The New Year Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski’s line lands like a reprimand disguised as reportage: the scandal isn’t Amin’s secrecy, it’s the West’s leisurely conscience. “Amin hid nothing” detonates the usual alibi that atrocities thrive in darkness. Here, brutality is almost performative, common knowledge circulating in plain sight. The next sentence, “Everybody knew everything,” tightens the screw: no fog of war, no plausible deniability, no intelligence failure to hide behind. Just a shared, ambient awareness.

Then comes the pivot that exposes the real target: “Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution…” That “Yet” is doing moral work. Kapuscinski frames the Senate’s action not as policy but as a belated gesture, a small bureaucratic movement arriving at the moment it can no longer cost much. “Introduced a resolution” is pointedly weak language; it’s not action, it’s the performance of action. And “three months before his overthrow” is the punchline: the timing suggests opportunism, the way institutions discover principles precisely when history has already turned the page.

Context matters: Kapuscinski wrote from the front lines of postcolonial upheaval, suspicious of how global powers narrate their own virtue. The subtext is that foreign policy often treats human rights as a weather report, noted when convenient, ignored when trade is flowing. Amin’s openness becomes an indictment of everyone else’s closed eyes. The quote works because it shifts culpability from the monster to the respectable rooms that kept doing business anyway.