Part 2: Section 6 Summary

This section is the title essay. It was published in conjunction with the European Parliament awarding Aung San Suu Kyi the 1990 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (whether she wrote this after being placed under house arrest and receiving the prize is not stated). She was obviously not present at the formal ceremony in 1991. Within a week, translations of her essay appeared in numerous regional and national publications in over a half-dozen different languages. It is not power, she began, that corrupts but fear: it corrupts both those wielding power and those subjugating themselves to it. She identified four kinds of corruption: people deviate from the right path, first, because of desire (sometimes by pursuing bribes or gratuitously awarding those one loves with public funds). In the second form, people deviate out of ill will towards others. In the third, out...