How do you get 1,000 stray dogs to walk into a fire?

Force.

How do you do something low, base, patently wrong, and then get someone else to pay for it?

The same.

Consider the governments of two powerful nations collaborating on a project to remove 1,000 people from their homes, dumping them on the shores of someone else's country and damning them to poverty, then when the cover-up unraveled, those governments got its subjects, its taxpayers to come up with the reparations as well as the legal fees granted to those people to challenge the government in court.

http://www.granta.com/extracts/1225

And we just let it go. We accept it as inevitable that the people in power do horrible things and we are meant to pay for it.