Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbara Amiel

The line weaponizes a grim kind of “praise” to expose the moral illiteracy behind order-at-any-price politics. Amiel isn’t endorsing dictatorships; she’s baiting the reader with a superficially reasonable claim - crime goes down - then yanking the curtain back to show the machinery that makes those statistics possible. The joke is cruel on purpose. It forces you to feel how quickly “safety” becomes a euphemism when the state’s method is permanent disappearance, mutilation, and the erasure of due process.

The specific intent is to puncture a recurring authoritarian sales pitch: that liberal societies are soft, chaotic, and permissive, while strongmen deliver public virtue through discipline. Amiel’s punchline is that dictatorships can “solve” social problems the way a house fire “solves” a mouse infestation. Yes, the symptoms vanish; the cure is the catastrophe.

Subtextually, it’s an argument about trade-offs that politicians and pundits prefer to keep off-camera. When people romanticize crackdowns, they often imagine punishment reserved for the obviously guilty and applied with clean hands. Amiel drags in the unromantic details: no trial, lifetime camps, bodily punishment. She collapses the comfortable distance between “getting tough” and becoming a regime where legality is whatever the enforcers say it is.

Context matters: as a journalist associated with hard-edged polemic, Amiel is writing against a late-20th-century drift toward admiring “efficient” authoritarianism - especially when democracies look messy. Her line insists that messiness is the point: rights are designed to be inconvenient, because power is always tempted to call its cruelty protection.