Politics & Power Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski is drawing a line that many comfortable histories prefer to blur: the difference between mass death driven by fevered crowds and mass death engineered by a state. By describing World War I as a “sudden passion of nationalism,” he doesn’t excuse the slaughter; he diagnoses its emotional voltage. Nationalism, in his framing, is volatile, contagious, improvisational. People kill because they feel swept up, because the story of “us” versus “them” spikes overnight into a permission slip.

Then he turns the knife. “But the Soviet case is different” is a deceptively calm pivot into a much harsher claim: that Soviet violence wasn’t merely wartime brutality or spontaneous ethnic rage, but bureaucracy weaponized. “Systematic murder” is the key phrase. It evokes paperwork, quotas, trains, lists, informants - violence not as eruption but as administration. The comparison “like the Holocaust” is deliberately provocative, not as a crude equivalence of ideologies, but as a reminder that modernity’s most terrifying talent is making atrocity scalable.

The subtext is also about Western habits of categorization. World War I can be narrated as tragedy, miscalculation, a chain reaction. Soviet terror forces a different moral grammar: intent, design, repetition. Coming from a journalist who reported from within authoritarian ecosystems, Kapuscinski is arguing for attention to mechanism, not just motive. Emotions start fires; systems keep them burning, efficiently, until the fuel is people.