Daily Inspiration Quote by Alva Myrdal

Fear is doing double duty here: it names a real threat while warning that the official response can quietly become a second, more permanent threat. Myrdal, speaking as a diplomat from a country that liked to imagine itself insulated by neutrality and social cohesion, punctures that comfort with a pointed phrase: terrorism has reached "peaceful countries such as ours". The scare quotes around "remedy" are the tell. She is not disputing the need for protection; she is disputing the easy moral math that treats expanded security apparatus as automatically curative.

The line turns on a subtle shift in scale. Terrorism is described as an increase in acts - episodic, volatile, attention-seeking. The countermeasure is described as an increase in security forces - institutional, routinized, and inclined to persist long after the emergency mood fades. That asymmetry is the argument: societies tend to answer sporadic violence with permanent architecture, then normalize the costs as the price of modern life. The object of protection is "individual men and women", a humanizing move that also signals the risk of paternalism: the state claiming intimate guardianship in ways that can blur into surveillance, restriction, and political convenience.

In Cold War Europe, where Myrdal moved between disarmament debates and the rhetoric of stability, she understood how security language can become a solvent for liberties. The subtext is not pacifism but skepticism: when governments manage fear, they also manage citizens. The most diplomatic accusation here is that the "remedy" may treat symptoms while quietly changing the patient.