Politics & Power Quote by Paul Robeson

Robeson doesn’t plead nuance here; he detonates a moral comparison designed to make polite listeners choke. By aligning “American imperialism” with the fight against Hitler, he’s not making a history seminar argument so much as issuing a loyalty test: if you congratulate yourself for admiring anti-fascist resistance, what do you do when the empire is yours? The line is built to corner a mid-century American audience that wanted heroic anti-Nazi narratives without accepting the idea that power can wear a Stars and Stripes.

The specific intent is declarative and disciplinary. “I do not hesitate one second” anticipates the smear campaign before it arrives, framing certainty as courage and hesitation as complicity. “Clearly and unmistakably” reads like courtroom language, because Robeson was effectively on trial in the court of public opinion: surveilled, blacklisted, stripped of his passport, treated as a threat for mixing celebrity with anti-colonial politics. As an actor and singer, he understood performance; this is a line calibrated for headlines, for hearings, for the record.

The subtext is also personal. Robeson’s fame made him “American” in the public imagination, yet segregation and state repression made belonging conditional. By claiming membership in a “resistance movement,” he recodes patriotism as dissent, not obedience. Context matters: this is Cold War America, when “anti-imperialism” was read as “Communist,” and when invoking Hitler was the quickest way to name absolute evil. Robeson uses that shortcut deliberately, forcing the country to hear its overseas violence and domestic racism in the same moral register it reserved for enemies abroad.