5/23/22, 1:44 AM Discipline and duty - New Mandala of July 2014. Later we heard that the network had been down worldwide for those hours, too. But the alternative seemed credible. Students’ movements have a special power in Myanmar; only two other groups can marshal numbers comparable or larger. Eventually the Internet seemed to go back to its regular inconsistencies. Each day, I read updates from the marchers and looked at their photos. To make that easier the online activists coded a mobile phone ap to aggregate news about the marches. It was brilliant and beautiful and our artist friends illustrated it to make it twice beautiful. I never did get it to work on my phone, but updates about the marchers kept coming. And then, 85 miles from Yangon, police barricaded students in the monastery. Later last week, demonstrations started downtown. Marches in other cities had started and stopped. Negotiations with the government had started and stopped. Supporters of the students gathered to show solidarity. Don’t respond to the students with violence, said some of their banners. Thugs ushered by police beat them and threw them into trucks in the shadows of Sule Pagoda. Familiar ground. That evening, photos of the streets being cleared took over my Facebook newsfeed. A fist meeting a face, arrested at contact. A young man and a young woman watching the camera, choked by violent arms marked with red bands reading ‘duty’ and ‘discipline.’ Who are these thugs with the red armbands? Quickly the most compelling photos began to repeat themselves, chopped, cropped, zoomed in, with text overlaid. Fist meets face. Chokehold. Fist meets face. Chokehold. Police batons in mid swing. Chokehold. Who are these thugs with the red armbands? This is not a rhetorical question. Memories of September 2007 harken to the power of photos in a crowd; in the months after those demonstrations, marchers were quietly identified, questioned, arrested. Faces in photos attached to bodies on familiar ground. This night on Facebook, neighborhoods and names quickly became attached to the photos. And in those photos a face that I recognized, maybe two. The next morning, more names, addresses, phone numbers. Each red armband guy was paid 8,000 kyat, a friend told me, people are calling them wage labour thugs. I toggled between work and my newsfeed. On the way home I stopped in front of the monastery near my apartment. In the shade of large banyan trees there is a chin lone court where men gather in the evening to play. I needed to check about a string of calls from Htoo Lay that I’d missed the previous night. I could have called but also I wanted to ask about the faces I recognized. ‘Min, I called you but you didn’t answer,’ he said. It was a little early and the chin lone game was fresh. A three-on-three friendly match between his younger brother and some others; high quality play but not serious enough for him to join yet. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t hear the ringer on my phone.’ ‘We had a lot of pickled mango last night. It was special so we wanted to give you some but now it’s all gone.’ I told him I was sad to miss it and we sat on a section of unused timber in the dust watching https://www.newmandala.org/discipline-and-duty/ 2/3