppress the people and make himself rich, we would be done talking about him now; most dictators do that, after all. However, he was also superstitious, and he let that affect national policy. We have seen that, like the kings of ancient and medieval times, Burmese politicians consult astrologers and soothsayers – they picked the time and date for the country’s independence, remember. But reliance on fortunetellers didn’t stop there. The BSPP kept a Board of Astrologers — an actual government agency! — and Ne Win heeded their advice, even when it was insane. He would cross bridges backwards to protect himself from evil spirits, and one report asserted that he bathed in dolphin’s blood, because he believed it restored youth and energy. When the astrologers warned Ne Win of an upcoming bloodbath, and told him how to prevent it, he followed their instructions: he stood with a pistol in front of a mirror, stomped on meat to symbolize the blood they were talking about, and then shot his reflection in the mirror, which was supposed to stop any assassination attempt. I guess he didn’t believe the superstition about a broken mirror causing seven years of bad luck!
One day in 1970, Ne Win grew concerned that his regime was leaning too far to the left politically, meaning the government was too friendly to communists. His soothsayers told him that was because the Burmese, like their former British masters, drove on the left side of the road. So to compensate for that, Ne Win suddenly ordered everyone to drive on the right from now on, though their vehicles and the roads weren’t set up to handle the change in traffic. On the day that law went into effect, Burma experienced a country-wide demolition derby. Today, 50 years later, Burma is still having problems you don’t see in other countries that drive on the right side of the road. Because of Burma’s long-term isolation, and because the cheapest vehicles the Burmese can get are used ones from Japan, another country that drives on the left side of the road, cars still have their steering wheels on the right side, and busses still have doors on the left side. This means that drivers have large blind spots behind them, and passengers have to dodge traffic in the middle of the road while getting on or off a bus!
To make sure that Burma’s population would never be absorbed into one of its two big neighbors, India and China, Ne Win outlawed all forms of birth control. In case you’re curious how that worked out, the Indians and Chinese outnumbered the Burmese by nearly 47 to 1, and Burmese mothers have never been able to catch up.
There weren’t many things the Ne Win regime did well, but putting down dissent was one of them. One source of dissent was a statesman we mentioned already, U Thant. After U Thant retired from being the UN secretary general, he stayed in New York City, because he did not get along with Ne Win, and there he died of lung cancer in 1974. His body was flown to Rangoon, as you might expect, but the only official who came to the airport to receive it was U Aung Tun, the deputy minister of education. In fact, the deputy minister was subsequently fired for doing that job. On the day of the burial, tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay their respects as the coffin passed, but the government did not give U Thant a state funeral, and it tried to bury him in an ordinary cemetery. Before that could happen, a group of students stole the coffin, buried it on the former grounds of the Rangoon University Students Union (a building Ne Win had dynamited in 1962), and they built a temporary mausoleum over the grave. Then the students gave anti-government speeches, until government troops stormed the campus, killed some of the students, removed U Thant’s coffin, and reburied it in a mausoleum near the Shwedagon Pagoda. Since this was an appropriate resting place for the secretary general, he has remained there to this day. Meanwhile, riots broke out on the streets of Rangoon, leading to a declaration of martial law over the city. When it was all over, the end result was that the government put down the U Thant funeral crisis so forcefully, that scarcely a murmur of dissent was heard again, until the late 1980s. Ne Win was less successful in dealing with the various rebels on the periphery of the state – mostly Karen tribesmen, communists and opium warlords – but since they were too weak to threaten Rangoon, the interior of the country enjoyed peace.
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In 1981 Ne Win, now 70 or 71 years old, stepped down as president, and was succeeded by a like-minded general, San Yu. However, he retained most of his power by staying on as party chief, and in September 1987 he singlehandedly ruined the economy with one more trick. The astrologers he trusted told him that nine was his lucky number, so he issued new denominations of the Burmese monetary unit, the kyat, in 45 and 90-kyat bills, because those numbers are divisible by nine, and he declared four other denominations (25, 35, 75 and 100-kyat notes) non-legal tender. Ne Win believed this move would let him live to be more than 90 years old, but because he did not allow the exchange of old currency for new currency, most of Burma’s cash instantly became worthless. As you might expect, this enraged the whole country, and riots broke out in Rangoon and Mandalay. Students were the most upset of all, because their savings, which they intended to use to pay for tuition, had just been wiped out. Though the government restored order, and the Burmese media said little about the unrest, the protesters remained angry, and kept each other informed by word of mouth. At the end of the year, the United Nations added Burma to its list of “Least Developed Countries.”
More protests occurred, after 1987 became 1988. The first one began at a tea shop, on March 12, 1988. Here students from the Rangoon Institute of Technology argued with some other young people over the music playing on the sound system in the shop, got into a brawl, and one student was injured. The next day, students protested this incident at a local police department, because the student had been injured by the son of a BSPP official, and in the clash that followed, one student was killed. Then on March 16, another string of demonstrations began at Inya Lake, the largest lake in Rangoon; when riot police attacked the students here, dozens died and hundreds were arrested. The government tried to stop this trend by closing all schools, including the universities, but when the schools reopened in June, more demonstrations and more crackdowns took place.
Eventually Ne Win decided the game was up for him, so on July 23, 1988, he resigned as head of the BSPP, appointed police chief Sein Lwin as his successor, and legalized political parties. But Sein Lwin was a despised general; he was known as the “Butcher of Rangoon,” for commanding an army unit that massacred 130 Rangoon University students in July 1962. True to character, the general declared martial law. Meanwhile, in his outgoing address, Ne Win warned the protestors, quote, “When the army shoots, it shoots to kill.” Unquote.
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Led by the students, the Burmese people made plans to stage a massive general strike. August 8, 1988 was chosen as the most auspicious day for the strike to begin, because that date had four number 8s in it, so today we call it the “Four 8s Uprising,” or “8888 Uprising.” Each day after that saw hundreds of thousands across the country taking part in demonstrations. Soldiers in remote parts of the country were called to Rangoon; they and the police shot at protesters, killing a few, but they did so halfheartedly. In response, the protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and raided police stations for firearms. On August 10, soldiers chased protesters into Rangoon General Hospital and then began shooting the doctors and nurses who were treating the wounded.
Not knowing what to do, Sein Lwin resigned on August 12. He had only been president for 17 days. The protesters were jubilant, but unsure about their next move. In the end they demanded that Dr. Maung Maung, the only civilian who held a senior position in the government, be appointed as the next president, and this was done on August 19. However, the demonstrations continued; one demonstration in Mandalay on August 22 saw 100,000 people participate.
It is at this point that Aung San Suu Kyi, someone you probably have heard of already, enters the story. I mentioned earlier that she is the daughter of Aung San, Burma’s independence hero, but for the first 43 years of her life she stayed out of politics, living abroad with a British husband and two sons. Around the time of Ne Win’s resignation, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma to take care of her ailing mother, and she was persuaded to make a speech to the protesters. She did so on August 24, during a rally at Rangoon General Hospital. Because she made a good impression, she spoke again on August 26 at the Shwedagon Pagoda, in front of a crowd that numbered at least half a million people. Here she called for both democracy and a non-violent solution to the conflict. I was able to find one quote from the speech, and here it is. Quote:
“The entire nation’s desires and aspirations are very clear. There can be no doubt that everybody wants a multi-party democratic system of government. It is the duty of the present government to bring about such a system as soon as possible.”
End quote.
With that speech, Aung San Suu Kyi immediately became the leader of the democracy movement. Former prime minister U Nu joined the demonstrations as well. An American congressman, Stephen Solarz of New York, was also there. Solarz had been in the Philippines during the 1986 People Power Revolution (don’t worry, I will cover that in a future episode), and his presence in Burma was taken to mean the US government was giving its blessing to the democracy movement. More demonstrations took place in September, with violence escalating from both sides. In Rangoon, much of the city government collapsed and the local administration was taken over by ordinary people.
Burma’s attempt to set up democracy abruptly ended on September 18, 1988, when the commander of the army, General Saw Maung, seized power, and announced that a 19-member group, the State Law and Order Restoration Committee, or SLORC, would replace the BSPP. Violent crackdowns to break up the demonstrations began across the country the next day. By the beginning of October, the protest movement had collapsed, and Burma was back under martial law, the way it had been for the past 26 years. To keep the students from organizing further protests, the military junta closed the universities again; this time they stayed closed until the year 2000.
The government reported that 350 protesters had been killed when it restored order, but this seems like an absurdly low number. We can’t get an exact number of many were killed, because many of the bodies were cremated, but estimates of the dead usually range from 3,000 to 10,000. In other words, there were more deaths in the 1988 Burma demonstrations, than there were at the more famous Tiananmen Square crackdown in China during the following year. Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, and more people were imprisoned or simply “disappeared.” Thousands escaped arrest by fleeing the country, and thousands more fled to the mountains, where they joined the ethnic armies locked in long-running revolts against the Burmese army. Finally, on the border of Thailand, a group of students formed a rebel army of their own, called the All Burma Students Democratic Front, to continue the struggle alongside the other rebel armies.
<Interlude>
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We’re going to have to end today’s narrative on a grim note, because we have run out of time. Don’t worry, things in Burma will get better before the story of Southeast Asia is over. And with Aung San Suu Kyi, this isn’t the end of her story; it’s really just the beginning.
Even so, we have some other places in Southeast Asia to visit first, before we continue with Burma/Myanmar. I think the next episode’s stop will be western New Guinea. That was the last colony the Dutch had in this part of the world, and in Episode 97 I told you how Indonesia acquired it. However, Indonesia’s rule over the western half of that huge island has not been a happy experience for the local residents, and at some point I should tell that story, so this is as good a time as any to do it. And then we will go back to the countries in the region for another round, covering even more recent history than we did last time!
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<Outro>
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