"Saffron Revolution"
The phrase "Saffron Revolution" connects the protests against Myanmar’s military dictatorship to the saffron-colored robes widely associated with Buddhist monks, who were at the forefront of the demonstrations. However, this nomenclature is misleading as the majority of monks in Burma wear maroon, not saffron-colored robes. While similar phrases had been used previously to describe the process of gradual or peaceful revolution in other nations, this seems to be the first time it has been associated with a particular protest as it is unfolding, and the international press seized upon it in reporting on the Burmese protests. However, the idea that the monkhood is connected to specifically Burmese ideas about revolution has been argued by Gustaaf Houtman, partly in critique of an alternative view held by a political scientist, that Gen. Ne Win's revolution was the only successful revolution in Burma. Burmese concepts of "revolution," however, have a much longer history and are also employed in many but not all monastic ordinations.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Burmese Anti-government Protests
Famous quotes containing the words saffron and/or revolution:
“As the saffron tints and crimson flushes of morn herald the coming day, so the social and political advancement which woman has already gained bears the promise of the rising of the full-orbed sun of emancipation. The result will be not to make home less happy, but society more holy.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)