Politics & Power Quote by Harry Belafonte

Belafonte’s blunt triad is a refusal to let language do the laundering. In an era when political violence gets rebranded as “security,” crackdowns get sold as “stability,” and apartheid can hide behind the softer upholstery of “policy,” his line insists on moral clarity over rhetorical comfort. The repetition is the point: no euphemisms, no “complexity” alibis, no selective outrage depending on who’s committing the harm.

As a musician-activist, Belafonte understood how public attention is choreographed. Power loves a fog machine; it thrives when people argue about labels instead of outcomes. “Fascism is fascism” functions like a call-and-response chorus: it’s easy to remember, easy to chant, hard to debate without revealing where you stand. The sentence structure is a cage match with spin doctors. It denies the listener the escape hatch of nuance-as-avoidance.

The subtext is also about complicity. If fascism is just fascism, then you can’t pretend it becomes something else when it wears your flag, your party, or your preferred foreign ally. Belafonte’s career placed him inside celebrity culture while he worked alongside the civil rights movement, anti-colonial struggles, and anti-apartheid campaigns. That vantage point trained him to spot the same playbook across borders: dehumanization, surveillance, intimidation, the policing of speech.

The line doesn’t ask you to be shocked; it dares you to be consistent. It’s less an argument than a moral audit.