One interesting thing related to how the outside views Southeast Asia comes from this.

Burmese and non-Burmese colleagues of mine have been commenting on the ubiquity of references to a “saffron revolution.” They point out, quite simply, that most Burmese monks wear red robes.

So should it be “paprika revolution” instead?

I’m not sure, but I wonder, is using the word “saffron” to describe monk’s robes a reflex on the part of a West that knows Thailand (and to a lesser extent, Laos and Cambodia) better than its troubled neighbor? After all, Thai monks do wear orange robes which share the brilliant hue of that most expensive of spices (which, to my knowledge, rarely figures in Southeast Asian cuisines despite the Indian influence).

I remember the New York Times ran an article in 2000 which gushed about “Thai lemongrass.” I thought at the time that perhaps people don’t want to know about Burmese or even Indonesian lemongrass–too much poverty political turmoil in those places! Not to mention that Thailand has been much more adept at marketing itself overall.

One final note: Awzar Thi is dead on when he makes a comparison between so-called “pro-government” militias in Burma and the organized paramilitaries operating in Thailand in the 1970s. I wonder if these people in Burma are initiated in a similar way to the Village Scouts in 1970s Thailand as described in Katherine Bowie’s scary book on the subject.