“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
– Aung San Suu Kyi
I graduated college in 1989, and I didn’t begin graduate school for another three years. During that time between, I read books and articles of my choosing, as opposed to those assigned to me by professors. Fiction and non-fiction alike, I rambled and roamed wherever my interests led me. In an era before the worldly wide interwebnets, I was living in a college town with plenty of new and used bookstores, and so my options were varied.
One day I was perusing the aisles of a store that specialized in newspapers and magazines from around the world. Its selection of books was mostly dedicated to non-fiction of the history and current events variety. My roommate’s girlfriend worked the counter several days a week, so if I timed matters well, certain discounts (some of them ethically dubious) were available to me, a friend and fellow minimum wage worker living in an overpriced college town.
It was there, and under those circumstances, that I picked up a copy of Aung San Suu 
Kyi’s Freedom From Fear in 1990. Suu Kyi was not yet well known outside of Burma and some circles in London where she had lived much of her adult life to that point. But it just so happened that as an Asian History major, I had taken a course in Burmese history during my senior year.
Can you imagine such a thing? And no, that is not a common offering anywhere in America. But it just so happened that Victor Lieberman at the University of Michigan was one of America’s few specialists on the history pre-colonial Burma (which changed its name to Republic of the Union of Myanmar in 1989), and when he offered his upper level course on Burmese history, I took it as an elective. I’ve always had a weakness for rare opportunities.
So it was in that context that I picked Freedom From Fear off the shelf soon thereafter and hustled it home. The book is a collection of her writings, some of them dealing with the history of Burma, which her family was wrapped up in at the highest levels during the 20th century. But most gripping were her essays on freedom. At the same time that European intellectuals and protesters such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Lech Walesa in Poland were receiving worldwide recognition (and rightly so) for their efforts to topple 
totalitarian Soviet regimes, the American press had largely ignored Suu Kyi and her followers as they struggled to loosen the stranglehold of a brutal military junta that was every bit as ruthless as the governments of the Eastern Bloc, if not more so.
As a young man, Freedom From Fear did less to shape my intellect than it did to arouse my sympathies and reinforce my sense of morality. Suu Kyi’s take on history is that of a highly educated, highly partisan insider. As someone who had been trained in history, had a small modicum of background on Burmese history, and was soon headed down the path of becoming a professional historian (though I didn’t know it at the time), that much was instantly clear to me; I read her historical sections with great interest and a critical eye. However, it was her insights on the human condition that were most influential. Her statements on the importance of human dignity and respect rang true. And her insights into the damage that fear, repression, and violence can wreak on both a soul and a society were and still are, in a word, brilliant.
I was moved enough by the book to buy my father a copy (full price this time) after discussing it with him. Our political differences had begun to sharpen by that point, but he too found Freedom From Fear to be a powerful statement from a person who had put her life on the line to promote admirable values. Shortly thereafter, we shared the joy of hearing that she had won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. And not because we have some inherent respect for the institution or that particular prize (we don’t), but because we understood that the international recognition the prize demands was something that she and the people of Burma so richly deserved amid the ongoing bloodshed of their military dictatorship and the grinding poverty it has wrought on that nation.
None of this is meant to put Aung San Suu Kyi on a pedestal. She is merely a human being. And what’s more, she is a highly political and partisan one at that. She can be in such a position of leadership, in part, because she is the highly privileged scion of one of the nation’s leading families. Her attempts to take down Myanmar’s atrocious government are in some ways inextricably tied to her effort to place herself in a position of leadership in a new government as she headed the National League for Democracy and ran for Prime Minister in aborted elections. And the ruling military junta has been unwilling to kill her, torture her, or lock her away forever in a remote prison, as they have done to so many 
others; instead she has spent has spent most of her time under house arrest at a lakeside villa, and this is due in large part to her national celebrity, which stems as much from her birthright as anything else.
But the reality is that she has spoken truth to power, and for that she has been held against her will for fifteen of the last twenty-one years, largely isolated from family and friends. She has suffered more than many people have and more than anyone should. And she has endured this for what can fairly be described as a righteous cause. And so when I learned on Saturday morning that she had been freed from captivity, I rejoiced. I called my father and shared the good news. I sat down and I wrote this celebration. And then I went to the bookshelf in my office where I keep my dusty old books on Asian history, and picked up a 20 year old copy of Freedom From Fear, which I had packed and shipped during the last two decades from Michigan to New York to Nebraska to Arizona, and to here in Maryland. I sat down with that book and I remembered that some things are worth resisting, and some things are worth striving for, no matter the cost.
We can only pray, each in our own way, that should the day come when the good work of brave people finally brings them to fruition, that the costs will not have been too great.