Faced with this spectacle, this machine of death, hate and madness, one hesitates between sorrow, pity, a desire to see these assassins brought before an international criminal tribunal that could try these kinds of crimes, and, finally, nostalgia for the days when France created and imposed upon the world the right and the duty to intervene.

– Extracted from Bernard-Henri Levy, “The Party of Death: Examining the boundless cruelty of the Burmese junta“, The New Republic, 19 May 2008.

Levy runs through his diagnosis of the situation in Burma: “The generals hate their own people”; “The generals are crazy”; “The generals are monomaniacal”; “The regime is autistic”; “The generals stay focused, too”; “The generals are mafialike”; “The regime is stingy”; “Finally, the regime is grotesque”; “It is rare to see a dictatorship functioning in such a chemically pure manner.”

But there is, to be fair, more to Levy’s analysis than these one-liners. New Mandala readers keen to see what one of France’s top public thinkers has to say about the Burmese generals will find his article useful.

As a semi-related aside – in recent days there have been an increasing number of people arriving at New Mandala who have been searching for information on Thandar Shwe. I wonder if BHL himself was one of them?