At this writing, on Friday, September 28, the Burmese military regime has brought its heavy hammer down on the thousands of people demonstrating against the country's 45-year-old dictatorship. Police and troops have fired on protesters, killing at least 13 people. Buddhist monasteries have been raided and sealed, including the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most famous and beautiful building in Rangoon, and some 200 monks are under arrest. Internet traffic, which dissidents used to report events to the world, has been cut.

It may be pardonable to begin comment on a land almost completely sealed off from the rest of the world with the only trace of humor in its situation--the difficulty some English-speaking newsrooms have had in deciding whether to adopt the nationalist renaming of the country and its main city, from Burma and Rangoon to Myanmar and Yangon. The Washington Post sticks with the former; the New York Times and other leading dailies prefer the new system, though the mouthful "Myanmarese" has failed to gain currency, leaving pretty much everyone still saying "Burmese."

Whatever one calls the country, its history since World War II has been one of almost unrelieved tragedy. Ruled as a part of British India from 1886 to 1948, it was once rich enough to be aptly symbolized by the gold of its pagodas--especially the thousands in the town of Pagan. An earthquake in 1975 damaged many of Pagan's treasures, but that destruction was merely physical--nothing compared with the political and psychological cruelties Burma has endured.

Burma has been subjected to just about every form of political and governmental brutalization the 20th century--and now the 21st--could offer. It has much in common with other victims of state socialism, including Cuba and the former Yugoslavia.

Like Castro's fiefdom, it fell from significant prosperity to extreme poverty, becoming a backward, ramshackle place. Like Yugoslavia, it was never a genuine nation-state. Although the CIA World Fact Book (which calls it Burma) claims the population of 47 million is 68 percent ethnic Burman, some question that figure. The many minority groups in the northern and eastern highlands, usually called "hill tribes," probably comprise at least a third of the population. They include several major and dozens of minor identities, with Karens and Shans being the best known, because of their long armed struggle for freedom.

While ethnic Burmans are typically Buddhist, the Karens are Christians and the Shans have their own religion mixing Buddhist and animist elements. A Muslim minority spread throughout the country is indistinguishable from the Burman majority in language, but has also been violently repressed, and hundreds of thousands of Burmese Muslims have fled west to neighboring Bangladesh.

Burma has not enjoyed real peace in over 50 years. Already in the 1930s it saw growing nationalist agitation against British rule. With the outbreak of World War II, "the Thirty Comrades," a group of Burmese patriots opposed to Britain, were recruited by the Japanese and trained in Tokyo to lead a "Burma Independence Army" (BIA). In 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma. They were welcomed as liberators by the anti-British populace, and the BIA collaborated with them in ruling the country. Quickly, however, the new invaders' atrocious behavior alienated the people, and the resulting resistance movement had a strong radical-leftist flavor.