March 27 2023 Resistance Day in Burma

jayofdollhousepark

Mar 28

On this day which commemorates the resistance of the peoples of Burma to the Japanese Occupation during World War Two, while the military junta which has seized the nation as a vassal state of the Chinese Communist Party, much like that of Pol Pot and other tyrants of genocide and war crimes, instrumentalizes the occasion to glorify itself while changing its meaning in service to its own authority as a carceral state of force and control, the peoples it has enslaved rise up in resistance and reclaim its original meaning.

The world's tenth largest military has failed utterly to consolidate power and repress dissent, despite massive brutal and genocidal war crimes. In the week before the annual Resistance Day, renamed by the regime as Armed Forces Day, the actual Resistance emerged victorious in battles across the nation, despite horrific atrocities perpetrated by the regime's special shock troops, the Ogre Column, in the Sagaing region.

There is a calculus of fear by which tyrannies seize power or fall; while a little may enforce order and obedience for a time, fear beyond hope of survival and horror beyond the limits of the human creates resistance. Those who would enslave us should have learned the hollowness of power and the Newtonian recursion of the use of force from the example of Nanking.

Politics is about fear as the basis of human exchange, as my father once told me, as a ten year old boy who in reaction to the insult of someone putting a piece of bubble gum on my chair at school mixed up everything with a skull and crossbones on the bottle from my chemistry set during recess and poured it down the spigot of the classroom drinking faucet in revenge. When several boys ran outside to throw up, I was horrified because I realized I could have killed everyone, and I told my father the story that night. He said; "You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear. Fear is a terrible master and a dangerous and untrustworthy servant; the question is, whose servant will it be?"

As the principle by which I have lived since it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; "When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things."

So may we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. In Burma, to use her pre-regime name, a whole nation has found such a will, a nation forged under the terrible hammer of tyranny and state terror, but one which begins to emerge from the legacies of its history as a free society of equals united in diversity and solidarity.

May we dream better futures than we have the past.

As written by Rhea Mogu in CNN, in an article entitled Myanmar junta throws huge military parade days after new US sanctions; "Myanmar's ruling military paraded an arsenal of weapons in the capital Naypyidaw on Monday, in a grand display of force days after the United States imposed fresh sanctions against the junta for inflicting "pain and suffering on the people of Burma."

The array of equipment – ranging from rocket launchers to tanks – was deployed alongside hundreds of marching troops to mark the country's annual Armed Forces Day, video from state media showed.

Myanmar's military has ruled the impoverished Southeast Asian nation with an iron fist for most of the past six decades, apart from a brief 10-year flirtation with a quasi-democracy that came crashing down in 2021 when the generals seized power once more.

Monday's parade was the third time the military, known as the Tatmadaw, has marked Armed Forces Day since overthrowing the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, who has since been sentenced to 33 years in prison during secretive trials that her lawyers say are politically motivated.

Speaking to the crowd during the parade, the junta's leader, Min Aung Hlaing said the Tatmadaw will "put in effort into achieving full law enforcement and tranquility across the Union to ensure the socio-economic security of all citizens."

He added the military will take action against "terrorist organizations" and armed resistance groups, adding "martial law is increasingly being imposed in important townships that need to be controlled during the second phase of the State of Emergency."

In the two years since the coup, the country has been torn by violence and economic paralysis.

The junta has cracked down on anti-coup protesters, arrested journalists and political prisoners and executed several leading pro-democracy activists, drawing condemnation from the United Nations and rights groups.

Swathes of Myanmar's long restive border regions have erupted in insurgencies with the military accused of conducting massacres and widespread rights abuses, including air strikes and war crimes against civilians.

The US last week slapped a fresh series of sanctions on two people with alleged ties to the military and three businesses owned by them, a statement from the State Department said.

"Additionally, Treasury is issuing a Sanctions Alert on Burma jet fuel to inform individuals, businesses, and other persons of the sanctions risks associated with the provision of jet fuel to Burma's military regime," it added, referring to Myanmar by its older name.

Rights groups and those fighting the Tatmadaw have accused the military of repeatedly using its helicopters and jets to carry out airstrikes that often kill civilians.

Myanmar remains roiled in economic distress, with shortages of food, fuel and other basic supplies."

As written by Dominic Faulder in Nikkei Asia, in an article entitled Myanmar military's might fails to crush decades-old resistance: Armed forces face no external threats, accused of widespread atrocities at home; "On a massive parade ground in Naypyitaw overlooked by three giant statues of mythologized kings, troops marched alongside modern military hardware before Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and his top commanders in the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar's military services are collectively known.

Monday marked the 78th annual Armed Forces Day, when the country commemorates Burmese resistance to Japanese occupiers who in 1942 had pushed British colonial forces to the Indian border.

Foreign military attaches and other dignitaries were also invited, but their numbers have shrunk since Min Aung Hlaing staged a devastating military takeover on Feb. 1, 2021, that has reignited violent ethnic unrest across Southeast Asia's second-largest nation by land mass.

Even so, all Association of Southeast Asian Nations members sent representatives this year except Brunei and Singapore; alongside were only China, India and Russia.

Although still not consolidated, the military's power grab succeeded in halting a faltering peace process with over a dozen insurgent minorities that had moved forward painfully in the mid-1990s and early 2010s. The violence that has followed the ouster of Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government is the latest bloody episode in over half a century of the Tatamadaw's battles against opposition to its rule.

But while a fighting force thought to be among the largest in Southeast Asia has the power to inflict mass casualties, it has never managed to crush all resistance.

In a speech on Monday, Min Aung Hlaing recited familiar Tatmadaw mantras about a glorious military holding the nation together, and the wickedness of long-gone colonial powers. More topically, the general alluded to the Tatmadaw's failed five-point road map for Myanmar, which entails it putting "an effort into achieving full law enforcement and tranquility across the union to secure the socioeconomic security of all citizens."

Myanmar faces no external threats. Its five borders with Bangladesh, China, India, Laos and Thailand touch on almost 40% of the world's population, and should be crossing points for massive exchanges of wealth, prosperity and goodwill, not millions of desperate people, drugs, arms, contraband and disease.

Yet, this is the reality in a country where the Bamar (Burman) majority from the central region, which has always dominated the Tatmadaw officer corps, has been at war with the country's minorities virtually since independence from Britain in 1948.

Analysts credit the Tatmadaw for its disciplined chain of command and quick deployments, but believe its rigid mindset has made it oblivious to incessant warfare that is both exceptionally cruel and unwinnable.

The conflict, described by some as a third war of independence, has never been more savage than it is now. On March 3, the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report condemning the Tatmadaw's tactics, particularly in the northwest and southeast of the country.

"The generals have embarked on a scorched earth policy in an attempt to stamp out opposition," said High Commissioner Volker Turk. "The military, emboldened by continuous and absolute impunity, has consistently shown disregard of international obligations."

For at least half a century, the Tatmadaw has fielded lean light infantry divisions (LIDs) to engage ethnic armed organizations using a "four-cuts" strategy to cut them off from supplies, funding, intelligence and recruits. In the weeks since the OHCHR report and in the run-up to Armed Forces Day, Myanmar's surviving independent media and the opposition National Unity Government -- which remains internationally unrecognized and unfunded -- reported incidents remarkable for their depravity even by Tatmadaw standards.

These have included heavy bombardments displacing thousands of villagers; the rape of women of all ages; the killing of children, monks and the elderly; horrific physical desecrations; and the ongoing burning of villages that by various counts has claimed 30,000 to 60,000 homes and structures in the past two years.

Myanmar is divided into 14 military regions and seven operational commands. In March, Burmese media identified Major Gen. Than Htike, the northwest regional commander in Monywa, as "the man behind the Myanmar junta's campaign of terror in Sagaing" -- one of the most blood-drenched parts of the country. According to an army captain who defected and was quoted in Myanmar Now, Than Htike had urged his officers to be more "unrelenting" or "suffer the consequences."

On Than Htike's watch, troops from LID 99 -- reported as the "Ogre Column" in local media -- are accused of a killing spree in Sagaing township, including the beheading and dismembering of suspected resistance members, even boys as young as 12. Troops from LIDs 33 and 55 are also reported to be active.

According to a detailed account in Myanmar Now, around 70 members of the Ogre Column crept into Tar Taing village on March 1 in Sagaing township, north of Naypyitaw, in plain clothes and flak jackets. They arrested "everyone" without a shot. By the time these troops pulled out of the 80-household village, 17 people aged 17 to 67 were dead and some butchered, including three women.

Later reports said 20 resistance fighters also died when fighting broke out afterward. Soon after in Pinlaung township, west of Naypyitaw, at least 28 civilians were reportedly executed in a monastery compound. The victims included three monks.

U.N. High Commissioner Volker Turk said Myanmar's "generals have embarked on a scorched earth policy in an attempt to stamp out opposition."

The Ogre Column's primary target in Tar Taing was evidently one Kyaw Zaw, a resistance leader. After he was wounded, villagers were forced to identify him from a smartphone photograph. A soldier then departed with a meat cleaver, returning some 30 minutes with another photograph showing Kyaw Zaw eviscerated, all four limbs lopped off and his head and innards placed on his torso.

Described by one international human rights lawyer as a "death cult," the Tatmadaw has always defied easy analysis. Burmese also do not have family names, so it is not possible to see which officers may be related. Outside observers freely admit that the true size of the Tatmadaw is a mystery.

"Despite the Tatmadaw's critical role in Myanmar's national affairs, its size has always been for observers one of the great 'known unknowns,'" Andrew Selth, an adjunct professor at Australia's Griffith Asia Institute in Brisbane, wrote in February 2022.

He estimated the size of the Tatmadaw in the era of Gen. Ne Win -- which ended in 1988, the year of a nationwide uprising -- at not more than 186,000. There followed an expansion and modernization program that took the numbers up to "about 400,000 service personnel" by around 2000. This made the Tatmadaw possibly the 11th largest armed force in the world and third largest in Southeast Asia after Vietnam and Indonesia. It currently ranks 10th worldwide on a Lowy Institute list.

Selth believes that Min Aung Hlaing reduced the size of the Tatmadaw after becoming senior general in 2011 to between 300,000 and 350,000, as he forged a more modern "standard army."

The more important guess is not how many men and women are in uniform serving all sorts of functions, including supposed national administration, but how many combat soldiers can be deployed. Selth put that number last year at between 95,000 and 120,000, but notes the existence of 80,000 police with 30 paramilitary battalions. The State Administration Council (SAC), the official name of the regime's governing body, has also created irregular militias.

Some diplomats in Yangon believe the Tatmadaw has been losing up to 15 soldiers on average each day. That would equate to almost 5,500 in a year -- well over half the 8,000 reported to be on parade at Naypyitaw. Although sometimes prone to exaggeration, opposition sources have claimed nearly 5,000 dead government troops in the first 10 months after the military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government.

The Tatmadaw has always had difficulty finding new recruits, making full battalions rare. Checkpoints around cities -- all of which remain under SAC control -- are often manned by younger or older men drawn from the police and fire services, or the militias.

Foreign military attaches in Yangon have long been aware of the miserable lives of the rank and file, including forced recruitment, poor pay and long rotations in remote outposts far from family and friends. Brutalization, poor morale and disillusionment led to thousands of desertions after the military takeover, but these have tailed off. By some estimates, defections are running at less than 10% of their early peak.

"The main reason for the severe decline is the junta's tightened security within the army," Captain Lin Htet Aung, a military defector and a founding member of People's Embrace, an organization created to encourage defections, told Voice of America in January. "Soldiers living inside the battalion are being restricted in access to information and prohibited from connecting with people from outside."

There have been other signs of internal dissent. The Irrawaddy reported in late January the shooting of Lieutenant Colonel Kyaw Soe Aung of the Signal Training Depot by a lance corporal during a parade in Pyin Oo Lwin Township, in the Mandalay region.

"We heard he was always bullying the lower ranks," a defector told The Irrawaddy. "There is no other way to deal with guys like that these days."

The incident was quickly hushed up. Pyin Oo Lwin, a British colonial hill station still better known internationally as Maymyo, is home to the Tatmadaw's elite Defense Services Academy, where Min Aung Hlaing served as commandant from 2003 to 2004.

Myanmar's main foreign suppliers of arms are Russia, China and India, but have also included at different times Germany, both Koreas, Israel, Singapore and Ukraine. There have been calls for international arms embargoes. The U.S. Department of the Treasury last week announced sanctions on a handful of individuals and entities supplying jet fuel to the Tatmadaw, and published a jet fuel sanctions alert.

But set against all this, the Tatmadaw has since 1950 worked hard on self-sufficiency. The Myanmar Directorate of Defense Industries has an estimated 25 plants manufacturing weapons and ordnance, much under license, that remain operational, along with several related facilities.

"There is no change on the ground," a diplomat in Yangon told Nikkei. "The Tatmadaw is not winning, but neither is the NUG -- and money is not flowing to them."

The Tatmadaw's war has always been futile, because it will never be able to hold territory it temporarily wins back. Its failure to grasp basic human psychology and the mood of the people is equally clear -- reflected in the election landslides of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in 1990, 2015 and 2020, as well as the counterproductive executions of imprisoned democracy activists and defenseless villagers.

"They are taunting us and trying to instill fear in us," said a People's Defense Team leader in Sagaing, two of whose men were decapitated by the Ogre Column. "That is exactly why we can't forgive them."

As I wrote in my post of March 28 2022, Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar; Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.

Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.

The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one's chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.

It's always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life's path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; "We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows", and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; "When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things."

As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta's celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing's declaration of his regime's intent to "annihilate them to (the) end" regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar's current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.

Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions. I was yelling "Run away!" when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear and shouted in S'gaw; "The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!" and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.

After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Burmese Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy's rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted.

The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.

Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; "Government is about force; only force."

Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.

But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.

As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.

I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.

As written anonymously in The Guardian; "Myanmar's military ruler vows to 'annihilate' resistance groups; Min Aung Hlaing also urges ethnic minorities not to support militias opposed to army rule.

Myanmar's top general has vowed to intensify action against homegrown militia groups fighting the military-run government, saying the armed forces would "annihilate" them.

Gen Min Aung Hlaing, speaking at a military parade marking Armed Forces Day on Sunday, also urged ethnic minorities not to support groups opposed to army rule and ruled out negotiations with them.

The military seized power last year from the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Security forces have since used lethal force to suppress mass nationwide protests, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,700 civilians, according to a detailed tally compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Forced to turn away from peaceful protests, many of those opposed to military rule took up arms, forming hundreds of militia groups called People's Defence Forces – better known as PDFs. In some parts of the country, they've joined forces with well-organised, battle-hardened ethnic armed groups, which have been fighting for greater autonomy for decades.

Min Aung Hlaing, addressing thousands of military personnel during the parade in the capital Naypyidaw, said he would not negotiate with "terrorist groups and their supporters for killing innocent people" and threatening peace and security.

He said the military, known as the Tatmadaw, "will annihilate them to (the) end", according to an official translation of his speech.

His government has declared major resistance organisations – regardless of whether they are directly engaged in armed struggle – as terrorist groups. Membership or even contact with them carries harsh punishment under law.

"I would like to highlight that there are no governments or armies worldwide that negotiate with any terrorist groups," he said.

Despite a huge advantage in equipment and numbers, Myanmar's military has struggled to crush the new militia units. Outgunned and outmanned, the PDFs have relied on support from local communities and knowledge of the terrain to carry out often surprisingly effective attacks on convoys, patrols, guard posts, police stations and isolated bases in remote areas.

The military is currently conducting operations in Sagaing, in central Myanmar, and in Kayah State, in the country's east, using airstrikes, artillery barrages and the burning of villages. The army recently seems to have expanded its offensive into Chin State in the west and Kayin State in the south-east as well.

Last year's Armed Forces Day was the single bloodiest since the military's seizure of power on 1 February 2021. Security forces across the country opened fire on demonstrators, killing as many as 160 people.

Anti-military protests were held on Sunday despite the risks in Yangon, the country's biggest city, and elsewhere. To avoid arrest or injury, urban street protests usually involve flashmobs, which quickly disperse before security forces crack down.

The main opposition group, the self-styled National Unity Government, urged people to join a "power strike" on Sunday night by switching off the lights and their televisions for 30 minutes while the military parade was broadcast on state-run TV channels.

The group said the strike was also intended to protest daily power outages. The blackouts started several months ago, and the government blames them on high gas prices and damage to power lines caused by sabotage.

The US, European Union and 20 other countries issued a statement marking Armed Forces Day by recalling "those killed and displaced by violence over the last year, including at least 100 people killed on this day alone one year ago".

The US, UK and Canada on Saturday imposed the latest in a series of coordinated sanctions on senior military officials and business leaders who allegedly act as arms dealers for Myanmar's army."

As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.

Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.

Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.

Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.

Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma's People's Liberation Army after thirty years.

This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.

But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.

A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.

The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; "We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity."

This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.