War & Peace Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky is weaponizing a memory: the late-Soviet spectacle of unanimous consent that everyone knew was staged, yet everyone had to perform. By invoking that infamous 99%, he’s not just calling authoritarian polling unreliable; he’s reminding readers how coercion manufactures “public opinion” through fear, paperwork, and the quiet calculus of survival. The line works because it turns a statistic into a moral allegory: numbers can be real and still be lies.

The second move is the provocation. He takes the same logic and aims it at Western perceptions of the Arab world after the rise of Islamist movements and the post-9/11 obsession with “hearts and minds.” “Army of true believers” is deliberately martial and theological, a phrase that flatters extremists with imagined mass devotion while also flattering outsiders with a simple story: they believe, therefore they act. Sharansky’s subtext is that this story is convenient propaganda for regimes (who want to claim unity) and for analysts (who want a single explanatory key). It’s also a political argument: don’t confuse loud, organized minorities and state-managed media with genuine consent.

Context matters. Sharansky, a Soviet Jewish dissident turned Israeli politician and writer, built an intellectual brand on the idea that dictatorships are legible if you understand fear. His aim here is to smuggle dissident epistemology into foreign policy: treat displays of unanimity as a symptom of repression, not a cultural essence. The risk, of course, is overreach; analogies can clarify, but they can also blur the specific histories that make “illusion” operate differently from Moscow in 1985 to Cairo, Damascus, or Tehran.