ABSTRACT
It is hard to feel sympathy for dictators with blood on their hands. It is all the harder if we have lived and laughed, hoped and dreamed, with their victims, as so many of us did while the Beijing spring movement unfolded. And having had the dubious privilege of watching the dictators’ fist come down, we feel that this is an act whose brutality is matched only by its insanity. Nothing, we think, can justify this; nothing, we thus conclude, can explain it. There can be no sympathy for the devil.
