The Paranoid Style in Burmese Politics

Alvaro Vargas Llosa calls the Burmese generals the world's worst government (no mean feat)... hyperbole, perhaps, though this is pretty damning evidence:

A regime so paranoid as to have moved the capital north a few years ago because soothsayers had predicted that a natural disaster followed by civil unrest would strike Rangoon, the traditional capital could not allow the population to be gripped by a fear greater than the fear of repression.

Using soothsayers to conduct public policy? (Is this Shakespeare or real life?) Moving the capital to hide from the political fallout of a horrific natural disaster? (Sometimes the soothsayers are right.) Even for a sadistic dictator like Than Shwe, that is above and beyond the call of duty... (what is it about paranoia that makes it -- as Shakespeare realized -- an essential ingredient in history's cruellest extremes of barbarism and inhumanity? I suppose the question answers itself...)

More depressing Burma reading: why we can't just drop supplies into the countryside, via Yglesias.