On Law, part 1 (prologue*)

"For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact the people who were arrested were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever. There was a general feeling of being destined for destruction, a sense of having nowhere to escape from the GPU-NKVD (which, incidentally, given our internal passport system, was quite accurate). And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf."
-- Aleksandr Solzhenityn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
(in my copy, p 11, chapter called 'Arrests')

Funny that. I could've sworn someone in Burma had taken a page out of the Soviet book.
No one of course could accuse Aung San Suu Kyi of sheepishness. Nor could they of half the former political detainees who stumble back through the streets in a post-prison daze wondering where on earth someone in the intervening years thought to move the shack they once called home. But subsequent readjustment, I've found, often comes with a steelier defiance. Onto to that point tomorrow when I'm lucid enough to take you to tea in the cluttered basement office of one of Aung San Suu Kyi's personal lawyers, shorn of all his hair, shortly after his release from the aptly named Insein prison. Which makes perfect sense (his stint in prison, that is) once you decide to discard logic and/or the general laws of physics and let the mind dissolve into a perfectly hypnotic state of Escheresque strange loopiness.

Meanwhile, and on that very point, ponder Daw Suu's challenge. I wonder if she intended the irony.
Till tomorrow then. G'night!


(* on law in Burma be warned. Rather like that elusive verdict, we may never get to a conclusive conclusion)

(P.S. Feel free to say hello, chuck a rotten tomato and/or offer a mean bit of criticism. I'd hate to think I was insulting anyone's intelligence)