War & Peace Quote by Simon Wiesenthal

Humour, for Wiesenthal, isn’t a personality trait; it’s a survival tactic. Calling it a "weapon" yanks comedy out of the lounge and drops it into a conflict zone: the oppressed don’t get tanks, lawyers, or microphones, so they improvise with the one tool that can’t be confiscated at a checkpoint. The line is tough-minded about power. It admits the asymmetry up front ("unarmed people") and then quietly flips the script: even when you can’t change the conditions, you can still change the terms on which those conditions claim you.

The subtext is a refusal of the oppressor’s preferred outcome: not just obedience, but psychic surrender. To "smile at the situation that pains them" isn’t denial; it’s a way of keeping the pain from becoming the whole story. Humour punctures the authoritarian demand for solemnity, the insistence that the regime’s narrative is unanswerable. A joke reintroduces choice - what can be named, mocked, shared - and that small freedom can be contagious.

Wiesenthal’s context sharpens the stakes. As a Holocaust survivor and a relentless pursuer of Nazi perpetrators, he understood both the limits and the necessity of symbolic resistance. Humour doesn’t replace justice; it buys time for the self to stay intact long enough to seek it. There’s also a warning embedded here: when the powerless laugh, it’s rarely because things are fine. It’s because they’re still here.