Politics & Power Quote by Dario Fo

Fo’s line lands like a stage aside delivered after the audience has already laughed and then suddenly realized what the joke cost. Calling it “Saddam’s level” isn’t a tidy moral equivalence; it’s an accusation about method. In war and occupation, the machinery of “liberation” can start borrowing the language and tactics of the regime it topples: coercion, humiliation, a casualness about civilian suffering, a reliance on fear. Fo’s “in a way” is doing sly work here. It sounds modest, even reluctant, but it smuggles in a devastating claim: the descent is predictable, almost procedural, “often” repeated as if history has a script and power keeps choosing the same ugly blocking.

The subtext is classic Fo: distrust of official righteousness, suspicion of narratives where the West gets cast as tragic hero rather than opportunistic actor. Coming from a playwright steeped in farce and political satire, he frames geopolitics as a recurring theatrical genre - the conqueror insisting on moral clarity while the scene’s ethics rot in real time.

Context matters. Post-2003 Iraq wasn’t only dealing with Saddam’s legacy; it was living through occupation, Abu Ghraib’s images, sectarian violence, and the grinding sense that sovereignty had been replaced by management. Fo ties legitimacy to perception: if people experience the new order as domination wearing a different uniform, they won’t “accept the current state of affairs.” The line isn’t a lament about Iraqi “ungratefulness.” It’s a warning that brutality, even when branded as security, sabotages the very consent it claims to build.