Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonia Fraser

Persecution doesn’t just brutalize its targets; it manufactures the very menace a state later claims it must crush. Antonia Fraser’s line is blunt to the point of abrasion, and that’s the tactic: she strips away the comforting story that terrorism arrives as an alien contagion. “Throw up” is doing heavy work here. It’s bodily, involuntary, faintly disgusting - violence as a kind of political sickness the persecutor induces and then pretends to be shocked by. The phrasing denies the romance of rebellion and the moral vanity of crackdowns in one move.

Fraser, best known as a historian and biographer with a long view of power, is arguing for causality over condemnation. The subtext isn’t that terror is justified; it’s that repression is strategic incompetence masquerading as strength. When people are denied lawful routes to dignity, speech, and safety, the political ecosystem tilts toward underground networks, retaliatory myths, and spectacular acts that force visibility. Persecution narrows the menu of options until extremity looks like the only form of agency left.

Contextually, the quote fits late-20th-century debates about Northern Ireland, anti-colonial aftershocks, and the post-9/11 security state: the recurring cycle where governments respond to dissent with indiscriminate punishment, then cite the resulting radicalization as proof they were right to punish indiscriminately. Fraser’s intent is prophylactic. She’s warning policymakers and publics that “toughness” can be a self-fulfilling prophecy - and that the cost of refusing that insight is paid in blood, then laundered into rhetoric.