This paper is about why Burmanization policies implemented by General Ne Win’s government after 1962 are important for understanding ethnic and other divisions in Burma today. These policies retrospectively were called “Bamar Baho Phyu” in Burmese, which means more precisely, “Bamar-centered policies,” or Burmanization of the economy, education, civil service, and especially the military. Like any nationalist, Ne Win wanted to put his own country first. In the autocratic “imagined community” he created, this Bamar Baho Phyu has long-term implications for the possibilities for peace, and an end to the civil war which began in 1948–1949, and continues today.