War & Peace Quote by Joe Slovo

Truth has a lousy distribution network under siege, and Joe Slovo is naming that problem with the cool realism of someone who’s lived inside it. The line doesn’t romanticize revelation; it treats it as logistics. “Eventually” is the only optimism he allows, quickly hemmed in by “but it takes time,” a phrase that sounds less like patience than triage. What matters is the delay: the gap between what happens and what can be known, when power controls the channels and fear taxes every messenger.

Slovo’s context matters. As a senior figure in the South African Communist Party and a leader within the anti-apartheid struggle, he operated in an environment where censorship, informants, detention, and state propaganda weren’t abstract threats; they were the weather. “Communication is difficult” is understated on purpose. It lets the machinery of repression reveal itself through mundane friction, the way a regime makes truth not illegal outright, but exhausting to verify and dangerous to repeat.

The subtext is strategic and moral at once. Strategically: movements cannot rely on instant clarity; organizing requires redundancies, discipline, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Morally: the “enemy” isn’t just committing acts, it’s engineering confusion so that accountability arrives late, if at all. The awkward phrasing at the end (“to come out, to go”) even mimics that impediment, as if the sentence itself has to push through checkpoints. Slovo’s intent is to warn allies and indict opponents in the same breath: history may surface the facts, but the fight is over who gets to slow them down.