Politics & Power Quote by Paul Robeson

Robeson’s sentence doesn’t just accuse; it flips the moral lighting of early Cold War America. The animating claim is that ordinary people wanted peace so badly after WWII that elites had to manufacture fear to keep the machinery of militarization and conformity running. That’s a brutal inversion of the standard story in which leaders reluctantly “respond” to external threats. Here, the threat is a product, sold through “hysteria and propaganda,” and the customer is the American mind.

The phrasing is doing strategic work. “In fact” signals a corrective, as if he’s cutting through a haze of official narratives. “Deep desire for peace” grants the public dignity and agency; he’s not scolding citizens for being duped so much as naming the conditions under which they were targeted. Then he narrows the blame with “ruling class leaders,” a class analysis that, in 1945-and-after America, doubles as a provocation. It’s also a warning: propaganda isn’t accidental spin, it’s policy.

Context matters because Robeson paid for this position. As a Black artist with international stature, sympathetic to socialist ideas and outspoken against colonialism and racism, he became a prime target of the Red Scare. His passport was revoked; his career was throttled. That lived reality sharpens the subtext: fear of “the East” is a convenient external alibi for internal discipline - policing dissent, breaking labor power, and containing movements for racial and economic justice. Robeson is naming a domestic project disguised as foreign policy.