Should I go?

In case you didnt already know I am now inside Burma. Some people may disagree with me being here (I wonder how many times or how well travelled many might be) but let me address why I believe it is the right thing to come to a country that very few people know much about. For what its worth I met a man who has been visiting this country on and off for nine years. Not once in all that time did any person in the country tell him he shouldn't have come.
Tony Blair - amongst other so-called esteemed (but not informed obviously) experts - called for people to boycott this country. Please remind me how many times he actually visited here. Are we all supposed to unquestioningly defer to such people and lose all ability to think and act independently for ourselves?
Travel - and I write here with a strong weight of conviction - is an incredibly powerful force for good not least in raising awareness, deepening understanding and broadening knowledge and insight. Tourism, if conducted with a sufficiently open well informed mind, independent thought, sensitivity and discretionary purse can do a great deal to open up a country. In particular it affords some people in that country the opportunity to open up their lives to the outside world.
To some people I am effectively contributing to the human rights abuses of the Burmese government. Of course a small amount of money is likely to unavoidably end up in their pockets. But I am extremely discreet and careful where I choose to spend my dollars. I always try to travel as locals do. I eat where they eat. And I talk to people, lots of people. I listen respectfully to what they tell me. I am offering an income to them and an opportunity to opine which they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
How exactly can people ever be free when we keep them isolated? You tell me inwhich other ways are we going to so fully and comprehensively inform ourselves about a country whose regime thrives on being 'isolated'. This country is anything but isolated to those who matter and the sooner we stop pretending that sanctions - over 20 years worth - are working the better. Lives depend on it. They depend on us being well-informed, realistic and genuinely open-minded. The sanctions have been in place for two decades and they patently have not worked.
Under which of the following circumstances do you think a government is more likely to repress its people?
a) with no allowed in to see anything.
or b) with international visitors like me walking around asking awkward questions, probing for answers, taking photos, recording mnemories and conversations, interacting with local people...?
Ultimately, is it not better to be as well informed as possible or to remain in the dark?
How exactly am I legitimising a nasty government when I intend to do no more than share with you what I see, hear and what people I meet tell me?

If poeple want to feel ethically better about themselves for choosing to boycott and to help salve a conscious, thats up to them. But do you know what most boycotts and sanctions do? They make the poor poorer while the rich powerful elite drive fancier cars and live in more luxurious houses.
Who really pays the price of isolation? Who really has to make the big life-changing sacrifices of having sanctions imposed against them. You've guessed it, the people at the bottom. Who really gets punished?
SO why push a country, any country backwards. The only things we end up sanctioning - if we take a long hard cold look at the effectiveness - are the regime's own propaganda when we should be doing all we can to help demolish it. It is just like Iran.
Why not make the country a proper part of the world? Why not just flood it with travellers, trade, but also with information, ideas, technology, journalists, observers and opportunities?
boycotts can never be perfect or consistent anyway. WHose going to tell the French and the Germans that they have no morals for going on package tours? They'll just laugh at you dismissively.
By the same perverse logic are all smokers responsible for the deaths and exploiutation of children in developing countries by big tobacco companies because they purchase cigarettes? Are all American taxpayers responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq becasue they happen to pay taxes to the American government?
And it matters very little what we ethically chose to do anyway because of one word: China. China controls much of the economy here already. It quietly got on with asserting itself and because we all stayed away we are near blind to it.
Tourism is anyway a drop in the economic ocean to this government compared to the revenues it generates from selling gas, teak and soon oil to thel ikes of not just China, but also Singapore and Japan.
Through apathy, misguided and ill-informed ideology and complacency we have left an entire people in near muted silence.
We should be encouraging as many people as possible to go and see and listen for themselves.
Its like a man said to me the other day...
"We are alive and I can feed my family because of tourists. Why is my country so neglected and forgotten? Please ask more people to come and speak to us."
"Go and see for yourself. Listen for yourself. Then you can decide. What will you know, or anyone know if you never come and never speak to us and us to you?"