War & Peace Quote by Nhat Hanh

Politics runs hottest when it can point at a villain, and Nhat Hanh is calling that bluff with the calm of someone who has watched the trick work up close. The line is structured like a simple mechanical truth: to rally people, you need an enemy. If reality won’t supply one, power will manufacture it. That matter-of-fact cadence is the point. He’s not arguing ideology; he’s describing an incentive system.

The intent is preventive: to make the reader suspicious of sudden unity, especially the kind that arrives gift-wrapped in fear. “Rally” sounds wholesome, even democratic, but he pairs it with “enemies” to show the moral trade-off hiding inside the word. The subtext is that social cohesion is often bought with borrowed hatred, and once a society learns that hatred “works,” it becomes a reusable tool. The move from “real enemy” to “invent one” is also an accusation about narrative power: governments don’t just respond to threats, they curate them, naming who counts as dangerous and who counts as “us.”

Context sharpens the warning. Nhat Hanh’s activism emerged from the Vietnam War era, when state narratives, propaganda, and ideological binaries turned human beings into abstractions: communists, imperialists, traitors, patriots. Against that backdrop, “invent” isn’t hyperbole; it’s a description of how fear can be staged through selective facts, exaggerated risks, and scapegoating. His deeper claim is psychological as much as political: enemy-making externalizes internal instability. When leaders can’t offer meaning, they offer menace.