Politics & Power Quote by Helen Suzman

Suzman’s “unequivocally” is doing political work: it forecloses sentiment and replaces it with a cold audit of leverage. Speaking as a South African liberal parliamentarian who spent decades opposing apartheid from inside a hostile system, she’s not dunking on moral outrage; she’s warning that outrage, in practice, is often theatre. A boycott, she argues, only bites when it is near-total and enforceable. That “unless it’s backed by force” isn’t a call for violence so much as an acknowledgment of how power actually yields: not to symbolic purity, but to credible consequences.

The subtext is a critique of Western self-congratulation. Boycotts let comfortable publics feel radical without paying the costs of real coercion. Suzman punctures the fantasy that consumer refusal alone can move states or entrenched industries, especially when loopholes, substitute markets, and quiet exemptions inevitably appear. Her line “I don’t think anybody in America seriously proposes that” is a barb aimed at U.S. political culture: Americans may like the posture of toughness, but they don’t want the escalation that would make their economic pressure truly decisive (blockades, enforcement, military risk, or sustained diplomatic rupture).

Context matters: anti-apartheid activism made sanctions and boycotts central tools, and debates raged over whether outside pressure helped or hardened the regime. Suzman’s intent is to shift the argument from righteousness to realism, insisting that if you choose a tactic, you must confront its mechanism. She’s not dismissing solidarity; she’s demanding honesty about what solidarity can and cannot do when it refuses to become force.