War & Peace Quote by Juan Goytisolo

Goytisolo writes with the cold clarity of someone watching an entire continent suffer from ideological claustrophobia. Postwar Europe, he argues, did not simply end up divided; it was manufactured by the war into a binary that made moral imagination feel like treason. The line lands because it refuses the comforting script of the Cold War, where one side supposedly held the cure. Instead, he diagnoses symmetry: Western capitalism riddled with abuses and injustice; Eastern-style socialism hardened into the privileges of a bureaucratic caste. Both, in different languages, reproduce hierarchy.

The phrase "each in need of a revolution" is less romantic than it sounds. He is not celebrating upheaval; he is underscoring that neither bloc can credibly claim legitimacy without a deep reckoning. That insistence quietly indicts the era's intellectuals, parties, and cultural institutions that traded critique for camp loyalty. The real target is the psychic economy of the Cold War: you were asked to pick a side, then suspend disbelief.

"Collective faith does not exist" is the bleak punchline. Not religious faith, but shared confidence in a common project - the sense that a society is moving toward something more just. In Goytisolo's register, division doesn't just split borders; it fractures belief itself. When every promise is compromised - by markets on one side and apparatus on the other - solidarity becomes performative, and politics becomes a grim choice between hypocrisies. The context is a Europe rebuilt in concrete and treaties, yet spiritually exhausted: a continent where "hope" is always already propaganda.