Time & Perspective Quote by Breyten Breytenbach

“Better still” is doing sly work here: Breytenbach pivots from abstract moral appeal to a concrete American precedent, as if to say, You already know this story; you’ve even starred in it. The intent is persuasive and tactical. By invoking “your history,” he drafts the listener into complicity and responsibility: if a society can generate a “moral catharsis” against one of its own wars, it can surely summon the same energy against other forms of state violence and injustice.

The phrase “moral catharsis” is a writer’s choice, not an activist’s slogan. It frames mass protest as something almost aesthetic and cleansing - a collective purging of guilt and self-deception. That’s flattering, but also barbed. Catharsis is temporary; it can feel like redemption without guaranteeing structural change. Breytenbach’s subtext: popular resistance is real power, but it’s also a narrative Americans like to tell about themselves, one that risks becoming self-congratulation instead of sustained accountability.

Context matters: Breytenbach, an Afrikaner dissident shaped by apartheid-era repression, knows the costs of dissent and the seductions of moral spectacle. Citing the grassroots anti-Vietnam movement is not nostalgia; it’s a reminder that legitimacy can crack from below, that public opinion can make policy ungovernable. “Sometimes” is the key hedge - a realist’s qualifier. He isn’t promising victory, only pointing to a historically verified mechanism: when ordinary people refuse the terms of injustice, the state’s moral story collapses, and that collapse can be politically decisive.