Tatmadaw and Tatmadaw-backed entities is intended to portray to civilians carefully constructed “facts” about national history, identity, and the nation’s political climate. As Skidmore (2004) notes, the military deliberately creates “gray spaces of confusion in which complicity may begin” (p. 71). She offers an example of how the military’s manipulation of collective memory and its careful construction of national identity and culture provides a new point of view from which to examine the current climate in Rakhine state. Referring to propaganda promoted by the Tatmadaw in the years following the Four Eights uprising, Skidmore (2004) cites an informant who explains: What the government was doing was to make people vacillate, to be indecisive about the influence of foreign culture that was entering Burma. When the government opened up the country in 1996, foreigners came in who were not very neat, who did not dress or act in ways that were culturally appropriate. The government propaganda attacked this, especially with regard to the influence on young Burmese girls and women and the way that they dress. I thought this was a good thing, because Rangoon girls were beginning to act in a wanton manner, and as a young man, I thought this was a good thing for the government to do, because I thought foreign culture might destroy the country. (p. 71) Although this passage refers to the 1996 “hit and run” demonstrations, it is an example of the ways in which the military has a long history of successfully shaping the public’s perception of foreign entities in a manner that is specifically geared toward the fulfillment of institutional needs and desires. When comparing the use of propaganda during the aforementioned time period with that of the present day Tatmadaw, it is possible to see that the institution has remained the same in terms of its behavior and the functioning of the governmental facets it still controls. The SLORC/SPDC strategies used over a decade before democratization serve as the foundation for the future of its continuing hold on power. Skidmore’s informer describes the civic influence of the military regime during the 1990s, and the civilian 97