Politics & Power Quote by Breyten Breytenbach

“Dangerous” lands first, like a verdict, then the sentence keeps tightening the screws. Breytenbach isn’t merely warning about policy; he’s mapping a climate of power where aggression becomes reflex and accountability becomes a joke told offstage. The phrasing “by all accounts” is doing sly work: it signals rumor, testimony, dossiers, lived experience - the informal archive that accumulates when formal oversight fails. He’s saying the evidence is everywhere, even if it’s not neatly admissible in a court of public relations.

The target is an American administration and its “specialized agencies,” bureaucratic language that carries the chill of intelligence services: discreet, deniable, procedural. “Know no restraint” doesn’t accuse them of occasional excess; it paints excess as the operating system. The verb choice “hitting out” is blunt and bodily, evoking not strategy but impulse, as if the state is throwing punches in the dark and calling it defense.

The most corrosive subtext sits in “any perceived enemy.” Perceived by whom? On what grounds? The line suggests that suspicion itself becomes sufficient cause, collapsing the distance between disagreement and threat. Then comes the coup de grace: “nobody or nothing can protect one.” That absolutism isn’t careless; it’s meant to recreate the paranoia of living under a security apparatus whose reach outpaces law. Coming from a South African writer shaped by apartheid’s surveillance and punishment, the warning cuts deeper: he recognizes the pattern of a state that treats moral certainty as a license to be vindictive, and he hears it echoing in American power at full volume.