War & Peace Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski isn’t just condemning Idi Amin; he’s indicting the global machinery that made Amin possible. Calling him “the shame of the whole world” sounds like moral clarity, but it quickly swivels into something nastier: shame, here, belongs less to the tyrant than to the spectators who found his brutality useful. The line’s sting comes from its refusal to let outrage be clean. Amin’s “crimes” aren’t framed as an aberration in an otherwise decent international order; they’re portrayed as a predictable byproduct of an order that treated African states as pieces on a Cold War board.

The key word is “hypocrisy.” Kapuscinski is attacking the East and the West not for miscalculations but for bad faith: the performance of principles (human rights, anti-imperial solidarity, “stability”) while underwriting violence when it served “world domination.” The phrase collapses ideological difference into shared appetite. Capitalist and communist blocs become mirror images, competing in rhetoric while converging in practice: support the strongman, secure influence, look away.

Context matters because Kapuscinski wrote as a roaming witness from the so-called periphery, suspicious of superpower storytelling that turned complex local realities into propaganda. His intent is to strip Amin of the mythic status that dictators sometimes gain - monster, clown, singular evil - and reposition him as a symptom. The subtext is bleak: if the system rewards cruelty, another Amin is always waiting for sponsorship.