I am still on the book 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild. It's taking a little too long for me to finish this. Came across a short excerpt that is so apt today with regards to the situation in Burma:
'The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."
…"To tell the truth," said Franz Strangl of the mass killings that took place when he was commandant of the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, "one did become used to it."
In such a regime, one thing that often helps functionaries "become used to it" is a slight, symbolic distance - irrelevant to the victim - between an official in charge and the physical act of terror itself. That symbolic distance was frequently cited in self-defense by Nazis put on trial after World War II…'
I may be thought of by some as 'biting the hand that feeds me', but it really saddens me to see a country I so highly revered many years ago supporting such a regime, yet denying, even pretending that they condemn it, painting a pretty picture of their role in the international stage.