Outrage

In 1988 Burma (now Myanmar) exploded. People rose up against their government in a massive and nationwide expression of outrage at the regime’s ruinous economic policies and repressive politics. The protests were suppressed by violence on a scale even more brutal than the Chinese suppression of the demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square the following year. Outrage is the result of many visits to Burma and its border areas, interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors of the massacres that took place in Rangoon and elsewhere in 1988. Even now, several decades later, it remains the fullest published account of these terrible events. The significance of Lintner’s book might be best gauged by the official response to the first edition, which was published in June 1989: “…a pot-pourri of maliciously selected misrepresentations, misinterpretations, fabrications, and rumour-sourced disinformation…by past master of malice, foreign journalist Bertil Lintner.” (Working People’s Daily, 1989).