Wit & Attitude Quote by Paddy Ashdown

Ashdown’s line lands like a field report from the moral middle of a conflict: close enough to the wreckage to feel it, far enough to see the machinery that produced it. “It works both ways” is doing heavy diplomatic lifting. It signals balance without pretending symmetry. The victims’ grief is treated as an immovable fact, not a bargaining chip. “Cannot reconcile” isn’t just sorrow; it’s a diagnosis of what war does to the inner life, turning memory into a permanent border checkpoint.

Then comes the harsher turn: “Likewise, I cannot change the mentality…” Ashdown frames himself as a political actor with hard limits. It’s an unglamorous admission that persuading traumatized survivors is not the same as converting ideologues, and that neither project is reliably achievable. The phrase “mentality” is telling: he’s not talking about isolated bad decisions but a worldview, a whole operating system built to justify violence.

“Crimes” names perpetrators plainly, refusing the euphemisms (“excesses,” “incidents”) that often cushion post-conflict narratives. “The fools who followed them” widens the circle of culpability to include the foot soldiers of ideology, the enablers who preferred belonging over conscience. It’s a cold, almost impatient moral taxonomy: grief is sacred but fixed; fanaticism is rationalized but stubborn; mass complicity is contemptible.

In the context of Ashdown’s Balkan-era work, the intent reads as both compassion and warning: reconciliation isn’t a slogan you can impose from above, and peacebuilders don’t get to rewire people on command. The subtext is bluntly anti-romantic about politics: sometimes the job is to contain damage, not to heal it.