
Hitler is alive in Burma, the sign says.

Ellen Page, star of Juno, stands alone on a street corner with a piece of cardboard held above her head, the unsettling message scribbled with Sharpie onto her sign. Burma, also known as Myanmar, is a Southeastern Asian country ruled by a tyrannical militant junta who came into power in 1962 through the act of a coup d’état. In 2007 a number of street protests occurred, the first public protests in a decade. Led by a large number of Burmese monks, these protests earned the name “The Saffron Revolution”, christened after the color of the robes that the monks wore. After the first few initial uprisings the public at large began taking an interest in the protests, and while at first the Burmese government begrudgingly allowed the monks to engage in peaceful gatherings, soon the violence escalated into what some considered an all-out war between the monks and the military junta, with the military actively invading and ransacking monasteries around the country. Foreign journalists were rounded up and imprisoned on sight, with a Japanese photojournalist named Kenji Nagai killed on September 27th, 2007, simply for being present at a street protest. While the official death toll rests at 13 killed, Colonel Hla Win, who defected from the army some days prior to the official report, is quoted as having said, “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”

This is nothing new. While these are some of the most recent examples of atrocities taking place in our world, a government’s desire to quash dissent and maintain complete rule over its citizenry has been around for as long as civilization itself. Early Roman emperors declared themselves chosen by the gods to have complete executive ruling over every aspect of their society. Japanese emperors are believed to actually be gods, sent to our world to lead their people to prosperity through the invention of Motorola cell phones and hara-kiri, and our current president, George W. Bush, has weekly conference calls with Ted Haggard, the leader of Stupid People Worldwide, a subsidiary group of the Republic Party.

Some of the most well known examples of these actions are such incidents as the 1989 June 4th protest at Tiananmen Square, where intellectuals, labor activists, and students all gathered to protest the authoritarian rule of the government. The death toll in that particular instance ranges wildly, with official reports from the Chinese government stating 200-300 dead to reports let out by the Chinese Red Cross, declaring between 2,000-3,000 dead.  Another is the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, where Hutu militia groups, aided by the Rwandan government, began a systematic killing of all Tutsis, as well as political moderates, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds. Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’, a period spanning several years and several countries where anyone of Jewish background was rounded up and killed, is another extreme example. 