By the 1930s, opium was taking a back seat to its more powerful products, morphine and heroin. The evolution was gradual. Morphine had been widely used by Western missionaries in the late 1800s to cure Chinese opium addicts: So in China the drug became known as “Jesus opium.” Then heroin, first derived from opium in 1874 by chemists at Bayer pharmaceuticals in Germany, and launched by Bayer as a patent medicine in 1898, showed promise as a treatment for morphine addicts. Chinese first became opium addicts, then graduated to morphine, then to heroin. By 1924, China was importing enough heroin from Japan each year to provide four strong doses of the drug to every one of the nation’s 400 million inhabitants. In that same year, however, the U.S. Congress, which had only recently banned alcohol, banned heroin as a patent medicine. Immediately, American mobsters, who were doing a thriving trade in bootlegging, plunged into the heroin trade. While European criminal syndicates drew their supplies of opium from the poppy fields of Persia and the so-called Golden Crescent, American mobs found it easier and cheaper to buy from China.

In 1931, Big-eared Tu held a great celebration in his own honor, to inaugurate an ancestral temple in his native village of Kaochiao in Pootung, across the river from Shanghai. Eighty thousand people turned out for the celebration, thousands of them government officials and national dignitaries invited personally by Tu. After everyone went home, the ancestral temple Tu had built became his largest clandestine morphine and heroin factory.

- Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty (1985)

It is one of the truisms of government by assasination that it removes the most promising leaders from competition. This was certainly true of the period that ensued in China, which stripped the field of flowers and left only weeds to grow.

Among the early victims was thirty-one-year-old Sung Chiao-jen, a leader of the new KMT party and one of only four independent republicans remaining in [Yuan Shih-k'ai's] Cabinet.  This young politician had a capacity that was quite original for China – in addition to being a remarkable administrator, he was a grassroots campaigner, able to rouse popular support in the countryside, something even Dr. Sun had not attempted. Sun’s immediate circle held that peasants needed to be led for a time by an educated elite, before they could be entrusted with a more direct role in the democratic process. By comparison, the popular appeal of Sung Chiao-jen was a political phenomenon. When Yuan began his power grab, Sung Chiao-jen and the three other independent Cabinet members resigned in protest, creating a direct confrontation. On March 20, 1913, while Sung was boarding a train in Shanghai, an assassin shot him twice in the stomach. The bullets were aimed to cause the greatest agony. It took two days for him to die.

- Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty (1985)

Given [Sun Yat-Sen's] propensity for disaster, we might be forgiven for wondering how he maintained his hold on his followers. What was his magic? In retrospect, with the advantage of hindsight, Sun’s adventures take on a picaresque folly that would endear him to Viennese fans of opera bouffe. But this was not apparent in Sun’s day. The participants were too close to events. Revolutionary passion lent a terrible drama to each horrific setback. It was not possible to recognize the comic proportions of a fiasco when it resulted in gruesome beheadings, mutilations, and slow strangulation. Suns’s pratfalls were not comic opera so much as grand guignol, taken with deadly seriousness by the participants, if not by all of the audience.

Also, there were many conspirators involved, and Sun only appears to blame when his case is seen in isolation. He was unquestionable gifted. He was an impassioned orator, able to illuminate the cause he championed, and to inspire to action those who might otherwise have wasted their energy and ardor in drunken conspiratorial discussion, where most revolutions are stillborn. If he was in some respects superficial, it might have been this quality alone that kept him alive while other, better revolutionaries were being murdered. There was a great deal of carnage going on. Many firebrands and plotters died grisly deaths. Perhaps there were among them men and women of much greater nobility than Sun, but they were too engaged to last. Sun’s quirks kept him slightly disengaged, so Sun always survived.

- Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty (1985)

“To break someone’s eye,” is an old Bedouin expression, which was turned into state policy in Iraq through the employment of a rapist like ‘Aziz Salih Ahmad. The people of Takrit were famous under the Ottomans for the way they would “break the eye” of any non-Takriti governor who  might be imposed on them by central government. The newly appointed governor, along with his wife and children, would be invited for a welcoming feast in the ho use of a local notable, On the way back, the party would be ambushed by a group of armed masked men. The governor would be forced to watch his wife being gang-raped, after which the men would whip off their masks, show the governor their faces, and disappear into the night, killing no one.  Such a governor could not ever again preside over the affairs of Takrit.  By the late 1970s, the most famous “aristocratic” Baghdadi families were having their eyes “broken” by the new upstart Ba’thi rulers, even though these families had long ceased to wield political influence or even economic power in the country. Young women from such families were kidnapped off the streets on their way to and from some of the famous clubs of Baghdad. They would disappear for a few weeks, and then reappear. Everybody would know what had happened to them, but no one would dare (or want) to say anything about it.

- Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence (1993)

Up to this point my interrogator had been speaking very quietly. Then he suddenly screamed in a voice that almost brought the roof down.

“I shall bring him this instant and hang him up here! GUARDS! Bring his father. Bring that bastard father of his!”

The tears almost drowned me out when he said this. I couldn’t see a thing and felt like a complete degenerate for having brought such pain on the man who brought me up.

“Sayyidi, God preserve you, please, sayyidi, my father is paralyzed. He was one of Iraq’s nationalist officers in 1941, He is a sick man. Please, sayyidi, God preserve and watch over you, he is a great Arab nationalist.”

My breakdown and nationalist appeal seemed to impress the interrogator. I felt he respected me for the fact that I was trying to protect my father. Maybe he hadn’t known that my father had spent four years in the prisons of the ancien regime because of his role in 1941. The Rashid ‘Ali affair in 1941 is a big thing with the Ba’thists.

The following day, when I was on my ten-second Monkey Run to the toilet, I saw Nabeel, half naked, in filthy rags, just like everyone else. Nabeel had been playing the role of informer in a big charade prepared for my benefit. He was in the same boat as I was! Worse in fact. I spent forty-two days inside and was decreed innocent, whereas he, poor chap, got life imprisonment.

- “Omar”, quoted by Kanan Makiya in Cruelty and Silence (1993)