Daily Inspiration Quote by Alva Myrdal

A diplomat isn’t supposed to sound shocked. That’s what gives Alva Myrdal’s line its bite: she speaks in the cool, reportorial register of international forums while describing something morally incendiary. “Many countries” is a deliberately unspecific accusation, the kind that can survive in a room full of flags. No names, no direct provocations, just a chilling normality to the claim. It’s both a warning and a way of sliding past denial.

The pairing of “prisons or concentration camps” is the rhetorical tripwire. Prisons can be defended as law; concentration camps carry the 20th century’s darkest shorthand for state power unbound. By yoking them together, Myrdal collapses the comforting distinction between legitimate punishment and political extermination. The subtext is pointed: systems like to relabel their violence. Bureaucracy becomes camouflage.

Then she lands on the most damning idea: oppression isn’t an outbreak, it’s infrastructure. “Becoming more and more a part of the systems” shifts the focus from individual tyrants to institutions that quietly metabolize cruelty - paperwork, regulations, emergency laws, “security” measures that outlive the crisis that birthed them. It’s a diagnosis of modern governance: repression doesn’t always arrive with a coup; it can arrive with a form.

Contextually, Myrdal came of age through fascism, world war, and the Cold War’s authoritarian temptations on both sides. Her intent reads less like moral theater than policy alarm: if oppression is systematizing, diplomacy can’t just negotiate events. It has to confront the architecture that makes atrocities repeatable.