Politics & Power Quote by Edward R. Murrow

Murrow’s line lands like a moral trap: it doesn’t let tyranny stay the villain’s problem. It drags the audience onto the stage, insisting that mass intimidation is never a solo act. The verb “terrorize” conjures the blunt instrument of fear, but “accomplices” is the sharper blade. An accomplice isn’t merely frightened; they’ve crossed into participation, whether through silence, rationalization, or the small daily bargains that keep a regime’s machinery humming.

The specific intent is journalistic and prosecutorial. Murrow isn’t diagnosing an abstract evil so much as building a case against civic passivity. His career peaks in the age of broadcast authority, when radio and television could either launder propaganda or puncture it. In the shadow of fascism abroad and McCarthyism at home, he understood how quickly a society’s institutions - press, employers, neighbors, even dinner tables - can become distribution networks for fear. The quote implies that repression scales only when ordinary people supply the force multiplier: repeating accusations, enforcing taboos, declining to defend the targeted because it’s socially expensive.

The subtext is uncomfortable and deliberate: you don’t get to claim innocence just because you didn’t swing the baton. Murrow frames complicity as a collective infrastructure, not a personal flaw. That’s why the line still travels so well in democracies that prefer to imagine authoritarianism as something that arrives with uniforms and marches. Murrow points to a quieter precondition: consent, often disguised as prudence.