Adam Hochschild Quote

Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. Monsters exist, wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are ... the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.