War & Peace Quote by Ahmed Ben Bella

Power speaks here in the cool grammar of inevitability. Ben Bella frames his fall not as a coup with names and motives, but as a verdict delivered by an unnamed collective: "from their point of view". It is a sly rhetorical move. By granting his opponents a perspective rather than legitimacy, he both acknowledges political reality and keeps his own moral standing intact. He did not lose; the system decided he had become inconvenient.

The key phrase is "gone too far" - elastic, vague, and therefore politically lethal. In post-independence Algeria, "too far" could mean centralizing authority, sidelining rivals, threatening entrenched interests in the FLN, or pushing a revolutionary program faster than the army and party bosses would tolerate. The ambiguity mirrors how power actually operates: rarely through principled disagreement, often through red lines that are never written down until someone crosses them.

"I had to disappear" is the most chilling line because it treats politics as a stage-managed act of removal. Not resignation, not defeat - disappearance. It hints at the logic of regimes where visibility itself is a threat, and where the solution to conflict is not debate but erasure.

Then Ben Bella delivers the final twist: if the army hadn't done it, "others would have". He's describing a structural coup, not a personal one - an ecosystem of factions primed to correct any leader who outruns the coalition that put him there. The intent is part confession, part indictment: Algeria's revolution produced sovereignty, but not yet a stable way to handle dissent without a purge.