"This world has been witness to great atrocities before and each situation has its own unique aspects.
We have seen these atrocities before".
It is not often that the international community gets ample notice and an invitation to stop atrocities before they begin.
Mr Fonseka was the architect of the army's annihilation of the Tamil Tiger rebels in a brutal military campaign that saw many atrocities before it ended last May.
Boko Haram had committed a number of equally appalling atrocities before but this was the first to so vigorously capture the attention of most people outside of Nigeria, and this fact gave some hope in an increasingly bleak situation.
There have been bigger atrocities before but nothing like the daily succession of attacks that we have reported, from the Nice truck slaughter and the Munich shootings to murder in Normandy and Yorkshire, not forgetting Orlando, Dallas, Ansbach and Sagamihara.
The two countries still fail to see eye to eye on a host of issues, particularly the sincerity of Japanese atonement for military atrocities before and during World War II.
In short, the international community should be oriented toward preventing atrocities before they get under way by helping the state in question, and only in extreme cases by using military force.
Simply to terrify them (and us) he metes out some stomach-turning atrocities, before giving them each a little kit-bag containing food, water, a compass and a weapon of some sort, and turning them out to fend for themselves.
